I'm pleased to note that even https://dolphin.town, my Mastodon server where the only letter you are allowed to post is "e", has seen increased activity in the last few days.
Oh right: some of you might be interested in this talk I did 5 years ago called "Infrastructure As Shitpost" where I talk about Dolphin Town and the creative possibilities of the fediverse
If you've been programming for ten years, and you discover a new tool that took you an hour to learn to use... that tool took you ten years plus one hour to learn to use
@cwebber@anna a couple of the mozilla fellows in my cohort were working on, essentially, "computer security without fear" -- how do you teach computer security practice without relying on fear, but rather on a sense of community support and safety? Seems highly related
I finished my stint as a Mozilla Fellow and now I'm relaunching my Patreon with a focus on, well, fixing social media.
This means I'm going to continue my concerted work trying to make the fediverse a better place, in the form of best practice guides for running instances, external advocacy, and technical tutorials and training so that more people can contribute software to the fediverse at large.
You can read a partial summary of my work so far at my new Patreon page!
Oh wow. So that really famous centralized vs decentralized vs distributed diagram that I quote above? Well, in one of the companion papers, Baran provides this iteration on it, which in my opinion is far superior and I'm going to start using in my presentations.
Paul Baran is not nearly as famous as Bob Kahn or Vint Cert or the like, but the guy literally invented packet switching in ~1964 as an outgrowth of this paper and similar work.
Here's Paul Baran's RAND-published September 1962 justification for distributed communications networks summed up in a single chart. It's also the same paper where the famous "centralized vs decentralized vs distributed" triptych of graphs comes from. You still see this exact diagram, uncited, in modern presentations on the decentralized/distributed web.
@cwebber Thanks!! You have helped create a very cool thing. I mentioned this to Evan already but AP is the reason I'm excited about the internet in a way I haven't been since 2005
I've made a big change to my RSS-to-ActivityPub converter: it no longer posts to the (Mastodon) federated timeline. This should prevent it from gunking that up with potential spam. It is also less "discoverable" but, fuck discoverability.
As always, you can convert any RSS feed into an ActivityPub compatible account here:
If I'm typing a bunch of unix command line stuff trying to figure out the right solution, and I eventually DO figure out the solution, one thing I do when possible is re-run the command with a comment like
$ doing-the-thing.sh # This is the one that actually works
So when I inevitably search my shell command history later, I have nice little notes