I built a custom feed server for Bluesky that drinks from the firehose. Getting everything working was very fiddly. For a hobby, the friction of it outweighed the entertainment value for me.
Working with the firehose probably isn't feasible for a lot of people who'd like to tinker. There doesn't seem to be any way of subscribing to only certain types of events.
For a lower-friction firehose experience, you can use Jetstream [0] (by one of the Bluesky devs) which supports subscribing to specific Collection NSIDs and user repositories, and converts records to JSON for you.
There's a public instance URL in the README (with bandwidth limits), or you can self-host.
The firehose itself isn't really the fiddly part since it's just a WebSocket connection. Setting up the feed server, publishing the DID for its web host, then publishing the feed generator to the network were all kind of a low-grade hassle that killed a lot of my enthusiasm. Like none of it was especially complicated if you're doing it for a professional project or whatever, but I was just trying to goof around while watching episodes of Highlander: The Series, and it was taking me away from Duncan.
I'll check out this Jetstream project for sure, though.
I'm a little surprised to hear this. Writing a state machine to simulate an alarm clock used to be an introductory project for first-year computer science undergraduates.
Poor choices during development reveal themselves in many ways: poor performance, awkward workflows, mandatory upgrades, one-way data conversions, inaccurate documentation, and so on.
> Poor choices during development reveal themselves in many ways: poor performance, awkward workflows, mandatory upgrades, one-way data conversions, inaccurate documentation, and so on.
Not necessarily. Some otherwise good systems might have one bug in each of those categories.
And, most other poorly designed and poorly executed systems just chug along fine without the customer realising anything.
I'm not sure what you mean. jagged-chisel asked how we look for smart choices in the software we download and install. I gave examples of how poor choices manifest for end users, the idea being that a lack of those issues suggests smart choices. I don't see how revenue is relevant to the question. Revenue for whom? And how did my examples miss the point exactly?
It's a simple prescriptive rule in English. If you are writing about a small number, like less than ten, spell it out. For example: "According to a survey, nine out of ten people agree."
But if you are writing about a large number, particularly one with a lot of different digits, prefer writing the digits: "A mile is 5,280 feet." Compare that to: "A mile is five thousand, two hundred, and eighty feet."
I guess a couple years down the road we'll need even more inoffensive words for these ones we've created. It is similar to people on social media using word seggs instead of sex because god forbid the algoritm gets a stroke
In the context of American Christian hegemony, even if "damn" or "damned" isn't considered particularly strong by many, a lot of people object strongly to "goddamn." It's a superstition that has to do with one of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
“Damn” is not a vulgarity unlike certain other words, but too many utterances of “damn” will make a movie’s rating PG instead of G, “damn” will get you in trouble for cursing at a private Christian school, and I wouldn’t use the word “damn” in church unless I’m referring very specifically to God’s damnation. It goes against polite Christian mores to say “damn” or “goddamn.”
It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums.
"Internet never forgets" is one of these naive fairytales we told ourselves when we were young and internet was new, along with "information wants to be free", "censorship on the internet is impossible", and "easy access to information helps democracy".
I prefer open web for sentimental reasons, but I don't think it's naturally better at preserving the information than walled gardens.
> It would disappear anyway. All those personal webpages will be lost in time, like images hosted on long-dead servers and phpbb forums.
Some will disappear. Others are maintained, sometimes by third parties. Many of them are on web.archive.org. Yes, we should build better solutions to retain random personal webpages but the sitations isn't really that dire.
> "Internet never forgets"
This has alwasy been in the context of things you want the internet to forget and it still holds true.
> "information wants to be free"
And it does - once something leaks it is hard to put it back into the bag.
> "censorship on the internet is impossible"
I don't recall this claim but depending on how you look at things isn't really wrong: Is there any kind of information that you can't find on the internet because someone wants to hide it? Yes, some parts of the web are censored but remember the internet is not just the web and even on the web highly controversial websites can cling to life.
> "easy access to information helps democracy"
It does. Most people do not have easy access to information, at best they have a highly curated selection that the media wants them to see. They could avail themselves to the full picture but are conditioned not to.
Misinformation wants to be free just as much as information. Removing information is the wrong strategy, because internet makes publishing information so much easier. And bitrot+time will effectively remove the information for you if you just make people look elsewhere for long enough.
So you just put out 10 different lies for every truth you want to cover. Most people won't be bothered to check what is actually true. Human attention span is the limiting factor of modern world, not the access to information. Lying to people is easier than ever before in history, so democracy is in fact getting worse over time.
A forum for my car just went dark. Gone are not quite 20 years of posts and discussions that I've searched many times over while troubleshooting mine or in preparation for some job that needed to be done.
I made this discovery after going to post a novel solution for getting into the hood with a seized hood release in hopes that it might spare someone else some trouble in the future.
