Speaker: Martin Kleppmann, University of Cambridge, Inc & Switch

We have come a long way since my colleagues and I published the local-first essay five years ago. In this talk I'll review where the local-first idea came from, where we are now, and what I hope the local-first community can work towards in the future.

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_caballero@mastodon.social and @dmitri@social.coop

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_caballero@mastodon.social:

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

Social bookmarking is a novel use case for ActivityPub and I’m super excited about it. I heckin’ love links and lists! I wanna use them for everything.

Things like Bookwyrm are cool, but it’s not what I want. I just wanna link the thing. Books, films, podcasts, articles, songs.., they’re all just resource recommendations which can be encapsulated by links.

To free ourselves of our current predicament, we must simultaneously de-centralize and re-centralize identity.

• Decentralize ownership.
• Recentralize agency.

By de-centralizing the ownership of identity away from platform monopolies and back to individuals, we can re-centralize the agency of personhood.

The central authority of ones digital identity must first and foremost be the individual themself. That's how we regain our digital sovereignty.

In the glory days of web 1.0, social websites would prominently link out to their digital neighbors via lists known as webrings; magical doorways to an expansive hinterland of digital villages.

Let's envision what a truly federated chat like Matrix could do to improve the cross-connectivity of chat channels. Most of these features are already possible, they just haven't been implemented yet in a community-oriented client experience.

I suspect the fedi-collective has more negotiating power in this moment than it realizes. We may as well make some asks, see how Meta responds, and they in turn will see how the public, the media and the regulators respond to them in this bold new era of pervasive Big Tech skepticism.

Money can mitigate the risk of Threads:

'coopting the fediverse': $200k for Test Suite. 'overburdening moderators': $200k for moderation. 'locking in users': $200k for Nomadic Identity

A bit of internet reparations.

https://writing.exchange/@erlend/112163747418805861

Like any other major network incumbent, Discord cannot simply be side-stepped altogether; appropriate off-ramps are required.

#Matrix bridging enables an incremental, non-disruptive transition from the old to the new.

We invite anyone interested in the development of #CommuneApp to join our newly opened space: https://matrix.to/#/#home:commune.sh

The first half of our product rollout starts next month, as we begin publicly testing our uniquely community-oriented Matrix client.

Microblog link: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/112141665369480242

Cyber is an embeddable language for fast, efficient, and concurrent scripting, ideal for rapid iteration in games and app development. Made with Zig.

At a glance:

• Easy to learn.
• Dynamic and static types.
• Concurrency with fibers.
• Memory safe.
• FFI and Embeddable.
• Fast VM and JIT.
• Cross platform.

Some excerpts:

What comes out of Big Corp’s ASS

When you hook up your mind to a cloud-controlled Artificial Synthesizer (ASS), you plainly receive their fully digested discharge.

You don’t get to see what happened further up in the synthetic digestive tract of the ASS, where copious amounts of data grub were initially ingested and processed by a divine black-box entity.

You don’t have any insight into where and who those morsels of data came from, and you certainly don’t get any say in which of them the entity should or should not consume for processing and output, delivered to you through the ASS-as-a-Service.

All you’re supposed to do is open your mind’s mouth wide and say “please” and “thank you” for the grossly diluted information bits you’re about to receive.

They’ve already laid claim to our collective land, labor and attention. With AI, they want to own our thoughts and the last shred of agency that comes with them. If we fail to defend our personal sovereignty at this juncture, a dark age of the corporate singularity awaits us."

To land a real blow, look for where the machines are at their most materialized. Take aim at their massive bodies of data and strike there with conviction."

With the now accepted RSA signatures for DPoP tokens, the ephemeral, dynamic clients and the basic serving of webid documents for each user, Rauthy should now fully support. Solid OIDC. This feature just needs some more real world testing with already existing applications though.

EVENT_MATRIX_ERROR_NO_PANIC This new config variable solves a possible chicken and egg problem, if you use a self-hosted Matrix server and Rauthy as its OIDC provider at the same time. If both services are offline, for instance because of a server reboot, you would not be able to start them.

One of the best features of Lemmy is that it supports a combination of image and text. I wish including the source link of a comic would be a standard practice on the fediverse, just like alt-text already is.

Source links are great for:

• Properly crediting and driving traffic to artists
• Checking authenticity
• Preventing image degradation for re-shares

p.s. I was thinking of posting this as a meta-post in /c/comicstrips but I only saw guidelines for how to post comics there.

There’s a major convergence of OAuth/OIDC support across fediverse applications, Matrix is going all-in on it as its root default, and other social web protocols are tagging along as well.

Like the separation of church and state, it seems prudent to keep the management of our digital identities separate from our social network servers.

Domain-based OIDC accounts, especially when self-hosted, serve the function of a minimum-viable ‘nomadic identity’.

With the emergence of Rauthy, being a self-hosted OIDC provider is suddenly viable. All that’s missing is web sign-in (IndieAuth lite) as single sign-on for the masses.

Mastodon post: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/111376285042429865