Technology's consumerization[1] has crushed & squeezed out all the earnest genuine enthusiasm & excitement that personal computing & earlier conmected computing brought about. There's no on ramps for humanity to engage in the mediums, to participate & create as a peer tp technology where we are: we are deeply deeply downstream of the act of creation & creativity, using strokes & lines already assembled before us.
Nothing obstructs computing from re authenticating itself, from becoming more than a industrialist workshop. Personal computing will happen again. Open source desktops and phones are doing ok, but the bar is higher- personal computing needs to meet society's new raosed bar & be more connected, working across systems, working across people. Personal systems need modernized technical underpinnings, with coherent, respected, operationalized basis, that both newcomers can start to learn and onboard into, but which the advanced seasoned developer also finds fit to purpose, is interested in tinkering on.
Finding thr community & time to grow, to bridge humanity & technics is a slow project, a much loftier, nobler, harder, & more important quest than selling product. Technics matter in this world. Finding alignment between parties matters, is much harder. Many different pieces need to flow together, each particular & important, building up & up the stack, towards a competitive, flexible, malleable, comprehendible medium of computing. All based around standards, if at all possible, to stir diversification & groth & prevent ossification.
Personally, there's a couple projects i'd list as contendors to re-owning computing: ActivityPub, Kubernetes, Pulsar, Gitea, ForgeFed, Json-ld/rdfa/microdata. Projects like Node-Red, Tekton, Matrix/Xmpp, and Yunohost and the home-cloud folks inspire me greatly & show aspects that are important, but im not sure i believe in them as quite right enough to fully endure. There's still a huge missing hole for what front end systems work & make sense but there are at least lots of interesting social systems built on ActivityPub, matrix and xmpp.
More than the tech itself, I see there as so little joint community. So many dispirate partiuclar projects, of great promise & potential, but in their lane. Becoming more generic, more flexible, creating assemblage we can jointly believe in & practice on is key. We have to find new paths where we can go it together.
Nothing obstructs computing from re authenticating itself, from becoming more than a industrialist workshop. Personal computing will happen again. Open source desktops and phones are doing ok, but the bar is higher- personal computing needs to meet society's new raosed bar & be more connected, working across systems, working across people. Personal systems need modernized technical underpinnings, with coherent, respected, operationalized basis, that both newcomers can start to learn and onboard into, but which the advanced seasoned developer also finds fit to purpose, is interested in tinkering on.
Finding thr community & time to grow, to bridge humanity & technics is a slow project, a much loftier, nobler, harder, & more important quest than selling product. Technics matter in this world. Finding alignment between parties matters, is much harder. Many different pieces need to flow together, each particular & important, building up & up the stack, towards a competitive, flexible, malleable, comprehendible medium of computing. All based around standards, if at all possible, to stir diversification & groth & prevent ossification.
Personally, there's a couple projects i'd list as contendors to re-owning computing: ActivityPub, Kubernetes, Pulsar, Gitea, ForgeFed, Json-ld/rdfa/microdata. Projects like Node-Red, Tekton, Matrix/Xmpp, and Yunohost and the home-cloud folks inspire me greatly & show aspects that are important, but im not sure i believe in them as quite right enough to fully endure. There's still a huge missing hole for what front end systems work & make sense but there are at least lots of interesting social systems built on ActivityPub, matrix and xmpp.
More than the tech itself, I see there as so little joint community. So many dispirate partiuclar projects, of great promise & potential, but in their lane. Becoming more generic, more flexible, creating assemblage we can jointly believe in & practice on is key. We have to find new paths where we can go it together.
[1] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/02/cons... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317827