blaine

Public Key

npub19r2jkjnpk6pp8zcd7hej43amglqalqtdky088tzer4ypgyjqsdqse284ag

NIP-05 Address

blaine_at_mastodon.social@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsz34ftffsmdqsn3vxltue2c7a50swls9kmz8nn43v36jq5zfqgxsgj23mrr

Author Public Key

npub19r2jkjnpk6pp8zcd7hej43amglqalqtdky088tzer4ypgyjqsdqse284ag

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Last Notes

2024-08-03 17:36:04

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@npub1qu5…4evr we're in a nearby town (Nelson), and extremely fortunate to be comfortable and well-taken care of by friends and neighbors. Many folks are camping with pets, children, etc.

2024-08-03 17:15:35

Now two weeks in to evacuation from my home due to wildfires; we're fine, and despite "communication that could be better" from local authorities, our understanding is that so far our home has been protected and safe. Grateful beyond words to the fire crews. ❤️
The experience has really driven home for me how deep a hole we're in. We live in the woods, and are in that sense a canary - but we're not the first, and won't be the last. Jasper is high profile, but this is happening everywhere.

2024-07-30 04:28:05

Folks in my area have set up a gofundme to help recover from the devastating wildfires that have been raging for the past week.
Slocan Lake is a remote area with very small communities that are tourism-dependent. Nearly 20,000 acres of pristine wilderness have burned since July 17th.
Recovery isn't going to be easy; if you're able, consider contributing to the gofundme here:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-slocan-valley-wildfire-volunteers-evacs-firefighters/
🙏❤️

2024-07-25 23:17:11

Is there off-the-shelf software to help coordinate evacuation resources (housing, etc)? Hopefully the worst has passed and these evacs won't last long, but locals in our community are looking for better ways to coordinate and I'd like to help, ideally without writing new software or putting together a bad spreadsheet (which may be the best option!).

2024-07-22 14:49:23

The world needs better mapping tools for simple sketching of "pirate maps." If you know of one, I would be very grateful right now to also know about it.
QGIS 🙅‍♀️ (crashes doing simple things)
Google Earth 🙅‍♀️ (seventy clicks to do one thing)
ArcGIS 🤑 (expensive)
Gaia 😖 (layer management is ... not fun)
Google My Maps isn't terrible, so that's what I'm using for now, but it's layer capabilities are fairly minimal. Any other pointers would be amazing. 🙏

2024-07-20 19:35:15

Evacuated. We're safe with our cats, we'll see how the next few days go for our home.
Apocalyptic scenes up here in south-central British Columbia. This photo was from when things were relatively calm.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/820/487/399/162/553/original/5e1272d2ce7ea93f.jpg

2024-05-16 00:18:16

I'm not sure it's ever going to be a "thing" like #mosstodon but here's my contribution to #moosetodon.
This absolute unit (actually kind of small for a moose, but still) visited our yard yesterday. No sign of Rocky. 🫎
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/447/885/017/920/776/original/62b6a525cdc49f59.mp4

2024-04-21 17:50:22

The back-woods, working class, remote rural community near where I live, whose primary employers are a zinc/lead smelter and a pulp mill, just elected amazing queer hero, Birkley Valks, to the local school board of trustees. He soundly won the election against a hate-mongering anti-trans bully.
Love wins! 🎉🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️❤️
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/310/467/369/297/119/original/3d4576d31c217dcc.jpg

2024-04-03 19:56:12

One must imagine Sisyphus listening to "Happy"
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/209/034/179/462/381/original/9fbc2f539c101ebf.jpeg

2024-04-03 19:37:44

On instagram, which I only use these days to follow friends who are on there, the most frequent "notification" is from obvious spam (presumably phishing) accounts. Meta has thus far been unable to stem the never-ending flow.
Except these accounts are all brand new. I don't know anyone who's not on instagram in 2024 that will decide to sign up and follow *me*
If Instagram had a flag that said "don't let new accounts follow me", it would stop the spam dead.
Fediverse apps should do this.

