@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

polotek

@polotek@social.polotek.net

Web developer, movie buff, and pretty much the best guy you know. Married to
@operaqueenie

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polotek, to random
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

Right. That part.
https://social.vivaldi.net/@jadonn/112497281365147200

polotek, to random
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

We got solar on the house last year. It wasn't necessarily about saving money for me. It became important to me to take a concrete step towards combatting climate change.

But something else started to dawn on me too. The fact that I'm now generating my own power, from an essentially unlimited source, is a truly radical act. I've been thinking a lot about creating a society centered around abundance instead of scarcity. It's not just theoretical.
https://assemblag.es/@theluddite/112496059286904697

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

The way these things play out in the US is still unbalanced of course. Getting solar is still expensive up front. And you have to be a homeowner first, which is obviously a huge barrier in itself. So abundance is still currently only for the privileged few.

But I also listened to this podcast episode which gives me hope for a different way. It's possible to create local renewable resources that can serve neighborhoods instead of just individuals.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7yuVuf0pIAf17At8n2BmPN?si=zE0_YinmQQSqnO1yT_J2cw

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Been thinking about getting some sort of Android tablet to read comics on, but worried my preferred feature set ("rectangular screen" "rectangular means the edges of the displayable area are ninety degree angles. that's not a rectangle" "cheap, like tablets were five years ago back when you could still get tablets with rectangular screens" "preferably not Samsung") might reduce the pool of available devices to zero

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@mcc is there a reason that you're opposed to an iPad? I'm just curious. I'm a person who has an Android phone but still has Apple devices for the stuff they do well. So I can speak to what it's like to live in that annoying gap.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@mcc somehow I thought that might be the case. I hope you find something that works for you. A tablet is the perfect format for reading comics. Unfortunately I can't say anything about the drawing experience.

polotek, to random
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I'm still thinking about this conversation. I had some thoughtful exchanges about it yesterday. Today I'm having a different thought.

I feel like we spend a lot of time trying to take the things we like and make them free. And conversely we spend a lot of time taking the things we don't like and trying to force companies to pay us more money to do it.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112480963476171110

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I think we're grappling with some important questions around money. Does getting paid for something ruin it for the person who does that work? Does paying for something that you can get for "free" elsewhere ruin it for the person who's using or consuming that thing?

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I've been deeply immersed in two distinct conversations recently.

One of them you've seen in here if you've been following me. What do we want out of technology? Why can't we have it without being exploited? Who's gonna do that work? How do we make it sustainable?

Many people are engaged with this conversation. We can all think of things we want to see in the world.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

But that last question, how do we make things sustainable, leads into the second conversation I've been trying to have.

How do we get more comfortable with doing business with each other? How do I use the money I have to get the things I want to exist? One way to make something sustainable is to inject money for the people doing the work to live off of. Why is it so hard to do that?

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

There are a lot of things trying to pull me back into a "steady job". One where I get a regular paycheck, but in exchange it takes up a huge amount of my energy and focus. And I'd probably be building things that people will pay for. But almost certainly wouldn't be the things I actually wanna see in the world. And meanwhile, the community that I would like to see gets very little investment.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I'm not sure how to turn these into coherent thoughts right now. I can't help but think about it in capitalist terms. And I know a lot of people hate that. We have an opportunity to create our own structures to do the kind of business that we find less objectionable. Things that we're happy to pay for. Exchanges that feel like value to all parties involved. But it really does require a change in our current expectations. And it's tough to find people who are ready to think differently.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

On a related note, you should find some way to support @zachleat and 11ty.
https://fediverse.zachleat.com/@zachleat/112485776015229718

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

People will pay for value. They don't mind it at all. The problem is that "value" is a very squishy and subjective term. Marketing people spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out how to tell a story that sounds like value to customers. Even though the product doesn't change. It's actually difficult. Which is why marketing is a job people get paid for.
https://toolsforthought.social/@billseitz/112492333166251040

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

Open source software rarely positions itself as "valuable". Instead the story is always about being an alternative to some other thing that you probably hate. People want that to exist. They will always say yes to that. But it's not a story about "value" that they're willing to pay money for.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@slink @jadonn I’ve been asking people in other tech roles why they don’t get more involved in projects. A big part of it us they refuse to deal with the disgruntled nerds who frequently own these projects. But it’s worth acknowledging that this is still a nascent culture in other roles. They’re not sure how to think about the value of it. And they’re much less inclined to do free work until they understand the value.

polotek, to random
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I started down this road because I asked about seeing a full activity log on my own server instance. And it turns out you just can't.

My goal is to make it easy to stand up two separate mastodon instances on my laptop. Then I can get them to talk to reach other and observe what is actually happening. I think that'll teach me a lot

https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112453817656490883

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@thisismissem why do you say that? K8s isn't what I think of when I want something simple.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@jenniferplusplus nice. I'll check it out. All of the docker-compose solutions look somewhat similar. They all seem to make sense. They just don't work easily when I try them. I've been trying to get away with skipping SSL termination since it's all local. But I guess you can't really avoid it? You need a domain, and chrome forces SSL for anything that's not localhost. So if this is a pain in the ass.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@jenniferplusplus oh wow. That's not what I would've expected. Is that a rails thing or specific to mastodon?

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@jenniferplusplus @konnorrogers I think I understand a bunch of the security concerns. You need have some confidence that the server you're talking to is the one you expect. But it should be more than possible to relax those layers in a trusted environment.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@thisismissem docker should be a simpler version of this for local development. I'm not sure why it has been so difficult to get dockerized mastodon working as advertised.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@thisismissem I'm tantalizingly close. Everything is up and running. It just won't respond to requests because of various security features. And I'm not sure of the recommended ways to get around them.

polotek, to random
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I've spent the last several days trying to get a local mastodon build running on my laptop. I've gotten pretty far, but I have yet to see an actual UI in my browser.

So far, I've been trying out various attempts to run it in docker. That should be easier than trying to get the various components set up myself. But for some reason it's not. Getting mastodon configured properly is pretty complex. Getting everything right "out of the box" feels pretty error prone.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@strypey nah. I'm aware of it, but haven't spent any time on it. My understanding is that pleroma has it's own flavor of ActivityPub? I've already invested in a mastodon presence. So it seems more reasonable to spend my time here first.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

Yes I'm aware of all of this. You're basically illustrating what I mean by "mastodon compatible". That concept is still nascent. Those who have tried to make something else that speaks mastodon are going to have limited success. That's because a) the behavior of mastodon is not fully documented, and b) the behavior of mastodon is still evolving pretty rapidly.
https://social.belkadan.com/@jrose/statuses/01HYHGPJWZMY4H032CY3QWDAY6

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I have some ideas about what I want to do in the future. But this isn't about just finding something off the shelf that does what I want. Right now I'm trying to actually starting to learn about the ecosystem from a technical perspective.

I've done a lot of griping about mastodon and the fediverse so far. Some people get frustrated. It's easy to just claim that I don't know what I'm taking about. So I'm gonna fix that.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

And eventually I'm coming back to this. One of the goals of the fediverse should be to give people the control that they want. I realized pretty early on that the mastodon ecosystem isn't meeting that promise all that well today. No shade. It just is what it is.

There's more work to be done. And I may want to influence how things develop. So I need to be more informed.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/111927504927667540

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