The blog has been quiet - partly because my usual beat has lost a bit of space to things that I can not A ctually I ndicate, and partly because frankly nothing of major interest was going on in the Fediverse. Zuckerberg plans to become an infrastructure company fizzled out due to (or thanks to?) European regulations. Reddit continues its slow descent into an exclusive forum for chatbots talking…
(I want to try something different here. Instead of a fully fleshed out post, I’d like to just start with a draft of some ideas and I hope that it is enough to generate a conversation. I’ll take the relevant responses and use them to keep improving this article) StackOverflow is nowadays famous for being the site that you only go after you’ve given up ChatGPT to stop…
TL;DR: I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities . During the…
This is the final part of the series calling for a different approach in the development of Social Media based on open standards. In the previous post , I argued that we could build applications that relied less on functionality provided by the server and put the client in control. The server software needed would be responsible mostly for authenticating users (i.e, keeping track of user…
This is part of a series of posts about the current state of Social Media. I talked about Mozilla’s failed strategy to get people out of the corporate-controlled networks and into the open alternatives and made a quick demonstration of how ActivityPub is used to power the “Social Web”. I wanted to talk about these things before I get to the main point of my thesis: the…
This is part of a series of posts about the current state of Social Media and the Fediverse. In the first post , I described some of the issues with the shot that Mozilla took with their mozilla.social initiative. By the end of this series, I plan to have laid out a strategy that can be more successful. But before doing all that, it will be good to have a very fundamental understanding of…
About 18 months ago, Mozilla announced that they would explore a healthy social media alternative . Their started their efforts by setting up a server and putting up together a team to work on new applications for the ecossytem. Fast-forward to February of 2024, and they released a memo which said: Our initial approach was based on a belief that Mozilla needed to quickly reach large scale in order…
For all the talk about Fediverse alternatives to the platforms from Big Tech, it seems that Funkwhale would be the easiest one to get people out of Spotify/Apple Music/ Youtube Music/etc, and I am trying to figure out what is missing to get more people interested and using it. I think that its main problem is that no instance provides a “public” catalog of songs that can be…
(This post is based on a discussion from Hacker News ) I will assume that the reader is already aware of the mass-exodus from Twitter users to Mastodon , I will also assume that the reader has some basic understanding of how Mastodon works - it is decentralized like email, different servers can talk with each other, etc, etc. What might be news to the reader is the story of how this affects me,…
Here is an incomplete, completely half-baked idea that I have been chewing on since Filippo’s call to professionalize the work of OSS maintainers . I want to share it here because (1) I think there is a good business opportunity here that could use some validation and (2) I am both an OSS project maintainer that would like to be paid for my work and I also have a business that depends on…
Part I - Can it run OpenOffice? My first job in Germany was for this T-Labs project: an innovative online-first, browser-based operating system which promised to make it simple for enterprises to manage the devices for their mobile workforce. The OS was based on Linux and Firefox and it offered a pretty standard set of features: users would have an SSO system and login directly to their office…
Yesterday I got the first (paid!) request to add a feature on Hub20 from someone who is working on what is likely to become the first Hub20 production instance. It’s a simple feature, driven by his need to have some functionality that is not provided yet. He could’ve looked at current state of the work and said “oh, it sucks because it doesn’t do X”. He could’ve…
Preface Due to my (short) time working on Raiden and (currently moonlighting) at Hub20 , I got quite a bit familiar with the different crypto projects that were coming with the “DeFI” wave. Something in common to most of these projects is the fact that they don’t really have any idea where their actual money will come from . Being a witness to the emergence of “DAO…
While I’m waiting for the next release of raiden so that I can finish my own release of Hub20 , I am left playing with other layer-2 projects. Of those, loopring is certainly the one that has caught most of my attention. It requires people to transfer their tokens to a contract and then lets you keep a “Layer-2 balance”. Loopring and the mechanics of an AMM Any transaction that…
Now that Communick is available for the public at large and I am looking for ways to spread the word about the benefits of decentralized services, something very curious is happening: people seem to understand the issue of centralized services, they understand how federation works and that they can follow people from anywhere, yet the most common question I am hearing is “What instance…