blaine

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Last Notes

2025-11-07 16:06:30 UTC

RE: https://indieweb.social/@bonfire/115507615653471686
What @npub1lzd…urpr are working on is impressive and important and y'all should consider supporting their crowdfunder!
Bonfire was absolutely the top contender for my work building New_ Public's Local project (https://newpublic.org/local); in the end, I'm building mostly from scratch not because Bonfire isn't great, but because I wanted our team's 2+ years of research, planning, and design to lead the conversation, not the technology.
BUT we're in a unique spot. Most communities could use Bonfire.
#note1lmf…4ua5

2025-10-30 14:51:58 UTC

A decade ago, I was an invited expert at a meeting to review the technical architecture of a £330m fraud detection system for Universal Credit at the UK Treasury.
My conclusion was that the proposal was not only massively over-priced (basically fraud-levels of overcharging), but that the system as designed would obviously have issues where automated decisions would leave vulnerable people in dire straits, against the legal requirements.
And so it goes: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/30/uk-woman-who-booked-oslo-flight-but-did-not-fly-loses-child-benefit-because-she-emigrated

2025-09-27 16:20:02 UTC

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... but that's not what the question is asking. It's intent, and the #atproto and #activitypub in the question aren't referring to specifications, they're referring to communities.

2025-09-27 16:19:25 UTC

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you're reading it as a technologist – I agree with you that making atproto and activitypub literally interoperable is ... weird (although, I have argued many times that I think the two protocols will converge in functionality and scope, and also separately that lens-based translation of data structures is basically the best thing and would smooth right over the lexicon/AS differences if we had good tooling).

2025-09-27 16:09:26 UTC

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I think you've misread the intent of the poll. The end user experience right now is "if you'd like to communicate across party lines, go install a bridge"; the question the poll is asking is "would you like to be able to communicate across party lines without setting up a bridge?"

2025-09-27 15:57:22 UTC

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💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯 I've been banging on about this for sadly, literally decades now. I'm 100000000% convinced that this is the conversation we need to have if we want to make decentralization relevant to people (and it's not going to be framed in terms of decentralization).

2025-09-27 15:42:21 UTC

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where the real "human-level" challenge is is that e.g. Mastodon and BlueSky are different, culturally, and so are "the Fediverse" and "Truth Social" and any combination of separate servers that we can imagine, or even two random servers *within* the Mastodon-running-Fediverse. Mastodon and Bluesky are way more similar than Pixelfed, and it makes much less sense to federate Pixelfed and Mastodon than it does Mastodon and Bluesky, because they serve different social purposes.

2025-09-27 15:36:59 UTC

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(i.e. not at all)
It makes plenty sense to make BlueSky and Mastodon interoperable, even if it involves protocol-level translation. Doing so is, frankly, easy, and much easier than the very common approach of translating between Spanish and Chinese (which is what we normally do to communicate instead of inventing a Spanish/Chinese pidgin, which is also a thing humans do!).

2025-09-27 15:34:09 UTC

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you're making a category error, Evan.
People who aren't us don't give even the tiniest shits about which protocols they're using. 5G phones happily talk to 2G phones over SS7, and the only thing anyone knows about "5G" is that it's "fast" – and they don't even know what that means.
You just said approx. "that doesn't make any sense; it's like saying that you want NG-RAN and SS7 to be mutually intelligible" and people will care about as much as someone who literally says that.

2025-07-14 18:46:15 UTC

The work is as important to the health of our communities as it is ambitious, and I’m deeply grateful to be a part of it. More soon!

2025-07-14 18:45:48 UTC

Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get to share a “new job” update that’s more like a “life goal ✅” update. This is one of those times.
I’m ridiculously excited to share that I’ve joined [@wearenew_public](https://mastodon.social/@wearenew_public ), working with @npub1nue…dtgk on their small-but-mighty Local Lab team to build a new product to support local communities come together online in healthy ways.

2025-03-28 17:42:36 UTC

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My own feelings on AI slop are "it's complicated" but to ill-advisedly paraphrase, in addition to "fuck exploitive and monopolizing tech, literally bring out the guillotines" I will also say that (1) we should respect and pay artists, (2) copyright itself has long been fucked, (3) everything is a remix, and (4) many musicians in the 1870s were deeply opposed to the idea of recording performances.

2025-03-28 17:38:05 UTC

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obviously that whole moment moved *extremely* quickly. One thing I'm not sure of is that as far as I've seen, Studio Ghibli (not Miyazaki) have been very quiet through all of this. ChatGPT refuses to do style transfers for most artists that I've tried. The open question is: have Studio Ghibli, or Disney through some licensing loophole, *permitted* OpenAI to do this? Some clarity on this point seems essential.

