Rowan Thorpe

Inflected Mushroom

I love this typo/autocorrect. In fact, I think it’s a better name for the band. They should definitely add that “L”.

Anyone who knows enough about Wireguard, iproute2 tools, iptables/nftables, etc (firewall-marking certain packets based on criteria, then directing them through alternate route-tables based on that) can hand-roll split-tunneling, internal point-to-point tunnels/meshes, etc. For (most) people who want to achieve this in a less painful/fragile way, from what I’ve understood it seems Tailscale just does exactly this under the hood in a less arduous and more intuitive way for users, while also providing a static internet-facing ingress point when needed. Headscale exists for those wanting that but with their own static ingress (self-hosted at their own IP) instead of Tailscale’s.

Very well said. I will make a concerted effort to inject “hypernormalization” into my speech more often going forward. For decades I’ve been saying to friends that the reductionist obsession with “normal” (whatever the hell that means) is a cancer to modern society.

In particular it already sounds creepy when you replace usage with its verb-form, e.g. changing “all my friends are normal” to “all my friends have been normalized”. It’s common practise to use a re-encoder to normalize a “background” playlist of songs to the same dB threshold so no single song sticks out and distracts us from what we are trying to focus on while listening. Similarly, authorities of an authoritarian ilk try to normalize populations so none of them stick out and distract from the primary focus (centralization of power and money). Hypernormalization involves taking that to its logical conclusion, telling the vast majority of people “stay in your lane” - meaning “shut up and consume, and when we tell you what to buy you buy it”, AKA be “normal(ized)”).

Just a heads-up to anyone who - like me - thought this was about Radicle and got confused about mentions of caldav/cardav/LDAP… Radicale != Radicle

Although I agree with the implied sentiment that “the Perfect is the enemy of the Good Enough” (especially for low-profile personal web-presence) and that naval-gazing about protocols can become a counterproductive rabbit-hole, sometimes it can also be risky to oversimplify in the other direction without at least parenthesizing the caveats too. For example this “HTTP/1.1 must die” site points out how desync attacks make HTTP/1.1 robustness a bit of a game of Whack-a-Mole. For certain sites (even some personal sites) this can occasionally matter.

This whole instance-tribalism seems very self-defeating to me. Why be decentralised if everyone ends up so boxed off that there are just a handful of isolated instance-clusters talking amongst themselves? It’s like how email (SMTP) is decentralised but the mega-hosts act like a cabal, gatekeeping so strongly (and virtually doing blocklist-by-default for unrecognised servers - even of good standing) ultimately capturing the user-base by undermining the decentralisation. Luckily with DKIM/SPF/DMARC/ARC/etc and stronger anti-trust regulations email seems to be slowly climbing back out of that hole. Unfortunately with all the banal tribalism it feels like much of the new Activitypub based tech users are willfully climbing into that same hole, without even being corralled there by mega-hosts.