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(With apologies to Monty Python)
After a couple of weeks of renewed tech posting, I've been doing holiday stuff for a couple of days, and now I'm "hacking my house(#DIY-ing). Here's the evidence:
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My 14yo and I positioning a rough-hewn beam which will be a shelf in my new office.
And the final touches:
Chris Krycho wrote a thoughtful post about the state of browser development and web standards, and as developers, the tendency sometimes to see Chrome as the standard for what features browsers should be supporting. Chrome is not the Standard:
> Over the past few years, I've increasingly seen articles with headlines that run something like, "New Feature Coming To the Web"— followed by content which described how Chrome had implemented an experimental new feature. "You’ll be able to use this soon!" has been the promise.
> These are tradeoffs, plain and simple. Chrome ships new features fast, but they're not always stable and they often have performance costs. Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they're usually solid and always perform incredibly well.
> That's what makes the web so great, even when it makes things move more slowly. Sometimes — often, even! — moving more slowly not in the experimental phase but in the finalizing phase makes for a much better outcome overall.
Fellow #webnerds, it's a good read.
Kevin Marks asks "is DiSo back?" I hadn't thought about it, but...
Damn straight #DiSo is back.
Not necessarily the project, but the ideas? Absolutely. As we begin to see the Silos we created for what they are, some are building the tools to re-colonize the Open Web. Are you publishing online? Do you own your own content? Are you sure? Or are you dependent on Twitter and Facebook - the #silo sites - of the world to carry (and monetize) your writing, your activities, your family photos?
I know I still am in many ways. It's just so easy. But easy leads to exploitation. So tie your shoes, button your coat, and get to work:
10 years ago: Will Norris, Chris Messina, Stephen Paul Weber and I launched a little thing called The DiSo Project. DiSo stood for "distributed social" and at the time was based on OpenID, XFN, and blogs (Twitter just launched the year before and wasn't much on our radar).
10 years later, we have IndieWeb, Activity Streams, ActivityPub, WebMention, and even an open, decentralized alternative to Twitter.
It took longer then we thought it would, but it's happening.
Designing an open Facebook alternative (outline), Jason F. McBrayer.
> I meant to be writing a couple of blog posts on Mastodon. But a thread on Mastodon led me to start thinking about Mastodon:Twitter::X:Facebook. There have been a few alternatives that haven’t really gone anywhere, which is kind of unfortunate, but perhaps they were just too early. And I was thinking about what we’d want today.
(I need about 3 hours to process and comment on this, so go read it and think amongst yourselves)
The federated social media project aardwolf (nee fedibook) is looking for a new name/identity, and one of the options is a name with a great domain: weare.social (oops, taken since 2014 - new domains are being purchased). I love the name and it veers away from the "facebook-but-federated" tone of "fedibook".
I decided to play around with an identity idea, so I whipped this up in 20 minutes. Would need a good bit of tweaking and research on finding licensable or open emojis, but :shrug:
Much has been made lately about Twitter having become a trashfire, with rampant trolling and abuse of women, monitories, and non white-dude-being folks. Being a white dude in tech, I was generally ignorant of the direction things were going, as my timeline was mostly other white dudes in tech congratulating themselves for their cleverness.
Around the time that GamerGate was blowing up, I made the concious decision to start following a larger variety of people on Twitter, in an effort to break out of the cocoon I found myself in. One day I need to write a post about that, but this is not that post.
This post is about how I discovered that, while I wasn't looking, an alternative began growing up from its very nerdy roots and is becoming something real people could - and should - use.
The major social media sites - Twitter, Facebook - are commonly referred to as silos - great collections of content with few connections to the outside world. Content flows in from users (and the web) but not out again.
The picture I've recently started forming is the Dystopian Underground Community from the science fiction genre: The Haves live near the surface, in the Silo's highest levels, blessed by light and air (and attention). The Have-Nots live below, garnering less and less light from the source, instead inheriting the castoffs and scraps dropping from the levels above them. The Upper-Midlevels can still see the light clearly, pretending that they are not dependent on the goodwill of the Haves for access, and pretending that there are not hundreds of levels of population below, struggling for life.
