erlend_sh

Anti-fascistic software is made possible by pro-labor licensing.

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/115549403577231766

Anti-fascistic software is made possible by pro-labor licensing.

I've been trying to write this piece for years. Every time I get started I'm just overwhelmed with paralyzing visions of the FOSS commentariat accusing me of WrongThink, more so here on the fediverse than anywhere else.

But I'm scared and tired and we urgently need to get our shit together.

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/115549403577231766

Anti-fascistic software is made possible by pro-labor licensing.

I've been trying to write this piece for years. Every time I get started I'm just overwhelmed with paralyzing visions of the FOSS commentariat accusing me of WrongThink, more so here on the fediverse than anywhere else.

But I'm scared and tired and we urgently need to get our shit together.

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/115549403577231766

If you're a regular internet user the Personal Data Storage paradigm won't move your data from the cloud to your personal computer. Most people will still rely on an institutional cloud service, but instead of data-banking with a shareholder-controlled corporation people’s data can be entrusted to the equivalent of member-owned credit unions for data storage.

..without informed consent.

This post takes a look at ATProto from a different angle, and explores the value of some possibly less-noticed pieces of it.

The "Login with Google" button has been so useful and yet so horrible for the freedom of the web. Why does google get to be the gatekeeper to all of our web logins?

We need an alternative, but it also needs to be easy, and by making handles domains, and making it so that normal people can use and understand it, they have made it possible for an actually decentralized social login button.

Linking Identity to your Personal Data Store and using Domains as Handles is a crucialcombination that is really starting to unlock web freedom.

A lot of what I'm trying to get at with this post is that there is more than one way to leverage ATProto, and that there are some pretty major things it has started to do right that we really need right now.

We're used to the idea that there's more than one way to make a web app, and the same is true even if you are building it on ATProto. It hasn't set a lot in stone, it's just given us some bricks that we can all share.

The "AppView" is a component of the ATProto architecture that you are given nearly free rein on. It can be any kind of thing you want, and I think there's all kinds of unexplored possibilities there.

You might even be able to make an AppView with a meaningful ActivityPub integration, or possibly borrow ideas about inboxes and outboxes as an alternative to relays.

Our v0.3 mvp is finally done after a year of development and many more spent pondering cozy community design.

Today it's a minimalistic personal site generator. Before long it'll be a social network made of people's personal websites.

Nerdy web weirdos unite ✊❤️‍🔥

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/113794326443596401

There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I don't think is mentioned enough.

Intro / TLDR

I was intrigued to learn that the Roc language rewrote their standard library from Rust to Zig. What made Zig the better option?

They wrote that they were using a lot of unsafe Rust and it was getting in their way. They also mentioned that Zig had “more tools for working in a memory-unsafe environment, such as reporting memory leaks in tests”, making the overall process much better.

So is Zig a better alternative to writing unsafe Rust?

I wanted to test this myself and see how hard unsafe Rust would be by building a project that required a substantial amount of unsafe code.

Then I would re-write the project in Zig to see if would be easier/better.

After I finished both versions, I found that the Zig implementation was safer, faster, and easier to write. I’ll share a bit about building both and what I learned.

As written, the proposed remedies will force smaller and independent browsers like Firefox to fundamentally reexamine their entire operating model.

Recently Christine Lemmer-Webber shared this on Mastodon:

Here is your recipe for making the "Correct Fediverse IMO (TM)":

• Integrate ocaps, which is possible because actor model + ocaps compose
• Content addressed storage!
• Petname system UX
• Better anti-spam / anti-harassment using OCapPub ideas
• Improved privacy with E2EE ("encrypted p2p" even a better goal)
• Decentralized identity (notice the *y*, I did not say DIDs) on top of ~mutable CAS storage

In this post I'm going to explore how Leaf stands up to these goals!

Links:

• https://atproto.com - https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
• https://www.blackskyweb.xyz - https://bsky.app/profile/rudyfraser.com/post/3l6d7mmzhik2r

For a lot of us, atproto projects are some of the biggest (most users, most publicized, most code written, etc.) projects we’ve ever done. For me, it’s also my first time working in open source (ironically, someone asked me to be more open about that)

If you can help, pls check out open issues.

I know not everyone thinks highly of atproto around these parts, but please don’t let that get in the way of welcoming a fellow rustacean into the open source world 🦀

How open source projects can balance Makers and Takers: lessons from Drupal's contribution credit system and recommendations for WordPress and other open source communities.