(webdev Tory) @worldsendless@qoto.org

December 1. Start of #AdventOfSystemSeeing 2023 edition.

Like last year, there will be daily prompts on the AdventOfSystemSeeing hashtag (making it easy to follow or mute).

The idea is to do daily (15-20 minute) exercises in a System Journal (notebook). These could be a “make your own advent(ure)” sort of thing, or you can follow the prompts on the hashtag each day.

Day 1 #AdventOfSystemSeeing

Without looking at one (not even a picture), draw a bicycle.

Annotate with observations and questions that your drawing raises for you.

(I have us do this exercise during of some of my workshops. It’s more interesting and useful than it sounds — probably.)

Day 2 #AdventOfSystemSeeing

On Systems

Jot down your ideas about systems. This will form a useful baseline to look back at, when we get to the end of this advent(ure).

You could use a Mind Map with branches such as "definitional concepts," "related concepts," "approaches to," "people to learn from," etc. Or a Concept Map. A set of doodles perhaps. Text. Or something else -- let us know what you tried (if you'd like to, of course).

It's the weekend. It'd be nice to have fun with it.

Day 4 #AdventOfSystemSeeing

Identify Focal Situation

Think of a situation you want to explore as we practice various systems approaches and views. It's good if it's something that matters to you, but don't stress too much about your choice, as you can always shift focus as you explore and refine your understanding. If it helps, think of a challenge you’re facing, that you want to understand better, and address/resolve/dissolve...

Briefly describe the situation.

Day 5 #AdventOfSystemSeeing

Sketch the Situation

Start to explore the situation you described on Day 4 - visually this time. I like Rich Pictures for this: identify who (people, organizations, systems) is involved in this situation, how they interact, (annotating to add) what their purpose and role is as it relates to this situation, what they care about, their concerns, and so forth.

Use words and images, but keep it informal and sketchy.

Day 6 #AdventOfSystemSeeing

Re-Center

Take a look over the visual situation description (rich picture) you drew yesterday. Pick a person or group that is significant to the situation you’re exploring, and center the next frame on them. Draw a Rich Picture of the people, systems, organizations, etc. that they're encountering, as broadly related to their concerns on the previous visual situation description (rich picture).

Day 3 finished, only a couple days late. 😅 Would have been sooner if I'd written fewer bugs
https://github.com/lambdasierra/adventofcode2023/tree/e1d26a64e2061502ce914907fdbb3b869600adea/clojure/src/advent/day03

#AdventOfCode2023 #Clojure #AdventOfCodeSpoilers #AdventOfCode

@gugurumbe Thanks for the reminder! I've resorted to writing my own of some things because the quantity of npm dependencies were maddening.

https://qoto.org/@worldsendless/110352073303676309

@worldsendless At work, we have Office 365 so we ought to use Teams, right, since we get it "for free" with O365? We tried it. We prefer to pay for Slack (in addition to O365) because it just all round works better and has better integrations etc. In the same way we also pay for Zoom because it works better than the A/V and screen sharing in Slack. I would sort of prefer we only paid for one collab platform but none of them on their own work well enough in all cases to supplant the others.

Right now, in the midst of our year-end fundraiser, we are just a little over 10k away from reaching our next major milestone of 100k! A big thanks to all who have participated so far! And if you're reading this, and you're ready to participate, please read: https://u.fsf.org/41e Every contribution, every boost/share, helps us in our mission. #LearnLibre #FreeSoftware #Education

#clojure really shines for today's #aoc 😈

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/