Initial thoughts on Friendica
If you've been browsing through your Mastodon feed, and you come upon a post with nice formatting — perhaps words emboldened or italicised, perhaps with an embedded link — and you've wondered how that post was written, the answer may be Friendica.
I've only been using Friendica for a few days, so this is a very preliminary review. It's a big complex system with a lot of configurability, which I certainly have not mastered yet.
What is Friendica? It's one of a number of alternative federated social network server programs which share a common interoperating protocol — ActivityPub — with Mastodon. This collectivity of servers running heterogeneous software but sharing the ActivityPub protocol is informally known as 'the Fediverse'. Because Friendica is a program, and open source, there are many Friendica instances, if rather fewer than there are Mastodon instances. Because they share a common protocol, users on Mastodon instances can follow users on Friendica instances (provided they federate with each other), and vice-versa. But Friendica offers a substantially richer (and conceptually quite different) user experience than Mastodon. While Mastodon is by conception quite Twitter-like — a continuous stream of short, by default unformatted, posts, presented to you in the order in which they have most recently been interacted with by someone you follow, Friendica is said to be rather more Facebook-like (it's a long time since I've used Facebook, so I'm not sure to what extent this is true). Its presentation is fairly configurable but by default it shows posts in conversations, so you shouldn't ever see a post which is out of context.
Whose party?
I'm not hugely a fan of Jeremy Corbyn. I'll defend him when he's attacked, especially when people repeat the vile slander that he's antisemitic. I do think he's the best leader the Labour Party has had since Michael Foot. But honestly, that isn't saying much.
He is, as Tony Benn said, a signpost, not a weathercock: a person of principle, whose principles do not change. But he's also stubborn, sometimes unnecessarily belligerent, not a good communicator, and not, I think, a fast thinker. And he's old — older than me — and I think it's time for our generation to get out of the way.
A letter to John Cooper MP on gaza
I've written another letter to my (Conservative) MP about Gaza. In the lead up to the debate on the petition 'Urgently fulfil humanitarian obligations to Gaza' a lot of us are going to have to do something similar. I'm posting this so that you can take advantage of the research I have done, but please, write your own letter to your own MP. Multiple copies of the same letter have much less effect than an equal number of different letters.
Also, I haven't hit all the beats here: there's something I meant to write, that in the moment I forgot, and I'd be grateful if other people managed to get it into their letters.
On Terrorism, and Genocide
On Terrorism, and Genocide
What am I doing?
Don't know, don't care
I first wrote about the principle 'don't know, don't care' in my essay Post-scarcity software in February 2006 — which is to say, twenty years ago. There's a lot wrong with that essay, seen from this perspective; my thoughts have moved on a fair bit. But there's far more right than there is wrong.
Firstly, everyone who uses software already uses the principle 'don't know, don't care'. We have to. The code we write (almost always) is built on top of libraries. We use libraries rather than reinventing everything ourselves for reasons of cognitive overload: we cannot keep all the details of all the layers of software under us in our heads and still have room for our own work. We don't know, and don't care, exactly what goes on inside the library code, provided the contract expressed by the API is delivered and the performance is acceptable. If the API contract isn't delivered, we file a bug report. If the performance isn't acceptable, we typically look for an alternative library.