2025-05-07 03:00:00
Another Long Links curation (the 31st!); substantial pieces of reading (or watching or listening) that you probably don’t have time to take in all of. One or two, though, might reward your attention. The usual assortmet of music, geekery, and cosmology.
Ever heard of Laniakea? Neither had I. It’s another word for our home. This 7-minute YouTube video, The Laniakea supercluster of galaxies, is graceful and mind-expanding; highly recommended.
I was sitting up late, pretty mellow, and Google Music showed me Atom Heart Mother as performed by Japanese tribute band Pink Floyd Trips in 2016. It woke me right up. The Japanese hipsters are instrumentally strong and use keyboards for the acoustic-instrument parts. As for the vocals, well, oh my oh my, definitely next level. Good stuff.
Which made me curious about other performances of Atom Heart Mother. Turns out Floyd recorded a 1971 performance, coincidentally also from Japan. Obviously they’re competent, but they’re just four guys and the keyboard technology was way more primitive back then, so they’re at a disadvantage compared to the resources they had in the studio when recording it, or the technology deployed by PF Trips. A lot of the visuals are of the band arriving in and traveling around Japan, which is OK, because their performances in that era weren’t particularly visually stimulating. Credit to Gilmour for hitting the high notes (albeit with some electronic assist), but once again, he’s at a disadvantage compared to the awesome Japanese singers.
The arrangement is quite a bit different than the original on the eponymous album and, within the limitations, is good.
There’s a cover by “Pussycherry et l'Orchestre d'harmonie de Clermont Ferrand” which I abandoned partway through because the orchestra just isn’t very good, clumsy and harsh. There is a nice little cello part though.
I will link to Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France with Ron Geesin at the Théâtre du Chatelet, once again an orchestra and a chorus. Ron Geesin is the guy that Floyd hired to do all the orchestral stuff after they’d recorded the basic tracks and went on tour. The orchestra is way better but disappointingly equals neither Geesin’s original take on the album, nor PF Trips. And the big choir doesn’t come close to those two Japanese women.
There are more performances out there, but I had to go to bed.
I have written quite a bit about C2PA and other “Content Authenticity” initiative stuff. Recently, Adobe has released more C2PA-enabling technology in several of its apps, and there is commentary from DPReview and PetaPixel.
If you care about this stuff like I do you’ll probably enjoy reading both pieces. But they (mostly) miss what I think is the key
point. The biggest value offered by this stuff is establishing provenance, and the most important place to establish provenance
is on social media. Knowing that a pic on Fedi or Bluesky was first uploaded by @[email protected] is highly
useful in helping people decide whether it’s real or not, and would not require a major technical leap from any social-media
provider.
Joan Westerberg’s excellent Notes from the Exit: Why I Left the Attention Economy is full of passion and truth. About stepping off the “content creator” treadmill, she writes:
Leaving the attention economy doesn’t mean vanishing. It means choosing to matter to fewer people, more deeply. It means owning the means of distribution. It means publishing like a human being instead of a content mill. It means you stop playing to the house odds and start building your own game.
And the rest is just as good. For what it’s worth, what she’s describing is what I’ve been trying to do in this space for the last 22 years.
I don’t read The Register often enough; for many years they’ve been full of fresh takes and exhibited a usefully belligerant attitude. For example, When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making excoriates “the weird cruft that happens when Microsoft saws bits of our limbs off to make us fit into whatever profit center is running strategy today.” I actually disagree with some of the article, as I often do with the Reg, but I enjoyed reading it anyhow.
Time to put on your hardcore-geek hat and look at Formally verified cloud-scale authorization. A group at AWS replaced a single heavily-used API call implementation with formally-verified code, simultaneously making it smaller and faster. The link is to an overview piece, the full PDF is here.
These are not lightweight technologies and this was not a cheap project; a lot of people did a lot of work and these are not junior people. But when what you’re working on is this call:
Answer evaluate(List<Policy> ps, Request r)
That call is at the core of where AWS grants or denies access by anything to anything, and it’s called more than a billion times a second. That’s billion with a B. A situation where this kind of investment isn’t merely justifiable, it’s a no-brainer. I know a couple of the people on the authors list, and I offer all of them my congratulations. Strong work!
