erlend_sh

This post takes a look at ATProto from a different angle, and explores the value of some possibly less-noticed pieces of it.

The "Login with Google" button has been so useful and yet so horrible for the freedom of the web. Why does google get to be the gatekeeper to all of our web logins?

We need an alternative, but it also needs to be easy, and by making handles domains, and making it so that normal people can use and understand it, they have made it possible for an actually decentralized social login button.

Linking Identity to your Personal Data Store and using Domains as Handles is a crucialcombination that is really starting to unlock web freedom.

A lot of what I'm trying to get at with this post is that there is more than one way to leverage ATProto, and that there are some pretty major things it has started to do right that we really need right now.

We're used to the idea that there's more than one way to make a web app, and the same is true even if you are building it on ATProto. It hasn't set a lot in stone, it's just given us some bricks that we can all share.

The "AppView" is a component of the ATProto architecture that you are given nearly free rein on. It can be any kind of thing you want, and I think there's all kinds of unexplored possibilities there.

You might even be able to make an AppView with a meaningful ActivityPub integration, or possibly borrow ideas about inboxes and outboxes as an alternative to relays.

Our v0.3 mvp is finally done after a year of development and many more spent pondering cozy community design.

Today it's a minimalistic personal site generator. Before long it'll be a social network made of people's personal websites.

Nerdy web weirdos unite ✊❤️‍🔥

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/113794326443596401

There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I don't think is mentioned enough.

Intro / TLDR

I was intrigued to learn that the Roc language rewrote their standard library from Rust to Zig. What made Zig the better option?

They wrote that they were using a lot of unsafe Rust and it was getting in their way. They also mentioned that Zig had “more tools for working in a memory-unsafe environment, such as reporting memory leaks in tests”, making the overall process much better.

So is Zig a better alternative to writing unsafe Rust?

I wanted to test this myself and see how hard unsafe Rust would be by building a project that required a substantial amount of unsafe code.

Then I would re-write the project in Zig to see if would be easier/better.

After I finished both versions, I found that the Zig implementation was safer, faster, and easier to write. I’ll share a bit about building both and what I learned.

As written, the proposed remedies will force smaller and independent browsers like Firefox to fundamentally reexamine their entire operating model.

Recently Christine Lemmer-Webber shared this on Mastodon:

Here is your recipe for making the "Correct Fediverse IMO (TM)":

• Integrate ocaps, which is possible because actor model + ocaps compose
• Content addressed storage!
• Petname system UX
• Better anti-spam / anti-harassment using OCapPub ideas
• Improved privacy with E2EE ("encrypted p2p" even a better goal)
• Decentralized identity (notice the *y*, I did not say DIDs) on top of ~mutable CAS storage

In this post I'm going to explore how Leaf stands up to these goals!

Links:

• https://atproto.com/ - https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
• https://www.blackskyweb.xyz/ - https://bsky.app/profile/rudyfraser.com/post/3l6d7mmzhik2r

For a lot of us, atproto projects are some of the biggest (most users, most publicized, most code written, etc.) projects we’ve ever done. For me, it’s also my first time working in open source (ironically, someone asked me to be more open about that)

If you can help, pls check out open issues.

I know not everyone thinks highly of atproto around these parts, but please don’t let that get in the way of welcoming a fellow rustacean into the open source world 🦀

How open source projects can balance Makers and Takers: lessons from Drupal's contribution credit system and recommendations for WordPress and other open source communities.

Some folks have gotten themselves together as something they’re calling the Social Web Foundation, and I’ll cut to the chase: this is an attempt by ActivityPub partisans to rebrand the confusing “fediverse” terminology, and in the process, regardless of intent, shit on everything else that’s been the social web going back twenty-five years.

Hey 👋 if you don't know us already, we're building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.

This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that's to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I've tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it's not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!

When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.

Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.

Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.

As a web engine, Servo primarily handles everything around scripting and layout. For embedding use cases, the Tauri community experimented with adding a new Servo backend, but Servo can also be used to build a browser.

We have a reference browser in the form of servoshell, which has historically been used as a minimal example and as a test harness for the Web Platform Tests. Nevertheless, the Servo community has steadily worked towards making it a browser in its own right, starting with our new browser UI based on egui last year.

This year, @wusyong, a member of Servo TSC, created the Verso project as a way to explore the features Servo needs to power a robust web browser. In this post, we’ll explain what we tried to achieve, what we found, and what’s next for building a browser using Servo as a web engine.

Back in June I wrote about an exciting confluence of digital auth tech:

(1) The commodification of #OIDC infrastructure, (2) the emergence of #FedCM, (3) and the compatibility of both with #indieauth .

In short, it is now easier than ever to log into web applications using your own website as an identity provider. Or at least, it would be, if your favorite web apps supported these agency-enhancing technologies.

https://blog.erlend.sh/indie-social-sign-in-could-go-mainstream

#opensource #indieweb #identity

https://writing.exchange/@erlend/113091679196090320

I think this is the most important (WIP) Fediverse Enhancement Proposal of this year for the #ActivityPub protocol:

FEP-7952: Roadmap for Actor and Object Portability — by @by_[email protected] and @[email protected]

It ties a lot of elementary building blocks for #nomadicidentity neatly together, most succinctly summed up by one particularly magic feature:

Bring-your-own Actor ID! 🪪💫

Actor profiles can now be hosted separately from the instance (including as a static JSON object on a personal website), which in turn enables service providers to offer their users a “BYO (Bring Your Own) domain name” feature.

That’s really all I ever needed from the notion of a ‘single-user instance’. All I want to manage on my own is my identity; I don’t want to take on the full burden of managing a whole AP server.

In this paradigm, someone’s tiny personal website could also be their Actor-ID Provider, and nothing more. That ID could in turn be used to as a (reasonably nomadic) account on any FEP-7952 compatible instance.

From @by_[email protected]:

the idea is to detach the Actor object (which could be operated by a microserver that consumes almost zero resources, and basically just operates a big redirect table like a link-shortener) from the Service Provider, to be a little more like email (in the use case where you point a domain that you own and configure at protonmail or mailgun or some other provider) or SMS service (in that regulation enables you to keep your number when you switch phone co’s).

We will prototype the micro-Actor in the coming months, but we have no idea how long it would take for implementations like WordPress or forks of Mastodon/Misskey/Pleroma to offer support for this kind of externalized/self-managed Actor. We are hoping existing servers will find it interesting to offer a “service-provider mode” for the nomadic/domain-owning user class, for many reasons. In the meantime, we might also prototype a Fedify-powered server that only allows external Actors to create accounts.

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/112684879834557152