The Atmosphere can win by becoming the foundation for software people already need to use because of real-world relationships.
Software Should Be Allowed to Be Weird - Ewan’s Blog
A fairly large amount of the software I write would probably die in a corporate planning meeting. There would be questions about the target audience, the bu…
Tests Are The New Moat | Daniel Saewitz
As AI becomes better at cloning people's open source work, what ends up becoming most valuable are software contracts, tests, and API surface area. This clashes the incentives of clearly defining your commercialized open source software with protecting it.
Opinion | The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun
We’re entering a new renaissance of software development. We should all be excited, despite the uncertainties that lie ahead.
7 Apps You Can Unlock With Your Bluesky Account - Loam
There’s a whole world of apps growing on top of Bluesky. It’s called the Atmosphere, and you already have the key to all of them.
at-store | Apps on the Atmosphere
Discover apps and tools across the Atmosphere. Find your next favorite app today!
“Policy Without Tools Is Just Poetry” - AT Protocol
Juliet Shen from ROOST joins the show to talk through the Coop 1.0 release, what open-source trust and safety unlocks for new builders, and where AI actually belongs in moderation
Scott Jenson: Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?
The Missing Middle of Open Source
Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.
It’s time to drain the Programmatic Swamp - New Digital Age
"Large parts of the programmatic ecosystem are a scam, and I don't mean slightly inefficient or in need of a tidy-up," writes Daniel Gilbert for New Digital Age...
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
Habitat's road to release: 07 bridging traditional SaaS apps - building [at] habitat
building bridges to the (organizational) atmosphere
psf (@psf@oldbytes.space)
In their article ["Malleable Software"](https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software), Ink & Switch list various ways that modern software applications fail to serve the user: - Software is too rigid: users can’t tailor it to suit their workflow, except by entering the role of programmers. - Software applications are overspecialized "avocado slicers", not general tools like "knives", so their lack of tailorability is keenly felt. - Software doesn’t provide a reasonable learning curve from beginner to expert; in other words, time spent learning an application doesn’t unlock tailorability, instead the end user must learn an unrelated skill like a markup/scripting language or even the tool’s implementation language. - Software applications are increasingly siloed, so sharing data between apps, let alone orchestrating cross-app workflows, is overly difficult. These are real problems. From what I can tell, Ink & Switch are software researchers, and view the problems from a highly technical perspective, focusing on novel infrastructure that enables end-user programmability. They pose questions such as "how do we ease users into programming?" and "instead of shipping a dead, static binary, can we ship a living image containing programming tools allowing it to be modified in arbitrary ways while still running?" These ideas are technologically exquisite, but they fail to provide a gentle learning curve. (cont'd) 🧵
Restate - Build innately resilient distributed apps
Restate is a lightweight runtime that lets developers build innately resilient distributed apps without the complexity tax.
