A question for your: would it be interesting to somehow be able to follow my sprawling research before I synthesize my ideas and implementations?
I don't particularly consider any of my digging "secret" and I'm thinking about how I should gather my notes. For example I'm currently trying a bunch of things and digging around in Membrane, Fediverse, Nerves Livebook for workshop/training and some ML/AI around Bumblebee. If there is interest there could be a public repo in whatever form I end up doing. Let me know (you can reply to this message).

Oh, and new year, new budgets right.  If you want to pin down me or my team for some work in the coming year. Good time to start that conversation now. Business, business :P

✨ I'm very excited to actually get rolling with the Elixir CTO project. I will be sharing more in the new year but anyone interested can sign up to be notified when it launches ✨

If I interviewed you for this and you agreed to be notified your are already on the list.

Open Alternatives

It has been taken as a fundamental law of the universe for a long time that open source alternatives to proprietary software is mostly crappy variants that you either choose because of ideals or lacking means (that's a euphemism for not having money).

Occasionally there are open tools that are exceptionally useful in what they do and whether they have warts becomes entirely irrelevant. ffmpeg comes to mind, the underpinning of all media processing anywhere. But I rarely see this about end-user software.

Big aside: I was planning on writing this email about the technical challenges of scaling the Ruby on Rails Mastodon and how I expect the Akkoma project built in Elixir to be a fair bit better in that regard. I veered off into other topics. But do read that Mastodon/Rails link. And consider Akkoma. If you know Phoenix you can contribute to Akkoma and that powers genserver.social where all the Elixir is.

GIMP is not known to be the smoothest graphics tool though it is very capable. VLC is not popular for it's beauty and smoothness but rather that it'll wrangle ANYTHING. [Open|Libre]Office is probably one of the most adopted open source alternatives and that is in my mind because it is free (moneywise) and good enough as most people use a fraction of their office suites. These tools tend to expose a few more knobs and settings than the proprietary cousins. Which is a thing I love about VLC for example. In many ways it behaves like software from the 90s and that's a great powerful thing. It is however hard to make approachable.

Where the open and free has made the most impact is under the surface of what the user sees. Protocols, standards and infrastructural software. The whole server world runs on open software. The proprietary tools are practically the alternatives there.  This is where the open source world has done the best job. It is an environment where all the knobs options and power is wanted, needed and accepted.

Enter the influx of Twitter users to Mastodon. I don't particularly want to speak to the cultural friction of it all. That's a thing, certainly, but overall this is a massive migration of users from a proprietary system to an open one.

I've heard a lot of complaints about the UX. Primarily about picking an instance. I don't really care about anyone "solving" that because I don't think Mastodon should paper over the fundamentals of how it works. I think making the choice easy and clear would be good but overall it is, hopefully, a momentary choice and then you are off tooting.

Search and discovery are the only other UX gripe I've heard and I generally agree that that's a poor/weird experience but I also don't actually need that very much. I did use Twitter search to find people and old posts a fair bit. I think finding posts and people might be easier with a general search engine now. The default Mastodon UI has been pretty good to me. The official app and the alt apps I've tried have been respectable. I'm curious to try Ivory when that becomes available.

An enormous advantage is that there are no ads and no agenda to drive engagement. The instances don't need to drive activity, that's actually mostly annoying for them. Some might run ads in the future, but you can essentially pick instances based on their rules and business model if you are particular about it.

I think Mastodon offers the base functionality that many (not all) people needed from Twitter and I think it has a strong chance to become a fact of life on the Internet for a lot of us. This excites me. Not particularly because of Mastodon but because this is the second example the common user will encounter of something federated. Everyone accepts name@domain.tld for email by now. The fediverse and ActivityPub might do that for .. everything.

It has disadvantages aplenty. We know this from email. But everyone knows how to use email. Email is the fallback. The bedrock foundation of communication online. And we have not had as impactful a standard gain adoption in a long time (that I can recall).

If we see organisations such as newspapers, cities/municipalities and states start running their own Mastodon instances I think we have some serious progress. An outward-bound, publishing channel that they can control, take responsibility for and operate according to their practices and regulations, as they've done with email since forever, that'd be very useful. And they can benefit from the spread through the fediverse much like they broadcast their activities on Twitter but without buying into a weird commercial platform.

This is already a thing by the way. If you haven't seen EU Voice you can see some admittedly very dull EU-related publishing. Oh, and here is their PeerTube instance EU Video. The requirements for transparency and openness that apply to the public sector means that open protocols, standards and source should be a no-brainer. It hasn't been unfortunately. I've seen preschools use Instagram for documenting their activities, Facebook groups in official school use and many other similarly egregious mistakes.

There is an english summary at the end of this mostly swedish post about recommendations to use Element/Matrix in the public sector.

This has always been the approach that should have been taken I think. The GDPR is tightening the screws on use of Microsoft 365 and that means Teams might no longer be acceptable. Wouldn't that be a thing. Reaching your city officials over an Element client. The thing that used to be called Riot :D

I can see a seed of hope for a future where more open alternatives take the stage. For legal reasons. For being less creepy to the general public. For being not run by megalomaniacal billionaries. If you are sick of Instagram being increasingly ad-infested. Try Pixelfed. Concerned about Amazon owning Goodreads? Try Bookwyrmm. I'm deeply considering some PeerTube for hosting my videos. I don't think we'll be rid of proprietary platforms entirely. But the spotlight has suddenly shifted to shine some light on the alternatives and that just might cause a pendulum swing and put things in more of a balance.

What can we do? Pick something you care about and consider running an instance for it. Or contribute to running an instance. Or help fund an instance. We as developers get what this takes, we know how to fix problems in these applications, we have the capacity to enable the journey of normal users away from awful platforms.

Is it sustainable? I bet you can make a good business offering fediverse hosting to local goverment, companies that want to control their presence and so on. Here in the EU there is a growing need for EU-owned and operated companies offering SaaS hosting and managing operations for orgs that shouldn't take that on themselves. I could see this type of market be a good contributor to the fediverse at large.

This went long  and I must return to my time off with family so I'm unable to edit it down further. My apologies.

Am I being vastly over-optimistic or have your hopes been raised as well? Or do you think it is bad and wrong to fediverse? I'm reachable at lars@underjord.io or as @lawik@fosstodon.org.

Happy new year if this is your new year :)

Thanks for reading as always.