@gwil@post.lurk.org
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

gwil

@gwil@post.lurk.org

Programmer and illustrator. Working on peer-to-peer networking protocols with Earthstar and the underlying Willow protocol.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

gwil, to random
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In Berlin this weekend for https://offline.place/events/2024/05/24/p4p-unconference/ , happy to talk about willow and/or sheep

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

The Willow Sideloading protocol is a new protocol for securely delivering Willow data by whatever means possible. USB keys, email attachments, torrents, and other ad-hoc means make a “sidenet” we can use to deliver eventually consistent data using the infrastructure users already have.

https://willowprotocol.org/specs/sideloading

gwil,
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

@freebliss that’s exciting, and thank you for the kind words! One of our hopes for the sideloading protocol is that it opens a path for simpler implementations that can gradually ramp up to the more involved WGPS.

gwil,
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

Now implemented in willow-js. https://github.com/earthstar-project/willow-js/releases/tag/0.5.0

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

10+ years ago I made this comic called “The Judge Must Die”. It is for all the people like me who find it hard to let themselves make something and let it go. A decade later, I am still struggling with this. http://gwil.co/tjmd/

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

I’ve spent more energy than I would have liked over the past few days responding to someone here who was stanning for China, bigging up the Belt & Road initiative as a fraternal and “socialist” gift bestowed out of boundless generosity, and ascribing Han anti-Blackness to the wicked Europeans. Let’s all be crystal clear, though, that in its obliteration of Tibetan culture, in its attempted physical erasure of the Uyghur people, in its own deep, organic racism, China is an empire like any other.

gwil,
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@adamgreenfield The invasion of Ukraine was a brutal acid test for whether someone's convictions are based in humanity or the geopolitical equivalent of supporting a football team. So many people I stopped listening to after that.

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

Came by https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/allure-of-sync-engines/ via @liaizon, and this image on a hypothetical ‘sync engine market’ caught my eye.

“This becomes very valuable because now you can have many “sync engines” — e.g. imagine “AWS Sync Engine”, “Azure Sync Engine” etc. — and when one becomes too expensive, or you stop liking it, or they change their terms of service, you can simply switch from one syncing service to another.”

I think we have good reason to believe that such a market would produce standards that’d be impossible to run without big companies at the heart of it all.

As a concrete example, look at Bluesky and their moderation market where the systems are simply too large and complex to be run by ordinary users, so if you want safety you have to rent it.

(^ for more on that, @lrhodes has a lot of good writing on this topic e.g. https://destructured.net/paid-moderation)

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

Im 100% for going back to "having more than 5 websites" and orgs hosting their own forums and git servers and whatnot, but I also absolutely cant handle checking 50 sites and I refuse to handle a million notifications coming to my email.

The next leg of my work after we get this arbitrary-binary-with-metadata format thing working will be to start building the p2p client, and im going to start designing that as a personal read/write webcrawler to pull in notifs and b able to crosspost and whatnot. Remember trillian and pidgin where you could log into AIM and MSN and IRC and etc. In the same client? That was a good idea, lets do more of that.

No new protocols for now, just better bridges.

gwil,
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@jonny Would be very interested to hear about your binary + metadata format if you’ve got anything on that :)

gwil,
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@jonny so I could have a thing which represents an essay with all its revisions, or the entire history of a music library over time? Am I understanding it right?

mauve, to random
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While some folks are trying to move towards "Lets put everything into WASM and WebGPU" I wish more folks would move towards "Lets put everything into standard data formats and let users bring their UI to the data more easily".

gwil,
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@jonny @mauve And I’m very much with you on the growing and mutation and meeting people’s needs. I’d like less structure, more human inference. Less waiting for the consensus of data architects, more slapping bits together now for something someone can see the meaning of.

liaizon, to random
@liaizon@wake.st avatar

Woah @maxrudberg is here. Their Mac OS themes were an entrance to a lot of weird interests in my present life.

gwil,
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@liaizon @maxrudberg Firstly: cool! Secondly: whaaaaat?! Were you active on MacThemes back in the day?

gwil,
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@liaizon Small world! I posted a bit, but was definitely a wannabe among all the people making themes and icons. I remember interviewing David Lanham once for the site.

ShapeShifter! Candybar! Heady days.

gwil,
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@liaizon just found the interview on the wayback machine, bathe in the 2008-era web design: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011204722/http://macthemes2.net/2007/09/21/david-lanham-inside-the-mind-of-an-artist/#more-233

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

“If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.”

