These principles name the opposite of the oppressive design elements being used against us, but like other cyberlibertarian frameworks, they stop short of the root cause: politics. Liberation depends on shifting political power, because power determines which values take hold. resonantcomputing.org

I did a study of now many users in the atproto world (Bluesky and the broader Atmosphere) have strong control over their identities via rotation keys or other methods

Remember when the DMCA was passed and the publishers lobbying it claimed it would protect individual artists 🤡

i wrote about my new tagline: "software you can touch" how to touch is also to be seen. it's simple but it invites curiosity, participation, and ultimately, collaboration news.spencer.place/p/software-y...

anyone know any Good Discourse on "what is programming anyway"? random examples of Good Discourse: - Melanie Hoff's "Always Already Programming" (gist.github.com/melaniehoff/...) & Lucy Keer's reflection on it (lucykeer.com/notebucket/a...) - PROGRAMme (programme.hypotheses.org)

IETF gave us the open internet. But consensus has gravity, and gravity pulls toward power. Here is my short thought on the hidden dynamics of standardization.

To "own" your data on ATProto you need to be able to adversarially migrate your PDS away from a hostile host. That requires a rotation key and a backup of your PDS (see www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversa...). Currently ~0.004% of users hosted by bluesky have rotation keys...

To "own" your data on ATProto you need to be able to adversarially migrate your PDS away from a hostile host. That requires a rotation key and a backup of your PDS (see www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversa...). Currently ~0.004% of users hosted by bluesky have rotation keys...

i just walked "check out sidetrail" by @danabra.mov sidetrail.app/@danabra.mov...

One of the top comments, “alive internet theory”

i genuinely am concerned this protocol is going to favor service providers over time and then we just reinvent web 2.0 with added friction and none of the meaningful decentralization we’ve been promised

"SF and Technology as Mystification" by Joanna Russ (1978) www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissu...

In works such as Tools for Conviviality (1973), he argued that technologies are never neutral: they can either expand human autonomy or quietly undermine it. 2/

Has anyone written about how the "Abundance" argument is just recycled from the technofeudalism cult that Elon Musk's grandfather was involved in?

A lost art in modern web dev is using the DOM event system for behavioral extensibility.

We have Custom Elements, but do we also need Custom Attributes? This was discussed at TPAC. Is it something you'd like on the platform? https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/1029

Appception: British Airways’s app using a WebView to embed their website, which recommends installing the app I’m already on 😅

Dogspinning @ Corsica Studios for the last time!!

How do I become a first-party developer on ATProto? 😜 matthieu.leaflet.pub/3m4pw7osrg22v

My agency as a person seeking to read a PDF has very little to do with the PDF file format; I have agency because feature-complete PDF readers are a ubiquitous commodity. The freedom afforded by #ATProto is no freedom at all while Bluesky remains a supermassive singularity within the network.

New: *Looseleaf* publishing — a way to publish standalone Leaflets on AT Protocol! 📝🍃 We started with publications on atproto; now we're bringing it all together so _anything_ you write on Leaflet, incl single documents / posts, can be 'atprotated' :) Learn more in thread! ⬇️

Hey, I just launched an app called Antler. The app showcases how we can rebuilt WeChat Mini Apps, but using open web standards. dmathewwws.com/antler-an-ir...

Adjacent point, there is nothing inherently ubiquitous about plain text in computing. It took decades of standardization, adoption, and gradual convergence of a behemoth of infrastructure that now resides in every computing environment that we take for granted.

Composing capability security and conflict-free replicated data types spritely.institute/news/composi... Capability security AND local-first chat?! Two great tastes that taste great together! Plus try our tasty demo, live on the blogpost: Brassica Chat!

Interop is not a feature. It’s an ecological condition.

Adjacent point, there is nothing inherently ubiquitous about plain text in computing. It took decades of standardization, adoption, and gradual convergence of a behemoth of infrastructure that now resides in every computing environment that we take for granted.

Dearly lacking discourse in local-first... the prerequisites for "data ownership" is it must be freely addressable (e.g. via the file system) and one must be able to adversarially do things with it (e.g. open/ubiquitous formats).

Video essay on Technocracy, how it was folded into capitalism, and is ingrained into engineering culture/education. www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAmz...

threw together a lil web component to add this to any input. super easy progressive UX enhancement for your atproto app! tangled.org/@jakelazarof...

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Getting real close to launching Seams.so for real this time! Had to undertake a lot of architectural work to setup a proxy which _doesn't_ require a browser extension, but shares almost all the code with it. Probably going to use this as the mobile version.

3D blog

“Adversarial poetry.” Love this. Obvs.

Dearly lacking discourse in local-first... the prerequisites for "data ownership" is it must be freely addressable (e.g. via the file system) and one must be able to adversarially do things with it (e.g. open/ubiquitous formats).

"Are Protocols Elite?" by @ntnsndr.in (2025)

Software Substrates Workshop. Submission deadline Feb 20 2026.programming-conference.org/home/substra...

Tech is so moat-pilled, we dismiss a lot of potentially useful tools. Like… Calculators have no moat. Does that mean we shouldn’t have bothered with them?

"Triumph of the Nerds" by PBS (1996) www.pbs.org/nerds/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1yz...

Deeper irony that the spreadsheet was the breakthrough application of personal computing.

Computers used to be called high tech, not tech.

This design would have definitely been rejected if I wasn't building it on my own 🙈 Weird chromeless UI that renders outside the window, that you can resize, and move anywhere in the screen, with drawn annotations that you'll need to keep track of their position and scale… 💀

This week on Cybercultural, more early-2000s Apple 🍎, including why Steve Jobs didn't want online music to go the streaming route (which of course it eventually did). cybercultural.com/p/ipod-2002/ #InternetHistory

My #Strudel collection bot is working! Now all #AtProto links to Strudel will be scopped up for an endless collection of musical fun!. Made a simple composition to celebrate: strudel.cc#LyoKQHRpdGxl... Start sharing your Strudel compositions, and let's see if it scoops them up.

The WASM for Automerge is 4 times as large as the WASM for Sqlite. 🫤

At first, I thought I could just rotate the hue of HSL colors and call it a day. Since then, I've learned about perceptual color spaces, OKLCH, Bezold-Brücke effect and I still can't always get good programmatic palettes 😅 But I built Color Palette Pro to help get us halfway there: colorpalette.pro

this looks very cool, i mean that genuinely, but tbh i bristle a bit seeing "local-first" used as a straw man here. of course if your server is the source of truth you can eliminate a lot of local-first complexity — the entire point of that complexity is to avoid a server-authoritative architecture!

"Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight over Intellectual Property" by Andrew Ross (2006) web.archive.org/web/20221206...

Spent three days intensely working on an esoconlang (programming language with its own script and pronunciation) with Jon Corbett (of Cree# fame)