"a reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber's thoughtful ... "How decentralized is Bluesky really?", Hubbed earlier, which "raises the bar on analysis in this space. However, I disagree with some of the analysis".First, agreement with CLW's "shared heap" image, and a good summary of how Bluesky works: "atp…

ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber "often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub... I do ... but I am usually head-down focused on building... [and] anything I had to say on the subject would not be received productively". But, encouraged by a core Bluesky developer, here is her longread.It'…

"Decentralizing the Web means people ... store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need... requires major changes in the way we develop applications... In this post, I discuss three paradigm shifts a decentralized Web brings"Rather than "accept package deals we cannot customize", redecentralisin…

"the distributed/federated digital garden approach is the way to go for knowledge commoning... cribbing from ActivityPub's local, global, and 'those-you-follow' timelines... you could have local, 'those-you-follow', and global gardens... [with] some kind of liquid democracy", and interest-based groups, perhaps s…

The "executive summary" of my 5-part bundle of 1/1/2023, which "provide a snapshot of my current thinking into how a decentralised collective intelligence ecosystem could be bootstrapped into existence."

Writing a chapter for a book on Personal Knowledge Graphs made me rethink MyHub.ai, and led to a new collective intelligence pilot project with the founders of massive.wiki.

A new app and protocol to give "people full control over their interest graphs ... there was no standard, decentralized repository for online media and its derivatives... culture that is readily available for anyone to annotate, remix, compile, create new editions of or link together in archives. Mediagraph [protocol] will let developers buil…

Marc-Antoine Parent's project: HyperKnowledge.

Discourse graph refers to an information model which represents scientific discourse by distilling "traditional publication down into more granular, formalized knowledge claims, linked to supporting evidence and context through a network or graph... knowledge claims ... as the central unit".Why? "Standardizing the representation of …

"What does it look like to design a system [the internet] for survivability?" This different question - not design for efficiency, or profitability - led "to different answers, and breakthroughs that made the internet we have today".Rather than protect something, "the r-selected response ... LOCKSS stands for "Lots o…

Basically this piece starts to unpack for me my ideas of what millions of Hubs networked together and processed by AI would offer the world in terms of content discovery:With "tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise ... people are aggregating content ... reviving the curated web. But at the moment these are mostly solo affairs... fragmented…

An overview of three protocols - ActivityPub, Scuttlebutt and Dat - and their complementary roles in helping redistribute power from "large centralized corporate interests and back into the hands of individual people and small groups... No one protocol [is enough] ... each protocol has its strengths and weaknesses". We need "develo…

Pretty good explanation of ActivityPub from Darius Kazemi: "ActivityPub describes ways for social network sites to talk to each other... [from] sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat... [to] New York Times ... Spotify. Basically any site where individual "users" create content and other people can subscribe to it could be A…

The Identity Stack ... Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database... requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protocols plus private key cryptography ...introduce ... full possession of digital assets, without having to trust a third party. Hence the terms “self-custodial” or …

"InterPlantery File System - IPFS - is a peer-to-peer distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data... to power the Distributed Web - DWeb... by using IPFS to download files from another system, your computer also becomes a distributor... a part of a decentralized network, helping ... distribute inform…

Urbit looks like a fascinating platform to build myhub on: “an open-source decentralized internet project... [to] give control of computing back to regular people... At its most basic level, an Urbit is:A super-private (virtual) computer, combined withan ID, which isconnected peer-to-peer with other Urbit computers"Urbit user access their Ur…

"We wanted MoodleNet, a new resource-centric social network for educators, to be federated... a decentralised network to empower global knowledge sharing and collaboration... we realised ActivityPub... would be perfect ..."They realised it would be useful to create "a ‘hello world’ starter project ... enable developers to build Ac…

we’ve grown wary of the so-called attention econom... But we also benefit from social media and hesitate to disengage from it completely... a loose collective of developers and techno-utopians ... the IndieWeb ... developing their own social-media platforms... preserve what’s good about social media while jettisoning what’s bad... Facebook and I…