No worries! Writing that down actually helped clarify some of my thoughts.

Something extra: distributed computing.

Let's say you have 3 processes that need to communicate with one another. There's heaps of tooling available in OSs to manage those processes. Logging, networking, filesystem access, privilege separation, resource allocation... all provided by the host OS without installing anything. But what if those 3 processes can't run on one "machine"? Which process should go where? What if it needs 8GB memory but there's only 6GB available on some of the machines? Who controls that?

Systems like Kubernetes, Nomad, Docker Swarm etc. offer a way to manage this. They let us say something like:

• run this process (by specifying a container image),
• give it at least these resources (xGB memory, xvCPUs)
• let it communicate with these other processes (e.g. pods, overlay networks...)

These systems manage containers. If you want to do distributed computing and want to take advantage of those systems to manage it, stuff needs to be run in containers.

Containers are not the only way to do distributed computing - far from it! But over the past few years this particular approach has become popular in the, umm... "commercial software development industry".

Opinion. Are Linux containers something to look into as someone who doesn't work in the industry? Unless you're interested in how containers themselves work and/or distributed computing; frankly - no. Computers are still getting faster and cheaper. So why is all this stuff so popular in the commercial world? I'll end with some tongue-in-cheek.

Partly it's because the software development industry is made up of actual human beings who have their own emotions and desires. Distributed computing is a fun idea because tech people are faced with challenges tech people are interested in.

Boring: can we increase our real estate agency brand recognition by 200%? We could provide property listings as both a CSV and PDF to our partners! Our logo could go on the PDF! Wow! Who knows how popular our brand could be?

Fun: can we increase throughput in this part of the system by 200%? We might need to break that component out to run on a separate machine! Wow! Who knows who fast it could go?

When you specify To: localtesting@aussie.zone how does the bridge know if you meant https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting or https://aussie.zone/u/localtesting instead?

Good question

The process of going from that email-like address to an ActivityPub Actor (https URL) is done by WebFinger. So whatever we get back from that lookup is who we send the message to. For example, when we look up localtesting@aussie.zone we get this response (truncated for readability):

{
  "rel": "self",
  "type": "application/activity+json",
  "href": "https://aussie.zone/c/localtesting",
  "properties": {
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#type": "Group"
  }
}

The value for type, application/activity+json tells us that we can send ActivityPub stuff to it.

You can play around with WebFinger in the browser.

• your account: https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=binomialchicken%40lemmy.blahaj.zone
• my one: https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=otl%40apubtest2.srcbeat.com

Hope that makes sense?

Markdown was originally designed for exactly your use case. The Daring Fireball blog has been using Markdown for 20 years now.

I always forget how old Markdown is. And the syntax it's inspired from - plain-text email - has been in use for even longer!

Don't tempt me :D

I'd much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now.

Interesting. Could you go into this a bit more? Do you mean for example being able to use the Lemmy web UI to read LKML?

Oh wow awesome. Thanks so much!

It needs a bit more fleshing out, removing a bit of hardcoding too. And of course I want to publishit under an open source licence too. Thanks for the tip - I've written it down in the growing TODO file! :)

The alternative is something like FediSeer where you can get sites guaranteed by others and block anything not given the all-clear, but that really harms the ability for new sites to appear.

If something like this were to gain lots of traction I'd hope it would be something not too difficult to implement by smaller new sites.

What really sucks is the situation with email now: it's really tricky to get stuff delivered if you're not Google/Microsoft. The barrier to entry is way, way too high :(

It's a nice thought, but the White House encouraging memory safety seems like a relatively insignificant push. It's the weight of legacy code and established solutions that will hold us back for a long time.

Absolutely. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. The reason there is so much poor code - including ones with manual memory management bugs - out there is not a technical problem. There are hordes and hordes of programmers, managers, companies etc. who would love to get paid to port this stuff. They'll do it for 10% of the price those stupid lumbering tech consultancies do it for.

But who gets the contracts in the end? Give me a f'ing break!