Six months ago, I joined New_ Public to help build a new social platform for local communities. Today, I could't be more excited and proud to share what our amazing little team has cooked up, and is launching in closed beta this week. This isn’t another toxic, chaotic space — Roundabout is designed to be useful, fun, and helpful and it isn’t motivated by stealing your data and selling you stuff. Learn more at

Roundabout

Roundabout is your new online community for local life. Find what you need, connect with neighbors, and take pride in your community.

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What @npub1lmc7...wyqx are working on is impressive and important and y'all should consider supporting their crowdfunder! Bonfire was absolutely the top contender for my work building New_ Public's Local project (

New_ Public

New_ Public

We’re a nonprofit R&D lab that’s reimagining social media. Join us in building digital public spaces that connect people, embrace pluralism, an...

in the end, I'm building mostly from scratch not because Bonfire isn't great, but because I wanted our team's 2+ years of research, planning, and design to lead the conversation, not the technology. BUT we're in a unique spot. Most communities could use Bonfire. View quoted note →

A decade ago, I was an invited expert at a meeting to review the technical architecture of a £330m fraud detection system for Universal Credit at the UK Treasury. My conclusion was that the proposal was not only massively over-priced (basically fraud-levels of overcharging), but that the system as designed would obviously have issues where automated decisions would leave vulnerable people in dire straits, against the legal requirements. And so it goes:

the Guardian

UK woman who booked Oslo flight but did not fly loses child benefit ‘because she emigrated’

Exclusive: HMRC told Lisa Morris-Almond there was no record of her return to UK, but she did not take the trip

Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get to share a “new job” update that’s more like a “life goal ✅” update. This is one of those times. I’m ridiculously excited to share that I’ve joined @npub1vsq2...fsc5, working with @npub1n0s2...q3dq on their small-but-mighty Local Lab team to build a new product to support local communities come together online in healthy ways.

My hot take for the day: Mastodon should implement support for atproto PDSes for every user account.

What's the state of the art for maintaining a single account that surfaces in both Bluesky and Mastodon? Just bridgy? (not a slight against bridgy, just the only one I'm aware of right now 😊)

We need a word like "arson" but for acts that have egregious climate impacts. Private jets (for example) aren't just tools of arson, they also cause floods and other extreme weather. The word should be cognate with arson, because at this point, with vanishingly few exceptions, e.g. flying in a private jet is a willful act of terrorism. Despite other options, some people choose violence.

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.

Folks in my area have set up a gofundme to help recover from the devastating wildfires that have been raging for the past week. Slocan Lake is a remote area with very small communities that are tourism-dependent. Nearly 20,000 acres of pristine wilderness have burned since July 17th. Recovery isn't going to be easy; if you're able, consider contributing to the gofundme here:

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Slocan Valley Wildfire Volunteers Evacs & Firefighters, organized by Danika Skye Hammond

On July 17th, a thunderstorm lit a record number of wildfires… Danika Skye Hammond needs your support for Help Slocan Valley Wildfire Volunteers ...

🙏❤️

Is there off-the-shelf software to help coordinate evacuation resources (housing, etc)? Hopefully the worst has passed and these evacs won't last long, but locals in our community are looking for better ways to coordinate and I'd like to help, ideally without writing new software or putting together a bad spreadsheet (which may be the best option!).

The world needs better mapping tools for simple sketching of "pirate maps." If you know of one, I would be very grateful right now to also know about it. QGIS 🙅‍♀️ (crashes doing simple things) Google Earth 🙅‍♀️ (seventy clicks to do one thing) ArcGIS 🤑 (expensive) Gaia 😖 (layer management is ... not fun) Google My Maps isn't terrible, so that's what I'm using for now, but it's layer capabilities are fairly minimal. Any other pointers would be amazing. 🙏

Evacuated. We're safe with our cats, we'll see how the next few days go for our home. Apocalyptic scenes up here in south-central British Columbia. This photo was from when things were relatively calm.

I'm not sure it's ever going to be a "thing" like #mosstodon but here's my contribution to #moosetodon. This absolute unit (actually kind of small for a moose, but still) visited our yard yesterday. No sign of Rocky. 🫎

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! 🎉🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️❤️

One must imagine Sisyphus listening to "Happy"

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.

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:

Fedify

Fedify is a TypeScript library for building federated server apps powered by ActivityPub and other standards, so-called fediverse.

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.

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.

Random unsolicited thought (disclaimer: I haven't been watching or participating in the spam response at all): One of the main differences between social/activitypub spam and email spam is that contact lists are largely open, and programmable querying is possible. What does that mean? If you see a new follow request or mention, you can check to see if anyone else you know follows that person. If not, the spam propensity is much higher. Email servers can't do this [without centralization].

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.