@maegul
@lemmy.mlFair, but at some point the "dream" breaks down. Python itself is written in C and plenty of packages, some vital, rely on C or Cython (or fortran) and rust now more and more. So why not the tooling that's used all the time and doing some hard work and often in build/testing cycles?
If Guido had packaging and project management included in the standard library from ages ago, with parts written in C, no one would bat an eye lid whether users could contribute to that part of the system. Instead, they'd celebrate the "batteries included", "ease of use" and "zen"-like achievements of the language.
Somewhere in Simon's blog post he links to a blog post by Armin on this point, which is that the aim is to "win", to make a singular tool that is better than all the others and which becomes the standard that everyone uses so that the language can move on from this era of chaos. With that motive, the ability for everyday users to contribute is no longer a priority.
Definitely interesting idea (I hadn't really quite seen it formalised like this)! I've kinda had vague similar-ish thoughts along these lines too.
Any chance you'd be willing to go into any more detail, or point to specifics? I'm not familiar with what's going on over on bestiver or programming.dev in the way of service-type things.
Just feels like every attempt at alternative social media is dying as the internet shrinks to a few corporate websites that control everything.
Yea ... it's sort of a lens for me as I view/critique the actions and decisions of people building alt-social ... this stuff is hard and fragile but also important ... so not fucking around with it kinda matters (to me at least).
The hate toward BlueSky from mastodon/AP people, for example, is misguided I think. The, IMO, general lack of concern for inter-platform interop across the fediverse bothers me too, where I ask whether a platform is being a good "fediverse citizen". And some of the "cultural purity through vigilance" culture out of the mastodon/microblogging crowd is, IMO, short sighted.
A common thread being a readiness for negative behaviour and effects rather than building and supporting.
As in a new one would be necessary to do the sorts of things I'm suggesting ... or the current moment requires a sort of rebranding and pivot that is best served by a new platform?
In general, this is true of the broader population as a whole. Mastodon got the size that it's an actual place (and I think this applies to lemmy/threadiverse too). But it's by no means "THE place" or even categorically a big public place. More like old-school forums that have a particular user base and vibe that you visit from time to time.
For the fediverse, the "migration" was exciting and successful, but compared to big-social, a drop in the ocean. And the biggest clue for that is that the people most excited about Threads joining the fediverse are Evan (author and lead "advocate" of ActivityPub) and Gargron (masto CEO/founder) ... they want to taste that big-social scale and know that they don't have it and likely never will.
I don't think this is true, maybe not at all.
Academia, by its nature, is socially exclusionary. So what they want/need is the ability to have flexibly closed spaces as well as very public spaces. Big-social never really provided that and in many ways I think academia is being kinda left behind by social media.
Reality for mastodon, I think, is that the "migration" is basically over, and has been for over a year now. The Brazilian move to BlueSky (and not mastodon) highlights it very well.
Recalibrating on what we want and can do with the fediverse, as well as how central we want the mastodon project to be, are the best things to do now.
For me, it seemed like Gargron didn't really know how to speak about the lack of a Brazilian migration to mastodon in favour of BlueSky, and handle a new moment of actually dropping in popularity or perceived relevance (having been the underdog then rising start for a while), which I take as a cue that being the dominant center of the fediverse isn't a natural fit for Gargron and his project, to the point where the fediverse may have just outgrown it.
So, random thoughts:
As for the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed, mbin, nodebb etc), it's always struck me that group based structures (EG, lemmy communities) seem to work better over federation. Account migration from instance to instance is simpler, in part because the user is not the central organisation. Which instance you're on doesn't really matter that much. Also, blocking a whole community seems a useful middle ground between blocking a user and defederating a whole instance at the instance level, and ditto with community level moderation which can operate over federation. Additionally, the little technical talk I've seen on the issue seems to indicate that moving a community from instance to another might actually be quite viable.
If true, then community building might be best started with the group based platforms. Maybe an ecosystem of formats that involves all of them other than microblogging might work well?? Perhaps user-based content could take on a different structure from what microblogging does ... perhaps something like what BlueSky does could be adapted to fuse user-based structures into group-based platforms like lemmy (IE, your content exists in a pod which you can own and which is portable, which is then sucked up into various public feeds depending on what permissions you provide)??
Things like private communities, group chats, blogs, wikis (and RSS feed management?) intuitively seem to me to pair well with group-based platforms and community building.
Cool to see so many peeps on the Fedi!
While I haven’t used uv (been kinda out of Python for a while), and I understand the concerns some have, the Python community getting concerned about good package/project management tooling is certainly a telling “choice” about how much senior Python devs have gotten used to their ecosystem. Somewhat ditto about concern over using a more performant language for fundamental tooling (rather than pursuing the dream of writing everything in Python, which is now surely dead).
So Simon is probably right in saying (in agreement with others):
while the risk of corporate capture for a crucial aspect of the Python packaging and onboarding ecosystem is a legitimate concern, the amount of progress that has been made here in a relatively short time combined with the open license and quality of the underlying code keeps me optimistic that uv will be a net positive for Python overall
Concerns over maintainability should Astral go down may best be served by learning rust and establishing best practices around writing Python tooling in compiled languages to ensure future maintainability and composability.
Yea the writing had been on the wall for a while AFAIU. I don’t know what lessons are to be gleaned from its story, but I’d bet at a basic level it’s that building new social media spaces is not easy. An old school forum is likely fine. But a whole platform with all of the expectations and features people have today, hard if not impossible.
It seems to be almost entirely about temperature/climate ... warm weather = eat at night when it's cool.
Searching for some cultural factors then becomes the interesting question. Which places offer food in spite of their climate?
Scrolling through the linked page and its maps, South America, India and South East Asia (eg Thailand etc) stand out.
Southern cities in South America such as Buenos Aires seem to have a night life despite being rather south (and therefore presumably cool), compared at least to more northern/warmer cities.
Similarly, Indian cities seem to do late night food (which I've heard is generally a thing in Indian culture, to eat dinner relatively late) while south east asia, which I presume is just as warm, doesn't do late food.