Evan Prodromou / is on Nostr

Director of Open Technology at Open Earth Foundation (OEF).
Past founder of Wikitravel, StatusNet, identi.ca, Fuzzy.ai. CTO of Breather, TRU LUV and MTTR.
Co-creator of GNU Social, creator of pump.io.
Co-chair of the Social Web Working Group at W3C. Co-author of ActivityStreams 2.0. Co-author of ActivityPub. Co-author of OStatus.
In Montreal, from San Francisco. Greek, Arab, American, Canadian. Husband, father, cook, gardener.

Last Notes

2024-08-27 13:12:05

I’ve had a few great interviews in the last couple of weeks. I decided I wanted to track them on a media page on my own site.
I’m going to try to keep them more organized, but for now I just want to get them linked.
https://evanp.me/2024/08/27/media/

2024-06-11 18:52:45

- reply

I hope you really enjoy it. I’m very interested in the federated blogging project!

2024-06-04 01:47:23

- reply

I don’t know a good address, so maybe whatever is linked on their site

2024-06-03 23:25:22

- reply

Right now, no, unless there is some demand. If you would like to see one, please email O’Reilly and let them know!

2024-06-03 20:49:46

- reply

You don’t have to!

2024-06-03 20:49:31

- reply

Yes, I wrote a whole post about it! https://evanp.me/2024/03/15/cover-animal-for-activitypub-book/

2024-03-15 16:56:20

One of the first things people ask you when you say you’re writing a book for O’Reilly Media is: “What animal is going to be on the cover?” O’Reilly books are famous for their lovely animal drawings, in rich detail, either in black-or-white or colour. Books are sometimes referred to by their cover animal, like the famous Camel Book by Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz.
As an author, you don’t get to choose the animal on the cover. This is a fiercely-guarded prerogative of the O’Reilly Media design department. Authors and editors can make suggestions, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be followed.
Today, I got the design for the cover of the ActivityPub book I’m writing. I have to admit, I haven’t been thinking about it too much, so it was a surprise to see it, and I wasn’t really emotionally prepared. All I can say is that I’m overwhelmed and I absolutely love it.
The bird on the cover is a Nanday Conure, a South American parakeet. They are extremely intelligent; in captivity they can talk, and are prized as pets. The birds live in central South America. They breed and raise their young in separate, private nesting holes, but when breeding season is over they join into large roosts with many, many birds, connecting their small family units into a bigger flock network.
I couldn’t think of a better description of what ActivityPub is and does.
We’re going to be pushing two new chapters — Activity Streams 2.0 and ActivityPub federation protocol — to the Early Release program this week. (The early release version still has the baby bird on the cover.) If you want to read the ActivityPub book today, that’s the place to look.
https://evanp.me/2024/03/15/cover-animal-for-activitypub-book/
https://evanprodromou.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/screenshot-2024-03-15-at-12.48.01e280afpm.png