All things are not in the moment. Sometimes it's good to learn from the past.
It makes me wish for forums where posts and comments are automatically synced and cached locally. Then everyone has a copy in case it closes down, and someone could use the content to bootstrap a replacement.
Note, that isn't the same as an ambitious fully federated mesh network or anything, but being limited in certain ways makes it efficient and easier in others.
The current moment is great if you never need to find an old book, fix an old car, fix an old house, identify an old variety of plant, or any of a thousand other things. Basically, if you have no other interests, responsibilities, or desires other than fads, like a child. That's fine. Otherwise, there are decades of useful experience of large groups of human out there to be mined. It can often save you thousands of dollars, but then again, that's something only a grown-up cares about.
Funnily, the walled garden often gives people the impression that it is not walled but in fact infinite. I‘m always shocked at how many people don‘t realize how little information is accessible on the internet anymore. Yes, as soon as you need something that isn‘t faddish/of the immediate current moment (especially if you‘re not trying to buy something), the internet fails. There is so much useful info that is extremely difficult to find online these days.
> I‘m always shocked at how many people don‘t realize how little information is accessible on the internet anymore.
Any millennial or nerdy Xer with a good memory would tell you what the deal is. We were the first ones who came of age online, and saw what the Internet was like when it came to prominence. Now, our libraries, town halls, and weird gardens are all ash. Try to surf like you did in 2010 and all you'll see is spam; the filters work in reverse now. Log in to what "social media" is these days (after filling in your phone number and uploading your driver's license) and it's just cable TV with some extra widgets.
I think the point is that passively feeding your content to a profit engine actually limits your opportunities vs a modicum of agency over how you want to share your knowledge and experiences. If you honestly don't care about anything beyond your tiktok feed, that's fine, but there is interest out there in a longer time envelope of cultural production.
Sometimes. I stumbled across somebody’s 20+-year-old collection of deep musical analyses of early Chicago songs. That same material on Twitter/Facebook/Discord/whatever is going to be inaccessible.
I'd be interested in a link. Live At Carnegie Hall was my paper-writing music in college. I discovered later that I don't much care for it when I don't have anything else occupying my mind. I'm unsure if it's because there isn't really that much to the songs of if I'm missing some nuance and complexity that makes them worth another listen.
Ironic you post this because I just rediscovered a 20yo blog post that I remembered reading, re-read it again and found it very motivating and inspiring and submitted it.
I’m somewhere in the middle on this. These communities are real, and the value of the content shared by users is real.
On the one hand, I prefer the old open web. On the other, I can’t deny the existence and value of these walled gardens. The wall doesn’t erase the value, even if I strongly prefer there wasn’t a wall to begin with.
To your point, discord comes with downsides, and does raise questions about the longevity of the content. Most of the old web disappeared too.
I think that in order to have any hope of returning to something more open and public on a wider scale, it’s necessary to understand why these communities are thriving on discord. I don’t have the answer to that question, but I suspect that the wall is actually a benefit to some.
This is always multiply determined, but part of the answer is that Discord and these other walled gardens are subsidized by VC funding with the expectation that at some point they'll turn on the garbage compactor and squeeze out the juicy value.
As sibling comment got at - the wall is a benefit because it's how they can justify raking in large investments to burn through while loss-leading for up to a decade (or two! just look at Google) before turning the screws on the user. If they just turned the screws without a wall their users would flee and they'd go under. With a wall, their users are stuck in by network effects, FOMO, etc.
My employer is mandating RTO now as well. I'm going for a medical accommodation, but they're even pushing back against that. They argue that office attendance is essential to my role--a role I got in 2021 after more than a year of full-time remote work and which I have never performed in an office.
I've been with my company since 2009. This RTO business has shredded any feeling of goodwill and reframes my employer as my adversary. Talking to my co-workers, I can feel their loss of morale as well. It makes me wonder how many people we will lose and whether that might be the whole point.
I recommend seeking the opinion of an ADA/disability attorney, might cost a few hundred bucks for an hour or two of their time and sending the letter to your HR department. Document you were hired remote, create a paper trail with the assistance of your attorney in the event you need to file a disability complaint with the DoJ: https://www.ada.gov/file-a-complaint/
I actually spoke to one Monday, and the takeaway is I can't do much except hope for the opportunity to file a wrongful termination claim with the EEOC.
Let me clarify that in my case, I wasn't hired as a remote worker. I went into the office regularly with no remote work from 2009 to 2020, when COVID forced us into working remotely. Since 2020, I've worked remotely and got my current position. This year is the start of our RTO mandate.
It is absolutely wild to me that people think of their employers as anything but an adversary. They're not our friends and they're not looking out for what's best for us, either.
Working with the firehose probably isn't feasible for a lot of people who'd like to tinker. There doesn't seem to be any way of subscribing to only certain types of events.