2025-03-26 23:39:00 UTC

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it is 100% ai slop. See also this thread https://bsky.app/profile/dame.is/post/3llces4rnas22 – I couldn't resist making the cuts deeper. 😅🙈

2025-03-26 23:21:53 UTC

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I am so sorry.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/231/297/419/479/689/original/911acddc215020a3.png

2025-03-26 16:49:32 UTC

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this is a masterpiece.

2025-03-04 03:37:34 UTC

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I reckon some major world governments would implement laws to this effect or similar; a billion? That's reasonable. A trillion? A line has been drawn.

2025-03-04 03:25:42 UTC

First person to become a trillionaire wins a bullet in the brain.
Sorry, I don't make the rules! (I'm a prison abolitionist and would never condone capital punishment, let alone cold-blooded murder)

2025-02-03 16:49:01 UTC

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https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf/
Should be a good time! I'm also definitely down for an Alberta or elsewhere in Canada Fediverse meetup.
On IMC, so many conflicted emotions about the direct line from IMC to X and what's happening at the White House. Overall I choose to choose hope, but damn. This was not the plan. 🥲

2025-02-03 03:30:16 UTC

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oh nice! I'll be there in late March for an atproto conference, looks like the exhibition will still be on! Will definitely check it out.

2025-02-02 20:41:58 UTC

25 years ago I was in Seattle protesting the WTO and "free trade" deals like NAFTA with many others who cared about local businesses and didn't want to see the exploitation of overseas workers.
What's happened since is *complicated* but I wish there were more thoughtful analysis that didn't amount to "we screwed over workers here, so let's screw over the overseas workers who are doing better than they were and go back to having exploited labour here so that we can have cheap toasters again."

2025-02-02 03:48:24 UTC

Billionaires are the problem, not our neighbours to the South.
So, let's target billionaires with a 30% tax on any transaction by any financial instrument (company, investment vehicle, etc) that's more than 2.5% owned by a billionaire.
It's not even a usurious tax: it's exactly the same as Apple takes.
Not owned by a billionaire? No tax. Easy.

2025-01-28 18:13:25 UTC

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so much this. I would read that book.
Yesterday I had a conversation that concluded, "yes, you _could_ replace an entire product/dev team with bots, but you would also recapitulate all of the complicated bits of having a team in order to do it."
I wonder if God feels this way when looking at the creation he made in his image...

2024-12-12 01:30:38 UTC

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I would definitely add [@darius](https://social.tinysubversions.com/@darius ) and @npub1sac…kcpe to that list.

2024-12-10 19:23:38 UTC

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I go further in my speculation. I think the opt-in requirement for Threads federation stands out as a signal of where Meta is going. I can't find the quote, but Mosseri has said that the opt-in requirement is to protect their users' privacy, security, and IP rights and defend against spam and abuse.
I call bullshit. Meta has always been crap (intentionally and unintentionally) at those things, even on their own fully-controlled platforms.

2024-10-25 19:00:21 UTC

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it's so great to see, I love having these conversations! There was a long time while virtually all the commentary out there were breathlessly following how Facebook Appification was going to be The One True Future and it was just depressing as hell. It's so inspiring to see how many folks are both really thoughtful but also, critically, building and experimenting with really amazing alternatives. (ps did you see Erin Kissane's XOXO talk? https://erinkissane.com/xoxo 😍)

2024-10-25 18:50:03 UTC

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hopefully we can find good solutions! The challenges are very lightly technical, rather almost entirely social and political.
On the plus side, the conversation is happening! By contrast, very few people run alternative phone infrastructures that refuse to peer with monopolistic behemoths like T-Mobile or AT&T, or email servers that wholesale block gmail.com. 😅

2024-10-25 18:46:52 UTC

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💯 I'm definitely guilty of hand-waving on that. I'd love to see more nuanced forms of moderation because instance-level blocking is the nuclear option.
e.g. As much as I despise Facebook, I recognize what a challenge it is to overcome something like Threads. We need tools that give flexible control, or as you say we end up with a fragmented network (and, by default, one that's centralizing for most, silencing for a few, which is both good and bad).

2024-10-25 18:36:47 UTC

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(to bring it back to bluesky, I think Jonny's reflections are really important – flexible identity and networks are certainly *possible* with atproto, but the question of whether the "social architecture" in practice tends towards surveillance, advertising, or de-facto centralization is an excellent one.)

2024-10-25 18:31:51 UTC

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The key thing imho that any decentralized social network should provide is that you should be able to move to a new context without having to convince everyone you know to do the same. Creating a new online persona likely means the cast of folks you interact with is going to be different, and *that's a good thing*! I'd love to see us optimize for diversity, privacy, and discovery, rather than building catalogues of people-we-know.