2024-03-13 19:23:54

Today, the United States House of Representatives voted to require the Chinese company Bytedance to sell its stake in the popular service Tiktok. If the company does not comply, the bill would ban the use of Tiktok in the US. The bill still needs to pass the Senate and get delivered to President Biden’s desk, but there are a lot of really interesting parts of this decision that I want to unpack.
Foreign companies own shares in all kinds of entities in the United States. There are some interesting restrictions on domestic transportation (listen all of y’all: it’s cabotage), financial services, atomic energy, and real estate. All of them have pretty strong justifications in terms of domestic security — that some level of domestic independence would be lost if all our railroads were owned by Chilean investors, for example.
But we don’t have restrictions on selling foreign-owned magazines or newspapers or movies, or serving foreign-owned Web sites, in the US. You can read Pravda or Al-Jazeera or China Daily on an iPad in the comfort of your lovely American home. It’s not universal — copyrighted information illegally shared and terrorist recruitment content are often blocked or the domains are just plain taken over. But for the most part, the US is pretty OK with you reading or watching content from other countries, even if it has a strong editorial slant against the US government’s current policies.
So, why is Tiktok different here? Realistically, most American viewers aren’t watching Chinese-made content on their Tiktok apps. They’re watching short videos made in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia or other, y’know, “western” countries. But the videos are curated by an algorithm provided by Tiktok, which if it is partially-owned by Bytedance, is somehow entangled with China’s interests.
The House bill, then, is an acknowledgment that algorithmic curation of feeds is a powerful feature that can have a major influence on individuals and society. It at least makes the point that allowing a foreign company, under its own government’s influence, to have some level of control of the algorithm, is a potential danger for domestic security.
This raises a few really important questions. First, for everyone outside of America, it raises the question of algorithmic feeds created outside their own countries. Is the Internet a nice, friendly post-national free-trade free-speech zone, or is domestic control of this technology important in France, Guyana and New Zealand, too?
In addition, for Americans, it should probably give us pause in thinking about our domestically-controlled networks. Does Congress think that algorithmic feeds under domestic control are equally powerful? If so, who’s making the decisions on how they’re used, and what connection is there between different factions who want to influence opinions or behaviour through curation?
I think the Fediverse provides some interesting answers here. The Fediverse is a federated network of social networks — a social internet or social web — connected by the ActivityPub social standard. The networks can be owned by all kinds of different entities — governments, private companies, community groups or individuals. Each network has its own local control mechanisms, but users on one network can follow, reply to, and otherwise communicate with people on any other network. Content created on one network gets published out to all the other networks depending on how many followers are there. Mastodon is a common example of software on the Fediverse, but new platforms are joining all the time.
For the international question, countries can consider implementing domestic social networks that federate with ones in other countries. This allows content to be received and sent across borders, but algorithmic feeds to be managed locally. If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem.
Within a country, it raises one potential solution for people concerned about the influence of algorithmic feeds, namely, running social network services under your own control, and following users from other networks. The home feed you read can be curated by an algorithm built into the server, or built into the client, or you can even leave it uncurated — just in chronological order. The Fediverse allows pushing the control of algorithmic feeds closer to users, who can make their own decisions about how content is prioritized.
Federation provides the possibility of some interesting changes in the locus of control in social networks. If we are starting to acknowledge how powerful this curational control is, we should start structuring our social network infrastructure to allow experimentation in whose hands are on the levers.
https://evanp.me/2024/03/13/tiktok-and-the-fediverse/

2024-02-09 02:27:48

Just a few minutes ago I sent my development editor Sarah the news that I’d finished another chapter of the ActivityPub book I’m writing for O’Reilly Media. This was the hardest one so far — the one on the ActivityPub federation protocol that connects different servers on the fediverse.
I’m now at 5 out of 7 chapters, but I’ve got some more deadlines staring me down over the coming months, so I’m not going to be slowing down any time soon.
In other good news, I think we’ll have some of the early chapters up on O’Reilly Learning Platform coming soon. I’ve heard from the production team that it’s going forward. Go team!
https://evanp.me/2024/02/08/another-chapter-done/