Regular readers know that my family has a boat, that we’re trying to decarbonize our lives, and that the boat has been the hardest part of that.
So, I pay close attention to the latest news from the electric-boat scene. I’m starting to gain confidence that in a single-digit number of years we’ll be using a quieter, cheaper, more environmentally praiseworthy vessel of some sort. So, in case anybody has similar worries, here are snapshots from a few of the more viable electric-boat startups: Navier, Torqueedo, X Shore, Candela. Also, here’s Aqua superPower, which wants to bring dockside charging to the electric-boat scene. And finally, here is the Electric boats category from the always-useful electrek electric-mobility site.
2025-05-05 03:00:00
Ever been to a soccer match and noticed the “supporters section”, full of waving flags and drummers and wild enthusiasm? Last Saturday I went there. And marched in their parade, even. I could claim it was anthropology research. But maybe it’s just old guys wanna have fun. Which I did. Not sure if I will again.
For the rest of this piece, when I say “football” I mean fútbol as in soccer, because that‘s what everyone on the scene says.
MLS (for Major League Soccer) is the top-level football league in North America and, depending on whose ratings you believe, the 9th or 10th strongest league in the world. At the moment, the Vancouver Whitecaps are the strongest team in MLS and are ranked #2 in Concacaf which means North and Central America. That may become #1 if they win the win the Champions Cup Final on June 1st in Mexico City, against #1-ranked Cruz Azul.
Who knows if these good times will last, but for the moment it means they’re kind of a big deal here my home town. I’ve become a fan, because the Whitecaps are fun to watch.
Mind you, the team is for sale and will probably be snapped up by a Yankee billionaire and relocated to Topeka or somewhere.
When I’ve been to Whitecaps games, I’ve always been entertained by the raucous energy coming out of the supporters section. They provide a background roar, shout co-ordinated insults at the other team and referee, have a drum section, and feature a waving forest of flags.
They’re called that because they inhabit the south end of the stadium, behind the goal that the Whitecaps attack in the second half. Check out the Web site.
So, on a manic impulse, I joined up. It didn’t cost much and got me a big-ass scarf with “Vancouver” on one side and “Southsiders” on the other. Which I picked up, along with a shiny new membership card, at Dublin Calling, a perfectly decent sports bar where the membership card gets you a discount. I have to say that the Southsiders people were friendly, efficient, and welcoming.
My son was happy to come along; we got to the bar long enough before The Parade to have a beer and perfectly OK bar food at what, especially with the discount, seemed a fair price. This matters because the food and beer at the stadium is exorbitantly priced slop.
Since I wrote this, I learned that there are actually four different fan clubs. Especially, check out Vancouver Sisters.
Forty-five minutes before game time, the fans leave Dublin Calling a couple hundred strong and march to the stadium, chanting dopey chants and singing dopey songs and generally having good clean fun. It’s a family affair.
Note: Kid on Dad’s shoulders. Flags. Spectators, and here’s a thing: When you’re in a loud cheerful parade, everybody smiles at you. Well, except for the drivers stuck at an intersection. Since we’re Canadian we’re polite, so we stop the parade at red lights. Sometimes, anyhow.
Note: Maximal fan. Scarves held aloft (this happens a lot). Blue smoke. Flags in Whitecaps blue and Canada red.
When the parade gets to the stadium, everyone kneels.
After a bit, someone starts a slow quiet chant, then they wind it up and up until everyone explodes to their feet and leaps around madly. That’s all then, time to pile into the stadium.
Which is visually impressive on with the lid open on a sunny day.
The Southsiders section is General Admission, pick anywhere to stand. And I mean stand, there’s no sitting down while the game’s on. There’s a big flag propped up every half-dozen seats or so you can grab and wave when the spirit moves you. There’s a guy on a podium down at the front, facing the crowd, and he co-ordinates the cheers and songs and… He. Never. Stops.
The Southsiders gleefully howl in joy at every good Whitecaps move and with rage at every adverse whistle, have stylized moves like for example whenever the opposing keeper launches a big goal kick everyone yells “You fat bastard!” No, I don’t know why.
When I shared that I was going to do this crazy thing people wondered if it was safe, would I get vomited on, was there violence, and so on. In the event it was perfectly civilized as long as you don’t mind a lot of noise and shouting. The beer-drinking was steady but I didn’t see anyone who seemed the worse for the wear. If it weren’t for all the colorful obscenity I’d be comfy bringing a kid along.