The pull quote of this (now pulled) article by Kate Wagner.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240301170542/https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a46975496/behind-f1-velvet-curtain/

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

The next edition of the Willow spec reading club will cover Meadowcap, Willow’s recommended capability system.

This is the spec that has the most to say about how communities and groups can be organised, and the kinds of tools available for moderation, so I think it’s one of the most interesting from the macro perspective.

The spec in question: https://willowprotocol.org/specs/meadowcap/index.html#meadowcap

Event link: https://discord.com/events/780542716940517407/1209035534089850880

22nd Feb, UTC 15 (Melon hour: https://seasonalclock.org/?&hl=melon)

ivory, to random
@ivory@tapbots.social avatar

We are closer to shipping Ivory v1.9! The big feature for this release is the ability to quote posts. If you'd like to test it out, jump back on the TestFlight version of Ivory. We've opened up some more TestFlight beta slots here as well:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/AOOy02ZU

Important Note!
The TestFlight version of Ivory doesn't use your active App Store subscription. You have to subscribe again in TestFlight. You do not get charged real money in TestFlight. It's for testing purposes only.

gwil,
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@ivory Is Ivory built using Nova? :o

computersandblues, to random
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@gwil heya! i see you use deno quite a lot. i like it, too, it feels like it's betting on web standards quite a lot, so maybe targeting deno means writing software that is by default quite portable. that would be nice! however, it's pushed by a vc-backed company that tries to make money using deno-kv and deno-deploy, so i'm a bit worried the next rugpull is right around the corner. any thoughts on that?

gwil,
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

@computersandblues Yeah that’s a concern I share. The portability you mentioned would hopefully be the saving grace if things went bad. I hope they stick to making a nice runtime and upselling on cloud stuff, I’d be annoyed if I had to switch to another (less web standards conformant) runtime.

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

Bedtime.

5yo: … what is three hundred plus one thousand plus one hundred?
Me: one thousand four hundred.
5yo: (slaps forehead) oh my gosh.

(Falls asleep)

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

This week we’re starting a Willow spec reading group. The idea is that we’ll nibble through the specs over time in an interactive format where everyone’s questions can be answered and explored, and we build comprehensive understanding together. Starts this Thursday the 8th at UTC15! https://discord.gg/WbmxKMvk?event=1204031524404461660

Seasonal hours clock time: https://seasonalclock.org/?&hl=melon

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

Spent. Got back from p2p Basel (https://p2p-basel.org/) this week happy but exhausted, and went straight to refactoring a lot of outdated concepts out of willow-js.

But now it’s Friday, the outdated concepts have been replaced by happy, new, spec-compliant concepts, and tests are passing. Ah.

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

More than ever, we need networking protocols which are resilient, privacy preserving, bandwidth conserving, able to run on low-spec hardware, and not quite as preoccupied with being the global network for everyone ever.

We’re delighted to present Willow, a new family of peer-to-peer protocols that cater to just that niche. https://willowprotocol.org is a guide to those protocols, with full specifications, ~50 hand-drawn diagrams, illustrations, and comics, and much more besides.

Our thanks to @NGIZero for supporting this project!

A screen capture of Willow’s Meadowcap specification. It has two drawings of different houses representing the different kinds of namespaces there are in the Meadowcap capability system.

alanz, to random
@alanz@social.coop avatar

@gwil
Congratulations on publishing the Willow Protocol. I look forward to a thousand gardens blooming.

https://willowprotocol.org/

gwil,
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

@alanz 🤫 domain is up but a few more details yet! Thanks though!

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

Found out about Marta (https://marta.sh) this morning, a really nice dual-pane file manager for macOS with stuff like fuzzy search and a built-in termina. There is so much wrong with the Apple ecosystem, but the mac indie software scene is still the best.

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

Good news! #NLnet will be supporting The Earthstar Project once again with another round of funding from #NGI0 Core.

We’ve pulled together a wonderful team (with @glyph and Aljoscha Meyer) to build a Rust implementation of the Willow protocol. This is a novel sync protocol which pushes the envelope on distributed deletion, permissions, and memory and bandwidth efficiency.

https://nlnet.nl/project/WillowSync/

gwil, to random
@gwil@post.lurk.org avatar

@fosdem I was hoping to see the accepted devrooms announced yesterday. When should we expect them?

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