Shakes
Harry Hall
@areyouevenreal
- 5 Followers
- 27 Following
- 324 Posts
Insert description of possibly human subject here
ari 
linux distro that removes the kernel to reduce bloat
i'm fedimaxxing rn
for my like, two mutuals who actually have experience with this (and whoever may know a thing or two in general), which part of building fedi software feels more complex; the frontend, or the backend?
i imagine both are an incredible undertaking no matter what you do (not to mention your skillsets may be more geared to one than the other)
with frontend you have to handle supporting all of the many wacky things that other instances do (which itself entails some backend work), while still keeping the thing stable and looking nice for users
with backend you have to build for as much stability as humanly possible when communicating with potentially hundreds of other servers on the regular, especially accounting for whatever weird quirks their particular instance has.
i'd love to hear folks' thoughts on this! 
i imagine both are an incredible undertaking no matter what you do (not to mention your skillsets may be more geared to one than the other)
with frontend you have to handle supporting all of the many wacky things that other instances do (which itself entails some backend work), while still keeping the thing stable and looking nice for users
with backend you have to build for as much stability as humanly possible when communicating with potentially hundreds of other servers on the regular, especially accounting for whatever weird quirks their particular instance has.
i'd love to hear folks' thoughts on this!
if there's one thing i've learned from the past few years of being in the cool, queer part of the internet, it's that identity cannot and should not be a fixed concept.
that said, identity being a fixed concept lies at the core of many services, given the need for accountability (in a professional environment, the absolute last thing you want is to bounce sensitive information around to the wrong person because you were unaware of their recent name or address change)
i think generated UUIDs get us a good part of the way there. give an account this one, traceable ID that rules over all, but is buried so far beneath the surface that no end user would ever need to notice. this allows users to change their identity as they please, without heavily disrupting the information associated with them. by making your UUID the only strict component, everything else can be more free and flexible.
the question "what's in a name" is so deeply rooted in such diverse human culture; we should absolutely never be restricted to two boxes for a "first" and "last" name. display names and handles are a great solution here, too; the handle as a simple, often shorthand string that can uniquely identify a user, and the display name as the open canvas where the user may dub themselves however they wish. often you need only develop software to work with the former (under the hood, the handle should always resolve to the UUID, never replacing it. discord mentions handle this quite well by secretly masking mentions as username tags, when in reality they are direct references to a UUID)
it's unfortunate that old, outdated systems (many of which being government systems rooted in the analogue era where """data centres""" were big filing cabinets) don't implement this stuff more, but we can at least strive as developers to make this a standard going forward. we can make better decisions for future solutions to deliver where our outdated predecessors have previously failed.
that said, identity being a fixed concept lies at the core of many services, given the need for accountability (in a professional environment, the absolute last thing you want is to bounce sensitive information around to the wrong person because you were unaware of their recent name or address change)
i think generated UUIDs get us a good part of the way there. give an account this one, traceable ID that rules over all, but is buried so far beneath the surface that no end user would ever need to notice. this allows users to change their identity as they please, without heavily disrupting the information associated with them. by making your UUID the only strict component, everything else can be more free and flexible.
the question "what's in a name" is so deeply rooted in such diverse human culture; we should absolutely never be restricted to two boxes for a "first" and "last" name. display names and handles are a great solution here, too; the handle as a simple, often shorthand string that can uniquely identify a user, and the display name as the open canvas where the user may dub themselves however they wish. often you need only develop software to work with the former (under the hood, the handle should always resolve to the UUID, never replacing it. discord mentions handle this quite well by secretly masking mentions as username tags, when in reality they are direct references to a UUID)
it's unfortunate that old, outdated systems (many of which being government systems rooted in the analogue era where """data centres""" were big filing cabinets) don't implement this stuff more, but we can at least strive as developers to make this a standard going forward. we can make better decisions for future solutions to deliver where our outdated predecessors have previously failed.
update: PR MERGED TODAY 
gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3746
DRM leasing is coming to gnome wayland!!
gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3746
DRM leasing is coming to gnome wayland!!