2024-01-15 23:12:19

I’ve been prompted by the Netflix algorithm pretty aggressively to watch Leave the World Behind, the 2023 apocalypse film — it said I was a 98% match for the movie. I’ve taken it in over the last couple of days, and I have to grudgingly admit that the algorithm was correct; I really liked it. Here are my impressions; spoilers ahead.
The film’s premise is straightforward — a middle-class Brooklyn couple played by Julie Roberts and Ethan Hawke take an impromptu family weekend trip to Long Island in a surprisingly posh rental house. Things start going wrong immediately — an oil tanker grounds itself on the beach where they are sunbathing; then Internet and mobile phone service go out.
That night, they’re awakened by the Black owners of the house, a father and daughter played by Mahershala Ali and Myha’la respectively. They’ve come from the city, where there is a severe blackout; they decided not to stay in their Park Avenue home, but instead come back to their country house. The renters, initially reluctant, even when offered a refund, relent when they see that all the television channels are on the emergency broadcast system.
Over the course of a few days, the families settle into an uneasy truce, as they realise that a serious attack on the United States has taken place. They endure sonic attacks, crashing airplanes and runaway self-driving cars, and increasingly strange animal behaviour. Ultimately, as the children suffer greater and greater hardship, they find a bunker in a nearby mansion to settle into, as mushroom clouds rise over the Manhattan skyline in the distance.
The underlying premise is fairly direct — that a foreign power, or a coalition of them, has used cyberattacks to weaken America’s resolve and spread terror. With a frayed social fabric, Americans may do the job for the attackers by turning on each other. What leadership there is in the country abdicates any responsibility, moves their investments electronically, and moves off to what we can expect is comfortable exile.
The acting was masterful. With only the faintest of brushstrokes, Roberts shows off the racist assumptions of white culture (she insists that the owners are really scammers, or maybe the handyman and housekeeper). Hawke’s character is easy-going and cavalier about his privilege. The gender dynamics in their relationship is roiling and unstable.
All the relationships are telling — between the renter dad and the owner’s daughter; between the owner and the mom; between the mom and the owner’s daughter. Probably the most difficult is the one between the renters’ older son and his younger sister, who dangles perilously at the margin of the social group. Her disconnection, and her resolve to start looking out for herself (inspired by an episode of West Wing), drives the story to its conclusion.
I was pretty deeply troubled by the story, in the shadow of the war currently underway in Gaza. I could not help but notice the parallels — absence of medical facilities, destroyed roads, information blackouts, bombings — between the experience of the TV characters and the real experience of the civilian population there. The characters’ absolute befuddlement that such attacks would happen to Americans, without understanding that they happen to people around the world every day, is richly ironic.
Most of all, I found the natural world’s disruption unsettling. Roberts’s character has a monologue at the end where she notes how little Americans actually care about the effects of their own actions on other people in the world or the animals and plants in it. It’s a little blunt and heavy-handed, but so well-written and delivered so expertly that it definitely broke through.
I’d recommend the movie if you’ve got Netflix (and sorry for the spoilers). It’s definitely given me a lot to think about.
https://evanp.me/2024/01/15/leave-the-world-behind/
#2023 #film #netflix

2024-01-07 05:58:23

I finished the Obelisk Gate today; it’s book 2 of NK Jamison’s Broken Earth series. I want to write some notes here about the book to cement them in my mind. Spoilers ahead.
I mentioned on Mastodon that the series had been pretty striking for me. It’s the story of a future (probably) world in which scientists have accidentally thrown the moon out of regular orbit by trying to tap power sources in the Earth’s core. The result has been millennia of unstable geography, devastating weather, and repeated civilizational collapse.
As I said, “The questions raised are so relevant for today; the changing of the world, the question of whether destroying an old and unjust order is worth the destruction of so much more; the value of traditional wisdom; what place people of the present have in the long line of time and what we owe to others in other places on that line; what obligations persecuted people have to the rest of the world.”
This book struck me well in some ways, and also interlaced generational struggle, as a mother and daughter find themselves on opposite sides of a factional battle.
But other parts have been weak. The identities and motivations of those factions have been really unclear — who wants what and why. Side characters who seem to be on one side do things to favour another side. At least one character has turned traitor on his original faction, but it’s not clear who he’s defected to or who he started from.
As with a lot of apocalyptic fiction, the motivations of the characters is also hard to understand. Sometimes they seem to be doing things for the good of all humanity, to preserve some parts of civilization and life until the current crisis is over and the next livable period on the planet. At other times, they do horrendous harm in order to preserve their own small group — even though the group’s ability to survive will require collective support.
I’m going to take a break from the series and start another few books before I come back to the trilogy’s end. I’ll let you know if the threads come together for me, or if it continues to feel like a lot of overlapping paths not resolving to a single way forward.
https://evanp.me/2024/01/07/the-obelisk-gate/

2024-01-06 03:43:59

I finished two more chapters this week in my book about ActivityPub. Chapter 2 is about Activity Streams 2.0, the social network data standard we use for ActivityPub. Appendix 1 is a reference for all the types in Activity Streams.
Next up is Chapter 4, federation protocol, and Chapter 5, extensions. I’m on a tight schedule for both.
First, though, I have to go over edits for the first 4 chapters so they can go out on the Early Release program. Can’t wait to get the text in front of real readers and start getting feedback.
https://evanp.me/2024/01/05/two-more-chapters/

