I quite enjoyed this write-up, OP 😊

I agree. All of that is very true. That’s why I am comparing it to Dwarf Fortress myself, which is similarly expensive.

Yet, the bias I feel between the two is one I cannot explain.

But I’m sure in a few days I’d consider it a Christmas gift to myself anyway and forget all about how expensive it felt at the moment :]

That does feel a tad bit expensive… Even though Dwarf Fortress is right there for comparison.

For me, trying to read the actual protocol or even tutorials that try to explain the protocol in a more approachable manner, didn’t help at all. It’s no understatement that ActivityPub itself is a mess.

But reading the Fedify documentation and describing “activities” with the library helped a lot more!

Even if you don’t plan on writing Js/Ts, I recommend the Fedify tutorial.

The Persona series as a whole, including the other Shin Megami games… If we count summoning them as playing them, but it’s basically pokémon isn’t it.

Fate/Grand Order also features a huge roster of mythical figures, but actual gods make a far smaller portion of them. Very few games get to feature, Ishtar, and, Quetzalcoatl, together with Shakespeare and Merlin.

Ironically, because there’s no UDP in browsers, we can’t actually get proper p2p on the web. WebRTC through centralized coordination servers at best. Protocol Labs has all but given up on this use-case in favor of using some bootstrapped selection of remote helper nodes.

IPFS has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Ethereum, or indeed any blockchain. It is a protocol for storing distributing and addressing data by hashes of the content over a peer to peer network.

There is however an initiative to create a commercial market for “pinning*”, which is blockchain based. It still has nothing to do with Ethereum, and is a distinct project that uses IPFS rather than being part of the protocol, thankfully. It is also not a “proof of work” sort of waste, but built around proving content that was promised to be stored is actually stored.

Pinning in IPFS is effectively “hosting” data permanently. IPFS is inherently peer to peer: content you access gets added to your local cache and gets served to any peer near you asking for it—like BitTorrent—until it that cache is cleared to make space for new content you access. If nobody keeps a copy of some data you want others to access when your machines are offline, IPFS wouldn’t be particularly useful as a CDN. So peers on the network can choose to pin some data, making them exempt from being cleared with cache. It is perfectly possible to offer pinning services that have nothing to do with Filecoin or the blockchain, and those exist already. But the organization developing IPFS wanted an independent blockchain based solution simply because they felt it would scale better and give them a potential way to sustain themselves.

Frankly, it was a bad idea then, as crypto grift was already becoming obvious. And it didn’t really take off. But since Filecoin has always been a completely separate thing to IPFS, it doesn’t affect how IPFS works in any way, which it continues to do so.

There are many aspects of IPFS the actual protocol that could stand to be improved. But in a lot of ways, it does do many of the things a Fediverse “CDN” should. But that’s just the storage layer. Getting even the popular AP servers to agree to implement IPFS is going to be almost as realistic an expectation as getting federated identity working on AP. A personal pessimistic view.

What if I am robot, Bloomberg? Aren’t you one as well? Would you judge the circumstances of your creation?

I use Penpot for every personal project that I can. The new(ish) grid layout is just beautiful. Figma can’t do that, can it!

Unfortunately, there’s a lot more Penpot can’t do that Figma can. And for any reasonably complex project, or commercial ones, I have to go back to it.

Hopefully Penpot catches up soon! My biggest showstopper right now is variable fonts. If it was possible to manually set CSS somehow, maybe that would help bridge the gap a lot!

Still no Spaces support. Even the short list of rooms I’ve joined are unmanageable when listed flat with no way to identify which Space a #general belongs to

I use the AmazFit Band 7, the last sensibly sized watch that exists it often feels like.

Weather fails to sync, but then it’s probably the least important feature on a watch. The only feature I really wish Gadgetbridge could do that even the official stack can’t is “nap mode”

As a narcoleptic person still recovering from major depression, I wish I could either press a button to silence the watch and set a “smart alarm” for 30 minutes. Even better if it would turn on automatically if it detects me sleeping during the day!

The only other thing GB can’t do is stand in for the phone-side ZeppOS API functionality, but who needs that, let’s be honest!

Fantastic battery life to boot. I have gone two weeks after forgetting to charge it while wearing it almost 24×7!