2024-10-25 18:27:59 UTC

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our "accounts", or more specifically individual "feeds" are situated – the data in them makes sense only in the context of the community (e.g. "followers") and wider conversation the social objects were posted in. We might want to back it up for archival purposes, and that's great and should be possible, but not an intrinsic property of decentralized networks. i.e., I have "takeout" backups of my twitter feeds and google data, but I don't need that data *here*; it's not relevant.

2024-10-25 18:21:51 UTC

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good thread! The atproto folks are great, and Jack's origin narrative is "a bit frustrating" to say the least, but one point I've always differed on, that I think Jonny calls out really well, is that _data_ portability doesn't matter, and has been a red herring for technologists in the space forever.
e.g., I have zero desire to back-port all my Flickr posts into my Pixelfed account. No more than I want the posters I had on my walls when I was 15 up on my walls today.

2024-10-23 01:54:18 UTC

I'm a massive @npub1sac…kcpe fanboi, but don't take this with a grain of salt:
Please go watch/read her XOXO talk here: https://mas.to/@kissane/113353287668829352
I'm not going to even try to summarize, because I think she shares everything I've felt but failed to communicate about the need for our online communities to evolve for the past 15 years with profound intelligence, care, and humility. Just watch (or read) it, please. ❤️

2024-09-25 19:50:33 UTC

What's the state of the art for maintaining a single account that surfaces in both Bluesky and Mastodon? Just bridgy? (not a slight against bridgy, just the only one I'm aware of right now 😊)

2024-09-24 00:18:24 UTC

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there's got to be some deep law about the relative utility of technologies that can be inferred from the contrast between the incredible resilience of DNS and the utter *state* of DNS management tools.

2024-09-20 00:32:03 UTC

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Maybe we could go with:
"Climate Terrorism", a wanton act of climate destruction, e.g. flying in a private jet.
versus
"Climate Counter-terrorism", an act against a Climate Terrorist, e.g. blowing up a private jet.

2024-09-20 00:20:10 UTC

We need a word like "arson" but for acts that have egregious climate impacts. Private jets (for example) aren't just tools of arson, they also cause floods and other extreme weather.
The word should be cognate with arson, because at this point, with vanishingly few exceptions, flying in a private jet is a willful act of terrorism. Despite other options, some people choose violence.

2024-09-05 14:39:49 UTC

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eep! Sounds very stressful. I hope your friends are ok! Is there a separate emergency beacon that would get activated if something bad had happened?

2024-08-27 04:03:56 UTC

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I'm eager to read Dan Davies' "The Unaccountability Machine" that argues that over-protective and broken bureaucracies that restrict people from engaging in care for their community *result in* populism.

2024-08-27 03:50:18 UTC

As we (at least in Canada) move towards a situation where government organizations are not* (in general, locally at least) engaged in direct suppression of less privileged people in support of more privileged people (i.e., as things get better), the state monopoly on violence is at risk of migrating to a state monopoly on care. When bureaucrats have jurisdiction over civic things that provide safety and security, a lack of capacity or will in government becomes an implicitly hostile gate.

2024-08-03 17:22:15 UTC

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This article is a bit bleak, but it's clear to me that we need to fess up to the reality of the situation: it's bad out there. This quote in particular:
"the amount of energy being trapped by CO2 emissions ... equals the force of 800,000 Hiroshima bombs every day."
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/07/30/Wildfires-Grief-Paralysis/
This doesn't get better soon, sadly. We need to adapt to this new reality faster than any of us think. Paradise, Jasper, Lytton, Fort McMurray, Lahaina, Marshall, Santa Rosa, and many others: just the start.

2024-08-03 17:15:35 UTC

Now two weeks in to evacuation from my home due to wildfires; we're fine, and despite "communication that could be better" from local authorities, our understanding is that so far our home has been protected and safe. Grateful beyond words to the fire crews. ❤️
The experience has really driven home for me how deep a hole we're in. We live in the woods, and are in that sense a canary - but we're not the first, and won't be the last. Jasper is high profile, but this is happening everywhere.

2024-07-22 14:49:23 UTC

The world needs better mapping tools for simple sketching of "pirate maps." If you know of one, I would be very grateful right now to also know about it.
QGIS 🙅‍♀️ (crashes doing simple things)
Google Earth 🙅‍♀️ (seventy clicks to do one thing)
ArcGIS 🤑 (expensive)
Gaia 😖 (layer management is ... not fun)
Google My Maps isn't terrible, so that's what I'm using for now, but it's layer capabilities are fairly minimal. Any other pointers would be amazing. 🙏