Busy week coding -- but there was one delightful article that led me down a small rabbit hole of Richard P Gabriel's writing about "worse is better" from 1989/90. The hub for this idea is here: Richard P. Gabriel: "Worse Is Better", https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html And I found it via: Christine Lemmer-Webber: "How decentralized is Bluesky really?", 2024-11-22, https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ The idea of "worse is better" got connected to Gall's Law, and loosely relates to why idealistic, big software rewrites fail so often. And why things that are imperfect but provide value proliferate.

"Queer people built the Fediverse," she said, adding that four of the five authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer. As a result, protections against undesired interaction are built into ActivityPub and the various front ends. Systems for blocking entire instances with a culture of trolling can save users the exhausting process of blocking one troll at a time. If a post includes a “summary” field, Mastodon uses that summary as a content warning.