The crowd is a little whiter than usual for Vancouver, mostly pretty young, male dominated, with a visible gay faction. Nothing special.
Note: Canadian and rainbow flags. Somewhat obstructed view; the flags are out because a goal has just been scored, you can see the smoke from the fireworks. The opposing goal is a long way away.
What’s good: Being right on top of any goals scored at the near end. The surges of shared emotion concerning the action in the game.
What’s bad: Standing all through the game. The action at the other end is too far away. The songs and chants grow wearing after a while.
The Whitecaps won, which was nice. It was pretty close, actually, against a team that shouldn’t be much of a threat. But then, most of Vancouver’s best players were out in healing-from-injury or resting-from-overwork mode. I still think the Whitecaps are substandard at working the ball through the middle of the field, but do well at both ends; At the moment the stats seem to say that they’re on top both at scoring and preventing goals.
Here’s what to do if you’re watching a game: If either Pedro Vite (#45) or Jayden Nelson (#7) get the ball, lean in and focus. Both those guys are lightning in a bottle. I’ve enjoyed watching this team more than any other Vancouver sports franchise ever. It probably can’t last.
Will I do the Southsiders section again? Maybe. I suspect I’ll enjoy their energy and edge just as much even when I’m not in the section, plus I’ll get to sit down. We’ll see.
My son and I had fun. No regrets.
2025-04-29 03:00:00
In mid-April we learned about Bluesky censoring accounts as demanded by the government of Türkiye. While I haven’t seen coverage of who the account-holders were and what they said, the action followed on protests against Turkish autocrat Erdoğan for ordering the arrest of an opposition leader — typical behavior by a thin-skinned Führer-wannabe. This essay concerns how we might think about censorship, its mechanics, and how the ecosystems built around ActivityPub and ATproto can implement and/or fight it.
That link above is to TechCrunch’s write-up of the situation, which is good. There’s going to be overlap between that and this but neither piece is a subset of the other, so you might want to read TechCrunch too.
How, as the community of people who live and converse online, should we want our decentralized social media to behave?
I’m restricting this to decentralized social media because the issues around censorship differ radically between a service owned and controlled by a profit-seeking corporation, and an ecosystem of interoperating providers who may not be in it for the money.
So, from the decentralized point of view, what should be the core censorship goals? As Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Here are two of those:
No censorship. Let people say what they will and the contest of ideas proceed. Freedom of speech must be absolute.
Suppress any material which is illegal in the jurisdiction where the human participant is located. Stop there, because making policy in this area is not the domain of of social-media providers.
The absolutists’ position is at least internally consistent. But it has two fatal flaws, one generic and one specific. In general, a certain proportion of people are garbage and will post terrible, hateful, damaging things that make the online experience somewhere in the range between unpleasant and intolerable, to the extent that many who deserve to be heard will be driven away.
And specifically, history teaches us that certain narratives are dangerous to civic sanity and human life: Naziism, revanchism, hypernationalism, fomenting ethnic hatred, and so on.
Another way to put this: Everyone has a basic right to free speech, but nobody has a right to be listened to.
So, the Free Speech purists can now please show themselves out. (Disclosure: I didn’t mean that “please”.)
I can get partially behind this. If you’re running a social-media service in a civilized democratic country and posting X is against the law, you’d better think carefully about allowing X. (Not saying that civil disobedience is always wrong, just that you need to think about it.)
But mostly no. The legalist approach suffers from positive and negative failures. Negative, as in censoring-is-wrong: I really DGAF about Turkish legal restrictions, because they’re more or less whatever Erdoğan says they are, and Erdoğan is a tinpot tyrant. Similarly, on Trump’s current trajectory it’ll soon be illegal to express anti-Netanyahu sentiment in the USA.
Positive, as in not-censoring is wrong: Lolicon is legal in Japan and treated like CSAM elsewhere. Elsewhere is right, Japan is wrong. Another example: Anti-trans hate is increasingly cheerled by conservative culture warriors all over the place and is now the official policy of the British government. Sir Keir Starmer would probably be suspended from my Mastodon instance and invited to find somewhere else, except for somewhere else would be mass-defederated if it tolerated foolish bigots like Starmer.