The residents in the Midlevels are used to life in the twilight, move in their circles of family and friends, and have grown to believe that making a life from the hand-me-downs from above is normal. They know of the lower levels, they depend on services that the residents there provide from time to time, but are convinced that either life there is not so bad, the residents are living in the dark by choice, or the worst: believe that they have earned the right to the light, rather than being born to it, and those below somehow don't deserve access.
The further one's social circle gets from the dominant Haves, the deeper into The Below, the harder life in the silo becomes. The Below is rife with roving gangs of trolls, descending even from the Midlevels where they live in relative comfort, to harass and abuse the citizens struggling to make ends meet on the scraps of attention and spaces left to them by the Haves and those in The Above. The trolls have little to fear from The Below, save the reminder that they too are Below - somon else. And perhaps it is that thought that drives them to stand on walkways and corners, hurling insults and petty self-justifications at the passing residents.
The Silo is a terrible place for those not born into, or assigned to, the upper levels. Fortunately, there is hope: The federated Colonies...
Out on the surface, separated from the Silo, a new set of colonies is being built. Each colony is self-sufficient, with resources for every inhabitant, and attention to spare. Some are small - just a few tens or hundreds of inhabitants. Others are massive, home to hundreds of thousands of residents. Here the domed and towered structures bask in the light, with a vitality and energy long since lost in the Silo.
The colonies are home to nearly a million former residents of the Silo. Some still descend into the Silo to visit family, friends, and invite others to the colony. Some have moved permanently, homesteading a new network of sheltered structures here. These colonies are a federation - communication and residents move freely from one to the other, local administrators making sure that their respective codes of conduct are maintained, provide space and facilities for the residents, and coordinate relationships with the other colonies. Residents find a colony of likeminded individuals, and can move from colony to colony as desired, with some paperwork to transfer residency.
This isn't a utopia; there are always disagreements - we're human after all - and adminstrative conflicts have led to colonies disassociating with one another. But here on the surface they are free to do choose their connections, joining and leaving the federation as desired.
If Twitter and Facebook are the Silos, blessing the privileged while taking advantage of the Outsider and the Other, the Colonies can be found in the federated web, the open social networks - sites like Mastodon, Diaspora, Friendica, and GNU Social.
Mastodon in particular has established itself as a viable alternative to the murky depths of the Silo. With a million-plus users spread over more than a 1000 instances, each server, or colony, is a full-fledged social network, with users posting, sharing, following, and liking each other's content. But more than that, each user can remotely follow users in other servers, bringing new viewpoints and content into their space.
Is a migration to federated social media sites going to break the power fo the Silos? No. There are enough users happy to be near their friends and family, or eager to harangue and harass those in The Below, while jealously eyeing The Above.
But maybe some at every level of the Silo will find themselves looking for something better, a place with something for everyone, a system that is not designed to entrap and enclose them, and make them subservient to the whims of execs and advertisers.
The Revolution will be Federated.
I love using Gitlab to manage the source of this site. It has all the feautres of Githab I use, and more. I've been hosting this site on Gitlab pages, using their build system to deploy this Jekyll site for the last couple of years. But (at least in my experience) Gitlab's CI system has been unreliable, with new posts or changes often refusing to deploy properly due to worker instability. Having this uncertainty (among other things) has killed a lot of my motivation to post or work on the site. Additionally, after my Let's Encrypt certificate expired, I fought to get Jekyll to render the challenge file properly and I was just completely frustrated.
Enter Netlify, which I had seen mentioned in my Twitter stream but had not investigated yet. I was able to log in to Netlify via my Gitlab account (Oauth++) and had my repo set up to build in a couple of minutes. Netlify worked out the Jekyll build command for me and the branch. I clicked build, skeptical that it was going to work out of the box. And work it did. The first build took 12 minutes (this site has many many posts). I was a bit worried that my long build times (a "feature" of Gitlab's new-docker-image-for-every-build CI system) were going to continue to haunt me.
On a hunch I tweaked my jekyll build command to add --incremental - a time-saving feature of jekyll that only rebuilds files that have changed. Gitlab never supported this option because every build was done in a fresh Docker container. I didn't know if Netlify would support it or not, but it was worth a shot. My next build time was two minutes, and the build log showed only 4 files re-uploaded. BOOM.
