Ricardo J. Méndez

Also the best ROI for gov outreach: one budget, one democracy-aligned multi-country institution which also happens to be looking at open solutions.

Or you could feed the money to a hungry, temperamental alligator that's also running a direct competitor and changes the rules on a whim.

"Extractive" isn't quite right - "unjustified" is better. If it can live in-protocol, those who keep it there will have an edge over those who don't. Germ and Graze have architectural reasons to go off. Going off-protocol without them is a liability.

I’m aware both @sebastian.eurosky.social and @robin.berjon.com have been active in that area, but my (possibly mistaken) impression is that it was mostly if not entirely personal drive.

I’m wondering if that’s the case, and if so, if there’s something more official and sustainable in the cards.

Germ's different - the threat model mandates its architecture. I'm thinking of extractive cases, eg. IMDB using ATProto identity to hoover your social graph while siloing data. @popfeed.social can interop everywhere they can't.

Coherence wins.

It's the old George Bernard Shaw, isn't it?

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

I get why you'd feel some general "Big Tech weaseling in" feeling from Google, and I might share it if I saw something actionable from their end.

And while admittedly this might be my lack of foresight, I don't see why @atprotocol.dev should cut off funding purely for speculative purity.

Personally... the old "Dorsey!" chestnut is by this point just tiring, and bears zero connection with concerns I've encountered from non-terminally online people.

Why a new account? What's Bluesky? Why can't I use my email? Why register over there? All pop in.

Ayahuasca Jack? Not once.

Is ATProto advocacy in the EU anyone's job @bsky.app? Or are we relying on the kindness of strangers?

That can work for tool building, but not for what is effectively lobbying.

Technical superiority is meaningless if you're not top of mind when decisions are made.

A coherent protocol punishes partial adoption.

Hypothesis: Anyone who tries to merely piggyback onto ATProto for bandwagoning (eg. by using identity to hoover the social graph while trying to control data) will be outcompeted by those who fully embrace the protocol’s potential.

For what it’s worth… that might be because getting access to those people is non-trivial, and I’d be willing to bet most here wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Might be a nice there for you. 🙂

Doctorow’s too far down the punditry path to let reality interfere with a punchy piece he means to write anyway.

The Light Phone Light is a radically different technology company. We design beautiful tools that respect and empower our users and our first product is The Light Phone.

There’s also the light phone, although no physical buttons there either.

www.thelightphone.com

And here I thought it was design bravery…

No worries. I remember the recommendations he got vividly, because one of them said he shouldn't take it because it was CIA money.

I bailed out of the whole discussion right there. 😆

Source: I ran the grant program, and in fact refused to do it *unless* it was "no strings attached" and the money went specifically to open source and research projects.

@dustyweb.bsky.social can of course set me straight on if at any point they exerted any pressure on grantees.

fwiw, the grant was for Mastodon, not Eugen personally, and they did take the money - I never tracked what they spent it, though, on because it was meant to be "no strings attached".

Checking now, it seems that Samsung NEXT is still (sadly) the main contributor to Mastodon's OpenCollective.

The only case where I’ve seen some weirdness like that is when there’s a test battery that gets run on precommit, and Fork’s UI seem to spazz out waiting.

Never seen it on command line.

People here, particularly if they come from the Fediverse, severely overestimate the impact of the Dorsey connection.

I’ve been onboarding normies IRL through @winesky.app

Not one has asked “is that Jack Dorsey’s new thing?”

The question has always been “what’s a Bluesky?”

So what does Google sponsoring the event change?

It’s not like they will convince app devs to keep the bulk of the user data locked on Firebase, because protocol no likey.

Maybe there’s some galaxy brain play here I’m not seeing.

But “guilty by conference association” doesn’t cut it.

I haven’t seen the tenuous Dorsey connection brought up as an indictment by anyone other than the same rabid anti-ATProto crowd who insist that it not being a neutral standard is an unforgivable sin… while accessing their own project via a proprietary API.

You’ll never please those people. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I suppose they could use the good will to try and butter up some app developers to integrate their stuff, but anyone who blindly takes Google at their word by now was going to fall for it anyway.

On the other hand… what’s the threat model here? Given all data is public, Google gets most of its usual value without any need to cozying up to the community.

Seems like the space gets some value from Google before they move from embrace to extend, extract, extinguish.

ACAB seemingly includes Switzerland.

Then again, you probably don't want to push the guidance up and freak people out too much, eh?

They do get credit for not sticking their heads in the sand, but...

Assuming that a massive, country-wide web of systems that depend on online providers for everything from payments to prescription validation to supply chain will be up within days of a wartime cyberattack seems optimistic.

"It's AWS, Michael, how long can it be down for?"

When a central bank starts advising citizens to hold cash for war scenarios, it is quietly pricing in payment system failure and supply chain breakdown. The Riksbank is not talking about inflation hedging here. It is talking about systemic resilience. That is a very different signal.

A week? 🤣

Tell me you haven’t seen systemic instability for generations without telling me you haven’t seen systemic instability for generations.

Ah yes, much like hours, barely surviving at the edge of starvation. Someone should call animal protection services.

Cat looks like he knows there are snacks but is dismayed, disgusted, and disappointed that you are keeping them from him.