There was a good discussion online between Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the editors of the ActivityPub W3C Standard, and Bryan Newbold, protocol engineer at BlueSky.

• CLW - How Decentralized is BlueSky Really?
• BN - Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization
• CLW - Re: Re: BlueSky and Decentralization

These are long reads. But they are worth reading. Christine and Bryan agree that ATProto and ActivityPub have different design goals and so what you get from “federation” with each is different. ATProto makes a centralized index of the entire system possible, at the cost of relying on very few (practically likely one) centralized providers.

As a result, the Lemmy ecosystem, as it exists today, wouldn’t be possible with ATProto. It would probably look more like Reddit, but with a “credible exit” possible as a defense against enshittification.

Didn’t have to be real, just scary to the powerful.

(Not commenting on truth of whether it happened or not, just a generalization of my observations of the behaviours of the powerful)

I don’t frequent that world much these days, but I personally preferred the agent/pull model when I did. I can’t really articulate why, I think I feel comfortable knowing that the agent will run with the last known config on the machine, potentially correcting any misconfiguration even if the central host is down.

The big debate back in the day was Puppet vs. Chef (before Ansible/SaltStack). Puppet was more declarative, Chef more imperative.

I also admit, I don’t like YAML, other than for simple, mostly flat config and serializing.

I further admit that Ansible just has a bigger community these days, and that’s worth something. When I need to do a bit of CM these days, I use Ansible.

So wait… Did Puppet have a license change as well recently? Is this just preemptive because it looks like Perforce is starting to change things?

The Free Software Foundation requires “CLAs” as well. I have no fear that they’re going to rug-pull. I don’t think we can use that as the indicator. IMO, it’s even a good idea to have a CLA so that’s no conflict that the project owns the code.

The warning for me is if the project is run by a company, especially a VC-backed company. Joplin isn’t, so I would be comfortable using it (although I don’t).

JIRA Data Center: What am I? Chopped liver‽

https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center/jira

Agreed that JIRA is… not the greatest tool.

X2go is the successor to NX and works well IMO, though I’ve never tried Rustdesk to compare.

I’m already on an independent git forge, so I have that covered.

I only read the protocol document and skimmed the guide, so I didn’t see the cryptocurrency angle of the funding company. Yeah, that’s a bit of a warning sign.

Um… It’s literally hosting itself, complete with issues and PRs (which they call patches). So to me it seems to replace a forge.

For private repos, it could be quite a good fit. No need for other contributors/users.

I was looking for something like this as a private alternative to GitHub/GitLab last month. Awesome to stumble across this.

This is interesting because I’ve been thinking about switching from Debian to Arch. I’m already running Nix inside of my Debian installation to get more recent apps (I don’t like how snap interacts with the rest of the system, so I avoid it if I can).

Is there anything else on a more base OS level (like apt v pacman) that you’ve noticed is different, if you’re willing to share?