To my knowledge, the project isn’t dead…but, it has been moving at a horribly slow pace for a very long time.

Funkwhale is a pretty cool project, but it’s one of those things where the ActivityPub implementation really was bolted on well after the core experience was defined and developed. It was meant to be a Grooveshark clone, while a lot of people were hoping to use it in a more social way, like SoundCloud.

Should be working now. Occasionally, the server gets a little janky due to post federation and caching, but it should be settled at this point.

Most of my working adult life has involved struggling with untreated ADHD. It’s one of those things that a lot of people failed to understand, and when I’d explain my symptoms to them, they would often just say that it sounded like I was depressed, burnt out, and overburdened at work. While all of those things were true, executive dysfunction is more complicated and nuanced - for me, it manifests in the form of procrastination, seeking stimulation, and difficulty carrying a thread of consciousness from one sentence to the next. It can also mean that your self-esteem is constantly in the toilet.

In spite of this, I had a lot of success in early stage tech startups, which are often chaotic. You have to switch roles at a moment’s notice, going from customer support and technical resolution to product development and logistics. When things are on fire, customers are angry, and things are broken, I tend to be at my very best. It’s the slower, more tedious, repetitive tasks like manual data entry that I tend to struggle with. I have been forced onto Performance Improvement Plans more than a few times in my career - despite glowing performance reviews - and have never gotten off of one.

In spite of dropping out of college, I had managed to make a career for myself. I worked at a few tech startups, and had a really good reputation among my team members. As I continued to climb a corporate ladder and move to bigger and bigger companies, I found myself becoming burdened with larger responsibilities. I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, but I gradually turned myself into a workhorse for the entire team. My manager eventually saddled me with an enormous task where I had to develop a deeply technical presentation from scratch and give it to a live audience of over 300 engineers. To be clear - no such resource had ever been developed within the company. I guess this stemmed from me rewriting so much of the documentation so that ordinary people could understand it?

I did the best I could. I solicited advice from just about every department in the company, rewrote the whole thing several times over, and practiced my presentation in front of my manager over and over again, as they nitpicked every aspect of it. Presentation day finally came, it ended up being a huge success. For me, this was a massive accomplishment. Unfortunately, my work performance had been languishing in other areas, and I once again ended up on a PIP. My manager drove the team into the ground, and I tried to make the case that I was just about done with being treated this way.

I ended up in an HR meeting that I thought was initially being done to hash out our differences and find a path forward, but it was actually just the company kicking me out. I got a severance package, struggled for months to apply for a new job, faced a ton of rejections and self-sabotage. I smoked pot and got drunk until I had to sell all of my belongings just to survive, and then had to move back across the country to live with my dad and apply for the military. Four years later, I’m married, going to school full-time, and living a pretty okay life as a veteran.

Thank you. ❤️ I know, and I’m doing my best. It’s just my first real experience of dealing with any of this as an adult, and I don’t think I’ve ugly cried harder in my life.

I’m about to fly East next week, to bury my grandfather. I think it will be good for me, but it hurts to let go of someone that so many of my happy memories stemmed from.

It’s also a horrifying thought to me that this is the logical conclusion of “growing old with someone”. One of you is going to go first, and it’s going to be the worst pain the other person has ever felt.

I’m a trainwreck right now.

My grandfather suddenly passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer, multiple strokes, and COVID. It was brutal, he was in so much pain for months. What really hurts is that he was a wonderful person, a source of great joy and insight, and most definitely the person who got me into computers at a young age. My youngest coherent memories are of him, and the loss is exceedingly painful.

My stepfather pointed a loaded gun at my autistic little brother and basically kicked him to the street. My little brother has had his fair share of problems with holding down any kind of job, and can barely take care of himself. He was kicked out of a shelter for a messy living space, and living out of a tent next to a YMCA.

My mom was living in fear for a while, as my stepdad increasingly became more paranoid and violent, to the point that she was no longer allowed to talk to us on the phone if he came home. She managed to give him the slip and take the kids with her to go take care of the grandfather on the other side of the country…but, she’s in for a messy divorce.

These three things have kind of converged, and a lot of it is starting to resolve finally, but it’s been a massive strain on my mental health and my marriage. I’m barely taking care of myself most of the time, and trying to live with anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation…and all of the fun side effects of trying to treat those things with therapy and medication.

I’m so tired. I’m barely eating. I have six months left in a maintenance squadron before I get out of the military, and all I want to do is scream.

