53: Fediverse reflections while the bird burns

Blender, the absolute powerhouse of FOSS 3d (and increasingly 2d) graphics! We give an overview of the software's history, some personal history of our relationships to the software, what it can do, and where we're excited to see it go!Links:BlenderBlender historyGrease pencilSome historical Blender videos from the NeoGeo and Not a Number days: Did It, Done It, Not a Number commercial, Come and SeeElephants Dream, aka Project OrangeBig Buck BunnyPrevious episodes on blender:Blender for open movie productions and educationSophie Jantak on pet portraits and Blender's Grease PencilBlender Conference videos mentioned:Inklines Across The SpiderverseMy Journey Across the Spider-Verse: from Hobbyist to HollywoodForensic Architecture - spatial analysis for human rights casesThe MediaGoblin campaign video (well, the second one)14th anniversary animation gift to MorganIn Unexpected PlacesSeams to Sewing Pattern (a Blender plugin for making clothes and stuffed animals!) (could we make Free Soft Wear patterns with it?)Wing It!Wing It! Production Logs and BlenderheadsEpisodes about lisp, because obviously Blender needs more lisp (who's going to do it):What is Lisp?Lisp but Beautiful, Lisp for Everyone

How do you survive in a world that is no longer optimized for making your own clothing when you suddenly find that modern conveniences no longer accommodate you? As a textile historian, Morgan has been ruminating for years about women’s contributions to the domestic economy, the massive time investment of producing clothing for a family, and the comparative properties of different textile fibers. These research interests were informed by a lifetime of sewing and other fiber crafts. None of this experience, however, properly prepared her to face the reality of needing to rely on her own hands to provide large portions of her own wardrobe.Guest co-host Juliana Sims sits down with Morgan to talk about how, in the wake of a recently developed allergy to synthetic fabrics, she now finds herself putting that knowledge of historical textile production to use to produce clothing that she can wear.Links and other notes:Morgan presented this as a (much shorter) talk at the Dress Conference 2023Slides from the presentationMorgan's Dissertation, which we also coveredRSI Glove PatternThe quote that Morgan somewhat misremembered about a woman preparing wool before the winter:"A thrifty countrywoman had a small croft, she and her sturdy spouse. He tilled his own land, whether the work called for the plough, or the curved sickle, or the hoe. She would now sweep the cottage, supported on props; now she would set the eggs to be hatched under the plumage of the brooding hen; or she gathered green mallows or white mushrooms, or warmed the low hearth with welcome fire. And yet she diligently employed her hands at the loom, and armed herself against the threats of winter." -- Ovid, Fasti 4.687-714

Back again with governance... part two! (See also: part one!) Here we talk about some organizations and how they can be seen as "templates" for certain governance archetypes.Links:Cygnus, CygwinMastodonAndroidFree Software Foundation, GNUSoftware Freedom Conservancy, Outreachy, Conservancy's copyleft compliance projectsCommons ConservancyF-DroidOpen CollectiveLinux Foundation501(c)(3) vs 501(c)(6)StitchtingFree as in FreedomLKML (the Linux Kernel Mailing List)Linus Doesn't ScaleSpritely Networked Communities InstitutePython and the Python Software Foundation, PyCon, the Python Package IndexPython PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals), XMPP XEPs, Fediverse FEPs, Rust RFCsBlender, Blender Foundation, Blender Institute, Blender StudioBlender's historyElephants DreamMozilla Foundation and Mozilla CorporationDebian, Debian's organizational structure, and Debian's constitutionEFFOh yeah and I guess we should link the World History Association!

