Notices by DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab (djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology)

as a kid, I had a floppy disc filled with text files I created where each text file represented a different type of thing and inside the file was a list of things of that type.

I was gonna teach my computer how to understand the world around me the way I understood it.

eventually, kid me realized that lists of types of things would be insufficient. I needed relationships, comparisons, differentiations, assumptions, all sorts of complexity.

I gave up.

the titans of industry are still kids.

@rysiek oof, stay safe!

@eugenialoli lol. also, lmao.

good morning fediverse. :cofepats:

saw something slide by that mentioned yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Let's Encrypt and y'all, that's nice. really nice.

I remember all too well the hell of commercial certificate authorities being yet another toll gate to getting a service online. Let's Encrypt changed that for the better for us, and the fediverse as it currently exists would have been much smaller without Let's Encrypt empowering operators to get free trusted certs.

we could do with more of that sort of success.

:blobpats:

@silverwizard probably about a lot of things but not about some other things because that's how smart works

if imma build a fedi server and a fedi client it's not gonna be some ongoing project for the commons but an ongoing project for me.

I'll share the code for it, but the ongoing maintenance of it on my end will be to make it keep getting closer to what I want for my website.

because that's what it is, the engine behind my website, ultimately.

if I can build it in such a way that I see how to reuse it for other websites I need or want to build, that's gravy and I'll head that direction because I'm lazy and like reusing shit.

if I can build it with lots of inline documentation so I don't confuse future me it might be pretty easy to screw with for future whoever.

if I then use it to blog about how I use it, I can probably distill a user's guide out of that. no reason not to share that too, it'd already be on my blog as I wrote it.

if people hit me up and tell me about bugs they found in my stuff, I could look at fixing them. if they pointed towards a fix I could use their fix.

this is me talking out loud about being able to do open source projects without it turning into an open source project.

nobody has to take on a git repo and issue tracker and release schedule and kanban board to do an open source thing. you can just do the thing and open the source and walk away as much as you want. no one can stop you.

@pamela @sungo license dot txt reads 'lmao you downloaded this off of my website. good luck.'

@are0h all of this, so very much. modular pluggable extensible services. flexible clients. data extraction and translation between stacks. none of this should be at all controversial and should absolutely be front of mind for folk interested in building the future of the fediverse imho.

there's no reason fedi servers cannot be set up to let you take your content with you and load it up somewhere else, and the good ones should even set up redirects for you if they're going to still be online. it's your identity, it's your content, you should be able to slide it around as smoothly as the underlying tech can support, and it can support so much more smoothness than it currently has, but the people interop side of the equation is the part key sections of the fediverse never seems to be ready for. maybe those sections just need to be left behind.

a gentle reminder that it is compulsory to kick out the jams, motherfuckers. you have to kick them out. it is not optional.

the flavor of "I wish I could financially support the further development of mastodon without funding the operation of the huge spammy flagships eugen runs" and that of "what exactly is the difference between wordpress dot org and wordpress dot com" aren't the same but they both carry that underlying, tongue-coating umami of "this came from a so-called benevolent dictator for life huh"

the sub-500 active user, community focused, often (but not always) topically themed instances of the fediverse are absolutely the sweet spot in my opinion for using this as a place for getting to know people over the long term. huge noisy instances just have no local community generally because they're too dang big and they have no mechanism for sub-communities (local neighborhoods?) to grow and thrive, in no small part because we flatten interactions into weird all-or-nothing relationships in this following-follower modality so building community through instance choice and heavy use of the local timeline is the only real play.

and while I'm at it, I want a column that's just the boosts the accounts I follow are boosting, and I don't want boosts to ever show up anywhere else in my interface. and a miniature mech pony.

sometimes I want a filter that merely removes a topic from my home timeline and moves it into a timeline of its own that I can interact with at a different pace than my home timeline. a subject I want to contain and address after reflection, maybe, or when my blood pressure is low enough, or what have you. maybe I want to be able to make that topic only refresh in clients on request rather than by push.

every time I toot something like this another grain of sand falls onto the balance plate of the scale labeled "sundog builds a fedi client".

my favorite part of the fediverse is the opportunity to come up with a new analogy for what the fuck it is every few months year after year.

social media networks are the big temporary tenants that lease the abandoned shopping malls and build indoor amusement parks and night clubs hoping they'll be able to make enough money on advertising and selling recordings of customers that they can branch out into other ways to make money. people often have a really good time until they don't and then realize that they've been taken advantage of throughout the relationship. but they had a good enough time enough of the time that when they find out there's a new abandoned shopping mall amusement park opening up they head on over and see if it is a place in which good times can be had too, because now there's a lack in their life.

the fediverse is a bunch of shitty cheap empty lots a few thousand people lease and drop empty shipping containers on for people to hang out in and chill and set up little chat groups and art displays and carve pathways between some of the shipping containers and block easy travel to other shipping containers and various shipping containers lose their leases and get yanked out but other shipping containers get added. people have absolutely no chance of having a good time unless they already know someone in the weird scene and put up with the fact that literally anyone can just drop a shipping container in this area and start trying to shape the experience in that area. eventually people sometimes have some really good times and some really horrible times and a bunch of times that are meh. nobody's in charge, the shipping container suppliers are poorly tooled for handling the needs and wants of a diverse group of decidedly not shipping magnates, and the whole place has some weird smells. the amalgamated joint turns off a lot of people, but some people find other people and groups of the shipping containers that are nice enough that it makes it worth it for them to deal with the creeps and the smells and to try and figure out how to make it less creepy and smelly.

I don't think you're ever going to turn one of those models into the other in ways that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative because I don't think they're trying to solve the same problems.

setting folks' expectations that the fediverse is not social media would go a long way, but so would setting folks' expectations that commercial social media is not social media either.

offline card catalogs and microfiche and microfilm are good and useful to this day. "taking things online" should not also take them away from the offline. might need the offline analogue. y'know. in case something fucks the online.