2023-12-27 02:12:40

As I often do, I made a poll on the fediverse about two concepts I am interested in: Big Fedi versus Small Fedi. Although I think these are interesting topics, I couldn’t come up with exact summations of what the “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi” positions are. So, I wanted to write down what I could here.
The fediverse, in this case, is an internetwork of social networks. It works a lot like email; you can have an account on one network and follow, message, and react to people (or bots) on other networks. The biggest software tool for making fediverse networks is Mastodon; there are a lot of other Open Source servers for setting up nodes. There are also some proprietary nodes — Meta Threads and Flipboard are two of the biggest.
The following are some clusters of ideas that I think coalesce into “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi”. I haven’t been able to tie them all back to some fundamental principle on either side. Big Fedi
The “Big Fedi” position is a set of ideas that roughly cluster together. Not everyone who agrees with one or a few of these agrees with them all, but I think they tend to be related.
The fediverse should be big. Real big. Like, everyone on the planet should have an account on the fediverse. It will make the internet better and the world better.
We should make choices that help bring the fediverse to new people. Because the fediverse should be big, we should be doing things to make it bigger; in particular, to bring it to more people.
There should be a lot of different account servers. (I’m using “account servers” instead of “instances” or “servers”.) It’s good to have a lot of choice, with a lot of different parameters: software interfaces, financial structure, what have you.
Commercial account servers are welcome. This variety includes commercial services. If they provide the right mix of features and trade-offs that certain people want, it’s good to have them, especially if they have a lot of users.
Moderation can be automated. Shared blocklists, machine learning, and other tools can be used to catch most of the problematic interactions on the fediverse.
Account servers can be big. It doesn’t matter how big they are: 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B people is fine.
The fediverse should have secondary services. In order to grow, we need secondary services, like people-finders, onboarding tools, global search, bridges, and so on.
The individual is central. People should be able to set up their environment how they like, including their social environment. They have the tools to do that. The account server may set some parameters around content or software usage, but otherwise it’s mostly a dumb pipe.
Connections should be person-to-person. The main social connection is through following someone. Building up this follow graph is important.
People I care about should be on the fediverse. I have a life outside the fediverse — friends, family, colleagues, neighbours. My governments, media, celebrities, sports figures, leaders in my industry. It would be good to have more of those people on the fediverse, so I can connect to them.
People should get to make choices about their account server. Everybody has different priorities: privacy, open source, moderation, cost, stability, features. We can all make our own choices about the account server we prefer.
It should be possible to have ad-free account servers. Technically and culturally, we should be able to set these up.
It should be possible to have Open Source account servers. People who prefer free network services should be able to run them and use them.
It should be possible to have algorithm-free account servers. You should be able to just follow things reverse chronologically.
It should be possible to have individually-run account servers. A normal technically-minded person should be able to run their own account server for themself, friends, their household, or even for a larger communty.
Harms that are mostly kept to account servers are up to people on those servers to solve. Good fences make good neighbours. If things become unbearable, people can move servers somewhat frictionlessly.
Affinity groups should stretch beyond account server boundaries. Groups, lists, and other social network features are important and should be fully federated. They should provide a lot of features.
There may be some harm that comes with growth; we can fix it later. We’re going to find problems as we go along. We can deal with them as we come to them.
The fediverse is going to look very different over time. The way things work now are not how they’re going to be 1, 3, 5, 10 years from now. Especially as the fediverse grows, different structures and ways of working are going to develop.
Open standards are important. By having public, open standards available through big standards organizations, we gain the buy-in from different account network operators to join the network. We definitely don’t have time to negotiate bilateral agreements; we need solid standards.
Variety in types of account server operators is good. Different people have different needs and tolerances. If we want to have more people, we need to cater to those different needs with different account servers.
Existing organizations can and should provide account servers. Not just existing tech companies; also businesses providing servers for their employees, universities for students, cities or other governments for their citizens.
Existing services, even if they’re bad, will become somewhat better if they have fediverse features. People on those services will get to connect with a variety of new people. They’ll find out about the fediverse, and might move to another account server, or try something else new.
It’s more important to bring good people to the fediverse than keep bad people off it. More people is good, and the people I care about on other networks are also good. There may be some bad people, too, but we’ll manage them.Small Fedi
Here is a rough cluster of ideas that I’d call “Small Fedi”. Again, not everyone who agrees with one or two of these agrees with all of them.
