About 2-3 weeks ago, the Fediverse (the federated social network based on the ActivityPub protocol) was in quite a stir: one of its users announced that soon, it would be possible to follow and interact with BlueSky users and their posts from the Fediverse. This would be made possible using a third-party application, a bridge, that would automatically relay (public) posts back and forth. The kicker: you wouldn't have to move a muscle to be recognised by the bridge, your Mastodon account would be available on BlueSky as soon as anyone there would try to follow you. If you didn't want your posts to be shared on BlueSky, you would have to opt out. Needless to say, this caused a major backlash among the largely privacy-minded, tech-oriented fedi crowd.

There's a certain obsession on social media with "student food", which is frequently used as a term for food that essentially fulfills three criteria: any idiot can make it, you can afford it if you're broke and it doesn't taste like crap. Bonus points if it's healthy. This popularity makes sense: a lot of young people (who are the main audience for these videos) don't have much experience cooking, grocery prices keep rising¹ and good food can be a distraction from the perpetual misery in which we Zoomers tend to find ourselves these days.

A few days ago, I saw a post from Arne Brasseur sharing a concurrency problem and asking people how to solve it in Clojure (given an erroneous solution as the basis).

Combinatory logic is a very strange branch of computer science. It's too much on the math side to be well-known among programmers, and yet it's so stupidly simple that it would take any programmer around 5 minutes to implement the complete set of common combinators in a modern programming language of their choice, regardless of how much they know or care about the topic. Needless to say, a weird niche has formed around it.

Yesterday, I published my resumé of spending a year on the Fediverse: what makes it unique, how it failed to reel in most Twitter users, why it changed my view on social media. That post was pretty abstract – I felt that the concrete challenges of the Fediverse, its current implementation and features are being sufficiently discussed elsewhere. As an addendum to yesterday's post, this one is more concrete: I'd like to share my thoughts on current "Twitter-like" social networks and the reasons why I don't use them.