2024-03-26 17:15:42

I'm not sure if it's new or if I'm just really bad at paying attention, but I just learned about it and I'm so excited about #fedify: https://unstable.fedify.dev/
I think systems that are shaped like fedify are one of the key things needed to really open experimentation and exploration of the possibilities that the fediverse affords.

2024-03-21 14:24:05

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@npub1tra…npqw I know! Scandalous! 😅

2024-03-21 05:14:37

I feel like billionaires are letting the world down.
So much wealth, so much power, but as far as I can tell there won't be a flock of supersonic jets with transparent upper fuselages following the eclipse.
I mean, there are ~2500 billionaires in the world, and *none* of them are going to experience five full hours of totality.
Really, it's a complete failure of imagination.

2024-03-15 17:37:39

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@npub1jc6…7v67 in my experience designing standards (especially learning from failure! 😅), it's best to state clearly what the intent is and use that statement to drive usage.
As a thought experiment, even if Mastodon/AP servers didn't add SMTP support, and assuming it'd be useful for that to work, it'd be trivial to add a rel=email to a webfinger profile, and easy enough for email clients to respect that.
Lots of possibilities! My main worry is that a fractured approach is a barrier to adoption.

2024-03-15 17:17:07

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@npub1jc6…7v67 our original intent with webfinger was that email addresses would *be* social addresses; gmail.com had a webfinger/well-known endpoint almost 15 years ago!
I'd think of it like WhatsApp/Signal - they use phone numbers, without any extra protocol signalling, and if the number is associated with a signal/WhatsApp account it "just works" - or you can use SMS to send an invite to the phone number.
Same could be done with social addresses. The preceding @ is just there for us nerds. 😅

2024-03-15 16:40:06

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@npub1jc6…7v67 I love the term "social address"! Much better than webfinger 😅
Two things I would add: first, the initial '@' is unnecessary and imho confusing. Eugen added it to mimic Twitter's @handles, but in personal communication it doesn't really add anything, and arguably takes away.
Second, I wrote up this short thread recently about the original vision for webfinger/social addresses: https://mastodon.social/@blaine/112073273204522419 - hopefully it's helpful!

2024-03-15 01:56:02

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@npub1v52…qu8a it looks like you've got lots of other answers, but just to support the unifi gear, I have a couple of similar setups, one at about 300-400 ft, the other at 200-300 ft, and both work great even with just so-so line of sight and a fair number of trees in the way. Both are 5+ years old (one pair is the very old nanostation M2 loco) and get really decent throughput.

2024-03-05 19:59:48

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@npub19lt…qfjk @npub1cwk…qe8n it was always my hope that webfinger (plus some extra bits) could be used for contact details (I think webfinger is properly understood as "DNS for People[/things/etc]").
By using the ability to do key lookups, it's not too complicated to build an authenticated profile server that wouldn't rely on a shared/trusted service.
I imagine something like a Facebook profile page with "friends-only" visibility for profile details, etc. Could work really well with Signal's new usernames..

2024-02-20 00:27:04

Random unsolicited thought (disclaimer: I haven't been watching or participating in the spam response at all):
One of the main differences between social/activitypub spam and email spam is that contact lists are largely open, and programmable querying is possible. What does that mean?
If you see a new follow request or mention, you can check to see if anyone else you know follows that person. If not, the spam propensity is much higher. Email servers can't do this [without centralization].

2024-02-19 23:06:30

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@npub1jeq…jglm "from" is a complicated word. 😉
I lived there for ~15 years, in my teens and through university, so I guess so? Usually I say "From BC" because I've lived kind of all over the province. I was in Vancouver during the (again, brief) Tyee project – spent most of my time those days working on/running resist.ca.

2024-02-13 06:25:45

The insular instinct in communities is something we need to reckon with. Today, a well-meaning person in my community got eviscerated on Facebook for not knowing local folklore.
Meanwhile, one extended community working to give people the freedom to communicate attacked another extended community working to give people the freedom to communicate.
The danger posed by community in-fighting isn't that one side or the other will win – it's that we'll all lose, by losing sight of the real goals.