(I should maybe say “How ATproto does it” but this seems more reader-friendly.) It’s not as though they pushed some button and silenced the hated-by-Erdoğan accounts. In fact, it’s subtle and complicated. For details, see Bluesky, censorship and country-based moderation by Laurens Hof at The Fediverse Report. Seriously, if you think you might have an opinion about Bluesky and what they’re doing, go read Hof before you share it.
Having said that, I think I can usefully offer a short form. Bluesky supports the use of multiple composable moderation services, and client software can decide which of them to subscribe to. It provides a central moderation service aimed at stopping things like CSAM and genocide-cheerleading that’s designed to operate at the scale of the whole network, which seems good to me.
It also offers “geographic moderation labelers”, which can attach “forbidden” signals to posts which are being read by people in particular areas. That’s what they did in this case; the Erdoğan-hated accounts had those labels attached to their posts, but only for people who are in Türkiye.
The default Bluesky client software subscribes to the geographic labeler and does as it’s told, which made Erdoğan and his toadies happy.
But anyone can write Bluesky client software, and there’s nothing in the technology that requires clients to subscribe to or follow the instructions of any moderation service. One alternate client, Deer.social, is a straightforward fork of the default, but with the geographic moderation removed. (It may have other features but looks about like basic Bluesky to me.)
(I should maybe say “How ActivityPub does it” or “How Mastodon does it” but…) Each instance does its own moderation and (this is important) makes its own decision as to which other instances to federate with. There are plenty of sites out there running Fediverse software that are full of CSAM and Lolicon and Nazis and so on. But the “mainstream” instances have universally defederated them, so it’s rare to run across that stuff. I never do.
To make things easy, there are “shared block-lists” that try to keep up-to-date on the malignant instances. It’s early days yet but I think this will be a growth area.
Most moderation is based on “reporting” — if you see something you think is abusive or breaks the rules, you can hit the “report” button, and the moderators for your instance and the source instance will get messaged and can decide what to do about it.
The effect is that there is a shared culture across a few thousand “mainstream” instances that leads, in my opinion, to a pretty pleasing atmosphere and low abuse level. We have a problem in that it’s still too easy to for a bad person to post abusive stuff in a way that is hard for moderators to see, but it’s being worked on and I’m optimistic.
So, suppose we want our social-media services to route around Erdoğan’s attempts to silence his political opponents. I do. How effective would Bluesky and the Fediverse be at that?
Bluesky makes it easy: Just use an alternate client. Yay! Except for, most people don’t and won’t and shouldn’t have to. Boo!
Still I dunno, in a place where the politics is hot, the word might get out on the grapevine and a lot of people could give another client a try. Maybe? Back in the day a lot of people used alternate Twitter clients, until Twitter stomped those out. I’m not smart enough to predict whether this could really be effective at routing round Erdoğan. I lean pessimistic though.
Wait, what about the Bluesky Web interface? Who needs a client anyhow! No luck; it turns out that that’s a big fat React app with mostly the same code that’s in the mobile apps. Oh well.
Anyhow, this ignores the real problem. Which is that if Erdoğan’s goons notice that people are dodging the censorship they’ll go nuclear on Bluesky (the company) and tell them to just stop displaying those people’s posts and to do it right fucking now.
If that doesn’t work, they have a lot of options, starting with just blocking access to bsky.app, and extending to arresting any in-country staff or, even better, their families. And throwing them in an unheated basement. I dunno, a courageous and smart company might be able to fight back, but it wouldn’t be a good situation.
And that’s a problem, because even though the ATproto is by design decentralized, in practice there’s only one central service that routes the firehose of posts globally. So my bet would be that Erdoğan wins.
This is a very different picture. Block access to the app and a lot of people won’t notice because they use the browser, connecting to one of the thousands of Fediverse instances, desktop or mobile, and it’ll work fine. OK, how about finding out which instances the people they’re trying to ban are on, and going after those instances? If the instance is in a rule-of-law democracy, the Turks would probably be told to go pound sand.
OK, so what if the Turks ferociously attacked the home servers of the Thought Criminals? No problemo, they’d migrate to a more resilient instance and, since this is the Fediverse, their followers might never notice, they’d just come along with them.
