The German government has setup a sovereign tech fund. It will fund open source technology because “the open source ecosystem serves as the foundation for society's innovative strength, competitiveness and democracy. Digital sovereignty is the self-determined use of digital technologies and systems by individuals, industry, and governments. “

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Third time this has happened this year. This is the first time I caught it on video, unfortunately they knew there was a security camper and covered their faces.

This is a really interesting idea and alternative to the way we could do custom algorithms with DVMs. View quoted note →

The Bluesky team has an academic paper describing the protocol that’s a pretty good high level but somewhat technical overview. It includes how they see Bluesky compares to Secure Scuttlebutt, Nostr, Farcaster, and ActivityPub/Mastodon. I think folks who are building Nostr apps or advocating for it in comparison to Bluesky would do well to read it to understand what they’re doing and how we’re different. We should also write up one for Nostr.

arXiv.org

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in ...

GN

@New_ Public is a research group looking in to how to make social media a heathier space for everybody. They just put out a presentation on how to make local digital communties that work. I’d love to be able to build these communities on top of Nostr. Here’s the slides: https://bit.ly/local-digital-spaces A lot of their research is looking at FrontPorchForum.com , which is a social network only for Vermont, but it’s REALLY popular in Vermont… 80% of households and 50% of adults in the state are active on Front Porch Forum.

New_ Public

Front Porch Forum | New_ Public

Does social media have to be toxic and chaotic? Front Porch Forum, a homegrown, family-owned platform in Vermont, may be a powerful and informative...

One thing which jumps out from this is how groups or community spaces need a steward for a community. Somebody to welcome newcomers, set norms, sometimes moderate, and generally be the welcomer. Just like physical spaces tend to have people who steward them. New Public has a guide for strewarding a digital community:

newpublic on Notion

Creating a Flourishing Digital Public Space for Your Local Area | Notion

A how-to guide for admins and moderators of inclusive, uplifting, and public-spirited local Facebook groups, Discord servers, subreddits, and more...

Right now we’ve got several kinds of groups, from just access restricted relays to a bunch of group nips… I think if we look at what works elsewhere it can inform how we build them on Nostr.

So Twitter is seeing a bunch of folks leave and join Bluesky because Twitter is changing the way its blocks work to be like Bluesky?

Why are blocks on Bluesky public? | Bluesky

The technical implementation of public blocks and some possibilities for more privacy preserving block implementations — an area of active resear...