Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 7

@bob The key to all of this is making it so that you don't need to pick a server, yeah? Just run on your device, and store-and-forward works ok enough so that when you come online, you get the messages you were waiting for.

Break down that client-to-server divide!

I walked past a protest today but I wasn't sure what the focus was... it seemed extremely wide ranging, like it was about everything I believe in at once? Pretty much every topic (outside of digital freedoms) I care about seemed to be brought up in the 5mins I was able to be a bystander. I was in a hurry, but even though I agree with all the things said, I wonder if more focused protests are more effective?

But maybe it's useful to have a very general leftie protest every now and then?

A few friends and I are thinking of starting a free software usergroup in Western Massachusetts that maybe would meet twice a month (once for presentations, once for hacking). Probably it would meet in Northampton, MA?

I wonder if there's interest in this?

I added a new "Encryption has a shelf life" section to the Caveats section of #Spritely Golem's writeup. It's an important point I hadn't called out previously! https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org

> Encryption has a shelf life. In general, secure ciphers from about 15 years ago aren’t secure today, so it’s possible that chunks that are currently only readable by intended recipients can eventually be read by anyone who gets their hands on them. [...]

And before you reply, yeah ActivityPub in its default incarnation is "only as private as email", and that's not quite private enough when the default is mega-nodes, and I agree (self hosting helps).

There are also intentionally spaces left in the spec to allow for even more private interactions than that and I'm exploring it but damn if you read people talk about it you won't get the sense that it's email-like in its directedness

it literally even uses to/cc/bcc for crying out loud

ActivityPub: Hi I'm literally being born because the former primary author of OStatus regretted not having private messages, let's make private messages the default addressing mechanism and public messages a special exception

*Years later, AP is a standard and widely adopted*

Popular meme: "Yeah well ActivityPub is nice and everything but it's too bad its only for public messages"

Me: ;_;

@aral @bhaugen ActivityPub, from the spec perspective, *IS NOT* everything is public. That's a common misunderstanding due to the most popular instance being a Twitter clone. But that's false. ActivityPub's origins come from trying to bring email-like private addressing (to the extent email really is private) to the fediverse, with public stuff being a special exception.

And that's not even to consider the current stuff I'm exploring in Spritely, which is taking some of that further.

YOU make all my work on this stuff worth it! <3

Side note, I've gotten a lot of friendly and positive responses to the #Spritely Golem demo, and I see people excited about the ideas and what it could mean. I've also gotten a reasonable number of "that was fairly easy to follow" messages which is really good to hear. It makes me feel like this work is worth doing and that I'm off to a good start. There's more of these coming!

Are you interested in how to bring secure, private, peer-to-peer distributable content to the fediverse that can survive nodes going down? I've finished writing the documentation for the #Spritely Golem demo which explains how to do just that: https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org

It also includes a running, workable demo which you can try yourself. Please do and let me know your thoughts!

@ckeen @kaniini The ocap community has a phrase that's not quite right: "We don't prohibit what we can't prevent." I don't 100% agree, because there are some things we do want to prohibit that we can't prevent, but where the consequences may be social rather than technical. But it's *close* to being correct.

So my alternative phrase is: "We shouldn't pretend we can prevent what we can't." Pretending to do so worsens a problem because it presents an opportunity for bad actors to violate it.

these meetings are open to everyone, you just have to join the group... see the join button on: https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/

SocialCG meeting in 20mins! Talking about Spritely and also going over old ActivityStreams issues https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2019-02-13

"Billion Dollar Brain" put out some of the best hacking music I ever listened to, but sadly the artist pretty much entirely disappeared from the intarwebs. I still have the album; maybe I should upload it somewhere. But it's too bad... the music was never released under a license where I know I can *legally* do so.

Free culture survives more easily than nonfree culture in this way, especially for obscure stuff...

I love the Guix project. Honestly, working with and contributing to Guix has been one of the best experiences in my free software life (even though using it still requires a lot of patience for rough edges)!

I do appreciate the W3C "let's scribe all the meetings" requirement. In general even though it's a little goofy the IRC scribing of a voice call route works. (The main exception is that any real time meeting scheduling is hard in an international setting because timezones)

one of those days where the main thing I did was read meeting logs so I can get up to date on what is happening / what I need to do (I'm doing contracting on some web standards stuff, so even my contracting isn't totally unrelated to my fediverse stuff)

@maloki I've long been interested in a hacker/community-oriented standards org. IETF is the closest we have, but isn't quite that. Though one thing the W3C does have is its patent non-aggression policy, and the reason that works is that it's able to bring a bunch of corporate participants to the table. I don't think a hacker standards org could do that. (There's also some government groups that will only accept work that come from "official" standards groups.)

Maybe it's still worth trying.

A lot of people find out that the W3C's governance is fucked up and overly dependent on corporate sponsorship (and it is) and then assume that the WHATWG must be a better institution (it isn't).

WHATWG is, for the most part, a "what-the-major-browser-vendors-say/do-rules" org. And keep in mind, that's now just two organizations (Google and Mozilla). That's good reason for pause.

If you're veg* and miss beef jerky, the Louisvile Vegan Jerky Co puts out a pretty damn good product. It's not quite as chewy as the original but it's close and hits the right notes.

However, it's *damn* expensive. Like, $7 a pack expensive. That's too much for anything but a rare treat.