On Bluesky: "The web is still there under all this michegas, ready to be magical again any time we want it to."#
New thread on Mastodon: OK, i give up for now on getting a team of nerds together to build a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub along the lines of what Automattic has done to bridge WordPress to ActivityPub. We will need that to happen, I would much prefer to get it done in advance, but people don't know me or trust me well enough to believe I might see something that they apparently don't. I'm pretty confident they will, but I would really love to get some help. #
- I wrote this on Bluesky this morning.#
- Most of what passes for discourse on platforms like Bluesky amounts to spam and abuse. Makes expensive moderation necessary and who’s going to pay for that on an open system. It’s why this approach can’t lead anywhere but to yet another Twitter or Threads, a place for billionaires to control us.#
- Hardly the first time I've said this, but this time I got a response.#
- Yep. I've said for years—your platform's experience will be determined by its mechanics, not whatever culture you think you want to foster. #
- Mechanics > culture in the medium term.#
- All systems are adversarial systems now.#
- That was from John Pettus. I could tell right off that we're thinking the same way. This morning I started to write a reply but quickly ran out of space because of Bluesky's stupid character limit. So I just pasted it into this blog post. #
- I've been saying that for years myself. #
- I ran a BBS in the early 80s, and was on Compuserve CB Simulator (my handle was Mastodon), and started blogging in 1994, and on and on. Mail lists always flame out. Same thing we're seeing in the tweetersphere. #
- Blogging has the inverse problem. Spam abuse is impossible, but then it's hard for people to find your brilliance. But at least you get to finish a thought before the trolls attack. ;-)#
- I was also a math major, studied combinatorics and graph theory. The connections between nodes determines a lot, as you pointed out. Most people don't even begin to get this.#
- I'm working on a new structure for a social web without these problems. It's very simple, a derivative of something I had on my blog in the early days called the Mail Pages. #
- I sent my blog posts out via email to groups of 8 people chosen randomly each time (or maybe it was 11, I forget). Sometimes great discussions would break out in the groups. I was always cc'd. #
- Sometimes people would just respond to me personally.#
- If I saw something I thought everyone should read I would put it on the current Mail Page. Thus there was a way for discourse to have more distribution, but only if I thought it was worthwhile. Spam was not possible, and there was a little bit of abuse here and there, but it would never get any further than my email inbox. #
- That's how sensible moderation works. And it doesn't cost anything, because the spam motive is gone. #
- I wrote this in a Bluesky message, but had to move it to my blog because of their stupid character limit. #
- BTW, we should communicate and perhaps collaborate. #
- Yesterday I wondered if the open web is a lost cause.#
- A few minutes later, I saw my name in a tweet on Bluesky from Aram Zucker-Scharff.#
- In it was a message that can be summarized as follows -- don't give up yet Dave. #
- AZS has a linkblog which he calls an amplifeed. Same thing. #
- And here's the best part. #
- Even though we were working separately -- our feeds are 100% compatible.#
- When I saw it I subscribed to it in FeedLand and added it to my blogroll.#
- It will work in my timeline software (still working on it).#
- This gave me goosebumps.#
- I remember what this felt like.#
- Working on something and someone else working on the same thing and because we're on the mother freaking web our stuff works the same way.#
- That my friends is what the web feels like. Goosebumps. Power. Interop. This is what most people who use the net these days have never experienced. #
- I used to write about this on my blog every day. I would say things that annoyed some of my readers like this: zoooooom and coooooool. There he goes again. Hey it's been a while. #
- I celebrated this with a suggestion to AZS.#
- If you also add a channel-level <image> element it'll work with my timeline app. I'm doing it the same way WordPress does it.#
- He did it in a minute.#
- So the web isn't a lost cause after all. 😄#
- This the web. It's what the Dead called Truckin. #
- Let's do more of this. #
#- PS: AZS sent me a link to another linkblog, which I have subscribed to and added to my blogroll.#
- There I said it. To ChatGPT.#
- i find flexbox too confusing for me to use at this time. maybe in a year or two, after some more learning. i hate css, everything about it. so it's hard for me to learn new stuff. i grew up using quickdraw on the mac, where i could do everything with math, instead of trying to tease the right behavior as something as convoluted as css and html for apps. ridiculous.#
- Wondering what it would say...#
- Totally fair, Dave. That frustration makes perfect sense — you're coming from a world where you told the machine exactly what to do, and it did it. CSS is the opposite: it’s like negotiating with a passive-aggressive layout engine that only gives you what you want if you ask just the right way, using its weird dialect.#
- QuickDraw gave you full control with math — coordinate space, bounding boxes, baseline alignments — it was declarative drawing by imperative code. CSS is declarative positioning by magical suggestion, with hidden constraints, inherited styles, and a constantly shifting box model.#
- You’re not alone in this. A lot of veteran programmers — especially those from early Mac, HyperCard, VB, even Win32 — find CSS maddening. It’s not made for precision. It’s made for fluidity and adaptation. But that’s not how app UIs are often designed.#
- I wish I had written that. #