October 2018 - Page 6 of 9

I spent this Saturday marching against the Democratic Football Lads Alliance. I was part of a unity demonstration which began at Portland Place (i.e. a little south of Regents Park) and marched ver…

.

14th October 2018

The two souls of anti-fascism | lives; running

Funkwhale has some handy docs on its implementation of ActivityPub.

https://docs.funkwhale.audio/federation/index.html

Gives a few basic hints as to how you might go about actually implementing ActivityPub in an app with a DB.

14th October 2018

OK so got a basic gist of ActivityPub I think… Objects are things like notes. Activities are things like creating or liking these objects. Actors post messages to or get messages from inboxes and outboxes to send these activities around. There’s a client-to-server part for actors to send messages to their server. And a server-to-server part to federate and deliver messages between actors on different servers.

Plenty more to it than that but enough to get by with!

13th October 2018

Yeahhh I find code kata really fun and relaxing. No stress, no mega problem to solve. Like doing a jigsaw or something. Just did a little PHP Fibonnaci one with spacemacs, git and behat. Nice easy way to improve with your tools.

12th October 2018

The ActivityPub spec is only a 47 minute read according to Wallabag. I can do that.

12th October 2018

The internet and near-costless scaling of digital has allowed the concentration of too much power in too few hands. Our systems for…

12th October 2018

When I wrote about owning and controlling my own content, I talked about trying to keep my “content” in its canonical location on my site, and then syndicating it to social networks and other sites. Doing this involves cross-posting, something that can be done manually (literally copying and pas…

12th October 2018

Do we really need a StateBook? https://newsocialist.org.uk/do-we-really-need-a-statebook/

The conclusion, with which I would agree, is: no. It would be centralised services just of another kind.

Good though to see a major political party recognising that the centralisation of the social graph with the big digital giants is not a good thing.

But a better solution is the support of open standards and protocols, and control and portability of data.

12th October 2018

ActivityPub hot take. https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/2535-ActivityPub-hot-take

I don’t have a deep understanding of much of it, but the general gist seems to be that RSS/Atom can do plenty of what ActivityPub can do, with its own benefits and easier implementation.

I couldn’t argue either way, but interesting to read. I’m happy there’s a plurality of approaches to this decentralisation movement, that’s a healthy sign.

12th October 2018

A critique of federation (in the technical sense).

https://fieldnotes.resistant.tech/federation-is-the-worst-of-all-worlds/

Are privacy concerns inherent to federation? Dunno. The idea of decoupling data ownership from applications is good though. It reminds me of Solid and its data pods idea.

https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2017/12/20/paradigm-shifts-for-the-decentralized-web/

And of course indieweb which I commented a while back Solid reminded me of but surprisingly the Solid peeps made no reference to.

https://doubleloop.net/2018/01/09/paradigm-shifts-decentralized-web/

11th October 2018