Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

Adblockers should block "AI" buttons and features and I don't understand why they don't

@evan I enjoyed my stay in Montreal.

Oh right it's Bandcamp Friday https://isitbandcampfriday.com/ so if you buy music on Bandcamp today https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115243834597904702 the artists get more money than normal and the mysterious holding company that owns Bandcamp gets less

Alright as soon as I get Situated on this train I'm gonna start asking a whole buncha questions about CSRF

What I'm listening to today: "TR-909 & TR-727 Backyard Beat", Zap Danger

It is the 90s and there is time to roller hover cyber blade through floating freeways passing through a glowing city where the buildings seem to be made of ephemeral light. Downtempo dance music for old drum machines and modern guitar pedals. Look quickly at the start of the video to see a sweet adorable baby (Elektron Analog Drive pedal) and also a sweet adorable baby (cat).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq9aJzDGT6E

Circumstances have contrived to force me to write this deeply unsatisfying sequence of characters

Things I saw on a walk in Montreal

@fluffy @trwnh I mean also DNS is a brittle and extremely censorable system. A cryptographic key like plc uses would be better, if you had a way of looking it up other than kinda reproducing DNS circa 1995

@trwnh Yeah. Hence the power of DID. Except that we've sorta poisoned DID now by introducing a half-solution, did:plc, which is fundamentally unacceptable but which is better to do better than from an end-user perspective.

The thing that upsets me about bluesky is it's not a very good solution but it is situated in the market in a way that makes it socially difficult to introduce better solutions.

@erincandescent @cwebber but at least it exists, right? which is more than you can say for did:plc

@trwnh @cwebber however also
- i think some previous systems, like protobuf, did this already, and
- at the same time they introduce the concept of the "lexicon" they poison it, by using the "schema" to absolutely, positively, in any bluesky-derived system, ban microblog posts with more than 300 characters. so the lexicon is good but you don't want to use it or you are limited to 300 characters

EDIT: typed the wrong word. the first time.

@cwebber But also, WordPress is a horrible, security-vulnerability-infested nightmare to maintain, and the BlueSky PDS is easy and resource-cheap to maintain, so I'd rather have (and eventually, will write) PDS with a wordpress-like frontend than WordPress with a PDS-like frontend

@cwebber also the thing I see the PDS as providing at root is "a standard API for requesting data objects by key". a blog isn't that, you can address it by key (URL) but it returns formatted HTML not a data representation. RSS isn't that either, RSS is a linear recency-biased stream, and anyway we don't want RSS we want ActivityPub. You could expose the PDS xrpcs from Wordpress with a plugin the same way you can add ActivityPub to WordPress with a plugin.

@cwebber the important thing is not that it's new it's that they built it

Question: "how infeasible/impossible is a hybrid server that satisfies both protocols [AtProto PDS and ActivityPub] simultaneously?" https://xoxo.zone/@clarity/115306161120635648https://xoxo.zone/@clarity/115306161120635648

Answer: M. Kasprzak already did this, in June of this year https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:svpym4ujks7qxczscyzq7fuy/post/3lr5iki7sf22a

What I'm listening to today: "Generative ambient", CELUS

21 minutes of ever-changing shimmers & swells. (If your attention span is not that long maybe stop at the 5:45 mark.) This is the song you hear when it's morning and no one else on the spaceship has woken up yet and everything is pleasant and peaceful, although *definitely* when this movie reaches its second act something within the corridors will start hunting your crew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXJC6ZvH5y8

@aeva @glyph Because they are geniuses they are better at using the device than you, so when you hand it to them it will start working

However we do have to think about network effects, so if we made a hybrid solution that uses a PDS to store data and ActivityPub to share the updates, I'm pretty sure we would be able to talk to neither ActivityPub nor ATProto¹. And a social network that has only you on it is pointless.

¹ Also at this point we'd probably have to actually face the fact that did:plc is a lie

Now what's interesting is when you compare this to Mastodon. Mastodon has a Good Enough decentralized way of two servers talking to each other & sharing data updates. But the servers are imperfect and have forced lockin. ATProto has a Good Enough way to create a small, portable data store. But there's no decentralized way for them to talk to each other, and the awkward centralized solution creates lockin. The two solutions complement each other, if we didn't have to think about network effects!

My position on ATProto, as a protocol, is that the Good Part is the PDS¹. Everything good about ATProto comes from the PDS. It's the "everything else" that is the source of the problems — centralization, high barriers to entry, tendency to monopoly, some of the censorship. Unfortunately, most of the system is "everything else".

¹ "Personal data server". The repo of posts that Bluesky scrapes to form feeds.