cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 37 Posts
  • 82 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • with BlueSky I’d have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes

    I think this is a common misconception based on some critics’ incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) “A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month” for some numbers.

    If I understand correctly, to run a “full nework relay” does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren’t interested in for any long period of time.

    Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people’s relays.

    Disclaimer: I’m not an atproto expert, and I haven’t set any of this up myself.


  • The blog post also says this:

    There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its “credible exit” (Bluesky’s own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.

    My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more “decentralized architecturally” I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.


  • ok, but, does ActivityPub have portable identity and/or content addressability yet, so that when some of those servers (which are often hobbyist-run and/or tenuously funded) inevitably cease operating their users can continue on a different server? 👀

    It’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is no.

    otoh, atproto’s PLC DID method is also not really decentralized… but at least the rest of their system is actually substantially more decentralized architecturally than AP is.

    To anyone interested in reading a very informative in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend the blog post How decentralized is Bluesky really? by ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber (followed by this and this).







  • Huh? That press release quotes the The Environment Agency’s Director of Water and National Drought Group chair saying “Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife” and includes “Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems” in its list of ways people should save water at home.

    I admit I made this post without clicking through to the actual press release or seeing more than the paywall preview of the article; for a humorous post like this, i think just the headline from a paywalled article (if it’s from a reputable source) is sufficient. Now that you got me to read the actual press release, I see I was correct to assume that 404media’s amusing headline was in fact accurate.

    How would you suggest they report this story differently? Highlighting the ridiculous part is what makes it worthy of reporting on it in their context at all.




  • NTFS, fat32, exfat, could I theoretically create my own filesystem?

    Yes. There are many different file systems and you can absolutely create your own. Making one that is reliable and performs well, and/or is something you can actually use for the disk that you boot from, generally involves low-level kernel programming and years of work - and is not exactly a beginner’s programming project.

    However, you can also more easily play with implementing filesystems in a high-level language using FUSE.

    If so would my computer even be able to work with most files or connect to other devices?

    Your computer can use many different filesystems at the same time. You can also store a filesystem in a file on another filesystem, rather than dedicating a partition of a physical disk to it. So, yes, you can use a filesystem of your own design at the same time you are using other storage devices formatted with more common filesystems.













  • The network never went down.

    You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan’s later OStatus site Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢

    When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.

    https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan’s own first post is “still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.” … but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren’t worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.

    Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/

    As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan’s URL shortening service ur1.ca which is also now long-dead.

    screenshot of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in the 1982 film Blade Runner, during his "Tears in rain" monologue. (no text)

    imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.

    🪦

    The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else’s domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don’t know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