So good build times are good. What about my issue with Let's Encrypt and the certificate? I really wanted my site to be served over SSL - not so much for privacy as for identity verification. The first time I saw Netlify mentioned it was in the context of someone getting their site up on SSL, so I was hopeful. Indeed, Netlify's control panel had a simple HTTPS section, with built-in integration with Lets Encrypt. Once I had my DNS moved over to Netlify, the HTTPS setup took... oh, 2 minutes. And that included http->https redirection, and had the site set up to serve on monkinetic.blog as well as www.monkinetic.blog.
Color me impressed and I'm now a Netlify customer (well, it's free for individual use anyway, but YKWIM).
Anther feature I'm excited about is Preview Builds: I'm typing this right now into Gitlab's editor, and it's going to get committed to a new "preview" branch. If all goes well, Netlify will build the site to a new non-production server image for this branch, where I can preview the post before it goes live (yes, it's just a few paras of text but I often edit after seeing a post "in-situ").
Jodi recently watched the Ken Burns Vietnam War documentary (yes all 18 hours worth) and has been encouraging me to see it as well. We sat down and watched the first installment last night.
I've watched my share of war movies, TV shows, documentaries, etc. They're a staple of our media culture, even our American identity. They're not things I gravitate towards as a rule.
The content in these representations is objectively awful — war is hell and the things people do to each other in the name of king and country are horrible. I'm not judging right and wrong re: causes, just observing.
I've mostly been detached from those aspects in the past, due in a large part to the incredibly good fortune to have never experienced war in any personal way myself.
Last night was different. It wasn't the fact that Ken Burns' work shows the horror of war, and the bullheaded stupidity of persons-in-charge — which it does admirably.
What's different? I'm different. I'm still shaken after the Nevada shootings and my own memories resurfacing in new ways.
More then once while watching, the sound of machine gun fire from the screen had me imagining that hotel room in the Mandalay Bay, agape and helpless as a shadowed assassin fired non-stop into the crowds amassed below. And then I was in that high school trailer again, only this time the gun didn't jam and people died.
I didn't say anything. I shivered and went back to watching, afraid to admit that something that has remained in the background, all but gone, for nearly two decades is now looming over my shoulder again...
Another mass shooting, this time in Las Vegas.
Each time, I'm warily grieved but I don’t let it in very deep. These things are awful, and I’ve literally been there, but when my thoughts drift there I sweep them away to somewhere else. I don’t want to spend time on the past, but this time the scale of the senseless death and destruction caught me off guard. My processing of these incidents has to be filtered though my own history.
I hesitatingly Googled "Atlantic Shores Christian School shooting" and scanned the top hits. Once or twice before I've looked to see what has been written about that December day in 1988, and haven’t seen much new. Today there was a follow up story done by a local Virginia Beach station -- WAVY 10 -- and I clicked through to YouTube to watch it.
For the first time in probably 10 years I saw that mobile classroom, desks turned over, papers strewn from one end to the other. I could see the exact spot where I and a dozen other students huddled on the floor, wondering if it was our last day.
I can't and don't compare my experience to the terror that the crowd in Las Vegas went through last night (or Sandy Hook, or Virginia Tech, or...). But revisiting my own place of fear gives me a small window through which to understand theirs.
(This was originally posted on Medium)
Another mass shooting, this time in Las Vegas.
Each time, I'm warily grieved but I don’t let it in very deep. These things are awful, and I’ve literally been there, but when my thoughts drift there I sweep them away to somewhere else. I don’t want to spend time on the past, but this time the scale of the senseless death and destruction caught me off guard. My processing of these incidents has to be filtered though my own history.
I hesitatingly Googled "Atlantic Shores Christian School shooting" and scanned the top hits. Once or twice before I've looked to see what has been written about that December day in 1988, and haven’t seen much new. Today there was a follow up story done by a local Virginia Beach station -- WAVY 10 -- and I clicked through to YouTube to watch it.
For the first time in probably 10 years I saw that mobile classroom, desks turned over, papers strewn from one end to the other. I could see the exact spot where I and a dozen other students huddled on the floor, wondering if it was our last day.
I can't and don't compare my experience to the terror that the crowd in Las Vegas went through last night (or Sandy Hook, or Virginia Tech, or...). But revisiting my own place of fear gives me a small window through which to understand theirs.
(This was originally posted on Medium)
RT @DOGGEAUX: sometimes i think about the time when the far side & dennis the menace had a caption mix-up and i just fucking lose it https:…
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