Pretty quickly the Erdoğan gang are gonna end up playing whack-a-mole. In fact I think it’s going to be really, really hard in general for oppressive governments to censor the Fediverse. Not impossible; the people who operate the Great Firewall would probably find a way.
When Bluesky progresses to the point that there isn’t a single essential company at the center of everything, it should be censorship-resilient too, for the same reasons.
I think that, to resist misguided censorship by misguided governments, we need (at least) these things:
A service with no central choke-points, but rather a large number of independent co-operating nodes.
Accounts, and the follower relationships between them, are not tied to any single node.
Clearly these conditions are necessary; we don’t know yet whether or not they’re sufficient. But I’m generally optimistic that decentralized social media has the potential to offer a pretty decent level of censorship resistance.
2025-04-22 03:00:00
Join me for a walk through a rain forest on a corner of a small island. This is to remind everyone that even in a world full of bad news, the trees are still there. From the slopes leading down to the sea they reach up for sunshine and rain, offering no objections to humans walking in the tall quiet spaces between them.
[The island is Keats Island, where we’ve had a cabin since 2008. It’s mostly just trees and cabins, you can buy an oceanfront mansion for millions or a basic Place That Needs Work for much less (as we did) or you can camp cheap. Come on over sometime.]
On the path up from the water to the cabin there’s this camellia that was unhappy at our home in the city, its flowers always stained brown even as they opened. So we brought it to the island and now look at it!
One interior shot. On this recent visit I wired up this desk, a recent hand-me-down from old friend Tamara.
When I got it all wired up I texted her “Now I write my masterpiece” but instead I wrote that one about URI schemes, no masterpiece but I was happy with it. And anyhow, it’s lovely space to sit and tap a keyboard.
Now the forest walk.
These are rain forests and they are happy in their own way when it rains but I’m a Homo sapiens, we evolved in a sunny part of the world and my eyes welcome all those photons.
In 2008 I was told that the island had been logged “100 years ago”. So most of these are probably in the Young-Adult tree demographic, but there are a few of the real old giants still to be seen.
Sometimes the trees seem to dance with each other.
Both of those pictures feature (but not exclusively) Acer macrophyllum, the bigleaf Maple, the only deciduous tree I know of that can compete for sun with the towering Cedar/Fir/Hemlock evergreens. It’s beautiful both naked (as here) and in its verdant midsummer raiment.
But sometimes when you dance too hard you can fall over. He are two different photographic takes on a bigleaf that seems to have lost its grip and is leaning on a nearby hemlock.
And sometimes you can just totally lose it.
It is very common in these forests to see a tree growing out of a fallen log; these are called “nurse logs”. It turns out to be a high-risk arboreal lifestyle, as we see here. It must have been helluva drama when the nurse rolled.
I’m about done and will end as I began, with a flower.
This is the blossom of a salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) a member of the rose family. It has berries in late summer but they’re only marginally edible.
It’s one of the first blossoms you see in the forest depths as spring struggles free of the shackles of the northwest winter.
Go hug a tree sometime soon, it really does help.
2025-04-17 03:00:00
I’m a fan of decentralized social media and that’s partly because I enjoy using it. But mostly because history teaches that decentralization is the best basis for sustainable, resilient online conversation. (Evidence? Email!) For the purpose of this essay, let’s assume that you agree with me. Let’s also assume that our online life is still Web-flavored. I’m going to describe a few unfortunate things that can happen in a decentralized world, then look at a basic built-in feature of the Web that might make the problems go away.
Let’s start with bad-experience scenarios
Suppose I post a picture to my social-media feed and since Ash follows me, it shows up in their stream. They can favorite or boost it, but let’s suppose they think their friend Layla might like it too, so they grab the link and drop into their chat window with Layla, or maybe they send her an email.
By “link” I mean “URL”, and by “URL” I mean “URI” (the distinction will matter in a bit). Here’s what that looks like, first
on the Fediverse:
https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/114361121438267145
And on Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/tbray.org/post/3lmxrkmwz5k2u
Layla sees the link and clicks it or taps it and yay, there’s the picture. She dislikes it and wants to add a negative comment. On the Fediverse, if it turns out she’s logged onto CoSocial.ca like me she’ll have no trouble, she can fire away. If she’s logged into another instance (and the Fediverse has thousands) she’s out of luck, even though she’s got a live Fediverse session. She can paste the URL or just “@timbray” into her search window and that might get her there indirectly if she’s lucky.
