Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.
may I have a simple burger PLEASE, sir
The #resistance in #minneapolis is another level. #news #Politics
🇪🇺🚌 With the #EU Parliament and Council ramping up their work on the #DigitalOmnibus, noyb continues to fight for changes to preserve your privacy rights.
🤝 You can help us by becoming a Supporting Member! Learn more ➤ noyb.eu/en/support-us
If you use an LLM to generate your security report, but ignore the part where it says "triage this report according to your security process" and just post it as a public GitHub issue, you deserve bad things!
Anyone who is about to complete, or already has completed, an age-verification or identity-verification process online should read this short article.
Especially if it's on LinkedIn or Discord.
"I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over." by 
@thelocalstack
https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verification-privacy/
#Privacy #LinkedIn #Discord #AgeVerification #IdentityVerification #MassSurveillance
@Em0nM4stodonEm 
@thelocalstack
Not only is it amazing that you shared your experience, but is a well written article. People take for granted what they now know after reading something like without having to go through it themselves.
Thanks for sharing.
A retired British primary school teacher with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE in the US while on holiday.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton-valid-visa-detained-ice
@smallcircles🫧 socialcoding.. 
@steveSteve Bate So, I disagree that we have to exclusively adopt a message-passing paradigm for ActivityPub.
EDIT: note that it's exclusive.
@evanEvan Prodromou @smallcircles🫧 socialcoding.. @steveSteve Bate ActivityPub already is a message passing paradigm
@smallcircles🫧 socialcoding.. @steveSteve Bate one anti-pattern I dislike seeing in ActivityPub discussions is that only one interaction defined in the ActivityPub spec is valid: an HTTP POST to an actor's `inbox` for server-to-server interactions.
We can use HTTP GET to fetch additional data about objects, actors and collections.
@smallcircles🫧 socialcoding.. @steveSteve Bate So, I disagree that we have to exclusively adopt a message-passing paradigm for ActivityPub.
EDIT: note that it's exclusive.
Do not comply.
Do not share your ID or biometric data with abusive platforms requesting it. You have a choice to say no, complain, and leave.
This is an important act of resistance for the future of humanity.
This isn't just about privacy, this is also about safety, diversity, democracy, and human rights.
#Privacy #MassSurveillance #HumanRights #Fascism #AgeVerification #IdentityVerification
Crabfield!
some final touches
I wish people would stop using the "but there are legitimate use cases" argument to recommend some slop machine to me.
I won't use it! I will stop listening to them! I won't even listen to anything else they might have to say unless they are able to make a convincing case how Slop-enAI (and its ilk) will ever stop roasting the planet, rotting our brains, and burning money in any other way than by going bankrupt.
I'm so exhausted by the Slop Mania!
--
#LLMs #StopTheSlop
트위터식 불매의 가장 아이러니한것은
일단 그 사람들이 "X"를 여지껏 불매안하고 쓴다는 점에 있다고 생각하며...
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bmkgnkgowz5lpvrxve7sjj4k/post/3mfexog45622v
요즘 그림을 통 안 그렸어... 좀 그려야하는데
Furthermore, I think Bluesky is providing something valuable: a lot of people are trying to leave X-Twitter *right now* because it has become a completely toxic place.
The fact that Bluesky's team has managed to scale to receive such users is incredible, nearly feeling miraculous.
On the fediverse we also see a lot of accusations of Bluesky being owned by Jack Dorsey, and this isn't true. My understanding is that Jay performed an impressive amount of negotiation to allow Bluesky to receive funding independently.
These days Jack Dorsey is instead focusing on Nostr, which I can only describe as "a sequel to Secure Scuttlebutt with extremely bad vibes where bitcoin people talk about bitcoin"
I participated a bit in the process of when Bluesky was Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal's personal project. I also believe Jack and Parag were sincere about Bluesky as a decentralized social network protocol that Twitter would adopt, which is the directive that Bluesky was given as an organization.