Unfortunately, even if instance admins were to unanimously defederate, Meta—or any social media corporation—could create white-label instances to take their place, and we might be none the wiser of their control of them.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this idea, but they would have to justify the business case to their shareholders. As of right now, the idea of a whitelabel personal silo is a limited value proposition to people not already invested in the Fediverse. If it’s whitelabel, what will Meta do? Start a new company? Inevitably, people would figure it out, and go with something else.

It’s true that we can always choose to defederate from them. What’s to worry about is their meddling with the ActivityPub standard using their incomparably vast resources, and them making their own extensions to the standard in efforts to suck users back into the Borg. Things like that.

I said this a little further up in the conversation, but if Meta produces some horrendous, awful version of ActivityPub that only benefits them, what’s stopping the rest of us from forking the protocol or adopting a different one? If we never switch to their version of doing things, and there’s feature breakage between us and Meta, who actually loses here?

Thank you for your response, I appreciate your insights!

I think if there were really serious problems with a future version of ActivityPub, we could feasibly do one of two things:

1. Maintain a fork of the protocol - this has actually already happened once, with an implementation standard called Litepub.
2. Move over to a different protocol, such as Zot.

The second route is probably much harder, but there’s no real reason why a zombified Meta version of the protocol would do much of anything to anybody running vanilla ActivityPub at this time. You’d probably have some feature incompatibilities and breakage, but…if you’re not going to federate with them anyway, what can they actually do?

My uBlock Origin extension is blocking “threads.net” on his site. Perhaps he’s got some skin in the game.

That’s a post embed.

Thanks, now I know not to take you seriously.

It’s all good, I don’t even take myself seriously most of the time. Most of what I have to say is dumb shit anyway.

Real talk, though: I legitimately think that Threads is incapable of actually extinguishing a federated network powered by open standards. Yeah, the infighting might fragment us, and the influx of millions of activities and interactions might overwhelm servers that connect with it. To some extent, they can propose protocol extensions and features and even make an ecosystem push with tooling.

But, so long as servers are federating via an open protocol, no entity can truly snuff out the network in its entirety. An actual EEE move would not actually work here: if they ever made such an attempt, we’d just defederate them.

My article is not a point about how we all need to shut up and start worshipping Meta, but that the things we ought to be most concerned about are in fact the things we’ve always neglected: actual user control over data, the ability for people to decide for themselves on what to connect to, and dealing with the technical requirements of hundreds of millions of people worth of traffic. And that’s just to start! If we want to reach the masses, we have to prepare for these things.

Thanks, fixed. Posting was a little broken earlier, and I made some incorrect assumptions about manually entering in metadata for the link (Kbin lets you upload the thumbnail manually).

I don’t think it was intentional, the dev seemed to be struggling with health-related problems and possibly burnout. But yeah, definitely a depressing moment for an otherwise really cool project.

Getting major NPR vibes from this one!

This one is S-tier!

Thanks for the feedback, I added a big quote from Radio Free Fedi to call more attention to that effort.

Fair point, I should probably clear that up. Static site generators typically work through a process that builds pages for you on the fly, based on what’s in the folder. However, for it to be available on the Internet, you’d still need a server to run the program, so that you can generate those pages.

You’d probably want to host it on an actual server, if you want people to be able to access it when your laptop isn’t on. The documentation seems pretty good, though, it should walk you through the steps: https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/manual/installation.html

Architecturally speaking, Nostr is really cool, and has some great ideas. I think their approach is way better than what we have with instances, but discovery seems to be a fair bit worse, and most of the landscape seems to just be right-wing crypto bros. I’ve also heard from some people developing for Nostr that it’s “easy to learn, but messy”, in terms that you’re basically always trying to figure out compliance with various NIPs, rather than just following a particular protocol standard.

I think the Fediverse would absolutely benefit from a system that didn’t tie user accounts to instances, and made use of a similar relay system.

The main thing is that their frontend was built for whatever APIs their own platform supported. You can theoretically adjust the code to use the Mastodon API instead, but it can actually be kind of a tedious process to change everything over.

It’s probably easier to mod an existing frontend to look and act the way they want, or write a new one from scratch.

The other thing is, it’s still a really new instance, and kind of started as a community experiment. While it looks like it could be a big next step for Pebble, they’re probably more interested in testing the waters before doing any serious committed development on it.

Okay. I’m glad that the situation is looking better, and it’s probably more on the Ubuntu people than the Gnome people, but it’s still an incredibly shitty experience.

The one that really irks me now is that Nautilus in Ubuntu doesn’t show thumbnails for PNG images in the file selection dialog. It’s such an ass-backwards change that I’m legitimately shocked.