Notices by blaine (blaine@mastodon.social)

@mkljczk @rysiek @cwebber @ben that's not unreasonable, but I would ask how is it different to receive a follow request (or follower) from one of Threads' 200 million users different from one of the fediverse's max. 10 million? Especially given Meta's horrendous record of moderation and consistent contempt of their users?

I'm convinced it's Meta's intentional (or, charitably) incompetent attempt to drive regressive regulation rather than an earnest attempt to "protect" their users.

@stefan @cwebber imho, <<they're the same picture>>.

I very much agree with @pluralistic's concerns that bsky need to *actually ship* meaningful, non-reversible federation (but also trust the folks involved to do that. There will be a *lot* of side-eyeing and loss of faith in progressive movements if they don't 😅).

@kissane there are cultural differences on the various networks, to be sure, but negotiating THAT is a conversation that actually goes somewhere.

Being someone who only uses PNG – and only communicates with people who also use PNG – because it's somehow a better technology? The sooner we can get past that particular phase of all of this, the better.

As @polotek started with, the reasons people choose one network over another are just so unrelated to technology it's not even funny.

@kissane 1000% this.

To take a small part of what you're saying and to be massively reductionist, as far as the technical stuff, goes:

RSS = Software-agnostic "what's happening with my website"
ActivityPub = Software-agnostic "what's happening with my website"
atproto = Software-agnostic "what's happening with my website"

It would be way healthier if we framed the distinctions more like those between JPEG, DNG, and PNG.

@kissane @polotek the particulars of a given technology matter, but the best technologies are those that can be invisibly replaced and upgraded.

As someone who's worked on protocols, my biggest feeling of success comes when the thing grows beyond what my original imagination and/or capacity was, becomes something bigger, and no-one but some boffins notice.

Getting excited about technology can be great – getting religious about it? Can we not, please? 😅

@darius nice! The only folks who *I* could imagine insisting on this being opt-in are Oracle's legal team, and they were told in no uncertain terms that this sort of data isn't even *eligible* for opt-out, even in the US of A. 😅

As we (at least in Canada) move towards a situation where government organizations are not* (in general, locally at least) engaged in direct suppression of less privileged people in support of more privileged people (i.e., as things get better), the state monopoly on violence is at risk of migrating to a state monopoly on care. When bureaucrats have jurisdiction over civic things that provide safety and security, a lack of capacity or will in government becomes an implicitly hostile gate.

Actually, if anyone who's comfortable with Tailwind (I went with Svelte/Skeleton) could help out, I'm working on a VERY BASIC site to help match evacuees from fires in my area with community resources, and I could really use some help making it look good (even readable would be an improvement) on mobile and desktop. I would extremely appreciate the help!

@evan nothing new, looks like activity has dropped off, initial Rank 6 fires have dropped to Rank 2-3, community meeting this evening. The wildfire service is really incredible and feels well organized from the interactions we've had. ❤️

@evan we'd been considering the possibility of a Montreal trip this summer, but felt uneasy leaving in summer (also it's really nice here when it's not burning 😅). Soon, though!

(I gotta say I don't miss planes, either. I wish the trans-Canada train had a slightly more comfortable and affordable seating option, would 1000% do that. I'll have to get your long distance rail tips at some point)

@evan heh, thanks, 💯 preaching to the choir. We're very well set up and safe in a nearby town about an hour away, extremely fortunate in that respect. ❤️

@evan looking slightly further out, we all need to take decisive political action – both to fight climate change and the effects of climate change, but also to take immediate actions that will protect our communities, environment, and infrastructure when disasters strike (not if — ask not for whom the climate bell tolls). Our highly reactive emergency/rescue orientation in funding and action is amazing to see in action but saddening because so much more could be done in prevention.

@evan wait. Hope.

Evacuated. We're safe with our cats, we'll see how the next few days go for our home.

Apocalyptic scenes up here in south-central British Columbia. This photo was from when things were relatively calm.

@thisismissem @evan alternatively having a "DM-native" protocol handle DMs – whether that's Signal or another protocol, it would be *trivial* to point a webfinger profile (or mastodon profile, but it'd be nice if this worked across different AP implementations) at a Signal account and let that other system handle it. Also adding developer-parseable support for DMs to AP would be trivial (except for all the encryption, so not really trivial ;-) ). Remember: we made all this up. It can change!

@evan the next poll: "direct messages in Mastodon are bound to appear in public feeds [of non-addressed users]"

Dipped a toe into a standards discussion and I remain convinced that it's not a world for me.

I wish we lived in a world where standards work was done by a wide, diverse, and open community rather than exactly the sort of technologist who loves to bikeshed.

It's such important work, and uniquely creates opportunities for amazing large-scale cooperation to happen. Too often, though, it's a place for insecure people to build little fiefdoms. 😢

@evan @julian @nightpool in the Postel sense, though, it's too bad that a client implementor needs to maintain (at least) four discovery pathways, and may require four separate requests to validate the information. Similarly, an ap host doesn't know which spots a client will check, so needs to implement all four. I'm well out of the standards game, but I'd very much advocate for "pick one and stick with it" 😊

@evan @julian @nightpool lots of folks advocated to support any URI scheme in a webfinger lookup, and that's why we have the "acct" scheme at all - so that email-style addresses could be used alongside http etc URIs!

The <Link> approach definitely works, but feels a bit reinventing-webfinger/creating more complexity in lookups (on the client side).

Hope the context is helpful! 😊

@evan @julian @nightpool for what it's worth, webfinger should be (re: is) able to do this, even if the implementations in the wild don't. The intent at the time was for webfinger to be the "DNS records" for "social addresses", and the main reasons we didn't just use DNS was because (1) DNS doesn't support anything but bare domain names, (2) management of DNS records at scale is hard, and (3) it wasn't possible to query DNS via the web.