Noting wrong with the IA whatsoever. But given how harshly they’ve been treated by basically every government and corporate interest groups they’ve been forced to contend with foot the last few years, and the regular DDOSes, I personally always feel guilty downloading things from them and spending more of their resources on “relatively frivolous” things.

“I’m already apart of the Fediverse” 🥲

Stars are perhaps even more common in written text for highlights and annotations than typed text, at least around here. I can draw a star much faster than three asterisks. But it wouldn’t be very easily distinguishable as the Fediverse star. And that’s the same between the regular sharp and pointy star and the rounded outline one.

Now, if we could get the Unicode Consortium to add the graphical logo, I’d be sold. But if we must pick an existing character, I for one prefer the outlined star (⚝) much more than either the asterism (⁂) or the pentagram (⛧).

Unlike the pentagram, it aligns a lot better with inline text and looks nice and smooth. It’s also far less commonly used or overloaded with existing readings.

The asterism would be easier to unambiguously read or write by hand though! That’s its one pro.

Phtn.app, on the web

For a while I was seeing people use the asterism symbol (⁂) around my Mastodon feed. Wonder what happened to that movement.

Those rumours about moonlit orgies can’t all be wrong. They are the f-druids after all…

The ability to post a video to multiple co-authors’ channels.

Instantly brought back memories of zoning out to Knytt on my then new PC 😊

I quite enjoyed this write-up, OP 😊

I agree. All of that is very true. That’s why I am comparing it to Dwarf Fortress myself, which is similarly expensive.

Yet, the bias I feel between the two is one I cannot explain.

But I’m sure in a few days I’d consider it a Christmas gift to myself anyway and forget all about how expensive it felt at the moment :]

That does feel a tad bit expensive… Even though Dwarf Fortress is right there for comparison.

For me, trying to read the actual protocol or even tutorials that try to explain the protocol in a more approachable manner, didn’t help at all. It’s no understatement that ActivityPub itself is a mess.

But reading the Fedify documentation and describing “activities” with the library helped a lot more!

Even if you don’t plan on writing Js/Ts, I recommend the Fedify tutorial.

Ironically, because there’s no UDP in browsers, we can’t actually get proper p2p on the web. WebRTC through centralized coordination servers at best. Protocol Labs has all but given up on this use-case in favor of using some bootstrapped selection of remote helper nodes.

IPFS has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Ethereum, or indeed any blockchain. It is a protocol for storing distributing and addressing data by hashes of the content over a peer to peer network.

There is however an initiative to create a commercial market for “pinning*”, which is blockchain based. It still has nothing to do with Ethereum, and is a distinct project that uses IPFS rather than being part of the protocol, thankfully. It is also not a “proof of work” sort of waste, but built around proving content that was promised to be stored is actually stored.

Pinning in IPFS is effectively “hosting” data permanently. IPFS is inherently peer to peer: content you access gets added to your local cache and gets served to any peer near you asking for it—like BitTorrent—until it that cache is cleared to make space for new content you access. If nobody keeps a copy of some data you want others to access when your machines are offline, IPFS wouldn’t be particularly useful as a CDN. So peers on the network can choose to pin some data, making them exempt from being cleared with cache. It is perfectly possible to offer pinning services that have nothing to do with Filecoin or the blockchain, and those exist already. But the organization developing IPFS wanted an independent blockchain based solution simply because they felt it would scale better and give them a potential way to sustain themselves.

Frankly, it was a bad idea then, as crypto grift was already becoming obvious. And it didn’t really take off. But since Filecoin has always been a completely separate thing to IPFS, it doesn’t affect how IPFS works in any way, which it continues to do so.

There are many aspects of IPFS the actual protocol that could stand to be improved. But in a lot of ways, it does do many of the things a Fediverse “CDN” should. But that’s just the storage layer. Getting even the popular AP servers to agree to implement IPFS is going to be almost as realistic an expectation as getting federated identity working on AP. A personal pessimistic view.

Friday Night Fuckin’ as well, then

Doesn’t have an entry for monads 🙃

If capitalism insists on those higher up getting exorbitantly more money than those doing the work, then we have to hold them to the other thing they claim they believe in: that those higher up also deserve all the blame.

It’s a novel concept, I know. Leave the Nobels by the doormat, please.

The city (and district) I live in still has its name spelled incredibly wrong, and has had so for the past decade.

You cannot select a municipality name. They’re not buildings or roads marked by mere mortals. And what you can’t select you can’t correct. It is just believed that they are always correct. Immaculate. Immutable.

Every attempt to fix it has failed, from contacting support (as a “premium Google One customer”) or looking for senior Google Maps contributors (all of whom lost all their contacts with “higher up” Googlers when the old map transitioned into new, or just vanished once the forums closed).

In a country where last mile location is often ambiguous, that Google manages to fail at it on a scale large enough to be visible from space says volumes about how worthless their services are.

P.S: Yes, of course it’s correctly marked on OSM. And a lot more.

That’s such a good photo. And by good I mean Trump-tier