blaine / is on Nostr

"1209c9057849daf17344238affbc38b9086a1076e27d1da0d2f8678b993fcba3011a8f2817e81f2d53ab48f4fcb6393b7e40ac4cfc0f31eb9c28e22d6aea894f"

Last Notes

2024-08-03 19:15:35

Now two weeks in to evacuation from my home due to wildfires; we're fine, and despite "communication that could be better" from local authorities, our understanding is that so far our home has been protected and safe. Grateful beyond words to the fire crews. ❤️
The experience has really driven home for me how deep a hole we're in. We live in the woods, and are in that sense a canary - but we're not the first, and won't be the last. Jasper is high profile, but this is happening everywhere.

2024-04-21 19:50:22

The back-woods, working class, remote rural community near where I live, whose primary employers are a zinc/lead smelter and a pulp mill, just elected amazing queer hero, Birkley Valks, to the local school board of trustees. He soundly won the election against a hate-mongering anti-trans bully.
Love wins! 🎉🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️❤️
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/310/467/369/297/119/original/3d4576d31c217dcc.jpg

2024-04-03 21:37:44

On instagram, which I only use these days to follow friends who are on there, the most frequent "notification" is from obvious spam (presumably phishing) accounts. Meta has thus far been unable to stem the never-ending flow.
Except these accounts are all brand new. I don't know anyone who's not on instagram in 2024 that will decide to sign up and follow *me*
If Instagram had a flag that said "don't let new accounts follow me", it would stop the spam dead.
Fediverse apps should do this.

2024-03-26 18:15:42

I'm not sure if it's new or if I'm just really bad at paying attention, but I just learned about it and I'm so excited about #fedify: https://unstable.fedify.dev/
I think systems that are shaped like fedify are one of the key things needed to really open experimentation and exploration of the possibilities that the fediverse affords.

2024-03-21 06:14:37

I feel like billionaires are letting the world down.
So much wealth, so much power, but as far as I can tell there won't be a flock of supersonic jets with transparent upper fuselages following the eclipse.
I mean, there are ~2500 billionaires in the world, and *none* of them are going to experience five full hours of totality.
Really, it's a complete failure of imagination.

2024-03-15 18:17:07

- reply

@npub1jc6…7v67 our original intent with webfinger was that email addresses would *be* social addresses; gmail.com had a webfinger/well-known endpoint almost 15 years ago!
I'd think of it like WhatsApp/Signal - they use phone numbers, without any extra protocol signalling, and if the number is associated with a signal/WhatsApp account it "just works" - or you can use SMS to send an invite to the phone number.
Same could be done with social addresses. The preceding @ is just there for us nerds. 😅

2024-03-15 17:40:06

- reply

@npub1jc6…7v67 I love the term "social address"! Much better than webfinger 😅
Two things I would add: first, the initial '@' is unnecessary and imho confusing. Eugen added it to mimic Twitter's @handles, but in personal communication it doesn't really add anything, and arguably takes away.
Second, I wrote up this short thread recently about the original vision for webfinger/social addresses: https://mastodon.social/@blaine/112073273204522419 - hopefully it's helpful!

2024-02-13 07:25:45

The insular instinct in communities is something we need to reckon with. Today, a well-meaning person in my community got eviscerated on Facebook for not knowing local folklore.
Meanwhile, one extended community working to give people the freedom to communicate attacked another extended community working to give people the freedom to communicate.
The danger posed by community in-fighting isn't that one side or the other will win – it's that we'll all lose, by losing sight of the real goals.

2023-09-01 21:17:25

- reply

@npub1j46…3gm7 I managed to get Condé to entirely drop passwords, which was a big lift but much easier than bikeshedding about password requirements would have been!
Also, wth with this sentence from that article: "However, the removal of recommendations against SMS indicates that this widely used 2FA channel is far from dead. It remains much more secure than email and is an effective way to reduce your reliance on passwords."
??? SMS is definitely not more secure than email.

2023-08-05 03:38:33

Writing Rust is like buying a car that's delivered as a box of individual parts – nuts, bolts, frame components, etc.
All the parts are well-labelled and only fit correctly in exactly one way, but the labelling is done using an inscrutable system of hieroglyphics, and the limited assembly instructions are written entirely in Tamarian.

2023-07-06 18:39:52

When Facebook started, they bootstrapped networks by downloading & matching contacts from email. Twitter, and everyone else, did the same.
Threads is blowing up because Facebook is using their monopoly on the social graph. Legislation to guarantee easy, fast access to your own contact lists for use in non-billionaire-owned media would help level the playing field, because Zuck & co sure aren't going to give the connections they stole back to us otherwise.

2023-04-02 20:00:58

- reply

#[0] sorry, I misspoke - I meant trademark. It's possible you didn't mean to imply this, but "you are benefitting from the recognition of our trademark ... you can develop your own social media platform from scratch and participate in the fediverse that way" seems to suggest that "if you don't like our decisions, do your own thing, but don't call it Mastodon."
If that's not a fair assessment, I'd be greatly relieved.

2023-04-02 19:48:57

- reply

#[0] in that case, we agree! 💜
fwiw, I'm not concerned about the thread – it was specifically the statement around the Mastodon copyright.
I think it'd be really helpful to figure out a way to build that narrative can hold that distinction.

2023-04-02 19:29:26

- reply

#[0] like it or not, "Mastodon" isn't just "Mastodon GmbH" or even just the software – it refers to the Fediverse in common usage. That's a tension that's not going away, and I profoundly worry about the your suggestion (understandable, at some level) that your org will exert control over what does and does not constitute "Mastodon."

2023-04-02 19:21:25

- reply

#[0] I think your replies there are not great. 😢
You and Mastodon GmBH benefit massively from the immense amount of work that the wider fediverse community does.
While I appreciate the perspective that the software != the community, I respectfully disagree. The decisions for the software impact the community, as we heard so profoundly at the Black Twitter Summit. The concern I have is that you often conflate the software and the community when it suits, but reject it when it doesn't.

2023-04-02 19:08:20

With posts like this, it's becoming really clear and important that we disentangle "the Fediverse" from "Mastodon."
#[0], you've done great work that we're all grateful for, but you're standing on the shoulders of many, many others that you rarely credit or acknowledge.
This attitude isn't what we built the fediverse for. 😢
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/130/304/459/145/493/original/2540c9db56b30d15.jpeg