This is a bad experience.
On Bluesky, it’ll probably just work. Well, for now. Because while Bluesky is based on the
AT Protocol (ATproto for short) which is in theory decentralized, at the
moment Ash is logged into the “App View” at bsky.app just like I am, because in practice everybody
on Bluesky is.
But in a future where there are multiple ATproto App Views, which is to say when Bluesky becomes as decentralized as the Fediverse is today, we’re back with the Fediverse problem, because her browser doesn’t know that the URI identifies an ATproto post that she should be able to boost or like.
There’s another problem in this scenario. Suppose Layla was logged into CoSocial.ca, but she wasn’t using the default Mastodon client, but rather an alternative such as Phanpy or Elk.zone. When Layla clicks on that link she won’t be in her fave Fedi client but back in vanilla Mastodon.
Not a good experience.
Let’s look at the URI for a different Fediverse post of a pretty picture:
https://mastodon.cloud/@timbray/109508984818551909
It’s one of my posts all right, but it’s not from cosocial.ca, it’s from
mastodon.cloud, which was my first home on the Fediverse. I left it in December 2022 because it
was sold to another company which is sketchy, by which I mean
Lolicon-friendly.
Whatever I think of whoever’s running mastodon.cloud, I have a lot of posts over there, some of which I care
about. For now, they’re still there, but I’m not contributing any money to those guys, nor will I, so if they pull the plug and
vanish I can’t complain. Only if they do, so do all those posts that I cared about back then and still do a bit.
Another bad experience.
[Anyone who already understands URIs schemes and so on can skip to the next section.]
Let’s look at that Fediverse link again:
https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/114280972142347258
I call it a “URI” because that’s the official name for what it is. What they look like and how to use them are very thoroughly specified in several Internet Engineering Task Force publications starting with RFC3986. URLs are also URIs, but URIs can do surprising things that you’ve probably never seen in the world of ordinary URLs.
The crucial thing about both the Fediverse and Bluesky URIs is that they begin with the magic letters “https” followed by a
colon. All URIs
begin with a short string and a colon; the string is called the URI scheme. For each possible scheme, there’s a set of rules
saying how to handle URIs of that flavor. If it’s “https”, then the rules say, using that Fediverse URI as an example, to make
an encrypted connection to the server at cosocial.ca and ask it to send you
/@timbray/114280972142347258. You’ll get some bytes that represent what the URI identifies.
[Yes, I’m oversimplifying. Sorry.]
While most of the URLs you’re ever likely to encounter begin with “https:” there are other schemes. Suppose your email is
“[email protected]”. Paste mailto:[email protected] into your browser, hit Enter, and see what happens. This is a URI
whose scheme is “mailto” and it works just fine.
When I tried this just now on my Mac, all three of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome noticed that I use the Mimestream mail app and popped that up. Which shows that somewhere in this computer there’s a notion of a registered handler for a particular URI scheme. Which is exactly what URI schemes were designed for.
I mean, if I can install an email app to handle mailto: URIs, why can’t I install a Fediverse app to handle
fedi:?
There are lots of URI schemes! Here’s the official registry. Now, most of these are marked as “provisional” which means “we’re just reserving this scheme because we think we’re going to use it” and even among the ones that aren’t provisional, very few of them are in widespread enough use that you can expect your browser to handle them.
You’ll notice that the at: scheme is in there, registered by the Bluesky people (after I suggested they do so). For the
Fediverse, I see
web+ap: (which I’d never heard of before starting to
write this).
Let’s suppose that there were URI schemes for both ATproto (at:) and the Fediverse(I
suggest fedi:
rather than web+ap: for reasons I’ll discuss later).
Let’s also suppose that they were well supported by operating systems and browsers. I claim that this would help solve all three
of those pain
scenarios.
Remember, Ash copied the URI for a post and dropped into their chat window with Layla; when Layla clicked it, she saw the post but couldn’t boost it or reply to it.
