Notices by Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp), page 2

Am I currently holding in my hands a physical copy of the exact paper that invented packet switching as prepared for the United States Air Force?

....maybe

Here's Paul Baran's RAND-published September 1962 justification for distributed communications networks summed up in a single chart. It's also the same paper where the famous "centralized vs decentralized vs distributed" triptych of graphs comes from. You still see this exact diagram, uncited, in modern presentations on the decentralized/distributed web.

Full paper: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2005/P2626.pdf

Every IMP (basically a proto router) on the ARPANET, December 1970.

A year ago I tried learning ActivityPub, and more or less failed. I was confounded by a spec that was so abstract I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Turns out I was missing some key things.

I have written a guide to learning about ActivityPub that I wish existed a year ago when I first set out to learn how to write social media servers that conform to the spec:

https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/

I wrote a thing about why I believe the best and most useful decentralized applications are going to be the ones that utilize multiple protocols. I imagine a world where ActivityPub, Dat, and Secure ScuttleButt are all seen as tools in a toolbox rather than as ecosystems, and what kind of amazing software we could build with them outside of the central/corporate paradigm.

https://blog.datproject.org/2019/03/22/three-protocols-and-a-future-of-the-decentralized-internet/

I've made a big change to my RSS-to-ActivityPub converter: it no longer posts to the (Mastodon) federated timeline. This should prevent it from gunking that up with potential spam. It is also less "discoverable" but, fuck discoverability.

As always, you can convert any RSS feed into an ActivityPub compatible account here:

https://bots.tinysubversions.com/

I've attached a screenshot of my Mastodon lists for blogs, work stuff, and podcasts. It's kind of like Google Reader in your ActivityPub client!

Anyone know any US-based public librarians who are active on the fediverse? I don't just mean aware of it, I mean actively participating on at least one federated social media instance

@nightpool @Trev Signing was by far the hardest part of writing my server, please use my code so you don't have to experience my pain:

https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub

Something that is blatantly obvious from looking through the actual physical historical record is that there are many women in computer science history that we just don't hear about. Sharla P. Boehm is the co-author of one of the three main papers that Paul Baran wrote inventing packet switching. Yet Baran is the only one remembered as its inventor. (Actually CO-inventor because another man independently invented it. No love for Boehm.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm

http://edtechcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2015/03/who-is-sharla-p-boehm.html

I'm just gonna put it out there: if you decide to run a federated social media server of any kind, strongly consider keeping it invite only and capping its size from the beginning. If your server has fewer than 100 active people on it and you have some level of trust or shared values, then moderation is a single person task that you as the admin can handle. At least in my experience.

I'm considering writing a "how to run a nice little community in the fediverse" guide with some best practices.

Just FYI, Mastodon v2.6.0 web client adds a nice feature that makes having inline RSS feeds (via something like my RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert ) much more convenient. The feature adds a "read more" to any post that is taller than a certain number of pixels, so now my "podcasts" list renders in a way that makes more sense. ("Read more" opens up a detail dialogue where you can read the full post in-client.)

A while back I built a site that converts RSS feeds to ActivityPub actors that you can subscribe to from Mastodon and other ActivityPub-compliant social networks: https://bots.tinysubversions.com/convert/

I've now also published the source code: https://github.com/dariusk/activtypub-to-rss

I see people posting that Esquire article about Mastodon and for all its faults the funniest thing is the <title> tag, which was presumably at one point the title of the article. I love how even the basic conceit of "this is not a corporation" loses people

@wakest ok but this is HILARIOUS, check the <title> tag