When Jay Graber was awarded the position to lead Bluesky, I was not surprised. To me, Jay was the obvious choice to deliver what Bluesky was being directed, and I do think Jay is an excellent leader
There is also something which Bluesky gets right which the fediverse does not. I mentioned that Bluesky uses decentralization *techniques*, and the most important of those is content-addressing. This allows content to exist even when a server goes down.
This is a great decision and I have advocated that the fediverse do so as well. In fact several years ago I wrote a demo in 
@spritelyThe Spritely Institute's early days showing off how one could build a content-addressed ActivityPub in a spec-compatible way.
And before we make it any further can I say that I watched a nice medley of David Bowie and Cher singing, and it was so lovely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPlN8RBP-Ws
@mlemwebDr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber said "of course it's very heteronormative despite having two queer coded icons on the stage and ISN'T THAT THE WAY I guess
But where was I? Oh yes. We had talked about why PDS'es aren't enough (blog/google analogy), relative costs of hosting things on ATProto vs ActivityPub, etc etc
But we haven't gotten into the really interesting parts which are the structural analysis stuff, so let's move onto that
Remember that the idea of "fully self-hosting" on Bluesky/ATProto at this point is primarily abstract; nobody is really doing it. But of course there's a place where tens of thousands of people are running their own servers for millions of users, and that's the fediverse/ActivityPub.
As said, tens of thousands of people are self-hosting *today*. Fediverse software doesn't just scale up, it scales *down*.
GotoSocial is cheap enough on resources where you can run it for family and friends on a raspberry pi or spare laptop you have sitting around.
Now you're hitting the point in this thread where some of you may be thinking "aha! this is where Christine is saying that the fediverse/activitypub are awesome and atproto is terrible!"
you have NO IDEA HOW MUCH I CRITICIZE THE FEDIVERSE ALL THE TIME, I do it all the time, and will later here
The fediverse has a lot of flaws. Oh trust me, we're gonna get to that.
But comparison-wise: what I mean to say is that architectural decisions matter, and scaling up isn't the only thing that's important, *scaling down matters too*.
If you care about decentralization, anyway.
As said, tens of thousands of people are self-hosting *today*. Fediverse software doesn't just scale up, it scales *down*.
GotoSocial is cheap enough on resources where you can run it for family and friends on a raspberry pi or spare laptop you have sitting around.
Now you're hitting the point in this thread where some of you may be thinking "aha! this is where Christine is saying that the fediverse/activitypub are awesome and atproto is terrible!"
you have NO IDEA HOW MUCH I CRITICIZE THE FEDIVERSE ALL THE TIME, I do it all the time, and will later here
But where was I? Oh yes. We had talked about why PDS'es aren't enough (blog/google analogy), relative costs of hosting things on ATProto vs ActivityPub, etc etc
But we haven't gotten into the really interesting parts which are the structural analysis stuff, so let's move onto that
Now you may be saying, "Christine, this is really unfair, because you're looking at ActivityPub servers which are only dealing with a small amount of the network, what if it were an ActivityPub mega-node? What are the costs THEN huh?" and "What if we hosted just PART of ATProto?"
What then INDEED
Now you may be saying, "Christine, this is really unfair, because you're looking at ActivityPub servers which are only dealing with a small amount of the network, what if it were an ActivityPub mega-node? What are the costs THEN huh?" and "What if we hosted just PART of ATProto?"
What then INDEED
ATProto is not designed for the Relay and AppViews to only hold part of the network, not *really*, and ActivityPub is. We'll get to this in a moment.
But Bluesky actually has good justification for this! I will defend it insofar as Bluesky was making a serious *design decision*
But here's the other thing. People have trouble with the fediverse! All those decentralization decisions get in the way, my god, you've got to choose a server, search doesn't work well (actually it could but it's a cultural thing, different topic), and worst of all:
Sometimes you DON'T SEE REPLIES!
Actually all these critiques of the fediverse are TRUE, these are known challenges, and actually it's not really so bad, but it could be better, and at any rate, Bluesky made a major decision to simplify a lot for new users, and they have. Things seem to just work for people! Incredible!
Here's my definition of federation:
> Federation: a technical approach to communication architecture which achieves decentralization by many independent nodes cooperating and communicating to be a unified whole, with no node holding more power than the responsibility or communication of its parts.