But suppose it began with either at: or
fedi: — then the computer or mobile would dispatch to whatever Layla uses to interact
with ATproto/Fediverse software, and it’d know how to go about opening that post in the way Layla expects so she can reply and
boost and so on. I’m ignoring
the details of how that’d work, and some of them are tricky, but this could be done.
This is a little more ambitious, but remember that “mastodon.cloud” post that might go away some day if the server does?
Suppose we change it slightly, like so:
fedi://mastodon.cloud/@timbray/109508984818551909
Once again, because it begins with “fedi:” not “https:”, the job would be handed off to Fediverse-savvy software. And since the Fediverse already knows how to migrate accounts from one server to another and bring your followers along, why shouldn’t it also copy your posts and store them somewhere, and when it hits that URI, remember “Oh wait, that @[email protected] handle migrated a couple of times but that’s OK, I still have the posts from the old servers stored away so I can fetch that post rather than just giving up because mastodon.cloud went away”.
Now, as far as I know, Mastodon doesn’t have any capabilities like that, nor does any other Fediverse software. But once again, it’s a thing that could be done. And if we have a new URI scheme, there’d be a hook to hang that kind of software on.
At the moment, ATproto/Bluesky is a lot closer to being able to do this. Your ATproto account isn’t tied to the server you happen to be logged into when you posted it, it’s a long-lived asymmetric-crypto based thing and it assumes that there’ll be per-account storage not tied to any particular App View. Also posts are identified by content hash, which should be helpful.
But as far as I know, even with ATproto, if my browser’s visiting the bsky.app App View and I shoot a URL beginning
with https://bsky.app to someone on the blacksky.web.xyz App View, I don’t see how the browser can
figure out that that URL should invoke ATproto software.
But if it began at://bsky.capp, it’d be perfectly tractable (I think).
There multiple proposals for a Fediverse URI scheme. I already mentioned web+ap: and then there’s
web+activitypub: from
silverpill (which may be the same?), and
fedi: from me. The “web+” ones are more descriptive but mine is
cooler and I think that matters.
The proposals include useful discussions of the issues, which include those discussed in this essay; if you care about this
stuff I think both would reward a read.
I also have to note this from Mastodon author Eugen Rochko back in 2022: “We've done this before but removed because browser support / UX was inadequate.”
(Before I go on I should point out that Eugen is right about support for alternate schemas in Web browsers being weak, but not all of them. On Android, any app can register itself to handle URIs of a particular scheme. I assume iOS has something similar? So this isn’t completely science-fictional.)
So using URI schemees isn’t a new idea and yeah, patchy browser support is a problem. The people who build Safari and Chrome and Firefox are busy and are fanatically concerned with security and stability for their billions of users, and if I go and tap them on the shoulder and say “Here are new schemes and here’s the decentralized-social-media software I want registered to handle them” they’re not gonna to just say “Okay” and do it.
Bit I dunno, the times they are a changin’. As Bluesky and the Fediverse build momentum, and the decentralized path forward looks more and more attractive, the case for new URI schemes probably becomes easier to make.
As it should. Because the notion of the URI is a core foundational piece of the Web’s architecture, and the design of URIs has multiple protocol support baked in, and the URI schemes exist specifically to enable it.
So, we should work on using it.
2025-04-15 03:00:00
Last weekend I spent a few hours watching Coachella on YouTube. The audio and video quality are high. It’s free of ad clutter, but maybe that’s because I pay for Google Music? The quality of the music is all over the map. If I read the schedule correctly, they’ll repeat the exercise next weekend, so I thought a few recommendations might be helpful. Even if it’s not available live, quite a few captures still seem to be there on YouTube, so check ’em out.
I tried sorting these into themes but that tied me in knots, so you get alphabetical order.
Lady Gaga brings it.
Not sure what kind of music to call this, but the drums and guitar (played by identical twins Simone and Amedeo Pace) are both hot, and Kazu Makino on everything else has loads of charisma, and they all sang well. Didn’t regret a minute of my time with this one.
I have no patience whatsoever for EDM. Deadmau5 and Zedd and their whole tribe should go practice goat-herding in Bolivia or anything else that’ll keep them away from audiences who want to hear music played by musicians. But there were multiple artists this year you could describe as X+EDM for some value of X, and much to my surprise a few of them worked.
