Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

psst

weirdos, freaks, and malcontents

we built a thing here. all of us - from the folks who worked on standardizing a protocol to replace OStatus to the folks who implemented and extended the protocol to the folks who did interop testing between different servers implementing the protocol all the way to the folks that use the protocol daily to communicate with each other.

it's a thing that's successful enough to have attracted experts across many fields to study the hows and whys of what's being done over here. it's a thing that's successful enough that titans of capital are doing the only thing they know how to do - throw capital - to try and figure out how to not lose their power over the internet at large.

it's pretty dang impressive, y'all. even with its warts. even with its missing stairs and paper cuts.

makes me wonder what else we could do for ourselves and each other instead of waiting on industry or government to do things humanely...

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The word "weird" is not perjorative. Weird is wonderful. Weird is fantastic.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. Stay weird, my friends.

IDK it does sorta reflect something tho right, like the emphasis on AI powered programming for the individual programmer over the social nature of code. codespaces has collaborative editing, sure, but comparative neglect of the thing that really keeps people on github - issues and pull requests, aka yno the collaborative process at the heart of open source - highlights the vision of software being the work of sole geniuses.

(yes i am aware that there are other ways of doing contribs like emailing a patch, no I don't think that is relevant to the point, no I don't think we should move to a system that is even more inaccessible to new programmers.)

i should have said nothing. i was able to avoid an onslaught of "git over email is the best" earlier this week by posing it as a joke, but srsly I just don't think it's a step in the right direction to make it so when i'm teaching programming I have to be like "ok your email client doesn't even allow you to send plaintext emails anymore, so turn on 2FA for your gmail and then generate an app password, configure your terminal to connect to the gmail SMTP server, compose an email with format-patch using the format that the repository maintainers favor. make sure you wrap every line at 72 characters or the devs will flame you. send that email by copy pasting your app password. then when you're replying, remember to expand the entire message and delete the inlined replies so you're not top-posting, sorry about how the code isn't highlighted in your email client, it really wasn't made for this. If you need to update the code just send another patch, remembering how many prior times you have updated it so you can apply the correct annotation to it...."

I get why that works for some people and there should be plenty of ways of interacting with code, but if you have taught anyone how to program who started from zero in the last 5 years you would know that is an unimaginable amount of complexity to endure to be a part of collaborative programming.

i don't love microsoft owning everything and i do think their monopoly of github is super bad, i run my own forgejo instance and am stoked for federated forges. i just really dislike the general pattern of treating ppl with scorn while telling someone that using something that to them is unimaginably worse is actually better to do - a classic fedi move that thankfully i have seen lots of growth past in the last year.