Nerd about the fediverse, based in Portland, Oregon. 🌲 Nice to meet you! 👋

Blog & Podcast: jaredwhite.com
On Mastodon: @jaredwhite@indieweb.social

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2024

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  • You seem to be incorrectly stating what is on Wikipedia, which leads:

    The fediverse (commonly shortened to fedi)[1][2][3] is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol.

    That last bit is absolutely key: a collection of services using a common protocol. Imagine if two different email servers didn’t both speak SMTP. Imagine if two different web services didn’t both speak HTTP. The Internet as a singular entity is only made possible because of protocol interop between all of its constituent parts.

    To say “the fediverse” is comprised of multiple incompatible protocols goes against that grain, and to go back to pre-ActivityPub-as-W3C-specification days as an argument that it’s fine to label multiple incompatible protocols as all being components of “the fediverse” is a stretch.

    To me, this isn’t a let’s-agree-to-disagree-issue, honestly. While the term “fediverse” is arguably colloquial and doesn’t necessarily imply any specific technical attributes, it ceases to be useful as a term if Fediverse Platform A cannot in any way communicate with Fediverse Platform B because the two platforms happen to be using 100% incompatible protocols. Aside from a third-party bridge, the AT protocol used by Bluesky is 100% incompatible with ActivityPub used by Mastodon, Threads, and others. Therefore, they cannot both be simultaneously services in the fediverse.



  • I’m totally fine with the SWF engaging with Meta just like they would any other entity building software using ActivityPub.

    Funding on the other hand is a different story. It sounds like Meta contributed to an overall fund in order to launch the SWF. OK, I suppose — but if there’s specific funding down the road for some specific project or funding in some way which appears to influence decision-making on which projects to work on or how to approach them, that’s when I have a huge problem with it.


  • Test in screen readers and see how content is being announced.

    Lists have certain semantics which are very useful. Definitely good in navigation (aka nav > ul > li).

    Grids are also useful BTW—we don’t have specific “grid” tags in HTML, but using ARIA attributes you can set up grids which might map onto div tags or even custom elements.

    Personally, I’m much less concerned about ul/li than I am “div tag soup” which is a plague upon modern web development. Use div tags sparingly, and almost always see if you can reach for either (a) a more semantic HTML tag (e.g., key/val pairs should probably be dl/dt/dd tags, not list tags), or (b) custom elements…yes, authoring tags with one or more hyphens which are purely for developer comprehension and hanging CSS off of is perfectly fine—recommended in fact—and in some cases if you need some JS component logic as well, then boom you have web components.







  • I all for removing barriers to entry in this space, and if you’re talking about self-hosting everything and wiring up all sorts of bits and bobs of various services together manually, yeah, it’s very technical and daunting. But somebody can get started on Ghost, or WordPress.com, or Buttondown, or ConvertKit or whatever. Lots of ways to write early and often online. Buzzsprout is pretty rad for podcasting as well.

    The problem usually boils down to distribution like Nilay said, not hosting. Fediverse seems like a real solution here. Honestly I’ve never been as successful at both blogging and podcasting as I am right now. This isn’t merely a glimpse of some old-school internet nostalgia trip. It’s a whole new world out there and it’s actually better. 🤩




  • Opt-out is bullshit, it’s unethical. Unless people specifically give their consent to their content being used for training data, and are compensated if they wish to be compensated for that privilege, then it’s just not morally defensible. Legally defensible? Sure, maybe so. But we don’t like to support companies who are merely abiding by the letter of the law, we want them to abide by the spirit of the law and of treating their customers with respect and consideration. This is not that at all. 😕



  • “physically easy”

    Sure, because our necks, backs, and hips are all feeling so great all the time with these long hours at the desk.

    “pays well”

    Some tech jobs are connected with living in places with high living expenses, not to mention some tech jobs aren’t at Big Tech firms so the pay is lower. Struggling with finances doesn’t magically disappear because you’re good at code.

    “people think you’re smart”

    lolololol said every person ever who isn’t white man passing or perhaps presenting as one of the “privileged” minority classes.

    Look, do I agree tech jobs on average are appealing compared to many other professions? Sure! But minimizing—verging on gaslighting—the very real harms people may suffer while working in tech is irresponsible. Our industry has a long way to go to provide real equality, equanimity, and stability.


  • Someone in your organization needs to be in charge of frontend fidelity. I don’t mean an official job title, I just mean someone who has taken it upon themselves to have a “the buck stops here” mentality—better yet someone who is recognized by the rest of the team to have that priority.

    If nobody else fits the bill, then that person is you. And by all means, make all the stink you want about these issues. Nobody should ever be touching global stylesheets that affect multiple components or screens throughout the system without there being subsequent review or issues filed in a very visible way. Ideally, those sorts of breaking changes would never make it through code review in the first place.