Posts from June 2023

8PM — Ploum writing one of the many arguments against Meta adopting ActivityPub that are circulating at the moment:

the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.

By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling.

ActivityPub is an open protocol. Open as in anyone can adopt and implement it. As much as we all want to break away from big-corp social media, these companies aren’t just going away. And anyone adopting open interfaces should be welcomed at this point, even if we don’t like what they have been doing in the past and will be doing in the future.

Consider this: Even if Meta builds a platform on top of ActivityPub and defederate eventually, how is that future situation different from the current situation? Mastodon isn’t compatible with Twitter, and if you want to chat to friends on Twitter, you need to use Twitter. If Meta’s new platform doesn’t implement ActivityPub, you won’t be able to interact with people on the platform.

If ActivityPub fails to develop into a de-facto standard for social networking, and that scenario is very real, it won’t be because Facebook added incompatible extensions to ActivityPub and subsequently cut off their service from the Fediverse. People don’t care about the protocols underpinning the services they use. They have needs, like staying in touch with friends and family, and they want to address their needs in the simplest way possible. If ActivityPub fails, it will be because the clients and services that support the protocol are hard to use, their design is not appealing or their feature set is limited.

8AM — Spot-on analysis by Alex Pareene, writing for Defector:

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader.

The implosion of Twitter and recent shenanigans at Reddit are like a livestream allowing us to observe the decline of once beloved platforms unfold in real time. What we know from history helps us better anticipate the future, and it doesn’t look good:

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles.

The internet as an information wasteland is a bleak outlook, but one that isn’t off the charts; it’s likely even, given the track record of those who currently drive the development of major platforms. Just look at who’s building Twitter clones at the moment: Instagram, Substack, and I’m sure others are experimenting with similar ideas.

The alternative, as always, is to build your own place, a website, host it somewhere you control or at a least makes it easy to move, and double down on open standards and protocols.

5PM — Christiano Ronaldo joined Al-Nassr FC after his disgraceful exit from Manchester United in December, reportedly making about 215 million US dollar. Per year. Last week Karim Benzema followed Ronaldo to Saudi Arabia, joining Al-Ittihad for about 107 million US dollar. Per year. Saudi Arabia’s rulers parked the money truck outside these player’s homes to win them over with significant contributions to their retirement fund. And Lionel Messi at least considered a move to Saudi Arabia before he decided to join the football powerhouse Inter Miami.

Football players signing one last big contract at the end of their career isn’t a new thing. In the past, they would join a club in their home country, maybe even their childhood club. Maybe they’d go for a last adventure and play away from home for two years. Today, it seems, ageing stars pick the obscurest leagues to ease themselves into retirement. The US was always a destination big names towards the end of their career. Remember Pele and Beckenbauer, Beckham and Henry? For a couple of years it was China. Now it’s Saudi Arabia.

There are different reasons why humans change their jobs. Sometimes they don’t get along with colleagues or their manager. Sometimes they are looking for a new challenge. Ronaldo has won league titles in Portugal, England, Spain and Italy; he won the Champions League five times and the EURO in 2016. Benzema won the French and Spanish league several times and is a five-time Champions league winner. Messi won the league in Spain and France, the Champions League four times, the Copa América and the World Cup. I left out domestic and international cup trophies for each of them because there are too many to count. All of these players have won everything. As a young boy you dream of lifting one of these trophies once. They did it repeatedly. They have nothing more to prove. Not to themselves. Not to anyone else. I find it hard to believe that the Saudi Pro League or the MLS are appropriate challenges for players of this caliber. It might add another trophy or two to these already ridiculously long lists of silverware, but for the perception of these players it will do nothing. These leagues are far too inferior and are off people’s radar in most parts of the world.

There are different reasons why humans decide to work and live in another country. Sometimes they move for economic reasons or because they are being harassed because of their religion or sexuality; hoping to to live a better life in a different place. This is a valid reason for much of the world’s population but not for insanely rich top-tier football players. Sometimes humans move because they want to live in a different country, meet new people and experience a different culture. That, too, is a valid reason for many. I’ve lived amongst expats for years, people who “love to travel;” these people want to live in places like the US, Canada, Australia, South America, maybe south-east Asia. But nobody ever said “I’m dying to live in Saudi Arabia.” I find it hard to believe that Ronaldo and Benzema moved to Saudi Arabia for the cultural experience.

Andrew Das and Rory Smith argue that Messi made his choice with an eye on the next World Cup:

But a base in the United States would also have appealed to him for competitive reasons, potentially making it easier for Messi as he prepares to help Argentina defend its World Cup title in 2026.

Wouldn’t Argentina be the more obvious choice for this, let alone the more honest, gosh, more romantic option? Imagine he’d go back to where it all started?

The money seems like an odd motivation for someone who already has so much that their children won’t ever have to work. I mean real work, not running a charity or something. But the money seems to be the driving force behind these moves. After years at the top of the game, Ronaldo, Benzema, and Messi (and others) no longer play for the love of the game. They play for the money, the fame, and Instagram followers. It’s sad, but it perfectly fits in a world where World Cups are not tournaments anymore; they are events that FIFA milks to enrich their leadership. Clubs are now enterprises that have a brand strategy for China but little relation to the neighbourhoods where they originated from. These players are a product of their environment.

8AM

Have any Republican presidential candidates made a statement yet that this wouldn’t have happened if they were in charge, the Canadians blowing their smoky, poisonous air across the border?

3PM — Julia Evans writes about myths that discourage people from writing a blog (via):

• you need to be original
• you need to be an expert
• posts need to be 100% correct
• writing boring posts is bad
• you need to explain every concept
• page views matter
• more material is always better
• everyone should blog

The single most important approach to counter any of these myths is this: write for yourself.

It doesn’t matter if someone wrote about a topic or linked to a site before. If you find it interesting write about it, post a link. It doesn’t matter how many visitors your blog attracts. A couple of readers can be enough. And it doesn’t matter what other people think, which applies to the entirety of your life, not just your writing.

1PM — I watched the entirety of Apple’s keynote and took notes. These are my observations.

iOS. Live transcriptions of voicemails solve a problem I didn’t know I had. Going forward, I’ll let any call go straight to voicemail to decide whether I want to talk to the person. It’s a great solution to the very millennial notion that phone calls are intrusive, almost rude.

Namedrop is very useful for people who get out of the house more often than I do. I suspect it’ll only work between iPhones, possibly only the latest models. So we’ll continue to hand out business cards or awkwardly spell out our names and phone numbers.

The new Journal app is worth a try. I’ve tried journaling before but never built a habit. This new app comes with prompts and reminders, and it might be what I need to start journaling more consistently.

Other than that, and as always, many playful new features we’re introduced that I’m never going to use. Contact posters and stickers, for example. The new standby mode is obvious nod to Tidbit. I get it, but it’s not for me. When I’m at home, my phone either sits on the office desk or I’m using it.

MacOS. On MacOS , the most useful changes will be introduced to Safari. Profiles, to separate personal and professional online lives, with separate browsing history, cookies, and stored passwords, is brilliant. Compared to Arc’s spaces, it’s the cleaner approach to the problem. Arc’s spaces are really only separate lists of open tabs. In private-browsing mode, Safari will automatically remove tracking information from URLs. I’ve been doing this manually for years; but wouldn’t it be great if that happened automatically even outside of private browsing?

Desktop widgets are another promising addition. It’ll be great to always have access to today’s to-dos from Things, upcoming appointments from Calendar, or the departure times at the closest train station from Citymapper.

One more thing. The long anticipated Apple AR/VR headset is here: Vision Pro. It’s big and very expensive. You have to carry around an external battery pack. But it looks better than other models. Apple did a lot more thinking about how virtual and augmented reality can be integrated in our lives. Vision Pro doesn’t require full immersion into a comical virtual world. Instead it projects onto your surroundings, so you never loose awareness of your environment. There won’t be people frantically waving to get your attention. But the eyes, projected on the outside, are the stuff of nightmares. At first I thought the headset was transparent, but after a while you’ll notice that the look is off; it feels creepy.

I don’t see where Vision Pro fits into my life. Yet. I don’t see myself working with goggles; I’m already overwhelmed by the size of my 27-inch screen. But I was equally hesitant when the iPhone and Apple Watch came out. I eventually got an iPhone 4 and loved it; but I never got an Apple Watch. So I’ll wait until the price drops and to see how people use Vision Pro in real life, outside Apple’s well-crafted marketing scenarios.

12PM — Two blogs celebrating how small communities foster connection. First, Manuel Moreale:

Blogs with a handful of dedicated readers, forums with fewer than fifty users, group chats with a dozen participants. Those are success stories. Not becoming huge can and should be seen as a good thing.

We don’t need a million followers. And maybe we don’t need a thousand true fans. But we probably could use ten good internet friends to make our digital life better.

Second, Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg:

it’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters.

The smaller the group, the closer and more impactful the connection.