my wife wants to shave racing stripes into our cat AMA
Most of the time, I don’t feel like a technical wizard, or a product visionary, or an inspiring leader, or an empathetic community builder, or anything like that.
Most of the time, I feel like a plumber. Just trying to keep the pipes hooked up, plugging leaks, keeping the raw sewage away from the drinking water.
I’m ok with that.
Possible futures for Bridgy Fed
People regularly ask me whether Bridgy Fed is ready to scale and support more users. It’s a technical question, but their underlying motivation is usually broader: they believe in the social web, and the fediverse(s), and they want them to connect everyone who’s willing, across instances and networks and protocols.
Right now, the answer is, I don’t know. It’s not a technical thing; as an engineer, that part is catnip for me. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and dive in. The more difficult part is organizational. Right now, Bridgy Fed is effectively one person’s side project. I love building and running (and funding!) it, and I have no plans to change that. However, it has basically no organization, governance, or institutional structure. It’s just me.
That’s ok! At least, as long as it continues to be one person’s side project. It’s growing, though, and people are starting to envision it, and bridges in general, as more important parts of the decentralized social web. Load bearing infrastructure.
Hi Bridgy Fed fans! It’s time for another status update, headlined by two big new features.
First, you can now use custom domain handles on accounts bridged into Bluesky! Web sites and fediverse accounts can both do this; click through for instructions. Here’s an example. We’ve been excited about this for a while, we hope it makes bridged accounts feel a bit more like first class citizens.
Second, if you deactivate bridging to Bluesky, you can now undo it and bring back your bridged account! Just un-block and re-follow the bot, or for a web site, file an issue or ping me. This is supported if you first deactivated after 2024-10-22; we’re still working on the rest.
I wish I had a better sense of where gravity comes from. Anyone have a good intuition that they could explain?
I obviously get what it is: apple falls from the tree, etc. And I think I more or less get how it is: Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, curved spacetime, etc.
But I do not get why it is. Why does gravity exist? Why do large accumulations of mass naturally pull other mass toward them? 🧐
One theory I’ve heard is that there’s a universal field, like the Higgs, with particles traveling in all directions and colliding with mass. If you’re near a massive body like a star or planet or moon, it blocks some particles on its side from hitting you, but not from the other side, so the net effect pushes you toward it.
That would make gravity related to volume instead of mass, though, which obviously isn’t right. Still, I don’t remember hearing any other explanations. Does anyone know of any?
Added Farcaster to my social protocols comparison table. Click through for HTML version with text, links, etc. Feedback is welcome!
My sister makes her own greeting cards with a celery heart as a stamp. They turn out pretty great.
Discovered a nasty, days-old data bug in prod just now in an untested code path. Only hit a few users, but still, ugh.
Lesson learned: 90+% test coverage is great, but bugs still happen in the other 10%. It may be harder to test, but do it anyway. If you shipped it then you should have put a test on it. 💍