https://www.docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed

I know you said “self hosted”, but if you are interested in an Android app, Google Play Books does most of what you want, I think. You can upload your books, and read them on any device (with offline capabilities). But this is the Self Hosted community, so I will show myself out.

When I joined some years ago, it automatically created a private, invite-only room named “Echo Chamber” with me being the single member. If it didn’t happen to you automatically, you can create one yourself.

I think single account ActivityPub implementations are addressing a weakness of the Fediverse: one’s identity (handle, username) is tied to an instance they have no control over. If that instance shuts down users lose everything. With a single account instance, you take that control back. And since it doesn’t need to scale the architecture can be much simpler and can be deployed to much cheaper infrastructure.

The demo was not straightforward, though. And I didn’t quite get how a user can follow Mastodon users, for example.

I would add Ars Technica to that list and call it a day.

For programming I follow YouTube channels of the conferences relevant for my tech stack (YouTube natively supports RSS). They are generally 1 hour talks but it’s a great way to stay up to date.

Did you take a look at write freely or other blogging software with native ActivityPub support?

I use InoReader. Most of the sources I want/need has RSS feeds. For the rest I create feeds using Feed43. I use it daily and that’s how I get news, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds (via Nitter), Reddit/Lemmy posts.

I was upset when Reader was killed. But looking back and seeing what Google has become over time, I think it was for the best. Now we have entire companies that only do one thing: RSS, and they are good at it. If Reader was still a thing, I’m afraid it would have extinguished RSS.

Names matter, and Reader told everyone that it was for reading when it could have been for so much more. “If Google made the iPod,” he says, “they would have called it the Google Hardware MP3 Player For Music, you know?”

This is funny, but I think Reader was a good name. At least it reflected what I want to do with the product.

That’s a heroic effort! I laughed so hard.

I think I will quit at this point.

By the time I checked the link, the second ad was from Netflix and I didn’t see the word “open” in the job description. Is everything Netflix does open source? If not, how is it communicated that the job posting relates to working in open source? I didn’t check all of them, but the list doesn’t necessarily seem to deliver what it promises?

Exactly. Even though one doesn’t need it often, it’s an important tool.

This is how I used it too. Write a test that fails with the “bad” version. Use a script to cherry-pick and run the test. It’s fun to watch it find the first bad commit even though what git bisect does is quite simple.

In this conference talk, Evans explains some of the most important concepts related to Domain-Driven Design while taking a critical look at how we traditionally think about models. Suggests asking “which model would be more useful to solve this problem” instead of relying on our understanding of objects “in real world”. He also emphasizes the importance of communication with domain experts an use of ubiquitous language.

I don’t think what you say contradicts with what I said. If we separate “identity providers” from “content hosts” a person could easily go get as many accounts as they like (just like getting many gmail accounts) and then use them to log in to any content networks they are interested in. I didn’t suggest that everyone should have their own instances of anything.

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my wording. I didn’t mean to say everybody shoukd/must have a single account. And separating identity from content doesn’t necessarily enforce it. Think about crypto wallets. They provide some sort of an identity, but anybody can have an infinite number of them. Now, I’m not saying crypto wallets should replace fediverse identities. I don’t even have one. But, I could log into all fediverse instances with a single account, that would make things much easier for everybody:

• New comers would just get an identity without stressing over which instance to pick for a handle
• People who care about their privacy would just create as many identities as they like
• People who want the convenience of having a single account would get it
• Those who want a different account for each of their interests (gardening, music, politics) could still do that easily

Thanks for the explanation and the links. It’s good to hear that there are people working towards this goal.

I use identity to mean “account” here. Like a Google account that can be use both in Gmail and YouTube.

Having several instances of Mastodon is probably not that big of an issue. I would expect one of them to win over time. But it’s not straight forward to use a Mastodon account when interacting with lemmy, PeerTube, PixelFed, etc. If I could get the identity (my handle) from a single place (like some neutral non-profit) and could use it on everything, that would be better. But I guess that’s not happening any time soon.