Pie baking didn’t go so well. #cooking #food #pie

I love a good single origin V60 pour over. #coffee

Posters at protests are now created with the hope that they’ll go viral as a meme and amplify the ideas and movement. The recent Hīkoi protest defending the founding treaty of Aotearoa New Zealand was a great example of this transformation. Few posters were mass produced, instead there were tons of different ones each with their own message. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/537394/signs-of-the-hikoi-more-than-just-words-on-cardboard

There’s a Banksy exhibit in town and I went to go see it today.

Bluesky’s ATprotocol ecosystem gets its first micro investment fund. It’s much smaller than the resources and investment we’ve got going in to Nostr but they’re doing better about getting press coverage.

TechCrunch

Meet Skyseed, a VC fund and incubator backing the Bluesky and AT Protocol ecosystem | TechCrunch

In November, Peter Wang sought ideas for a new fund to support the AT Protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, he launched Skyseed.

Apple allows external purchases for content in apps in the US AppStore using their External Purchase Link Entitlement which they setup to allow for compliance for EU rules.

An App Store First: Delta Adds Patreon Link for Purchase and Perks - MacStories

The folks behind Bridgy Fed the gateway project between social media protocols have spun up a new organization so they can focus on their work on bridging social media protocols. Adding Nostr support is in their roadmap, but I wonder what we can do to help them go from planning to support Nostr to having it run in production. Having @npub108pv...yev6 as the only person building / maintaining gateway tools is a kind of centralization and single point of failure, not that there’s anything wrong with his work, he’s just one person. Anyway, check out ANew.Social and their manifesto about bridging open social protocols:

augment

Bridges & The Last Network Effect

We're in an exciting moment for the open social web. As Elon makes one bad decision after another on X, we've seen waves of users leave the platfor...

https://www.anew.social/hello-social-web/

The main organization by law in the US for combatting child sexual abuse material is really problematic in many ways. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) at missingkids.org it is misleading at best. It doesn’t advance an agenda that actually protects kids nor do they ever lead to pedophiles being found and caught. It’s a mess which mostly advances right wing evangelical Christian values and opposed free speech and privacy on the internet. NCMEC has used the threat of CSAM to oppose encryption and the right to free speech on the internet. But there’s an alternative which actually works to prevent abuse of minors and stop perpetrators from abusing. While at the same time supporting free speech, privacy, and encryption. This alternative organization bases their work on the science and evidence of what works and how to stop real harm. While at the same time protecting everyone’s rights. Check out Prostasia.org for a better alternative to the CSAM nightmare boogeyman that is used to censor the internet while failing to actually make kids safer.

This real estate video is so kiwi.

I helped put together a paper on the future of open middleware in the era of social media protocols.

Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware | The Foundation for American Innovation

The Foundation for American Innovation.

This is a first for me, a Nostr app which has migrated off of Nostr to a newer protocol, willow.

GitHub

GitHub - Cynsar-Foundation/second.exchange: This is the social media platform owned by users and governed by users

This is the social media platform owned by users and governed by users - Cynsar-Foundation/second.exchange

Willow is one of the most interesting emerging protocols, this is the first time i’ve seen a willow app in the wild.

Another mega thread digging in to the ways ATprotocol isn’t decentralized and the tradeoffs Bluesky has made to scale by @Christine Lemmer-Webber

Bluesky Social

Christine Lemmer-Webber (@dustyweb.bsky.social)

My definition: > [Federation] is a technical approach to communication architecture which achieves decentralization by many independent nodes coop...

I find I kind of surreal that an airport can have flights arriving from New York, Doha, Tokyo, and Santiago de Chile all at the same time. Each one coming from a completely different direction around the planet.

This is just as true with user accounts as it is with wallets. Most users don’t want to trust themselves to keep and secure their own keys. That’s ok. View quoted note →

@PABLOF7z Do any nostr clients you know of implement the oauth like flow for creating and storing keys in an nsec bunker?

GitHub

nsecbunkerd/OAUTH-LIKE-FLOW.md at master · kind-0/nsecbunkerd

nsecbunker daemon. Contribute to kind-0/nsecbunkerd development by creating an account on GitHub.

I see the docs and sever code, but looked on github and couldn’t find anybody using it.

The fall of the Assad Regime in Syria seemed to come out of nowhere. After 13 years of civil war, most of which had been a stalemate for years, one group of rebels takes over Aleppo, Homs, and finally Damascus in two weeks.

Fall of the Assad regime - Wikipedia

So who are the rebels? Tahrir al Sham

Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham - Wikipedia

They’re a faction that is opposed to Al-Queda and ISIS with some support from Qatar and Turkey. It seems like it’s mostly a remixing of Islamic groups which had led the civil war for a long time, but when Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, Israel, and The US got distracted elsewhere they were able to use some support from Turkey to finally overthrow Assad and capture Damascus. My guess is once they took Aleppo and discovered Assad wasn’t able to bring in help in a counter offensive then faith in the regime amongst its soldiers collapsed. I’m personally really concerned about what will happen to the Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish region (

Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria - Wikipedia

). At the start of the civil war Kurds who are aligned with the Turkish PKK took over and liberated their own land, then got support from the US to defeat ISIS. The region has been effectively an independent country for the last 12 years. Ideologically the PKK used to be a Marxist group but they shifted to Social Ecology, a branch of left Anarchism founded by Murray Bookchin a couple decades ago. They do not believe in a centralized government and have run their region with a network of independent democratic local governments, associations, businesses, and militias. The US government maintains military bases and cooperation with Rojava. While many people in Rojava are religious the movement is multiethnic and non-Islamist in its political ideology. I find it kind of crazy that such an interesting radical political and economic project can emerge in what is clearly one of the most difficult and conflict ridden places. Despite the US and Turkish governments being close allies and the US providing military support to the Kurds in Rojava, the Turkish government hates the Kurdish sovereignty movement. Turkey wants to prevent the emergence of any independent Kurdish country, even one without a state as such like exists in Rojava. Will Turkey turn on and invade Rojava now that they have something like allies in power in Damascus? It doesn’t seem to make like Tahrir al Sham is an agent of Turkey, there are militias directly under the control of Turkey occupying land which is nominally Syrian, plus regular Turkish troops, but more like Tahrir al Sham is just getting support where it can. So we shall see. One last thing I find interesting is the positive statements put out by governments around the world about the fall of the Assad regime to an organization that those same governments have declared a terrorist group. Does a terrorist grouping become a military when it gains control of a nation state?

The way billionaires pay or avoid taxes is really different from people who work for a living or even the “normal” wealthy millionaires. @ProPublica has a great investigative piece based on a major leak of billionaires tax returns from the IRS. View quoted note →