And since we’re talking about how Bluesky works, View quoted note → I might as well share this technical deep dive.

Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges)

Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 5 million users since publicly launching in February this year. A deep dive into novel des...

The new version of primal.net is hot. the first time a Nostr app is good enough for newbies. Watch Paul outline what they’ve done.

How decentralized is Bluesky really? @npub1s7kf...eul5 has a great essay digging in to it and looking at the design decisions that make Bluesky work but also really hard to decentralize. Nostr is mentioned several times, we take the mantle of an actual decentralized network by making it work really well. Interestingly Primal is the best Nostr client ecosystem and they’ve also had to introduce centralization to make the experience work well. If you care about social media protocols and want to get in to some of the details about how then work, then read this essay. We can’t build Nostr effectively if we don’t understand what others are doing.

How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

Rabble: a large group of butterflies. "we arrived at the grounds after following a rabble of butterflies"

Recurring payments are an important feature in the sustainable business for saas and content creators. We need it to work with crypto or people will just use credit cards because it makes the economics of their business work.

Exciting to see that Foursquare has open sourced their POI database. Imagine a satlantis but with 100 million venues.

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community

I did not expect this! [...] we are announcing today the general availability of a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places ("FSQ ...

View quoted note →

So is there going to be some kind of zapathon celebration or something else when bitcoin crosses a $100k usd valuation?

Finally some good news out of Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Spinoff

Drugs are getting cheaper and easier to find in Aotearoa

Two new surveys show a dramatic shift in New Zealanders' drug use habits – and there has been a sharp discount in prices.

The government of New Zealand has made these words illegal to display in public starting today. Aotearoa Natives Bandidos MC Barbarian Stormtrooper Black Power Comanchero MC Crips Damned Pirates Devils Henchmen MC Filthy Few MC Fitus Full Blooded Islanders Greazy Dogs MC Head Hunters MC Hells Angels MC Highway 61 MC HTOWN07 Killerbeez King Cobra Kuki Squad Magog MC Mangu Kaha Mongols MC Mongrel Mob New Zealand Nomad Outcasts MC Outlaws MC Rebels MC Road Knights MC Satans Slaves MC Stormtrooper Taupiri MC Tribal Huk Tribesmen MC Uru Taha West Side It took all of 3 minutes from when the law came in to force for the police to stop a motorist and arrest him for having a placard on his car dashboard which said “Mongrel Mob”. I think if gangs are doing things which are crimes which have victims then the people who commit those crimes should be arrested, but this kind thing is a thought crime. https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2024/0036/latest/whole.html#LMS939439

New Zealand has a new law that fundamentally goes against the rights of free expression. They’re banning people wearing patches on their clothing or in some cases even posessing symbols if the goverment designates it as ‘gang related’.

The Bulletin - no longer publishing on Substack | The Spinoff | Substack

The Spinoff's essential wrap of NZ news is still being published each weekday morning but not on Substack. Head to www.thespinoff.co.nz/newsletters...

If gangs are doing things illegal, then arrest them for the illegal things. The new government policy of making speech illegal is pretty messed up, in this case racist too.

Nostr users to follow who don’t talk about Nostr or Bitcoin. ;-D Diversify content on Nostr. #grownostr View quoted note →

The government should not have the unilateral power to shut down legally operating non-profits simply because it disagrees with them. A vibrant, open democracy depends on the freedom for diverse organizations to exist and express different perspectives. The suppression of opposition groups is precisely the kind of action that erodes democratic values, as we’ve seen in countries like Hungary and Turkey, where shutting down dissenting organizations was a key step in dismantling democratic institutions and consolidating authoritarian power. View quoted note →

Anybody use a FairPhone and got recommendations for how they use it with Nostr? View quoted note →

GM.

Bluesky has 10 million monthly active users. It’s still a centralized service with aspirations to be a decentralized protocol, but what they have done is working for a real set of users. They don’t overwhelm or confuse people because the main app feels like something people know and their starter packs really work for people finding their communities of interest and people. View quoted note →

Good essay by @Cory Doctorow about why he’s not joining Bluesky because although ATprotocol is open, the Bluesky network and service is not because there is no way to use it without any services run by the company.

Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

I find it funny that Americans are very focused on the 13 British colonies that joined the United States of America and nobody ever even acknowledges the 10 others which did not. It feels like a massive blind spot. The only time they’re even obliquely referenced is related to the war of 1812. Odd given how much obsession Americans have with the country’s founding.

British America - Wikipedia

Excited we’ll have people and a booth at fossdem! View quoted note →

We need to get the small things for new users figured out. That stuff matters more than anything else. View quoted note →

“As for coffee, tea, and chocolate, I know no good they do.” King Charles Not the current one, a it was a long dead earlier King Charles who was quite convinced that coffee, tea, and chocolate were leading to moral downfall of England.