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

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 wa

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.

Some folks have gotten themselves together as something they’re calling the Social Web Foundation, and I’ll cut to the chase: this is an attempt by ActivityPub partisans to rebrand the confusing “fediverse” terminology, and in the process, regardless of intent, shit on everything else that’s been the social web going back twenty-five years.

Hey 👋 if you don't know us already, we're building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.

This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that's to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I've tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it's not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!

When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.

Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it

As a web engine, Servo primarily handles everything around scripting and layout. For embedding use cases, the Tauri community experimented with adding a new Servo backend, but Servo can also be used to build a browser.

We have a reference browser in the form of servoshell, which has historically been used as a minimal example and as a test harness for the Web Platform Tests. Nevertheless, the Servo community has steadily worked towards making it a browser in its own right, starting with our new browser UI based on egui last year.

This year, @wusyong, a member of Servo TSC, created the Verso project as a way to expl

Back in June I wrote about an exciting confluence of digital auth tech:

(1) The commodification of #OIDC infrastructure, (2) the emergence of #FedCM, (3) and the compatibility of both with #indieauth .

In short, it is now easier than ever to log into web applications using your own website as an identity provider. Or at least, it would be, if your favorite web apps supported these agency-enhancing technologies.

https://blog.erlend.sh/indie-social-sign-in-could-go-mainstream

#opensource #indieweb #identity

https://writing.exchange/@erlend/113091679196090320

The concept of progress is at the heart of humanity’s story. From the present, it is possible to imagine a future of abundance in which our great challenges have been addressed by the unique human ability to modify the universe toward our own ends. Many believe that we will attain this future through a combination of expanding human knowledge and advanced technologies. 

This article explains how our current idea of progress is immature: it is developmentally incomplete. Progress, as we define it now, ignores or downplays the scale of its side effects. Our typical approach to technological innovation today harms much that is not only beautiful and inspiring, but also fundamentally necessary for the health and well-being of all life on Earth. Developing a more mature approach to our idea of progress holds the key to a viable, long-term future for humanity.

The way we understand what progress is and how we achieve it has profound implications for our future. Ultimately

Speaker: Martin Kleppmann, University of Cambridge, Inc & Switch

We have come a long way since my colleagues and I published the local-first essay five years ago. In this talk I'll review where the local-first idea came from, where we are now, and what I hope the local-first community can work towards in the future.

I think this is the most important (WIP) Fediverse Enhancement Proposal of this year for the #ActivityPub protocol:

FEP-7952: Roadmap for Actor and Object Portability — by @[email protected] and @[email protected]

It ties a lot of elementary building blocks for #nomadicidentity neatly together, most succinctly summed up by one particularly magic feature:

Bring-your-own Actor ID! 🪪💫

Actor profiles can now be hosted separately from the instance (including as a static JSON object on a personal website), which in turn enables service providers to offer their users a “BYO (Bring Your Own) domain name” feature.

That’s really all I ever needed from the notion of a ‘single-user instance’. All I want to manage on my own is my identity; I don’t want to take on the full burden of managing a whole AP server.

In this paradigm, someone’s tiny personal website could also be their Actor-ID Provider, and nothing more. That ID could in turn be used to as a (reasonably nomadic) acc

I’m personally very excited about this because Rauthy provides a robust foundation of OIDC-based identity for the fedi-connected platform we’re building with Weird netizens.

The addition of “social logins” such as GitHub means indie platforms like Weird can let people easily sign in with the mainstream identity provider they’ve already got, but once they’ve signed up they’ll have the option of using our open source identity provider for other services going forward, thus reducing their dependency on the Big Corp.

Social bookmarking is a novel use case for ActivityPub and I’m super excited about it. I heckin’ love links and lists! I wanna use them for everything.

Things like Bookwyrm are cool, but it’s not what I want. I just wanna link the thing. Books, films, podcasts, articles, songs.., they’re all just resource recommendations which can be encapsulated by links.

To free ourselves of our current predicament, we must simultaneously de-centralize and re-centralize identity.

• Decentralize ownership.
• Recentralize agency.

By de-centralizing the ownership of identity away from platform monopolies and back to individuals, we can re-centralize the agency of personhood.

The central authority of ones digital identity must first and foremost be the individual themself. That's how we regain our digital sovereignty.

In the glory days of web 1.0, social websites would prominently link out to their digital neighbors via lists known as webrings; magical doorways to an expansive hinterland of digital villages.

Let's envision what a truly federated chat like Matrix could do to improve the cross-connectivity of chat channels. Most of these features are already possible, they just haven't been implemented yet in a community-oriented client experience.

I suspect the fedi-collective has more negotiating power in this moment than it realizes. We may as well make some asks, see how Meta responds, and they in turn will see how the public, the media and the regulators respond to them in this bold new era of pervasive Big Tech skepticism.

Money can mitigate the risk of Threads:

'coopting the fediverse': $200k for Test Suite. 'overburdening moderators': $200k for moderation. 'locking in users': $200k for Nomadic Identity

A bit of internet reparations.

https://writing.exchange/@erlend/112163747418805861