The fediverse should be safe. Safe from harassment, safe from privacy violations.
Growth is not important. We’ve gotten along this long with a small fediverse. It’s OK how it is, so growth is not important. Growth is a capitalist mindset.
People who aren’t on the fediverse don’t matter as much as people who are. Their needs, at least. When discussing the future of the fediverse, we don’t need to talk about people on other networks much at all.
If people want to get on the fediverse, they can join an existing account server. We don’t need to bring new account servers to the fediverse; there are a lot already. People who really care about getting on the fediverse can join an existing account server, or set up their own. If they’re not willing to do this, they’re probably not that interested in the fediverse, so why should we bother trying to connect to them?
If growth could cause harm, we either should fix the problem before growing, or we shouldn’t grow. We should examine opportunities carefully, but by default we should say no.
Commercial account servers are discouraged. Most commercial services do harm. Even if they’re on the fediverse, they’re going to try to do harm to make more money. So, they should be avoided as much as possible.
Secondary services can cause harm and should be severely limited if allowed at all. People search and content search can be used for privacy invasion or harassment. Shared blocklists can be manipulated to cause echo chambers. Machine learning can be biased. Onboarding services favour big account servers. They should be discouraged or, preferably, closed.
The account server is central. Moderation decisions, cultural decisions, account decisions, most social decisions should happen at the account server level.
Account servers are the primary affinity group. You should find an account server that feels like home. Any other groups are less important.
Feeds like “fediverse” and “local” are important. There is a public community of account servers that your account server connects to, and the public feed from that community is important. You might use it more often than your home feed. Your local feed is also important, because your account server is a group you belong to.
Moderation should be primarily by hand. The courage and wisdom necessary to make most moderation decisions can only be managed by hand. Automated tools can be manipulated.
Account servers must be small. Human moderators can only do so much work, so the account servers they moderate can only be so big.
The fediverse works just about right right now, and shouldn’t change. There’s a good reason for how everything works, and it’s fine. People who want to change the way things work just don’t get it.
It’s not important that people from my real life are on the fediverse, and it’s kind of discouraged. The account server is the most important affinity group, then the larger “fediverse”. That’s enough; other people are needed or welcome. People who I know who aren’t on the fediverse don’t care about fediverse stuff, so they’d get bored here, anyway.
It is highly discouraged to have ad-supported account servers. Even if they only show ads to their own users, they are causing harm. In particular, they’re showing our content next to ads, or using our content to develop ad algorithms. Either way, harm goes beyond the server border.
It is highly discouraged to have proprietary account servers. They just can’t be trusted with their own users’ data. Also, they’re going to get some of our data, just through federation, and who knows what they’ll do with it.
It is highly discouraged to have algorithmic timelines. Anyone having these causes problems. If you want one, you just don’t get it.
Open standards are less important than making things work the way we want them. In particular, fiddling with standards to keep people safe, and to discourage particular account server structure, is an OK thing to do.
Most existing institutions have proved themselves untrustworthy and should not provide account servers. Name any particular part of civil society, and I can come up with an example of at least one bad practice they have.
Harms that happen on one account server are a problem for every account server. Server blocks, personal blocks, and protocol boundaries aren’t enough to isolate problems to their account server of origin. Secondary or tertiary effects can happen and cause harm.
Existing services, if they’re bad, will make the fediverse worse. Bad practices, bad content, bad members will cause problems for everyone on the fediverse.
It’s more important to keep bad people off the fediverse than to bring good people to it. Bad people can be really horrible. There aren’t actually that many good people on bad services, and if they really wanted to connect with us, they’d find another way.Where do I land?
I’m mostly a Big Fedi person; I did the work on the fediverse that I’ve done in order to bring it to everyone on the planet. I don’t think people should have to pass a test to be allowed on the fediverse.
That said, I respect that harm can come from new technical decisions and new network connections. As someone deeply involved in the standards around ActivityPub and the fediverse, I’d like to make sure that we give people the tools they need to avoid harm — and stay out of the way when they use them. I very much like the Small Fedi suspicion of new services and account servers, and careful consideration of the possibilities.
I’d like to find ways to mitigate the problems of so many people on proprietary social networks being unconnected to the fediverse, but still centre the safety of existing fedizens. I don’t have an easy answer to how this can work, though.
Anyway, thanks for reading this far. Also, an acknowledgment: I borrowed the term “Small Fedi” without permission from Erin Kissane’s great piece on Untangling Threads. I’m also using it differently, stretching it out, which admittedly is an ingrateful thing with something you borrow. I hope it is not ruined by the time I return it.
https://evanp.me/2023/12/26/big-fedi-small-fedi/
#bigfedi #fediverse #smallfedi