Now historically, federation has been achieved on the fediverse via "message passing". Actually, this is to the degree where I just always associated message passing with federation, but really, federation is about the distribution of power, creating an abstract whole in a sea of autonomy.
Maybe there is another way to achieve federation, but it's about the power dynamics. It's a technical immersion of power dynamics, the flow and interchange of cooperation between many parts.
So you may say, well, doesn't ATProto have that? After all, messages flow through the different parts!
ActivityPub, as it turns out, follows the actor model of computation. Okay, many people implementing the fediverse don't know about the actor model aspect of ActivityPub but I am here to tell YOU, dear reader, that it is an important thing, not a detail
The thing you often get seen thrown around is "it's amazing, I had no idea a decentralized protocol could just work like that! How on earth did they solve that in a decentralized system and so FAST too!"
It's simple: all those things "just work" because Bluesky is centralized.
Now yes, they are using decentralized techniques. Remember when I said content-addressed storage is a good idea and the fediverse should do it too? IT IS! (And as I also said, it's actually fully possible for the fediverse to do, more on that later.)
But the reality is, it's still *centralized*
It's true that sometimes users click over to a thread and see some replies but not all on their instance's UI. There's things that could be done to improve it, but it's sometimes mildly confusing, but not so bad, and you can click over typically to see whatever else is happening, and people learn to
I actually think this is improvable but I mostly don't care because this isn't as big a complaint as people tend to think it is on the fediverse, the other concerns like "what instance do I pick" tend to be bigger and "oh no my server went down"
That can be improved, we'll talk about that later
ActivityPub, as it turns out, follows the actor model of computation. Okay, many people implementing the fediverse don't know about the actor model aspect of ActivityPub but I am here to tell YOU, dear reader, that it is an important thing, not a detail
I'll take one more note about federation which is that often time the message passing mechanism of the fediverse is often called "federation", but theoretically another mechanism could exist, but I'm actually not so sure of that.
There's a reason the actor model and the lambda calculus are undying
On top of "message passing" we will build "publish-subscribe" as a second-layer abstraction
"Your ideas are interesting and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter."
You send me a letter saying you'd like to hear the things I have to say, okay, you're part of the reader list. That's how it works.
On top of that we can build even more abstractions and the net result is that this is how federation works in pretty much every "federated" system I know.
ActivityPub does some extra work to help you see replies on a thread, think "letters to the editor". This is a bit lossy sometimes though
So let me introduce two models of communication which we can use to analyze these two systems. It's important!
- Fediverse/ActivityPub: "message passing"
- Bluesky/ATProto: "shared heap"
Okay, cool, terms established, let's talk about them and why they matter because they matter A LOT
"Message passing" is what ActivityPub uses. It's "like email", people say, and that's true.
Actually it's even a lot like physical mail. You write a letter, you say where it should go, it gets delivered to your house.
Message passing. The world runs on it.
On that note, again, I am not reading the replies right now because I am (a) afraid to and (b) I'm never gonna finish this and we are a bit over HALFWAY THROUGH the analysis but I have this fear that EVERYONE is mad at me, Bluesky fans, fediverse fans
I am trying to be analytical. I am trying!!!
I said we are about halfway through and criminy we're halfway through the afternoon, I need a break to get some tea
We have a few big topics left:
- Decentralized identity, how does it work (magnets too, yes)
- The Org is a Future Adversary
- Christine critiques the fediverse
- Wrap up
갑자기 저렇게 이쁘게 그리시는 분한테 내 병아리 캐릭터 보내면서 그려달라고하면 당황해하실까 상상해봤다.
But to Bluesky's credit, Twitter's DMs aren't decentralized either! And getting and shipping something that works, now for the influx of Twitter users, again... I am sympathetic
Bluesky's team is doing an INCREDIBLE JOB in that way of scaling to meet the incoming stream of Twitter refugees
On that note, again, I am not reading the replies right now because I am (a) afraid to and (b) I'm never gonna finish this and we are a bit over HALFWAY THROUGH the analysis but I have this fear that EVERYONE is mad at me, Bluesky fans, fediverse fans
I am trying to be analytical. I am trying!!!
