A leap of faith: Committing to open source
github.com
github.com
I've fired up and taken down multiple attempts at blogging, I don't know if anything I've written was worth keeping but still, the information is lost.
I think this battle could be won in the tooling -- if all/most of the static website tools that you'd use support RSS, you can expect that it will show up (Hugo, Gatsby, VuePress, etc).
[0]: https://gohugo.io/
Adding an offering of developer blogging seems like a slam dunk if they want to continue being a fixture of developers world wide. Arguably it's not so great for other alternatives (GitLab, BitBucket, etc) and more lock-in is probably not great, even if the garden aren't locked around us right now.
[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-yo...
Whether I/we can blame them or not, it does feel good that there are some other business models in the space, I personally am a huge fan of GitLab[0] (I pay for an upgrade membership though it's nothing crazy), and on the more home-brewed front there's HN darling sourcehut[1]. Honestly if I was a GitLab project manager that browses HN... I might try and shark this idea -- you already "pay" for Gitlab Pages, why not streamline it, offer a netlify-like experience on top of it and try to get there ahead of Github?
[EDIT] - the "them" in "can you blame them" is intended to be the early Github team and/or their Microsoft equivalents. People like to put out good PR releases, but selling means something. The people who sold are aware of the the risks of selling and the loss of control/vision. Along with that realization/knowledge I think it's expected for them to have felt some fatigue/been expectant of some recompense for supporting open source as much as they have over the years.
I was moving from Medium (not a fan of their paywall practices and medium.com posts tend to fare poorly on HN). Didn't know dev.to existed until after I tried out HashNode. Didn't consider self-hosted as I just couldn't be bothered.
[0]: https://dev.to/pnehrer/a-story-of-rusty-containers-queues-an...
[1]: https://this-week-in-rust.org/blog/2020/08/26/this-week-in-r...
The difference between user generated content and curated content is a big enough differentiator that I don't think it'd be a death sentence.
However, the article doesn't address the most obvious question, how does Henry fund this activity?
If an open source maintainer relies on GH sponsors, Patreon, Open Collective then they are going to have to invest time in marketing themselves to the community. It's an odd dynamic.
Open source / Free software has been valued over $400 billion, and supports our entire economy, funding developers shouldn't be a problem.
Open source / Free software is a public goods issue, and we should be looking for the best ways to support them.
Quadratic funding could be a useful mechanism for this:
Patreon after the recent incident make me trust less and less centralised players. Seems like a power corrupt symptom
> I currently host two podcasts studio_microphone: Hope in Source and Maintainers Anonymous.
This isn't very typical of open source creators, but for people who want to live off donations, it's a big help, because it helps building a fanbase of people, of which a subset then donates to you. Basically the same model as of a youtuber, who also creates content and uses patreon because youtube's unilateral and weird decisions to demonetize people or change their compensation on a whim.
Furthermore, it really depends on which area you work in. It seems that in the js ecosystem, it's possible to live off donations, but the js ecosystem is gigantic, and many people make money building js stuff.
IDK the people who can live off donations are an extremely tiny subset of all open source maintainers. For most people it's as unattainable as living from your proceedings of being a youtube star, and even then lots of people want to become youtube stars.
That being said, for the 99%, being in open source is still beneficial, as it opens doors into the jobs world, helps building a portfolio as well as a network, both useful for getting a job.
What was also missing was if he is a 1-man WFH show, or whether they are a team with an office. I don't know Babel really, maybe it's obvious to others. But it would provide context.
I also wondered why NYC. If you are low on funds, or at least your economic base for your project is fragile, why choose such an expensive place to live? If you are WFH anyway (is he?) then some cheap place in the midwest would instantly multiply the buying power of the availabe funds. How to explain to donors that half of their donations go straight into the pockets of the landlord for an overprized tiny apartment?
If so, does that mean that IRC is basically like instant messaging along the lines of AOL Instant Messanger, or Google chat? Or is there something that makes IRC very different?
IRC is "very different" in the sense that it's more open and more freewheeling than, say, Slack. Slack is basically IRC with a slicker coat of paint and more monetization.
But I think I'm getting the idea now. It's a similar idea to a typical instant messenger, except that since the protocol is standard, you have federation that actually works, much like someone who uses gmail can email someone else who uses yahoo.
Plus you have the concept of a channel, which seems to have no direct analog in a typical instant messenger, but seems to be essentially a persistent chatroom that doesn't vanish even if nobody is in the channel at the moment.
Is that about right?
Also these persistent channels are created just by joining the channel with that name; they disappear when the last person leaves. Notably, the first person to join a chatroom gets "operator" status, and thus the rights to change channel settings and kick/ban people etc. So there evolved a culture of bots, who would sit in channels with op status and 'occupy' it in case someone came along; these bots had op status themselves, and were programmed to auto-ban certain users or even domains, and auto-op their owners and their owners' friends. slap me summa dat +o.
And of course, there were the bot wars and the attempts at deliberate netsplits to try and steal op status, which were fun games for the script kiddies, but would really take the piss out of your evening chat when they would come by.
shifto slaps rabidrat around a bit with a large trout
* <nick> <action text>
More generally, on most clients you could use "/me <text" command to do the same thing. And on the protocol level, it was done by a mini-protocol on top of IRC, called DCC (direct client-connection), that would look like:
PRIVMSG #channel :^AACTION text^A
(where "PRIVMSG #channel :text" was a way to send a normal message, and ^A is Ctrl-A).
DCC was also used as signalling for file transfer. Clients wishing to send files would open a high-end port on their machine and send a DCC message with the file name, IP and port to connect to (similar to active FTP).
(yes, I spent an inordinate amount on time on IRC...)
The difference over something like AOL is that IRC is more open. Anyone can run an IRC server, so there was a lot of niche irc networks.
https://freenode.net/ is a popular IRC server for various open source communities.
To whom does each message get sent? This is where channels come in: a "channel" is just a list of currently connected people, and the server relays every message sent to the channel to all the people who's in it.
You can also open "private consversations" (i.e.: channels between only you and another person in the server).
From this very simple model, new features where added over time. Most notably:
- Very early on people realized that trolls are annoying. So... whenever a chanel is created, the first person to join gets "operator" status and can kick other people from the channel, silence them, etc. They can also make other people operators.
- Some severs are federated to form an "IRC Network" (like freenet). These servers are relaying messages between them. For end-clients, it should not matter to which of the servers in the network you are connected to. Federation only works between servers on the same network (there's no federation between networks!).
- Some networks created a small layer of authentication. You can "register" your nickname so the network won't allow other people to use it. Furthermore, you can "register" channels so when they get created the first person to enter doesn't get operator status. The network will only grant such status on that channel to whatever (registered) nicknames you specify, etc.
On this basis, people started creating bots to:
- Build archives of conversations (remember that all of this is ephemeral!)
- Auto-reply to certain "messages" in certain channels.
- Whatever else crosses your mind it has probably been done at some point. IRC is old ;)
They all require a server to relay messages.
Most UI toolkits will render emoji characters according to whatever emoji font you have installed, just like they'll render Cyrillic characters according to whatever Cyrillic font you have.
I'm not sure if you imply that the emoji glyphs are not from a font, because they usually are. To display emojis well, you should have your normal font setup, plus one font for emojis (like [Noto-Emoji]. All desktop applications I use display these glyphs and don't interfere with it. The only example of something overriding your selected font is Slack, which uses small images if it knows the emoji. At least, that is true on my Linux. What Windows does, I have no idea.
[Noto-Emoji]: https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/emoji/