2023-10-14 09:20:18

Today, October 14, is my birthday. I’m far from home, in Brussels, with my wife on a trip to celebrate our anniversary and my birthday. We had a long, exhausting flight from Montreal, got in yesterday evening, and dragged ourselves out for dinner and got to sleep at a reasonable hour. This morning, coffee and ontbijtbrood in the sunshine overlooking the city from our borrowed apartment.
Each birthday for the last few years I’ve done an inventory of my life from various points of view. It’s been a really valuable exercise for me, and I’m going to continue today. I don’t like to compare, but there are earlier ones on my blog.
Family. Life in our four-person family has been changing this year. My daughter Amita turned 18, and with her schoolwork, social life, and working at a cafe, she’s been away from family events. We’re no longer a certain group of four for every excursion; she does a good job making time for us, but for longer trips it’s been likely to be just 2 or 3 lately. I’m glad she’s growing up, and I’m proud of the woman she’s become, but our social circle during COVID-19 was largely circumscribed by the four people in our household, so it feels like a change.
I still get a lot of joy from the things we do together, though. We go to events, have special occasions at home, and take day trips from Montreal to the country or to nearby cities. It is the richest part of my life.
My extended family has been farther away and closer this year. My brothers and their families and our parents, all of whom are in the San Francisco Bay Area, had video conference calls every couple of weeks during COVID-19. We’ve been doing it less and less since they’ve been able to visit in person more often. But my cousins, uncles and aunts have been closer this year. My household took half a week on the Jersey shore with extended family in August, and we had a family wedding in September. It feels like we see extended family more than my California family.
My relationship with my wife has also done well. We’re both very busy with work, but we find time to be together as a couple and to go out alone or with others. Our shared projects — kids, home — take up a lot of our thoughts and time together, but we also get to talk about the world and our lives. We’ve started to discuss what our life will be like as empty-nesters, although that’s still 5 or more years away. I feel luck to have such a good companion to be with.
Health. This is a hard part of my life right now. I’ve been slowly gaining weight since the pandemic started, although I exercise daily and try to eat reasonably. A lot of the techniques for staying in good shape that I used to use in my 20s, 30s, and 40s no longer seem as effective, and I’m going to have to make some deeper changes to my diet and exercise habit. I’m not as comfortable in my body as I’d like to be. I remain fortunate in not having any chronic issues, and I’m trying to make changes before those become inevitable.
Mentally, I’ve been overextended. I do a full day’s work every day, then move into school or one of my other jobs in the evening, or sometimes in the morning before my paid work starts. I consequently haven’t had time for practices that help keep me happy; my daily meditation has dropped to 1-2 times per week.
This year I hit my 20,000th day on the planet — an unusual anniversary to celebrate, but one that has made me think about the arc of my life. I feel like I’m at a special part of my lifetime, and I’m trying to experience it fully.
Work. My work for the last year has been an excess of riches. Last year I started working in my dream job — as director of technology for the Open Earth Foundation, a non-profit that makes Open Source software to fight climate change. It combines my experience and skills with a topic I care about deeply. I’ve managed to hire a great technical team. Best of all, our organisation has changed strategy from covering a lot of different projects on different topics in an experimental mode to a single project in production mode. This is where I’ve done my best work in the past, and I’m happy to see our team buckling down to make software that really matters for people. Our product, CityCatalyst, helps cities track and report GHG emissions, and our initial users and wider community are effusive about the need we’re meeting. That feels great.
Which makes the distraction of the last year all the harder to deal with. In October of 2022, with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, interest in federated social networks has skyrocketed. The protocol I worked on at the W3C, ActivityPub, has had exponential growth in adoption. I had been holding off on joining the network, partly to pressure myself to upgrade my own sites to support it, but with the surge of popularity I felt I needed to jump back in. Most overwhelmingly, Meta, the social media giant, has announced that their Threads product will support the protocol in the coming months.
So, I’ve been posting on my own Mastodon server for the last year, and I’ve been hugely involved in the growth of the “fediverse”. This has taken on three big aspects. First, I cofounded a social media cooperative for Canadians called CoSocial. It’s my first time being part of a coop, and it’s definitely new territory, but it’s also really rewarding. I love the people I work with and the dedication they have to user-owned social networking.
Second, I’ve been much more active in the W3C’s SocialCG community group, which maintains the ActivityPub spec and the Activity Streams 2.0 documents. As the main named author on the documents who’s still involved, I do regular meetings, participate in online conversations, and manage errata and corrections to the docs. I also do a weekly issue triage to handle questions people have and document best practices.
Thirdly, and really exceptionally, I’ve been working on a book about ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media since September. It’s the first time I’ve written a technical book, and it’s a lot of work. Because it’s technical, I find myself switching back and forth between writing English text and writing sample code in Python or JavaScript. It’s remarkably rewarding, but also very high stress. I’ve got a tight deadline, since we want to meet the moment of the Threads launch.