I have actually critiqued ActivityPub and the fediverse a lot! I have kind of never stopped critiquing it, ever since the spec was released. There's a lot that can be improved!
I have even gotten criticism from AT LEAST ONE ActivityPub spec author for critiquing AP-as-deployed but I do anyway
Actually something that is funny about ActivityPub is that there's "ActivityPub the spec", which I think is pretty solid for the most part, and "ActivityPub-as-deployed"
Many of the critiques I'm about to lay out we left holes in the spec for which I hoped would be filled with the right answers
Content addressing is important. It should not matter where content "lives". It should be able to live anywhere.
A server should be able to go down, and content should survive.
Go content addressing!
Actually with this and several other things I am going to bring up, I actually made sure there was space to do things right: there was a push to make ActivityPub "https-only"
I pushed back on that, I didn't want that requirement, and it was exactly for this reason: enabling content addressing
Alright you've heard enough critiques of Bluesky for a bit and I SAID I was gonna critique the fediverse and I am a WOMAN OF MY WORD
So let's get into it!
I have actually critiqued ActivityPub and the fediverse a lot! I have kind of never stopped critiquing it, ever since the spec was released. There's a lot that can be improved!
I have even gotten criticism from AT LEAST ONE ActivityPub spec author for critiquing AP-as-deployed but I do anyway
It is time for TEA BREAK 2: THE REHEATENING
I will also go to the bathroom
TMI? If you've read this far into this weird thread I am already giving you too much info
=== TEA BREAK 2 ===
I have returned, with tea
I am still not reading notifications. Well, I have seen a few fly by on the fediverse which is blipping and blooping nonstop in the Mastodon UI so people are clearly reading it there
Bluesky says "30+". How big is the +?? I will resist temptation to look and assume "31"
Before we get into the next section, earlier I left an easter egg, which you could reply to and say "I found the easter egg" or something
Now you can put 2 eggs
I 2 was once an egg
(Look I specifically transitioned so I could never be accused of making dad jokes again so that does not qualify)
Alright you've heard enough critiques of Bluesky for a bit and I SAID I was gonna critique the fediverse and I am a WOMAN OF MY WORD
So let's get into it!
I have returned, with tea
I am still not reading notifications. Well, I have seen a few fly by on the fediverse which is blipping and blooping nonstop in the Mastodon UI so people are clearly reading it there
Bluesky says "30+". How big is the +?? I will resist temptation to look and assume "31"
"Where are we going with this Christine?"
Well you could have just read the blogpost but 3 more sections remain, we are approximately 2/3 there
I know, bear with me, what is left is:
- What should the fediverse do?
- Preparing for the organization as a future adversary
- Conclusions
Actually something that is funny about ActivityPub is that there's "ActivityPub the spec", which I think is pretty solid for the most part, and "ActivityPub-as-deployed"
Many of the critiques I'm about to lay out we left holes in the spec for which I hoped would be filled with the right answers
One thing we have already discussed so, before I will say anything else, I will repeat: content addressing is really good, and I'd like to see it happen in ActivityPub, and it's *possible to do*, I even wrote a demo of it https://gitlab.com/spritely/golem/blob/master/README.org
Bluesky does the right thing here, AP should too
Now I want to be clear here that I *don't* think that proposal was necessarily the right one for Bluesky, and I *do* think Jay Graber *was* the right person to lead Bluesky
What I wanted to do required a lot more research, and we have done that over at @spritelyThe Spritely Institute instead
The reason I bring up the proposal here is that I think it has all the right analysis of *what the fediverse should do*, if it was going to rise to the challenge of fulfilling its true potential
So let me lay out what the things in that proposal were:
(cotd ...)
- Better anti-spam / anti-harassment using OCapPub ideas
- Improved privacy with E2EE ("encrypted p2p" even a better goal)
Whew! An improved fediverse?
"Uh, Christine, this sounds like a lot, do you think the fediverse can take this on?"
