@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world

deadsuperhero

@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world

I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.

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Decentered Podcast: Interview with creator of Blacksky (wedistribute.org)

This ended up being such a great interview. I know some people will shrug it off, because it’s Bluesky and not Mastodon, but Rudy’s a super smart dude and an amazing guest, and he shed a lot of light on building a community space for black people on an emergent platform. There’s so much good info coming from this man!

deadsuperhero,
  1. There were a variety of price points, including $1.99 tickets for people who couldn't afford more. General Tickets were 40 bucks, but quite a few people spent more to sponsor the cheap tickets to help out. Only corporate attendees paid $250 per person.
  2. The demos were recorded and uploaded, extensive notes for each breakout session were written, and some of us did live-blogging for the entire day while attending. The general format of an unconference is pretty grassroots, conversational, and informal.
  3. It's the third event of its kind, bringing in a wide variety of people building different parts of the Fediverse, from Trust & Safety to standards bodies to developers and advocates. There's a lot of awesome things happening as people try to grapple with some of the biggest challenges the network has ever had.
deadsuperhero,

Honestly, I think this is an extremely cynical take. It takes a lot of effort to organize and run something like this, and nobody is getting rich off of it. If anything, it's pretty meagre compensation to set off infrastructure and organizational costs.

The talks themselves are also a informed by privacy concerns: some attendees are fine with being directly cited in notes / recorded / talked about, but a lot of people just wanted to be part of conversations and do not want that.

I think some of your suggestions in your last paragraph are actually pretty good, but I also think it's a little unfair to make demands here. No aspect of running this thing is easy, and the whole "why don't they just?" attitude from the sidelines is kind of unsavory when a lot of us went out of our way to pay extra to make sure there were more than enough $1.99 "almost free" tickets.

Like, if that's not good enough for you, I'm pretty sure nothing is.

deadsuperhero,

Let me think…

  • Flohmarkt is like Craigslist or eBay
  • Honk - Ultra-ultra minimalist
  • Vocata - a general C2S-enabled server that allows you to throw any kind of Vocabulary you want at it. Could be useful for mocking up client apps.
  • Wordforge - federated novel-writing
  • SkoHub - Some kind of federated knowledge discovery system?
  • GreatApe - an OBS-like federated video thing that you can have live audiences with.

That’s just what I could find from scrounging around, I know there’s more.

deadsuperhero,

Nostr is more of a protocol / network in and of itself, as is Scuttlebutt. Both legitimate efforts in their own right, but not quite Fediverse in the traditional sense. Though, with bridging, it’s getting harder to tell where one starts, and another stops.

Regardless, I would love to start a list of really esoteric Fedi software like what I have above. I know there’s more, it’s just harder to dig up.

deadsuperhero,

So…it does do what it sets out to do, just not in the way you would think.

ActivityPods doesn’t bring Solid to ActivityPub accounts. It brings ActivityPub protocol capabilities to Solid Pods. The reason this is significant is because Fediverse platforms historically use relational databases, whereas this is like using Google Drive and files to create a graph database. Additionally, ActivityPods is a framework for building apps on top of.

Damon, my friend and co-founder at We Distribute, is building a really killer app on top of it called Memory.

deadsuperhero,

Basically, it’s the second half of ActivityPub that’s for mapping an instance to clients. Most platforms on Fedi use bespoke APIs or copy Mastodon, but C2S is kind of more fluid and lets you build custom experiences and logic that hooks into it?

What’s cool about Vocata is that you can kind of just make up the vocab and activity you send out the Outbox. Vocata just shrugs and says “whatever, that’s valid.”

It could be brilliant for prototyping.

deadsuperhero,

It’s less expensive than you would think. Object Storage is actually really, really cheap in a lot of cases. I host a PeerTube instance, and while it does cost me money every month, the cost is decently offset by recurring donations, as well as the savings that Object Storage brings.

deadsuperhero,

Good to know, I was wondering about that!

deadsuperhero,

The Pixelfed app isn’t officially published yet, but you can easily grab a beta build: pixelfed.org/mobile-apps

deadsuperhero,

They can upload videos for Stories, I don’t think videos can be uploaded elsewhere from mobile, at the moment.

deadsuperhero,

Within the Pixelfed app: tap the Camera button, then the Clock. Tap +Video to add a video story.

deadsuperhero,

There are a handful of decent instances, but you really have to dig to find stuff, sadly. I run Spectra Video and basically have to curate sign-ups and which servers we follow.

It helps cut down on a lot of the crap, but it takes work.

deadsuperhero,

Jira. In the Software-as-a-Service world, it’s often the tool of choice by Product teams to track issues, by breaking everything down into stories.

It’s a horrible, slow, janky mess. The interface is confusing and poorly laid out, you can easily have too many options all over the place, and how its even used can vary dramatically from one company to another.

Salesforce is also trash for very similar reasons. How Sales people around the world all vouched for this thing is beyond me.

deadsuperhero,

Holy shit, Air Force MX represent!

Yeah, this piece of garbage has it all:

  • Crusty UI that looks like Windows 95 + Web 1.0
  • All navigation is done either though typing numbers in a box, or diving into a maze of links with the density of a black hole.
  • Loses everything if you hit the back button
  • Schedule in the future, sign off in the past.
  • The yellow windows in the ugliest font imaginable. Pop-up blocker enabled? Yeah, you won’t see them, and your page will refresh if you turn it on.
  • Have fun fishing for a primary JCN to pull from for all your subsequent job write-ups. Cross-reference everything!
  • You signed off a whole JCN tree on an X and need to open it up again? Better have powers.
  • Half the time, your shop writes stuff that’s just wrong. They took out a part and put it back in? “L 127 Configured to Installed Position”, because they didn’t want to put in an install and removal job.
  • Being the DIT monitor who has to fix all the bad write-ups for QA compliance. So many people get basic details horribly wrong.

Been doing F-16 MX and using this garbage for the last few years now. I’ve actually gotten pretty good with it, but it doesn’t excuse the fact that this is one of the worst pieces of garbage out there.

deadsuperhero,

I mean, the real gag here is not just that it’s bad and people mostly don’t use it correctly, it’s that your whole section can catch hell if QA finds even the smallest error. Better have multiple people on DIT to look over everything every single day!

It got to be one of those things that I hated so much, I sketched out plans for my own open source alternative. No guarantee that I’ll ever actually make it, but I have loads of thoughts on how to do this better.

Meanwhile, all the F-35 guys laugh at us in ALIS, which is apparently great.

deadsuperhero,

Hey everyone, I just wanted to thank you for the lively conversation and thought-provoking insights. We don’t have to agree on every point (or at all), but I’ve decided to synthesize a lot of thoughts and ideas from these conversations into a blog post: deadsuperhero.com/…/economic-musings-on-federated…

deadsuperhero,

Yeah, one of the project devs threatened to ban me after I told him to get past his own ego.

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