Blue-er Skies
I’m writing this to you shortly after the 2025 Canadian Federal election where the Liberals won by a slim margin over the Conservative party, aided by Donald Trump’s recent rhetoric about Canada being the “51st state” and how that really didn’t land with Canadians. Luckily for those of us who don’t vote Conservative, they’d hitched their wagon a little too tightly to the conservatives down south and couldn’t do enough damage control to separate themselves once Trump became unfavourable with their voter base. So the pendulum swung and the Liberals picked up the win. Two party leaders lost in their own ridings, really wild stuff, so if you’re at all politically inclined then check it out.
With how close we came to a Conservative government, it got me thinking about how ephemeral things can be. One moment you’ve got access to a piece of software, a website, or a device. The next moment, TikTok gets banned (a real thing that kinda sorta happened in the USA). A major reason I’m writing this newsletter and occasionally streaming on Twitch is to bring awareness to software that is (hopefully) less ephemeral. Stuff that you can run on your own server, keeping it alive when the original may go down. I’m a big fan of protocols that allow for federation, replication, etc. Mastodon, and its protocol ActivityPub, lets folks socialize across a bunch of different networks. You can follow someone’s Lemmy server (open Reddit alternative) from your Mastodon account (open Twitter alternative), and post videos to a PeerTube server (open YouTube alternative). The possibilities are practically endless, and that’s just one protocol. BlueSky uses the AtProto protocol, which is growing, with some new apps recently launched like an Instagram clone and a video-sharing app, all leveraging BlueSky’s current authentication and federation systems.
I think that’s enough to get you started exploring a whole new world: The Fediverse, and whatever BlueSky’s ecosystem is called… The Sky or something lofty like that maybe.
Cheers,
Tig