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
> I've been thinking a lot about creating a society centered around abundance instead of scarcity.
Currently reading Walkway by @pluralistic, which centers about exactly that. It's the weirdest book I've discover from him yet, but also the most thought provoking.
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
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 This gets at what I feel is one of the great tragedies in open source - the overselection and over-emphasis on engineering/development skills as what has value in open source. After years of working with open source and participating in open source communities, I believe the lack of open source marketers, designers, technical authors and other highly-skilled, highly-technical, "non-engineering" roles holds open source projects from achieving higher adoption.
I get you have to build software, but users won't be able to adopt your software if 1) they never know about it, 2) you can't articulate to the user effectively enough why they should adopt it, 3) adopting/using it is a huge pain, or 4) documentation doesn't exist or is insufficient to lower the cost of adoption and use for users.
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
@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.
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.
For one thing, I feel like rails really doesn't wanna be run in a container. Most of the challenges I've run into have been about rails. There are many other moving parts though. And maybe I just haven't gotten to those issues yet because rails tends to complain first.
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.
Yeah I feel this. Too many people struggle with this binary. If you care about money at all, there's only a short leap in people's heads to the worst kind of exploitative behavior. And the only way to avoid that is to not care about money at all. So not caring about money becomes a moral character trait that people are supposed to actively seek and perform. https://glasgow.social/@sue/112473252309499347
We're probably going to have to repeat this a lot and keep talking about it. But we don't actually have a ton of practice for how to manage things in a world without corporate control structures. Managing spam is one of the many things we take for granted now. Companies just do it for us, because not doing it devalues their business.
In the fediverse, all of these responsibilities are decentralized. It's going to matter a lot that nobody has to make themselves responsible for fighting spam.
I have a vivid memory of the first time I set up my own self-hosted blog. We still allowed people to freely post comments back then, before we realized that was a mistake 😂.
Anyway, I started getting spam pretty immediately. And I had to figure out what was available in terms of spam filtering and how to integrate it into my hacky project. It was really instructive. And it's one more thing I stopped taking for granted.
Can anybody point me to a good deep dive on the mastodon database schema? Preferably with explanations where necessary? Yes I know how to go look at the mastodon docs and code. I’m doing that. I’m also looking for more of a guide to wrap my head around things.
I've been thinking a lot about what what it would look like to have a mastodon-compatible architecture that was designed for a single admin/single user experience.
I think what I want is an architecture that is designed with an eye towards maintainability and also preserving the data long term. So for example, I don't think I want a traditional database to be the primary store of record. I want things in text files. They can be loaded into a store for performance and efficiency. But the store of record is just text that can still easily be read many years from now.
@mastohost@polotek there's a site like ActivityPub Academy that may be more what You're looking for — it's a fork of mastodon with exactly this added in
@polotek Maybe it’s the opposite of VC led? OP glossed over that the VC money didn’t show up for about two years. And even when it did a lot of it got spent hiring people straight from meta. We held the majority of the board seats (@anildash was there). Not a lotta twirling of mustaches from my recollection.
@JasonPunyon@polotek the other large issue here is "VC" as the signifier when the company sold to an owner years ago? There are no VCs running Stack Overflow at present.
I don't think I'll ever understand the kind of person who says "you MUST fight with me about technology minutia. And if you choose not to, I will block you forever." Like it's such a weird combination of principles.
There are lots of different reasons that my career in tech has been effectively derailed. But first and foremost, I definitely failed to make talking about tech into my entire personality. That has been working against me for a long time. 😂
Devs: Ok, I'll help you build Torment Nexus. Just so we're clear, you can't just lay me off after we've get the thing up and running.
Oh, we're definitely gonna do that.
Devs: That seems harsh. Then I don't want to be blamed for it when it starts hurting people.
Well who else would we blame? You built that damn thing! And if I'm not mistaken, a bunch of people warned you not to. I'm afraid this ones on you champ.
Devs: Fine! Can I at least get an office with a door that closes?
Here’s a big secret that people don’t want you to know. If nobody is able to give you clarity about the scope and scale of a request, sometimes that means you get to decide. It’s really cool when that happens. Don’t waste it. https://soc.jrconlin.com/@jrconlin/112374476337793296
@polotek@jrconlin You are correct, and the thing to do is try and constrain the scope to “one point”. There will be fixes that are smaller, there will be things that blow up due to unknown unknowns but on average, every chunk of value you deliver will be “one point” (in practice something like 2-3 “ideal engineering days”.) If you build a reputation for delivering on this cadence that’s how you gain trust, including forbearance when things go south.
@polotek unions and guilds could potentially improve things at least for the larger studios, but the state of the industry right now and the maybe unique qualities of the industry in general probably makes this sort of thing more difficult to set up than it would otherwise normally be. It's not impossible though, and there are success stories here.