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 even if you are building it on ATProto. It hasn't set a lot in stone, it's just given us some bricks that we can all share.

The "AppView" is a component of the ATProto architecture that you are given nearly free rein on. It can be any kind of thing you want, and I think there's all kinds of unexplored possibilities there.

You might even be able to make an AppView with a meaningful ActivityPub integration, or possibly borrow ideas about inboxes and outboxes as an alternative to relays.

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 was safer, faster, and easier to write. I’ll share a bit about building both and what I learned.

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 reply in Frontpage.

Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.

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 explore the features Servo needs to power a robust web browser. In this post, we’ll explain what we tried to achieve, what we found, and what’s next for building a browser using Servo as a web engine.

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, it shapes our most significant actions in the world—it affects how we make changes and solve problems, how we think about economics, and how we design technologies. Whatever is not included in our definition and measurement of progress is often harmed in its pursuit. Its side effects (or externalities) occur in a complex cascade, often distributing harms throughout both time and space. The second- and third-order effects of our actions in the world can be difficult to attribute to their original cause, and are frequently more significant than we realize. 

As technology gets more powerful, its effects on reality become increasingly consequential. On our current trajectory, these effects will end civilization’s story long before we merge with machines, or before we have built a self-sustaining colony elsewhere in the solar system. We are not as close to a multi-planetary future as we are to the kind of damage to the biosphere that either destroys or significantly degrades civilization. If we continue to measure and optimize progress against a narrow set of metrics—metrics focused primarily on economic and military growth, which do not account for everything on which our existence depends—our progress will remain immature and humanity will continue its blind push toward a civilizational cliff edge. 

In this article, we use the phrase “the progress narrative” to refer to the way we think and talk about progress in society. The progress narrative is the pervasive idea within our culture that technological innovation, markets, and our institutions of scientific research and education enable and promote a general improvement in human life. This article questions the accuracy, incentives, and risks of this narrative, examining the reasons that the idea has held such a central role in shaping the development of our global civilization. In doing so, it attempts to outline the progress narrative earnestly and clearly, noting that it is often driven by an honest desire to see positive change in the world. The intention is not to point the finger of blame, or to deconstruct for the sake of argument. It is to inform a way forward and outline a path ahead toward potential solutions.

Drawing on a range of sources, the article takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the reality of humanity’s current trajectory. Several prevalent progress myths are reexamined, including apparent improvements in life expectancy, education, poverty, and violence. The roots of these inaccuracies are exposed by widening the aperture of our view. Even if we are living longer, many measures of the quality of life we are living are in decline. Our educational outcomes are in many ways deteriorating, even if access to education is improving. At a global level, despite the common narrative, it is not clear at all that poverty is actually reducing. And the tools of violence have increased vastly in scale of impact since the end of World War II; we now routinely create the kind of weaponry previously reserved for dystopian science fiction. 

To convey a sense of the extent of unintended consequences that can result from a single innovation, the primary case study explores the invention of artificial fertilizers. This development enabled a significant increase in the amount of food (and therefore people) that could be produced. The externalities of this innovation have had far-reaching consequences for human health and the wider biosphere. An assessment of these side effects helps us to open our eyes a little more widely, so that we may glimpse a fraction more of the complex reality that is generally omitted from the simplified narrative of progress. 

Our idea of progress needs to mature. If humanity is to survive and thrive into the distant future, we must transform and elevate the very idea of progress into something truly good and worthy of our shared pursuit and aspiration. As we understand more about the universe and find new ways of changing it with our technologies, we must account for the endless ripple of cause-and-effect beyond our immediate goals. We must factor both the upsides and the downsides that will continue to impact reality long after the technologists of today are gone. 

For our idea of progress to be mature, it must take account of its side effects and plan to resolve them in advance—it must internalize its externalities. In the second part of this article, four specific methods for internalizing externalities are outlined, alongside some clear examples of what such a process might entail.

The possibility of a mature kind of progress is both grounded and optimistic. It’s a proposal that the human capacity for both wisdom and ingenuity is far greater than we currently imagine. We are capable of holding the unknowable complexity of reality at the very center of how we take action in the world, and mitigating the consequences of the gaps in our knowledge in advance. This enables a *real *kind of progress that reduces suffering, builds a better understanding of the universe and our place within it—and increases our chances of both surviving and thriving into the distant future.