2024-02-06 19:19:16

The rumours about WhatsApp/Matrix federation are very promising, but the suggestion that legal contracts will need signing to federate is worrying. We've done this before, with the traditional telephone network, and we got a cartel.
The first version of Twitter was illegal (or, at least, against telco rules – what's the difference?) because it wasn't "approved" by the telcos. We were only able to launch publicly because of an expensive certification process that skirted the truth.

2024-02-02 20:41:43

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@npub1m0v…du9y it was a naive one-off that worked out just as well as I hoped it would: "can you make a design for a t-shirt that contains the text "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against my policy"?"

2024-01-22 17:11:28

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@npub1hyk…3p33 *as someone who has spent immense amounts of time reminding people that 9 ET is 6 PT, strong agree with a slight tweak: if developers are building a tool where timezones are likely to be discussed, they should build affordances to make the translation easy for everyone. Email clients could easily support something like this, but product manager laziness precludes it.

2024-01-04 18:35:42

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@npub1q8n…kct8 if you remember, let me know! :D

2024-01-04 18:05:58

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I want one place where I can see all my messages, organized by contact. I want to put my *contacts* into lists, not messages (or both), and I want to be able to see all the messages I've exchanged with that person/bot, regardless of platform. The mental overhead and overwhelm these days is just too high, even with tools like Beeper.

2024-01-04 18:03:16

My world for a single, reliable, contact-oriented messaging interface.

2023-12-15 19:01:57

While I fully, really, completely get all the arguments on every side around Meta implementing ActivityPub, I'll confess to not understanding the profound concern that this will kill the fediverse.
Federated social media never "belonged" to anyone. Feel free to block Threads. Build disparate communities!
Or federate with them!
The network and power dynamics are not & will not be any way worse than they are now, or before Threaderation, or before Musk bought Twitter. They are only better*.

2023-12-14 21:18:12

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@npub1k08…6xvn @npub1ykg…g4jv @npub1kd6…w72f yuuuup – A decade ago, my hope was that a grassroots effort that could be sufficiently ahead of regulation would allow de-facto standards like the fact that email doesn't require a license/ToS agreement (!!!!) to take hold before capture/regulatory missteps.
I have hope that because the EU framework has allowances for small players that we can avoid the fate of the PSTN. Definitely not assured, though. 😬

2023-12-14 21:03:26

Once again, I find myself stuck in Javascript Packaging Hell.
But ... with pnpm and an assortment of other small advancements, it's ... better than it used to be?

2023-09-01 19:17:25

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@npub1j46…3gm7 I managed to get Condé to entirely drop passwords, which was a big lift but much easier than bikeshedding about password requirements would have been!
Also, wth with this sentence from that article: "However, the removal of recommendations against SMS indicates that this widely used 2FA channel is far from dead. It remains much more secure than email and is an effective way to reduce your reliance on passwords."
??? SMS is definitely not more secure than email.

2023-08-06 18:40:41

TIL Google's Pixel phones don't support HDMI out or USB HID devices – they ship with hardware support (like every USB-C device forever), but it's disabled by Google at the OS level.
Speculation is that they've done this to sell more Chromecast devices, but it's really inconvenient when your screen is broken. Do I pay $250 for a new screen, or $500 for a new phone? Either way, Google wins. 🙃
(I wonder if the internal product fight about this is why Google finally added 2FA code sync? 🧐)

2023-08-05 01:38:33

Writing Rust is like buying a car that's delivered as a box of individual parts – nuts, bolts, frame components, etc.
All the parts are well-labelled and only fit correctly in exactly one way, but the labelling is done using an inscrutable system of hieroglyphics, and the limited assembly instructions are written entirely in Tamarian.