School. I started a Master’s degree in Computer Science at Georgia Tech in January of this year. So far, it’s been hugely rewarding. I had thought, after 30 years in the industry, that there wasn’t much more for me to learn about computer science, and that this degree would be more of a rubber stamp on my existing knowledge. But my two classes so far, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Architecture and Design have been extremely useful. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m fascinated with the practice.
HCI was probably the most transformational. It takes a user-centered design methodology and applies it to software, and really gives a different look at the craft than I was used to from a software-development POV. I did two big projects for the semester — one on travel planning, and another on personal relationships in Mastodon — and felt like I did some of the most interesting work in my career.
The hard part has been the time commitment. I put in 10-20 hours of work per week on my single class per semester, between reading, writing, watching lectures, and coding. I’ve found that I can combine the work with my existing schedule — I listen to text-to-speech versions of published papers while I exercise, and watch lectures while I cook or do dishes — but it’s still a big chunk of time. I don’t have as much time for TV, reading, or other media.
This semester, I realised I couldn’t do the extra time of writing a book and also taking classes, so I managed to get a professor to sponsor me for a “special project” in the book project. I’m not sure how this is going to turn out — it’s definitely not as structured as my time in classes, and I feel much more distant from the Georgia Tech community than I did while actively taking classes. Hopefully I can get back to studying in the next semester.
Home. My time at home remains some of the most rewarding for me. I’ve become obsessed with gardening with native plants over the last few years, with work on our yard in the Eastern Townships taking up a huge part of my mental space. That work has really paid off this year — clearing out invasive species and planting native bushes, trees and perennials is starting to (literally) bear fruit. Our yard now has dozens of different interesting plants that take up my attention and bring me joy. My grapevines are also achieving a level of maturity that makes it likely that I can make wine from them in a couple of years. Finally, I’ve planted some native plants in boxes and in the ground in our city house in Montreal — which feels like I’ve brought that country experience home.
I work at home, and some days I don’t leave the house until late in the afternoon for a walk or run. This makes me exceptional in our household — everyone else leaves for school or work early in the morning. I feel a bit like I’m still in pandemic lockdown while the rest of the world has opened up. I’ve shopped around a bit for a coworking coop in Montreal, just for the change of pace, but it hasn’t been a high enough priority for me to actually commit. I also feel like my meeting-heavy schedule doesn’t work well with the style of coworking with a lot of people in a big shared space.
Travel. It’s been a busy year for travel. I’ve done more work travel this year than any previous years — to Vancouver for Open Source Summit and to New York for climate week. My work for the W3C took me to Seville, Spain, which was overwhelmingly beautiful. I also had an absolutely action-packed week in New York at July 4th with my son, Stavro, which we both really loved, and a family trip to Toronto to see my cousin-in-law Nick play with his band Slowdive. I’ve liked the regional travel, which we either do by train or in our electric car, but the international and transcontinental travel has been by air. I keep telling myself that it’s exceptional, but I think over the next year I’m going to get more serious about reducing that carbon footprint, even if it means missing out on important opportunities.
Friends. A perpetual source of concern for me, personal friendships have been hard to keep up this year. Partly it’s been the huge demands on my time by graduate school and my work in the federated social web. I have been lucky to meet and spend time with great people, notably my fellow members of CoSocial, who I really like and admire, and the people involved in the SocialCG, some of whom have been allies going back decades. But I’d like to put time into other offline connections.
My online friendships have suffered somewhat from my move to the social web. I have left Twitter entirely, and I haven’t been as active on Facebook or Instagram. My time on the social web is less about me as a person, and more about me as a figure in the movement. That said, I’ve continued to use my social presence to post polls about ideas and practices that interest me.
World. As I write, a war rages between Israel and Gaza, with an invasion of Gaza City imminent. With family roots in the region, it’s hard to see this level of human misery, and it makes me wonder at my own good fortune. War in Ukraine continues, and the government in the US seems completely unfit to meet the challenge of rising authoritarianism and instability around the globe. My hope is that multilateral cooperation can step forward and replace the unilateral world we’ve known since the early 90s.
Most troubling over this year has been the increasingly visible effects of climate change. My work brings me in touch with climate change data on a daily basis, but just looking out the front window shows exceptional changes. From ice storms to heat waves to torrential rains, we’ve had strange weather almost non-stop. The hard part is realising that these conditions will continue to get worse, even if the world community manages to meet its GHG-reduction goals. It does make me feel, however, that I’m putting my time and skills to their best possible use at the work I do now.
Wow. That’s a lot. Just looking over this list makes me realise how over-charged my life is right now. I’ve thought a lot of this time as a high point in work and life, and I can see on the page that it’s true. I hope I’m able to give as much energy as is demanded by all these different strands of work to bring them to successful fruition.
Thanks for reading this far. I’m going to go out now and enjoy this sunny cool day in Belgium, see the sights, and have a cold weird Belgian beer for lunch. Tonight, we’re having supper in the Atomium restaurant — a great way to celebrate.
https://evanp.me/2023/10/14/birthday-inventory-2023/

