Notes

Short updates, links, and thoughts that do not need to be full blog posts.

I spent some time this evening learning about video transcoding, streaming and the difference between a video’s container and its encoding. It’s way more complicated than I realised!

I don’t want to join any more Discord servers. Please use Discourse for communities!

I’m gonna be in London for a few hours at lunch time today. Anyone wanna hang out?

My grandmother just informed me that her phone doesn’t work anymore because she dropped it into a cup of tea.

I have some thoughts on ActivityPub vs the AT Protocol. Firstly, I the the protocols are more interesting than the products currently built on them (Mastodon and friends vs Bluesky).

ActivityPub was one of the first attempts to create a protocol for decentralised social media.

It was finalised in 2018 after a small team worked on it for several years. It nearly didn’t happen at all. Mastodon is the flagship app using ActivityPub but there are a bunch of other including PeerTube and PixelFed.

I love the idea of ActivityPub as it’s an open, web native protocol.

ActivityPub is not without its problems though. One of the main ones being account migration. Right now it relies on your old server being online and it doesn’t migrate your existing content, just your social graph.

The fact that it is a reasonably mature protocol with a lot of services build on it means that any changes are now pretty tricky to implement without potentially breaking those existing services.

None of these problems are unsolvable but it’s going to be tricky.

At this point ActivityPub will have to deal with the first mover disadvantage. Competing standards like the AT protocol can take a look at what does/doesn’t work and improve on it.

AT and Bluesky specifically has also arrived at just the right time to take advantage of Twitter imploding.

A huge advantage that ActivtyPub and Mastodon have over Bluesky is that they are not VC backed. Sure, they still need money and funding but they don’t have investors eagerly awaiting a profit, so they can focus on building things with users as the no.1 priority.

Wether that will matter or not I don’t know, but what I do know is that these protocols don’t need to be seen as competitors. The rising tide of decentralisation lifts all boats.

So I got access to #BlueSky and it is interesting. The vibe is very different.

Mastodon feels like walking around a public gallery. Everyone is fairly well behaved and composed.

BlueSky is like walking into a raging house party right as someone barfs down the stairs. It’s way more chaotic. I liked that when I was on Twitter but I don’t know if I want to go back to that again.

@joelhooks I think I recall you talking about this. Do you use it? Any thoughts/reasons not to use it?

I need to start working on my CV/resumé, specifically for the US job market. Are there any you’ve seen that have been particularly impressive? Any recommendations or tips?

The Rust Foundation are doing some serious damage to their brand. I’m sure they’ll get it right in the end but damn!

I flew to a little grass strip at Kilkeel today. Got some great views of the Mournes. Here is the airfield from above.

Kilkeel airfield from above

The French riots are over a change of the retirement age from 62 to 64. Good fucking reason to riot. I just looked up what age I will get to retire in the UK. 68. ☠️

I built https://thedeathclock.co at the start of last year and it is on track to get a quarter of a million page views this year. However, it just costs me money. How the heck do I monetise it? Google adwords rejected it because it doesn't have enough content.