I posted a somewhat emotional note about hearing about @tonroosendaal's passing of the torch within Blender over on lobste.rs.

[cwebber@social.coop]

I posted a somewhat emotional note about hearing about @tonroosendaal's handing of the leadership torch of Blender over on lobste.rs. https://lobste.rs/s/bpk3l6/ton_roosendaal_step_down_as_blender#c_69jzlp

There's a lot more I could say. In many ways ActivityPub would not have happened were it not for my exposure to the Blender community.

As I said in the comment, Ton's fingerprints are all over Blender, which is so much more than just software. I have full confidence in the team that will carry the torch forward but for now: thank you Ton.

[cwebber@social.coop]

What I mean by "ActivityPub would not have happened" is I mean quite literally, @tsyesika and I, the co-editors of the spec, would not have worked on it were it not for my exposure to the Blender community.

There's a lot of reasons why that's true actually. The MediaGoblin fundraiser that ultimately paid for @tsyesika's work on ActivityPub happened largely with direct mentorship from multiple people in the Blender community. That's just one way.

There are so many others.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Likewise, @spritely is building super ambitious tech, right? It's very low level, and it would be *easy* for it to look like just vaporware, for it to be just academic.

Our solution to that is *directly* inspired by the Blender open movie projects. We ship game jam demos we build using Spritely's tech, like Cirkoban https://files.spritely.institute/embeds/cirkoban/

"Demo driven development", I often say. This makes sure we know that the tech *works*, is fun to use, and gives the community something to try out.

[cwebber@social.coop]

The source of that inspiration is watching the Blender community through the open movie projects put artists, the real users of Blender, right next to developers by making films that push the project to its limits. This leads to many features, many bugs found early, and much engineering effort happening right in Blender in a very direct way that we often just don't see in FOSS.

It's a large part of the reason Blender has become *the best* and now *the default* of its class of software.

[cwebber@social.coop]

Anyway. I'm going to stop rambling. I'm grateful for Blender, and I'm grateful that several times when I've met Ton, he's sat down with me and treated me with full seriousness, even at times when I was very young and inexperienced in any of this.

Thanks for everything. Hell of a legacy, no matter what happens next.