Spec-wise in ActivityPub, I think it's possible. The ecosystem, as deployed? I think the ecosystem can and will only do part of it, if we really get everyone excited, maybe the content addressed storage and decentralized identity parts, in which case the fediverse will also survive nodes going down
Anyway, if you know *anything* about me, you know I am a big fan of capability security (ocaps) and that's the foundation of our work over at @spritelyThe Spritely Institute
But we will come back to ocaps in a second because it turns out OCapPub is not the only time I proposed AP + ocaps!
The other time I wrote about ActivityPub + ocaps was in a proposal to, yes, Twitter's Bluesky process in 2020 with Jay Graber titled... "ActivityPub + OCaps"! https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535398
I think that document laid out all the right ideas for *the fediverse* (not saying bsky, the fediverse)
For this reason, @spritelyThe Spritely Institute's tech looks like it's very focused on computer science'y low-level BS, but that's actually because it's *too hard to build the systems I want right now on top of current technology*, we need stronger foundations
But people have to build for today too
Let's leave the ocap stuff to the side for now, then. Let's focus on what Bluesky and the fediverse have to learn from each other.
- The fediverse should adopt content-addressed storage and decentralized identity
- Bluesky should adopt real, actual federation and decentralization
This isn't the only time I left a critique of ActivityPub-as-Deployed as opposed to ActivityPub-as-it-could-be: see also OCapPub, which critiques the anti-abuse tools of AP as inadequate and leading to "the nation-state'ification of the fediverse" https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org
Oh, and ocaps!!!
ActivityPub left giant holes in the spec around two things which sound the same but which are not the same: Authentication and Authorization
Trying to mix these two, you accidentally get ACLs, and then you get confused deputies and ambient authority, plagues of the security world
Let's leave the ocap stuff to the side for now, then. Let's focus on what Bluesky and the fediverse have to learn from each other.
- The fediverse should adopt content-addressed storage and decentralized identity
- Bluesky should adopt real, actual federation and decentralization
The reason I bring up the proposal here is that I think it has all the right analysis of *what the fediverse should do*, if it was going to rise to the challenge of fulfilling its true potential
So let me lay out what the things in that proposal were:
Here is your recipe for making the "Correct Fediverse IMO (TM)":
- Integrate ocaps, which is possible because actor model + ocaps compose
- Content addressed storage!
- Decentralized identity (notice the *y*, I did not say DIDs) on top of ~mutable CAS storage
- Petname system UX
(cotd...)
Spec-wise in ActivityPub, I think it's possible. The ecosystem, as deployed? I think the ecosystem can and will only do part of it, if we really get everyone excited, maybe the content addressed storage and decentralized identity parts, in which case the fediverse will also survive nodes going down
The ocap stuff, I tried getting fediverse implementers excited about this and tbh, it's pretty hard to design into a Ruby on Rails or Django style framework and mindset. Backporting the right designs to existing systems is a real challenge.
Especially ocaps need to go bottom-up.
Here is your recipe for making the "Correct Fediverse IMO (TM)":
- Integrate ocaps, which is possible because actor model + ocaps compose
- Content addressed storage!
- Decentralized identity (notice the *y*, I did not say DIDs) on top of ~mutable CAS storage
- Petname system UX
(cotd...)
(cotd ...)
- Better anti-spam / anti-harassment using OCapPub ideas
- Improved privacy with E2EE ("encrypted p2p" even a better goal)
Whew! An improved fediverse?
"Uh, Christine, this sounds like a lot, do you think the fediverse can take this on?"
To the end of the fediverse, perhaps I sound bitter, "they didn't adopt ActivityPub the way *I* saw it!"
The truth is that Mastodon didn't, but Mastodon also saved ActivityPub. It then painted a vision of the future that wasn't, at least, what Jessica Tallon and I expected of it. But it saved AP.
The fediverse and Bluesky, at great effort, could learn a lot from each other in the immediate term.
In the longer term, neither is implementing the ocap vision I think is critical for the big vision, and in a way, I think maybe neither can be easily rearchitected to achieve it. Well, not yet.
Inside Fediverse
@