On the internet, more open standards and community driven stuff. It’s currently really, really annoying that on my mastodon there are a lot of people sharing bluesky codes, as if that’s not just punting the ball for another couple of years. Although this will hopefully be a better outcome than straight up silos like the old social media, fediverse still should be the default way we think about connecting humanity (or something like it, the underlying tech isn’t really that important.) Also, far more things should just be like, a dollar a month or whatever instead of having a massive amount of privacy invading, user experience destroying ads.
In software in general, more privacy. It should be assumed that unless I explicitly opt in, my data is just that, mine. This is a tricky one because I remain hopeful about generative AI and that needs data to improve the models, I’m leery of sharing my data with it because so far the more pedestrian uses of data mining have not been used for things that I can really support. I remain extremely leery about GAI that isn’t explicitly open source and can’t be understood generally.
On the hardware side, computers have mostly been good enough for a while now. Tech will always get better, but I would like to see more of a focus on keeping working devices useful. Like, at some point, technology products will cease being possible to be useful in a practical way because it can’t run modern software, but we’re leaving a lot of shit behind where that’s not the case. Just about any device with an SSD and a processor from the last 10 years (including phones!) should be able to be easily repaired, supported longer, and once support ends, opened up for community support.
FYI the bluesky protocol is open and there’s plans to standardize. It’s also federated (the sandbox network is open to 3rd parties)
There’s lots of new privacy techniques from cryptography, stuff like differential privacy and MPC could help a lot with making it easier and safer to use collaboration tools.
I am skeptical of Bluesky. It’s led by Jack and we’ve already seen how that goes. Second, there isn’t really a good technical reason for it to exist as it’s own protocol outside of the fact that they want to control it given that Fedi/Mastodon was already there and they could have just as easily contributed to that with the things they wanted, they just wouldn’t have had full control. Similar to Threads promise to federate, I will be somewhat surprised if they ever do it.
Were Bluesky/Threads not a corporate effort, I have a feeling that it would have followed a similar pattern as the fediverse - build the protocol and release that, then the clients will follow. Bluesky still isn’t federating even with its own protocol, and Threads isn’t either. Given that’s stuff that tiny teams with far, far fewer resources than the corps have accomplished, it’s a little wild that neither have gotten there.
Especially with Bluesky, there doesn’t seem to be a stated plan for how it’s going to make money. And we’re talking about a lot of the same people that destroyed the Twitter API and started locking things down even before Elon killed it completely and they’re trying to convince us that they are pushing for an open environment.
As said many times before, Jack is now AWOL and left for nostr, he even deleted his bluesky account because the crowd didn’t like him there. He doesn’t have a majority on the board and don’t own any majority stake either.
The motivation for a new protocol is there’s architectural limits to activitypub. It’s essentially email over http, it really behaves like public mailing list archives, as servers push each interaction as a message. This is part of why there’s often a discrepancy between visible replies across servers because retries are limited. Account portability is also very limited as accounts and posts are tied to a server.
Bluesky switches to a content addressing model plus user ID based on a public key, allowing you to more easily move across servers as well as syncing data between servers such as thread replies, it’s very much like git (user data is held in personal repositories signed by your key) with a shared CDN/cache (relay servers, previously called BGS) and “worker agents” (mostly driven by the “appview” which is the api endpoint for your client + feed generator servers). You post to your repository via your appview, it sends a ping to other servers and they sync new relevant entries.
They already have federation with 3rd parties in a sandbox network and the official server just switched on “internal federation” (used to be a single shared server, now there’s 10 using the same protocol that open federation will later use)
The code is already open source, several servers in the sandbox is 3rd party reimplementations
Since handles are domain names (and your own DNS entry points to your account public key, DID) they have a referral deal with a registrar to let people easily get a custom domain and set it as a handle (otherwise your handle is a subdomain on the bluesky domain). But future plans are uncertain
Yeah, this is def a thing that is a big sticking point for me. I have a hard time supporting a company these days without a clear revenue plan because it’s just kind of a bait-and-switch otherwise.
Same thing for companies that run out of business. When you pay for something there’s a (sometimes tacit) agreement that bugs will be fixed. At least this would allow companies/users to do that themselves when needed.
I love how we have free to use licences (MIT, GPL, CC, etc) and it would be really great to see the same idea used with terms of services and privacy policies! How great it would be to quickly see that this site uses fair tos and to understand what it includes? Maybe this would also nudge (at least smaller) companies toward not being horrible privacy invading monsters
That would probably be pretty hard, considering every service is different. Google drive stores your data and so their ToS probably says you can’t store pirated content, but that wouldn’t make sense for most other services that you can’t upload stuff to.
Personally, I’m just sick and tired of modern UI design. Bring back density, put more information on the screen, eliminate the whitespace, use simple (and native!) widgets, get rid of those fucking sticky headers, and so on.
In addition to all the software freedom stuff, and so on. Also, I wish GPL were more popular too.
Yeeees, why do modern websites have so much horizontal whitespace? That 3 column design where 2 are empty. Just… why? Luckily firefox has a reader mode. Makes news websites much more bearable.
Awareness if not prioritizing energy efficiency. We rarely give any thought to services that run 24/7 even though they’re only used 8/5 or we don’t care how many CPU cycles a process uses even though it has no SLO for runtime. Most companies probably think it’s a question of dumping millions of carbon units into to the atmosphere or becoming luddites.
I’ll go further and say some sort of OpenStack like thing should be mainstream. Why shouldn’t home computers by default be able to deploy cloud-like services?
The death of the device and the return of the system.
A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.
A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.
A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.
Developers should go back writing efficient code in lower level programming languages to stop wasting CPU cycles for stupid reasons, like not wanting to use types, or something more stupid than that.
For personal projects and prototypes i believe it’s fine, but when you consume the electricity of mid-size countries just because you prefer to write your production code in convenient languages don’t lecture others about ecology and climate change (i am not refering to you).
Stop forcing updates on the lower level stuff that forces people to spend billions on maintaining code. This way, we could return to a world where you can just buy software and use it for years without some update borking it.
Also outlawing financially motivated (i.e. greedy) retroactive ToS changes.
Any sort of “contract”with the user including ToS, licensing agreements, etc. These consistently violate contract law since it’s not a negotiation between peers, you don’t have an opportunity to read before purchasing, and there’s no direct quid pro quos for what you’re giving up. By all rights these should be unenforceable
I mean it did change for a very good reason. Stuff gets hacked because everyone is online always. In “the good old days” it wasn’t a problem because people weren’t really online so there was pretty much zero risk of old software being used to exploit your machine. These days? It’s a liability to have old stuff on your phone because someone could exploit it to steal stuff from a large number of users.
Small security updates when necessary would be fine, but all the time I just see software (especially with the web) be like, we’re deprecating these features (that millions of websites use).
Fucking always-on connectivity and security problems caused by it are the main reason why things can’t just work. You need to be updated or else.
I visited a friend not that long ago and he kept using Windows XP and The Bat and Opera around version 9. He knew every keyboard shortcut because he didn’t have to relearn every few years. Never got hacked, I just wonder when his bank stops working because of TLS incompatibilities.
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