2023-07-06 16:39:52

When Facebook started, they bootstrapped networks by downloading & matching contacts from email. Twitter, and everyone else, did the same.
Threads is blowing up because Facebook is using their monopoly on the social graph. Legislation to guarantee easy, fast access to your own contact lists for use in non-billionaire-owned media would help level the playing field, because Zuck & co sure aren't going to give the connections they stole back to us otherwise.

2023-06-13 16:21:13

I've been mostly offline lately, hanging out in the garden instead of on the internet. This morning I accidentally looked at the corporate "news" and it confirmed my bias that it's not worth watching.
"Protests erupt as [Trump] to appear in court" / compare with video of same, where fewer people than occupy an average lineup for the DMV are clowning around with Trump capes on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf_bRgDXCtA&t=2000s
This is an infinitely more valuable message: https://todon.eu/@CrimethInc/110533003803240178

2023-04-02 18:09:47

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#[0] I believe you that it was a far cry from what you intended. 💜
The BDFL approach is complicating in these scenarios, because in social settings "benevolence" to one is "hostile" to another.
I think #[1]'s point gets to the root of this: https://chaos.social/@swetland/110130547164629389
It's absolutely fine for one person to have a strong view of what "Mastodon, the software" is, but anyone dictating what the Fediverse is anathema to us all. It gets messy when "Mastodon" is used for "the Fediverse."

2023-04-02 18:00:58

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#[0] sorry, I misspoke - I meant trademark. It's possible you didn't mean to imply this, but "you are benefitting from the recognition of our trademark ... you can develop your own social media platform from scratch and participate in the fediverse that way" seems to suggest that "if you don't like our decisions, do your own thing, but don't call it Mastodon."
If that's not a fair assessment, I'd be greatly relieved.

2023-04-02 17:48:57

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#[0] in that case, we agree! 💜
fwiw, I'm not concerned about the thread – it was specifically the statement around the Mastodon copyright.
I think it'd be really helpful to figure out a way to build that narrative can hold that distinction.

2023-04-02 17:29:26

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#[0] like it or not, "Mastodon" isn't just "Mastodon GmbH" or even just the software – it refers to the Fediverse in common usage. That's a tension that's not going away, and I profoundly worry about the your suggestion (understandable, at some level) that your org will exert control over what does and does not constitute "Mastodon."

2023-04-02 17:21:25

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#[0] I think your replies there are not great. 😢
You and Mastodon GmBH benefit massively from the immense amount of work that the wider fediverse community does.
While I appreciate the perspective that the software != the community, I respectfully disagree. The decisions for the software impact the community, as we heard so profoundly at the Black Twitter Summit. The concern I have is that you often conflate the software and the community when it suits, but reject it when it doesn't.

2023-04-02 17:08:20

With posts like this, it's becoming really clear and important that we disentangle "the Fediverse" from "Mastodon."
#[0], you've done great work that we're all grateful for, but you're standing on the shoulders of many, many others that you rarely credit or acknowledge.
This attitude isn't what we built the fediverse for. 😢
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/130/304/459/145/493/original/2540c9db56b30d15.jpeg

2023-04-01 03:44:31

Today's the first day in quite a while that I can remember feeling *ambiently sad*
I think that means life's pretty good? 🤷‍♀️💜
Anyhow, here's a hallucinated version of what I imagine I might look like if I wasn't afraid of violence (and could justify spending the $1000s that this amazing outfit would obviously cost 😂).
Hope everyone's having an amazing #[0]-tastic day!
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/121/471/608/862/012/original/23c736924f8f9dc6.png

2022-11-11 23:08:56

While everyone's being nostalgic about what Twitter means to them, I may as well add my two cents.
I didn't give birth to Twitter – that was Jack and Florian. But I was its midwife and adoptive mother; for two months in early 2007, I was the code's sole guardian and caretaker.
I was also the first person to hate Twitter; back when it was SMS-only, I did the math and realized that my immigrant prepaid phone plan would charge me $2000/year to send and receive even a 2006-era number of tweets. 🧵