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HN discussion on Takahē

An efficient ActivityPub Server, for small installs with multiple domains

This is magic.

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why? One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.

Two teams of five is not the same as one team of ten.

Outernet boasts of being “the world’s foremost bridge between the real world and the digital world”, a place where the metaverse meets meatspace, where virtual luxury trainers can be sold as NFTs alongside the real thing. There are plans for it to grow into a worldwide network of 10 connected hubs, with New York and Los Angeles next on the list. But it shows what happens when urban development is conceived in the same way as making a website or running a TV channel – “curating a brand neighbourhood,” as O’Ferrall puts it. Pings, clicks and content trump human experience, until advertising swallows the city whole.

This brings us to today, where the loudest complaints about “cultural stasis” tend to come from Gen X adults whose cultural interests have long been anchored in obscure and openly-artistic cultural forms. From their perspective, today's cultural capital does feel very tame. Being "with it" requires listening to top-charting albums, watching blockbuster movies, and being well-versed in internet memes. Compared to Gen X, Millennials who grew up on the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC would have fewer qualms about a pop culture centered around Harry Styles fandom, Harry Styles albums, and Harry Styles cinema gossip. Meanwhile Gen Z, in its rebellion against Millennials, appears to appreciate obscurity as a virtue again, but this is a new obscurity, not based in artistic complexity and historical knowledge but the discovery of amateur videos lurking at the edges of the internet.

Tools and structures from social.coop, "a coop-run corner of the fediverse"

A governance toolkit for great communities.

Fediverse stats

GoToSocial is an open-source, ActivityPub compatible, federated social media server. It's easy to install, lightweight, and perfect for small servers

Some good pointers here.

From lePirateFrançais 🏴‍☠️🇫🇷🥖 on Twitter

Helm recently described the UK’s privatised utilities as “not fit for purpose”, but he thinks it is not a matter of “private bad, public good”. “Neither the nationalisation model nor the pure privatisation that we’ve inherited are fit for purpose,” he said. Rather, Helm sees it as the job of the state to provide rules – a “system framework” – within which the private sector competes.

It wasn’t until my early twenties that it clicked for me: the web doesn’t have to be like this! You don’t have to participate in the con! You can make websites that are joyous and funny and charming, websites that don’t contribute to the meat grinder. You don’t have to steal anyone’s email address or exploit and coerce folks into giving you money. The world wide web could be—if we imagined it correctly—more than money.

Also how it _was_ (mostly).

Rebase dependent branches with `--update-refs`