(One that notably didn’t was Parcels, whose genius idea is EDM+Lightweight Aussie pretty-boy pop. On top of which, every second of their performance featured brilliant lights strobing away, shredding my retinas and forebrain. I say it’s EDM and I say to hell with it. Go back to Australia and stay.)
But Mr Böhmer not only held my attention but had my toes tappin’. His stuff isn’t just hot dance moves against recorded tracks, it’s moody and cool and phase-shifty and dreamy. It helps that he plays actual musical notes on actual keyboards.
I thought “I remember that name.” (Sadly, on first glance at the schedule I did not in fact recognize many names.) Ms Gibbons was the singer for Portishead, standard-bearers of Trip-hop back in the day. Her voice sounds exactly the same today as it did three decades ago, which is to say vulnerable and lovely.
The songs were all new (aside from Portishead’s Glory Box) and good. Beth never had any stage presence and still doesn’t, draped motionless over the mike except when she turns away from the crowd to watch someone soloing.
What made the show a Coachella highlight was the band, who apparently had just arrived from another planet. It was wonderfully strange as in I didn’t even know what some of the instruments were. Anyhow it all sounded great albeit weird, the perfect complement to Beth’s spaced-out (I mean that in the nicest way) vocal arcs.
This posse of sixtysomething women won my heart in the first three seconds of their set with a blast of girl-group punk/surf guitar noise and a thunderous backbeat. The purest rock-&-roll imaginable, played with love and bursting with joy. They can sing, they can play, they still have plenty of moves. It‘s only rock and roll but I like it, like it, yes I do.
OK, this is another X+EDM, where the X is “Ghettotech, house, Rap & Miami base” (quoting their Web site). I have no idea what “Miami base” is but I guess I like it, because they’re pretty great. Outta Detroit.
Their set was affably chaotic, the rapping part sharp-edged and hot, and they had this camera cleverly mounted on the DJ deck giving an intense close-up of whichever HiTech-ers were currently pulling the levers and twisting the knobs. Sometimes it was all three of them and that was great fun to watch.
I’m an elderly well-off white guy and am not gonna pretend to much understanding of any of HiTech’s genres, but I’m pretty confident that a lot of people would be entertained.
They are historically important but the show, I dunno, I seem to recall being impressed in 1975 but it felt kinda static and tedious. The only reason I mention them is that a few of their big video-backdrop screens, near the start of the set, were totally Macrodata Refinement, from Severance. I wonder if any of the showrunners were Kraftwerk fans?
Give Coachella credit for giving this a try. Dudamel is a smart guy and put together a program that wasn’t designed to please a heavy classics consumer like me. I mean, opening with Ride of the Valkyries? But there were two pieces of Bach and the orchestra turned into a backup band for Laufey, an Icelandic folk/jazz singer, a Gospel singer/choir, and some other extremely random stuff. If you’re not already a classics fan, this might open your eyes a bit.
I’m sure you’ve already read one or two rave write-ups about this masterpiece. It’s going to be one of the performances remembered by name forever, like Prince at the Superbowl or Muddy Waters at the Last Waltz. They built a freaking opera house in the desert, and that makes me wonder what the Coachella economics are; someone has to pay for this stuff, do Gaga and Coachella split it or is it the price of getting her to come and play?
To be fair, as the review in Variety accurately noted, it was pretty well New-York-flavored hoofing and belting wrapped in a completely incomprehensible Goth/horror narrative. So what?! The songs were great. The singing was fantastic and the dancing white-hot, plus she had a pretty hard-ass live metal-adjacent band and an operatic string section, and she brought her soul along with her and unwrapped it. It was easy to believe she loved the audience just as much as she said. She didn’t leave anything on the stage. They should make it into a big-screen movie.
I did feel a little sorry for the physical audience, quite a bit of the performance seemed to be optimized for couch potatoes with big screens like for example me. Anyhow, if you get a chance to see this one don’t miss it.
There were three nights and thus three headliners. You’ll notice that I only talked up Friday night’s Lady-Gaga set. That’s because the other two were some combination of talentless and uninspired and offensive. Obviously I’m in a minority here, they wouldn’t get the big slots if millions didn’t love ’em. And I like an unusually wide variety of musical forms. But not that shit.