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I have tried switching from to like some of my colleagues, but I just can't. I have had nothing but problems with Teams and Zulip just works -- with key features that Teams is lacking. In essence, Teams is trying to be a "do everything" app, and wants to pull us in to the MS ecosystem that our parent organization has been all-too-willing to acquiesce. But things like Video Call work terribly*, permissions are complicated, and integrations are hairy, and over-reaching obnoxious.

I guess I'm a fan of "do everything" apps; I must be, with how I use emacs. But also implicit in that is not denying anyone's earlier work, and not solving problems that have already been solved. Zulip builds beautifully on regular . Teams wants to replace everything, including email. It the process it has become a massive and over-engineered behemoth where it is hard to get anything done (as a dev) without Microsoft-levels of funding.

Innovation in decentralised social networks

Flipboard’s Mike McCue recently released the first episode of the new podcast Dot Social with Mike Masnick, where they discuss protocols, platforms, and the decentralised internet, and it’s worth listening to.

Johannes Ernst gives a thread with a summary and responses here, which is worth reading. One thing I’d like to comment on is Mike Masnick’s comment that he expects innovation more to happen on Bluesky’s ATProto than on fediverse’s ActivityPub.

I agree that innovation in the decentralised network space is happening to a signficant extend outside of the fediverse sphere, but I disagree with the idea that this will happen on Bluesky and ATProto. Instead, I think that Nostr is a more likely candidate:

Innovation in a decentralised network is currently largely dependent on individual hobbyist developers that are experimenting. For an individual developer the accesibility and difficulty of working with the protocol is an important consideration. From my understanding talking to developers is Nostr the easiest to work with. ActivityPub differs a lot, but can certainly be difficult, especially regarding actual interoperability. I have been told that ATProto is the hardest of the three to develop for, plus that it is simply not even put into practice yet.

Culture of the network is even more important though in driving innovation. The fediverse has cultures and etiquette that say that some innovations in the network are unwelcome, especially regarding search and consent. One of the things that interest me about the fediverse is that the social impact of technology is taken into account. We’re building these networks for people. But making features off-limits in a network does limit innovation as well, there is a cost to it.

Bluesky is threading a difficult middle ground here with the culture. The developers seem to have more of a technologist mindset to protocol design, and concerns about how federation will interact with content moderation are not given much care. At the same time, a core group of Bluesky users is not particularly interested in federation, and wants a simple Twitter replacement. That puts the team in a pretty difficult spot with regards to future innovation. They made great strides with custom algorithms, but they do experience significant pushback from the community on features that they themselves want to work on, especially relating to opening the network.

Nostr has an explicit culture of adverse interoperability, and a libertarian community who seems to be quite inspired by crypto’s mantra of ‘if we can build it we should build it’. This is not really grounds for a network that is safe for many people. It does provide a fertile ground for rapid experimentation and innovation. The network is by far the smallest of the three, but it has also created quite some innovations that the other two network haven’t, in the recent months. Multiple long-form article publishing sites, a torrent archive, an integrated payment system for subscriptions with crypto, and more. There are good reasons to be have some issues with some of these innovations, but it is hard to deny that they are developing at a rapid speed.

Overall I think that innovation often happens at the fringes where there is reasons for experimentation. But also, cultural reasons that inhibit innovation speed can actually be pretty good from the human perspective.

#fediverse #nostr

https://laurenshof.online/innovation-in-decentralised-social-networks/

Three things I that make omnipresent glorious:

1. password-store.el, which makes emacs an ever-present (even in browsers) manager as present and more secure than LastPass
2. built-in emms, allowing me to interact (eg play, pause, skip, random) with my music from anywhere on my computer
3. well, I thought I had a third, but I can't narrow it down now. Let's say being able to execute shell commands from anywhere, any time with C-M-& (async) or C-M-! (blocking). Or maybe being able to do a quick orgmode capture regardless of what app I'm in. OR...

Everyone should read this about and its alternatives. Special note: DRM (about crippling/controlling users) is NOT about copyright (about protecting content creators). defectivebydesign.org/faq#purp

Worldwide community of activists protest OverDrive and others forcing DRM upon libraries - Greg Farough @ Defective by Design @ FSF: defectivebydesign.org/blog/wor

On Friday 8th December they're asking you to:

* Not use Libby, etc.
* Discuss the harms of DRM, especially in relation to libraries, with hashtag #DayAgainstDRM
* Don't watch any DRM'd or streaming-only media, etc for that day.

Pfft, trivial for me! I'll binge DRM-free!

One of the biggest life-savers on has been the command `xrandr -s 0`. This somehow refreshes things and causes my triple-monitors to wakeup in ways that -auto and -set do not. But I cannot find documentation on it ANYWHERE; I've checked the manpages, web search... nothing!

EDIT: just tried `xrandr --help` and saw that it is short for --size. I'm still not sure why it works such miracles, though...

#Clojure Automigrate 0.2.0 is out! Database schema auto-migration tool for Clojure. | redd.it/1850ays

I have a general distaste for , and use when I need SQL (except WordPress) and realized that I don't really know why I have issues with it, other than its proximity to the past's bad PHP. Is there any backup for my MySQL dislike?

@veer66 How does REPL actually work for those languages, TypeScript or Rust?

Having moved away from Spotify and other streaming services and starting to use , I found decade old burned CDs that needed meta tags. orys.us/vd

Found out about for editing cd tags; even easier than ! And it can be set up with Now to figure out if I can get to use it instead of random python scripts... gnudb.org/howto.php

A fully switched to Firefox a few months ago when Google kept on pushing their "Manifest V3" Chrome policy, now that they continue to push it and remove V2 (and with it meaningful adblockers) from Chrome in 2024 maybe you want to start migrating as well?

developer.chrome.com/en/blog/r

Don't go to Brave btw. It's a shit company that keeps doing shady stuff and is run by a homophobe. There are so many browsers, just pick one. (Whether other Chromium-based browsers will keep an interface for effective customization for users around is for you to research. Just use Firefox TBH).

@askonomm@mastodon.social yeah, and I realize that it's not entirely apples-to-apples to compare typescript, at best a dialect of Javascript and maybe just a practice, with a full language. I guess it should be "ClojureScript with Spec vs JavaScript with typescript"

@askonomm@mastodon.social so both Clojure and TypeScript are doing "gradual typing." I guess the difference are the approaches.With Typescript that is in its name, and is all it is about. In Clojure[Script] it is an option but not a default

Key bit: "#Tumblr moving away from a growth strategy also aligns with the larger movement toward smaller and decentralized social media, characterized by the dispersal of Twitter’s users onto platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord, and even back to Tumblr itself.

'Every future for Tumblr that I’m involved in will include it being more open, supporting more standards, APIs, and open source.'”

theverge.com/2023/11/17/239645

Just got my @indivisibleteam newsletter, and I'm heartened to see that they're stepping back from Twitter. They're removing Twitter from their social media links on their website, phasing down on-Twitter content, and helping folks migrate to alternate platforms.

It's good to see large influential organizations finally drawing the line. It's awesome that they're not just doing so passively, but actively helping people leave. #Twitter #Indivisible

Read the inspiring story of how Eyüpsultan, Turkey switched to free software, gained independence from proprietary software, and saved money ($$$) in the process! If they did it in their city, your city can do it too! | Read more at: u.fsf.org/3m9

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