2023-10-12 18:59:23

I’m really happy to see the ActivityPub plugin enabled for all free and paid WordPress.com accounts. I’ve been using the plugin on this blog for about a week, thanks to Matthias Pfefferle at WordPress, and I have some thoughts about it so far.
The first thing is that it’s definitely more like having a fediverse add-on to your WordPress blog than like using WordPress as your main fediverse portal. That’s OK, and I’d kind of like to see more applications integrate that way.
The second is that it’s extremely smooth. People who follow me on this blog (“@evanprodromou@evanp.me”) will get pushed blog posts when I post them. There isn’t anything else I have to do. The blog posts appear like native fediverse posts, not as links (although the link is included at the end).
Best of all, when I get likes or comments, they act like native WordPress likes and comments. I have a chance to approve them and manage them. The conversation turns out to be really natural in the blog interface.
I have been followed more than 180 times, which is pretty neat; and comments are pretty lively and active. I haven’t seen any get caught by Akismet, but I have seen some of them in the queue waiting for me to approve.
I am really excited to see what happens next here. Somewhere around 40% of Web sites run on WordPress. I don’t know how many of those are on wp.com, but probably a lot. It would be cool to see how well they start lighting up on the fediverse.
If you’ve got a WordPress blog that’s fediverse-enabled, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to start putting together a directory of recommendations.
https://evanp.me/2023/10/12/activitypub-on-wordpress-com/