David Sterry @weex@c4.social

This whole episode is confirming for me that the migration to the fediverse is inevitable and that every action taken in cweb is good for us.

What's particularly exciting about this is that nobody can know the result of thousands of communities molding the software to suit their needs.

If the the human story is one of engineering a better world, then the fediverse is a collective effort to engineer a better online world.

Thinking how great it is that one rich dude can't buy the fediverse.

Preparing some thoughts on the first 6-8 months of Magic Stone's existence. Ecko, Acropolis, themes, plugins, new contributors... it's been a blast!

If you maintain open source software and don't use C4, I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on this talk by the late Pieter Hintjens. The talk doesn't depend on video much so it works as a podcast. https://peertube.co.uk/w/2cw9QGY51ey6SiF3zPPtvW

The best feature of Git is that decentralization is baked right in. upstream is just a label, and one that doesn't come along in a clone. This clean slate of context makes a first class citizen of every single copy of the source code. When you clone a repo, I feel like git should say something like "You now have the ball. What will you do with it?"

As the git/pull request flow becomes the norm, innovation in development process would seem naturally to look toward tooling for forks. How could we make forks interoperate more seamlessly? By perhaps making tools that transplant PRs from one repo to another with higher success.

Is it possible to develop better techniques for merge conflict resolution? I'm sure better understanding of the source of conflict could help.

How could we make package managers more flexible about which fork of a package to link into a stack? Working protocols and API specs seem promising avenues.

#FOSS #random #development

Been writing a lot more recently and it's just good. One trick to try is stream-of-consciousness, not stopping or going back to edit. I found myself still using backspace and stopping so made this single pager to help turn it into an exercise.

Write Without Stopping:
https://codeberg.org/weex/write-without-stopping

Join Magic Stone. It's a good community. You should contribute. Visit the website. Say hi in the Matrix. Discuss problems. Write code and get it merged. It's very simple and we can have some fun making accurate software.

#magicstone #ecko #acropolis #c4

Twitter has been rolling out downvotes on replies for a while. At scale, the lack of signal attenuation has meant that centralized social networks amplify everything too easily, so I welcome this step for its potential to improve discourse.

Mastodon doesn't have this problem in part because we don't have the money-hungry algorithm adding fuel to the fire.

Either way, I find Twitter kind of creepy and am so so glad to have found the fedi 🌻

h/t #JoschaBach

You know what's fun about free software and the C4 process? The mystery. Though our sample sizes are still small and there's no real control groups or hypotheses, the software we make goes out into the market and either meets a need better than alternatives or it doesn't. This process aspires to be scientific even though it's inherently messy.

If you're a little bored with what you're working on, why not make a fork or try one, and see if you can learn something from it?

Along somewhat similar lines, I joined a bunch of different Mastodon servers to see how they were different. They're mostly the same since 99.9% of the code+config is the same, but the content and community on each is so different.

Some people want to have one account that works across the Fedi, but with the experience of joining these difference instances, I feel like that'd be quite boring. It's more fun to think of each one like a different place to hang out, where I can wear different clothes and think different thoughts.

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Attention all media uploaders! Please caption your images and video so that everyone, not just the sighted, can appreciate, boost and reply to your brilliant memes and funny fails.

We've added a couple of themes to Ecko that highlight undescribed media but one wonders if more can be done.

In discussions around Media Upload in ActivityPub mention is made of a summary but it is non-normative. So would it make sense to formalize the handling of captions and text descriptions? Can a protocol extension or document help the fedi become more accessible at network level?

h/t @weirdwriter@writeout.ink @makarygo

🥳 I'm pleased to announce that "FEP-8fcf: Followers collection synchronization across servers" has just been finalized. Find the document at https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/feps/fep-8fcf.md

👆 This FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) is the third standards document to be finalized under the FEP process and continues efforts to help interoperability across the fediverse.

🔗 View other proposals and the process for submitting yours at https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep.

#fediverse #fep #standards #activitypub

After creating an OpenAPI spec for wot-server, I went looking for an API client generator. The first one I saw looked decent and made ruby gems, but didn't have much activity around it. A few closed issues and PRs.

OpenAPI-generator on the other hand has thousands of open issues and a few hundred open pull requests. I used to see these as red flags, signs that a project was out of control, maybe beyond help, but now I see these big numbers as proof that the project is socially important. Not only do tons of people care enough to report problems and submit solutions, the commit log is buzzing.

I still have no idea if the gem it generates for me is good but with this many eyeballs how bad could it be? #codegen #openapi #ruby #python