Governance of FOSS projects, a two parter, and this is part one! Here we talk about general considerations applicable to FOSS projects! (And heck, these apply to collaborative free culture projects too!)Links:Why We Need Code of Conducts, and Why They're Not Enough, by Aeva BlackBlender Cloud and the Blender Development Fund

WebAssembly! You've probably heard lots about it, but what the heck is it? Is it just for C and Rust programs? Can you write it by hand? (Do you want to?) And wait, how is Spritely getting involved in WebAssembly efforts? Find out!Links:WebAssemblyHoot! (and Hoot announcement, Andy Wingo joining, Robin Templeton joining)Lisp Game Jam - "Wireworld" - Hoot's low level WASM tooling in actionDirectly compiling Scheme to WebAssembly: lambdas, recursion, iteration!Understanding the WebAssembly text formatWebAssembly GC proposalEpisode 49: Lisp but Beautiful; Lisp for EveryoneWASIPOSIXEpisode 17: Gardening, from seedling to seasonedConway's Game of LifeWASM-4Episode 46: Mark S. Miller on Distributed Objects, Part 1Schism by Eric Holk

F-Droid, a repository of free software for your Android devices! Christine interviews F-Droid developers Sylvia van Os and Hans-Christoph Steiner as well as F-Droid board member and chair... Morgan Lemmer-Webber!Links:F-DroidSylvia van OsHans-Christoph SteinerF-Droid board announcementGuardian ProjectGoogle Play bans Matrix/ElementCatimaYour app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell

In yet another deep dive into yet another weird hobby of Christine's, we talk about how to make your own dehydrated meals! Why the heck would you want to do this? Well, maybe you want more consistent or dietary needs friendly travel food! Maybe you want to go camping or hiking! Maybe you're sick of deciding what's for lunch and you just want to scoop a cup of meal out of a jar on your desk every day! Maybe you want to weird out your fellow conference-goers as you turn a dry powder into a fully cooked meal with hot water and hot water alone!Links:Making dehydrated meals overview (Christine's Kitchen 0): [YouTube] [PeerTube]Backpacking chefDishwasher cooking (yes it is a thing)

Morgan talks about "Free Soft Wear": textile processes under free culture licenses!Links:Morgan's talk about Free Soft Wear at the Creative Freedom SummitElena of Valhalla’s repository of CC BY-SA sewing patternsMorgan's blogFree Soft Wear indexDice bag and simple skirt tutorialsRSI Glove patternSimple sweaterLayered SkirtKat Walsh or @[email protected] Dog Electronics face mask (You may recognize Dan and Tall Dog Electronics of TinyNES fame)Wikimedia CommonsProject GutenbergLearning the sewing machineRSI episodeFreeSewing (an open source software project that creates made-to-measure creative commons licensed sewing patterns)

Everyone goofs sometimes. Today we talk accidents... some happy, some not!Links:Decaf coffee and history of penicillin, your pop-sci "accidents of history" stories of the day. Look, this is admittedly kind of a fluff episode.Have we linked to Worse is Better before? We did? In the lisp episode?And here's the Terminal Phase episode

Twitter is burning, and people are flocking to the fediverse. Is the fediverse ready though? How did we get here? Where should we be going? Since Christine is co-author of ActivityPub, the primary protocol used by the fediverse, Morgan decides it's time to get Christine's thoughts recorded and out there... so we hop in the car as we talk all about it!Links:ActivityPub, the protocol which wires the federated social web together, of which Christine is co-author! Be sure to check out the Overview section... it's actually fairly easy to understand!Some of the implementations discussed (though there are many more):MastodonPeertubePixelfedPleromaA lot has been written about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. Here's a pretty decent timeline (though it's missing the transphobia stuff).W3C Social Web Working Group is where ActivityPub was standardizedOcapPub (while not complete, it lays out a lot of the core problems with the way the fediverse has gone)The Spritely InstitutePrevious episodes on Spritely: What is Spritely?, Spritely Updates! (November 2021), and sorta kinda the Terminal Phase episodeThe Presentation of Self on a Decentralized Web (PhD dissertation by ActivityPub co-author Amy Guy, partly covers its standardization)SMTP and XMPP can be seen as decentralized "social networks" before that term took offOStatuspump.io is where the pump.io API came from, which is the direct predecessor to ActivityPubStatusNet / GNU SocialDiasporaMediaGoblinAPConf videosContext CollapseEarly writeups from Christine some of these ideas, but are old:ActivityPub: from decentralied to distributed social networksmagenccrystalgolem