Posts by scripting@daveverse.org
(DIR) Post #AwdGv5wYirRjTyl0u8 by scripting@daveverse.org
2025-07-24T22:13:56Z
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Protocols matter, even to usersProtocols actually are important to users, even if they don't know it, and never will.If there is a platform vendor, a company that owns the protocol and has the exclusive right to move it forward (because they own all the users basically) then progress stops. There's only one way for the platform to work.That's why all these systems are such careful emulations of Twitter. Because they all practically speaking did the same thing that Twitter did, they have APIs but no one but them can be in the driver's seat.If this were the web, as open as it was in the 90s and early 00s, such a vacuum would never last, it would quickly be filled by individual developers and startups. For me this is not theoretical, I've actually worked in this kind of ecosystem three times in my career. And I've also tried to get things done in a platform controlled by a big company, such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and many more. I probably have done more of each kind that anyone else alive! So believe me, the protocols do matter.I could write a few books about that. š
(DIR) Post #AxjPLwqWaMXO79cTIm by scripting@daveverse.org
2025-08-30T22:25:36Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
If I ran Bluesky..If I were running Bluesky Iād have a quiet project to make a lite Bluesky server that peers with the mother ship, highly factored, in a Node package, open source of course. Get this snake oil phase behind them, where theyāre claiming to be decentralized, but arenāt.
(DIR) Post #AyAAOQBmCxiLecCPtA by scripting@daveverse.org
2025-09-13T09:15:49Z
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Reading the news at 4amThereās a large shift in perspective that hasnāt yet happened in the US. Weāre still all in it for ourselves.It shakes me when I get complimented for āaltruism.āOr fighting the good fight.They donāt have the time.The truth: you have to help other people if you want to survive.We are incredibly codependent. Our fates are determined by what all of us do. Itās always been this way actually. Somehow we got pretty far without having to face this. The myth is we all live on the prairie fighting for survival and not able to depend on anyone else. Yet in reality we canāt survive without lots of people coming through for us.I want to believe, but in the middle of the night I want to give up more. Itāll probably be better when the sun cones up.Which is reality? I think more and more that believing in other Americans is crazy.
(DIR) Post #AyGaQnwHOGA7XF8rBo by scripting@daveverse.org
2025-09-14T23:48:38Z
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The Bloggers of MastodonA quick idea.You can now pretty much write a blog on Mastodon.I am doing such a thing here now.Ā This site is emanating from a WordPress site, on a server I run myself.But I've also installed the plugin that cross-posts to Masto via ActivityPub. I have no idea how it works, but I don't have to. My writing magically appears on both the web and Mastodon at the same time.Ā And the features it has on Masto are good enough to call it blogging.I have the ability to do simple styling. I can link from a word toĀ another page, the most basic feature of blogging and the web. We dreamed about how we'd use this in the early days of the web, and now it's rare that we type into a place where you can. But blogs still love links! And somehow they get through the usual filters and the links show up in Mastodon via ActivityPub. Woohoo!Ā Of course we want more! But this is a decent place to start.So let's think about it and if you have a Blog of Mastodon, send me a link, I want to read it.Ā PS: If you can read this on Threads please let me know! šPPS: And the cool thing about the Blogs of Mastodon is you can't do it on Bluesky, yet. But we hope they will support this too.
(DIR) Post #B2ohOI33EVC2WWXMHI by scripting@daveverse.org
2026-01-30T15:40:13Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Notes for FediForum meetupThe FediForum home page says "the Open Social Web still has only a tiny fraction of the users of the closed social media platforms, and growing that number significantly has turned out harder than expected." This is the premise of their next conference, on March 2, a little over a month from now.Why don't people switch to Mastodon?It's hard to use.Twitter beat RSS because it was so damned hard to subscribe to a feed in RSS, and with Twitter it was a single click. Mastodon has the same problem. You might want to think of coming up with a Mastodon Lite that trades off some of the decentralization for ease of use. Not sure how that would work. But I promise you ā you all are having the same problems we had with RSS. People wouldn't work together, Twitter blew right through that.If you want to get an idea why adoption is slow for Mastodon, take a typical task, responding to a post, and write down the actual steps you have to go through. It'll be a long list, and every one of those steps is a reason someone will give up and go back to Bluesky or Twitter.Does it matter if people use Bluesky?What are you actually accomplishing by using Bluesky?It's not decentralized. Bluesky could shut down any developer or all developers any time they want.It's not replaceable. Pretty sure it never will be.People get confused because they have an API. Twitter has had an API since inception. It broke when Musk took over, but it works again. Bluesky breaks developers too, and if they want to be part of the "open web" why didn't they just use the existing standards of the web.Bluesky at some point decided to clone Twitter, which is fine ā it's actually a better twitter than Twitter is. But once they did that, it becaume impossible for it to be federated, because Twitter has features that can't be federated, that depend on it being centralized. Again the realities of software kick in, you can't do what's impossible.Start overThe only way imho to achieve your goal is to start over.Start with a simple to install server and make it peer-to-peer at the server level from the beginning.No features go in that don't work in that mode. Now see what you can make that's social.Who owns Bluesky?You have to start thinking about who is behind these companies.Mastodon I believe is what it appears to be. I don't think you have to worry about anyone breaking developers there.But Bluesky appears to be a pretty normal tech startup, except we know much less about its backers than we usually do.They disclosed a $15 million investment two years ago. Have they raised more money? No idea. Do we know who their original backers are? We know who the founders of the Blockchain Capital fund are, but that's all that's publicly known, as far as I can tell.Open social webYou should leave out the "open" part ā because it's implied by "web."And imho neither of the products is connected to the web.There's more to being on the web than being able to use the product in a web browser.Why do I keep saying this stuff?Because I think a social web wouldn't just be nice to have, I think we need it, last year, not next year. (Actually we needed it twenty years ago.)You guys have been wandering.And the biggest flaw in your culture is that you don't listen.If you want to bootstrap something of significance, you should always be looking for clues of things that will work.Just coming out with something that's a labor of love basically what you have now does not help you find the magic spot where it grows virally on its own.I speak from decades of experience trying to do products that do what you say you want, sometimes with success. Sometimes with huge success. I know what it's like to find the sweet spot at the right time.But I say things you don't want to hear. Like this ā you have not found the answer from a product standpoint.When we look back at this I want to be sure people know I tried.And ultimately I think we will succeed and I think some of you folk could help. šIt's commutativeHere's a good rule to follow. (It's also kind of a joke.)Things that can be decentralized should be.Things that must be centralized must be.
(DIR) Post #B3klwVIq7yCcSlASKO by scripting@daveverse.org
2026-02-27T17:08:03Z
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When I write a comment on someone else's blog I want it to automatically be on my blog. It should just appear to be on theirs, the original and only copy of the writing appears on mine. A truly distributed system.