Notices by Axel Rauschmayer (rauschma@fosstodon.org), page 2

@functionalscript The biggest challenge with social networks: There are not only technical problems but also people problems. And those are really difficult—e.g., as a woman you can have a really bad time on social networks. AFAICT that’s why many women don’t use headshots as avatars.

One thing that I’d find very useful is built-in support for ActivityPub in Bluesky.

@SocketSecurity I wish the narrative were less one-sided: Who evaluates the efficiency of managers and investors and how much money they get? Who evaluates *why* people are quiet-quitting? Happy employees usually don’t.

If iPadOS were as open as macOS, iPads would rival Macs with regard to versatility. Right now, I can’t use an iPad because it doesn’t have:
– Homebrew
– Terminal
– Visual Studio Code

File and window management could also be improved but that’s much less important.

It would be great to have Mac-like power with the option of touch input.

But I’m not holding my breath. It currently seems more likely that I’ll eventually switch completely over to Linux.

I have similar thoughts about most big tech companies: Tech has lost its way. It used to genuinely improve people’s lives. Now it’s often about ads and tricking people into using tech even more. Tech is looking for a way to go uphill, even though it’s already reached an impressive peak.

Most tech visions involve ever more sensors, machines and automation. And I don’t find that appealing at all. My vision for us is: simpler lives, less consumption, more free time, more nature in cities.

Apple’s trajectory makes me sad: I used to root for the company because they are doing a lot of things right: tech as something that has to be useful, focus on accessibility, etc.

But it’s become clear how cut-throat, greedy and anti-user they are. Their devices could be much more repairable (incl. fewer design changes over the years) and be supported much longer. They treat developers awfully too.

And I’m not anti-corporate. Companies are not evil per se. Linux has its own set of issues!

@functionalscript Interesting. I’d have thought you’d need a protocol on top of CAS for moderation and managing/distributing data.

@functionalscript Quoting the post: “Some of these tasks are quite feasible for the fediverse to pick up today: the content-addressed storage and the portable identity stuff I think would be a major thing to introduce into the system but would be quite doable and would give the fediverse properties of surviving nodes going down better.”

@functionalscript You may enjoy this blog post (see section “What should the fediverse do?”): https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

I asked an #ActivityPub question: “Posts and profiles—how to fix the disconnect between local and remote data?"
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/newbie-question-posts-profiles-how-to-fix-the-disconnect-between-local-and-remote-data/4765

Mastodon’s weaknesses and how to fix them
https://2ality.com/2024/11/mastodon-weaknesses.html

#2ality #Mastodon

@functionalscript I think the two can meet in the middle. I’ll explain more in the upcoming blog post.

I’m working on a blog post about Mastodon’s weaknesses and what is being done to fix them. During my research I was delighted by how much interesting work is happening in the Fediverse space—e.g.:

* Live Fediverse analytics: https://fedidb.org
* Fediverse info and directory (crawled automatically): https://fediverse.info
* List of Fediverse platforms: https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/
* Interviews with people who work on the Fediverse and other decentralized networks: https://dot-social.simplecast.com/

How I make sense of .flatMap():
– .map(): Each input element corresponds to one output element.
– .flatMap(): Each input element corresponds to zero or more output elements.

More information, uses cases and examples: https://exploringjs.com/js/book/ch_arrays.html#Array.prototype.flatMap

#JavaScript

Just got the classic fraudulent SMS: “Hi Dad, can you send me a message on Whatsapp? I have a new number.”

I did a web search and you can report such SMSes to the Bundesnetzagentur (Federal Network Agency). Which I did.

The Social Web Foundation is “a non-profit organization dedicated to making connections between social platforms with the open standard protocol ActivityPub.”

Goals:
* Educating general and targeted audiences about the social web
* Informing policy-makers about issues on the social web
* Enhancing and extending the ActivityPub protocol
* Building tools and plumbing to make the social web easier and more engaging to use

https://socialwebfoundation.org/2024/09/24/launch/

#Mastodon #Fediverse

1/ Good blog post by @molily about an ongoing conflict in the web dev community. AFAICT, it’s fair to both sides.

“Client-side JavaScript and React criticism: What comes next?”
https://molily.de/javascript-criticism/

“You can kick the alpha tires on System76’s Cosmic, a new Linux desktop”
“A whole new desktop aims to appeal with tiling, themes, and a safer Rust core.”
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/you-can-kick-the-alpha-tires-on-system76s-cosmic-a-new-linux-desktop/

Behold, “Diablo” is fully playable in your browser
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/08/behold-diablo-is-fully-playable-in-your-browser/

Neat #TypeScript trick: If we create a Set with a `const` Array, then the type of its elements is the union of the Array element types. In other words: The Set behaves a little like a tuple.

const packStatus = new Set([
'draft',
'approved',
'shipped',
] as const);
// const packStatus: Set<"draft" | "approved" | "shipped">

packStatus.has('abc'); // type error!
// Auto-completion works for the arguments of .has(), .delete(), etc.

Source: Matt Pocock. https://x.com/mattpocockuk/status/1823284205763121573

“Verso is a web browser built on top of the Servo web engine. We aim to explore embedding solutions for Servo while growing it into a mature browser in one day. This means we want to experiment with multi-view and multi-window first and then build UI elements entirely from Servo itself.”

Caveat: “At the moment, Servoshell should provide a better user experience.”

https://github.com/versotile-org/verso (h/t @bkardell)