2024-03-26: Crazy platforms, mission, and little apples
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
2024-03-26: Crazy platforms, mission, and little apples
(Originally posted on the #monologue-danny Slack, which is where folks in the Filecoin Extended Cinematic Universe can jump and ask me questions, set me tasks, and find out what I'm doing. Also available on the Filecoin Foundation Notion🄽, which may have limited access outside our org -- which is why some 🄽-links won't work for you. Blame ACLs! Viva the OCAP Revolution!)
Three Things I Did
Intense conversation — well, intense for 9:30AM — with Brynn O’Donnell🄽. We teased out the balance FFDW’s dynamic between movement core🄽 support, legitimizing blockchain/decentralized storage🄽 social impact work, and what I might describe as “crazy platform co-op, dao, open source, decentralized endeavours” (my favourite). It’s less about how much we divide between these streams, and more about what are the criteria that we use to judge each of these, and how successful we are being. (I swear to God after three years we’re getting a hang of this.)
One of the my goals for this year is to nudge myself, and hopefully Filecoin culture from being an oral, in-the-moment culture (a consequence I think of being remote and Zoom-o-centric), to a more documented, written culture — without slowing anything down 😅. Today we sat in front of a bunch of new docs crafterd from distilled, distributed knowledge — about what are Nucleated Entities🄽, what Data Onboarding Tools🄽 in the ecosystem (here’s a doc that’s public if you can’t access our Notion— please add if you know more), and pooling together what FF has said (internally and externally) about what we do. And they were all useful docs! I mean, I feel like I need to build an Anki deck to remember them all, but still. Plus the ones that are on Notion get sucked into Notion’s RAG AI implementation, for a cheap(ish) AI search.
Fun trying to explain Farcaster to Randy Farmer🄽 of Spritely Institute🄽. He got my description of it as insanely messy, see-what-sticks social network, with all the juice and failings of Web3: lots of innovation, some of it obviously likely to fall off a cliff. Heavy contrast to the (rightly) cautious modes of the Fediverse🄽, BlueSky🄽 and the like, but intriguing. In particular, Frames are a scrappy implementation in the real world of something that Spritely is attempting to do right: making computation as easy to spread, share, and participate in on social media as content. Just having Frames to show people makes it so much easier to explain this as a possibility — something centralized social media will struggle to deploy. Here’s an invite link : if you can’t don’t want to pay the <$10 gating fee, ping me and I’ll send you the sponsored invite.
TIL
If you hit Option-Shift-K on a Mac, you get a little apple: . But it doesn’t display right on any non-Apple machine.
If you have an RSS feed you want to turn into a newsletter (or vice-versa) Buttondown has you covered. (I’m really enjoying Buttondown, though their onboarding is a bit clunky).
Diátaxis is “a systematic approach to technical documentation authoring” which “identifies four distinct needs, and four corresponding forms of documentation - tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation.” (Contrast with DITA, and probably best not to go overboard with enforcing either)
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Do you like these static symbols, but enjoy noise and flashing colours more? Why not subscribe to the DWEB DECODED podcast, where Danny and a cast of thousands talk about similar topics but out loud and toward cameras? Here is one with BAD UNCLE CORY DOCTOROW.
Links
Video breakdown of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse by a shipping expert. Hours after the crash, this was still the best explanation online of what happened. No gore, but I do not like to watch video of someone’s death, and six construction workers are still missing presumed dead from this.
Possibly paywalled quote from the always quotable Byrne Hobart:
The reason Stripe is a decacorn rather than an open source project that raises money from fans on Patreon is that there's enormous economic upside to making purchases work the way they should, and some of that upside was going to inevitably be captured by whoever figured it out.
(Nothing wrong with open source public goods. Stripe levels of usability should be available for everyone).
The Filecoin Mission. Great breakdown from 2020: