#Zara muss bleiben.
mein.aufstehn.at/petitions/zarableibt-ost...

Dear @capibarabot! Thanks for all the fun but I actually have had enough Capibaras for now. I'll be back, I promise.

@sean @pluralistic The two that you maybe could actually bridge (AcitvityPub and Matrix) are so far apart, regarding what they are for, it's most probably useless as well.

RE: https://mastodon.art/@mobydick/116257327523462293

calm down, Herman, why do you have to be so ominous all the time

@pluralistic This *can not* be the best way. Please have a look how @vagina_museum does it.

Autofahrerland Österreich... Wenn die Spritpreise steigen hüpfen alle auf die Barrikaden.
Meine Vorteilscard kostet jetzt 89 statt 76 in 2025 oder 66 in 2024. Das sind zumindest +17%.
Meine Tickets kosten 2,10 statt 1,90 (2025) oder 1,70 (2024). Zumindest +10%.

Wo sind meine Barriakden? […]

PSA for application developers: when you litter my dot folders with empty directories don't expect them to be there afterwards.

I'm very partial to `find -type d -empty -delete`.

@mattblaze Or "I keep slapping you till you stop crying." :(

@alisynthesis @sberson
As someone who has now spent a couple of nights making my Wireguard setup work I wish for something similar secure but easier to setup.

Der 12-jährige @Plauzer hat auf dem neuen selbstgebauten PC grad als erstes OS Ubuntu installiert.
Bisserl hilfe von mir aber stellt sich recht geschickt an.
*stolzbin*

Square promotional graphic for the Grammar Girl podcast interview. A pale green background with a courthouse façade features large headline text: “Why do we SHOUT in ALL CAPS?” At left, a woman with brown hair rests her chin on her hand and looks thoughtfully at the viewer. At right, guest Glenn Fleishman, wearing glasses, looks off to the side under pink-purple lighting. Labels identify “Grammar Girl” and “Glenn Fleishman.” Icons at the top indicate listening on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, with a QDT logo in the corner and an “Interview” tag.

Did you know people were using capital letters to shout in print as far back as 1856?

This week, I talked with Mastodon's very own technology historian, @glennf, who traced the history of "shouty caps" through centuries of newspapers, old Usenet posts, and even […]

[Original post on zirk.us]

Whale Fall When a whale dies in the open ocean, its carcass sinks to the abyssal floor and becomes an ecosystem. Marine biologists call this a whale fall, and the body sustains life in three overlapping stages: mobile scavengers strip the soft tissue over months, enrichment opportunists colonise the bones and surrounding sediment for years, and chemosynthetic bacteria feed on the skeleton itself for decades, converting the lipids stored in bone into energy that supports entire communities of specialised organisms. A single whale fall can sustain life on an otherwise barren ocean floor for fifty years. Michael Winser mentioned whale fall offhand while we were talking about what happens to the dependency graphs of abandoned projects, and it won’t leave my head. A large open source project goes unmaintained. Maybe the maintainer burns out, maybe the company behind it pivots. The project stops getting updates but doesn’t disappear. It sits on GitHub accumulating issues, its last commit receding further into the past, and somebody forks it to start merging the most urgent patches. If the project was popular enough, multiple forks appear, competing for users the way hagfish compete for blubber, though most die quickly and one or two survive on the strength of someone with enough time or institutional support to keep going. OpenOffice became LibreOffice this way, MySQL became MariaDB, Hudson became Jenkins, each a scavenger fork that grew into the canonical replacement through a familiar sequence of fork announcement, migration guide, and “why you should switch” blog posts. Smaller projects then start extracting specific modules or building tools that target the dead project’s data formats. Google Reader wasn’t open source, but the same thing happened when it shut down: Feedly, Miniflux, FreshRSS, Tiny Tiny RSS, and a dozen others rushed to fill the vacuum, several of them implementing the Google Reader API or the Fever API not because those were good APIs but because years of RSS clients had been built to speak them. The licence didn’t matter. The interfaces were public, other software depended on them, and that was enough. And then the structural skeleton, the protocols and file formats and API contracts, goes on supporting specialised communities that may not even know where the bones came from. OpenDocument Format has outlasted the OpenOffice community that created it, sustained by document format libraries across dozens of language ecosystems. Docker donated its container runtime and image format to the Open Container Initiative in 2015. The OCI spec now defines how containers work regardless of runtime. Docker’s own dominance faded; the spec didn’t. Tree-sitter was built for Atom, and after GitHub archived Atom it became the syntax engine inside Zed, Neovim, Helix, and most editors shipped in the last few years. ### Succession The pattern I keep noticing with unmaintained libraries is successive recolonisation. A project goes quiet, someone forks it, other projects start depending on the fork, and then that fork maintainer burns out too and the whole cycle repeats at a smaller scale. Each generation of fork is typically smaller than the last, with fewer contributors and a narrower user base, until eventually the idea itself migrates rather than the code. Someone in another language ecosystem looks at the accumulated wreckage and decides to rewrite the concept from scratch, carrying the design forward but leaving the implementation behind. Sass went through this. The original reference implementation was a Ruby gem. When Ruby’s performance became a bottleneck, LibSass rewrote it in C++, and the `sassc` gem wrapped that for Ruby users. Then LibSass itself was deprecated in favour of Dart Sass, which is now the canonical implementation. The concept migrated from Ruby to C++ to Dart across a decade, each rewrite benefiting from the accumulated bug reports and design arguments of its predecessors, and at each stage there were wrapper libraries in other ecosystems feeding on the structural skeleton of the Sass language spec. Most people writing Sass today have no idea it started as a Ruby gem. Successive recolonisation has a nasty failure mode. Edera discovered a differential parsing bug in Rust’s tar-rs library that affected every fork downstream: tar-rs itself, async-tar, tokio-tar, and multiple internal forks maintained by companies like Astral (whose fork ships inside the uv package manager). Coordinated disclosure meant contacting around twenty entities across a fragmented fork graph where three of the four library versions were unmaintained and several maintainers were unreachable. The vulnerability existed because the code had been copied forward through successive forks without anyone re-auditing the PAX header parsing that all of them inherited from the original. The bug had been sitting in the bones the whole time, inherited by every fork. Discovering which forks of a package are affected by an advisory is a problem I’m working on separately, because right now nobody has good tooling for it. CentOS after the Stream pivot is the same pattern at operating system scale: Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux forked, smaller RHEL-compatible rebuilds appeared in the enrichment layer around them, and the structural skeleton underneath, RPM packaging, systemd conventions, filesystem hierarchy, persisted unchanged regardless of which particular distribution is alive or dead at any given moment. ### Licence changes When a project switches from an open source licence to a source-available one, the scavenger stage triggers almost immediately, often before the change even takes effect. Redis to Valkey, Elasticsearch to OpenSearch, Terraform to OpenTofu, the pattern by now is familiar enough that the community has it down to a routine: rush to fork the last open commit, compete briefly, and consolidate around one or two survivors. The organism isn’t exactly dead in these cases. Redis the product still has revenue and a roadmap. But from the perspective of the open source ecosystem the body of code has stopped accepting outside contributions, and the forks start drifting from the original the way MariaDB drifted from MySQL. The abstraction layers are the part that lasts. Every project that integrated with the open version faces a choice between following the proprietary version or switching to the fork, and plenty of them just build a compatibility shim instead. Those shims tend to outlast the controversy that created them, feeding quietly on the skeleton of the original API years after the licence debate has cooled off. ### Sun Microsystems Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2010 was less a single whale fall than an entire pod dying at sea simultaneously. Java, Solaris, ZFS, DTrace, VirtualBox, NetBeans, GlassFish, Hudson, MySQL, each sank to a separate ocean floor and spawned its own succession. Some produced single dominant forks (Hudson to Jenkins, ZFS to OpenZFS), others scattered into competing lineages (MySQL alone fed MariaDB, Percona, and briefly Drizzle, which itself became a smaller whale fall when it was abandoned), and some bounced between foundations before settling (NetBeans to Apache, GlassFish to Payara and the broader Jakarta EE ecosystem). The structural skeletons underneath all of it, the JVM bytecode format, the ZFS on-disk format, the MySQL wire protocol, are still load-bearing in projects whose developers have never heard of Sun. ### Shallow water Some projects die in shallow water where the carcass gets recycled quickly. Acqui-hires work this way: the company gets absorbed, the code goes proprietary or gets archived, and the knowledge disperses with the people rather than accumulating in a public carcass that others can feed on. Corporate consolidation has a similar effect, because when a large independent project gets folded into a platform company’s proprietary service, the nutrients get recycled in the water column rather than sinking deep enough for succession to happen. I think the current trend of consolidation under cloud providers is reducing the whale fall rate in open source, and that this has second-order effects on ecosystem diversity that nobody is tracking. You could measure it: look at the fork and dependency graphs of dead projects over time, count how many new projects cite a dead dependency, compare the half-life of a whale fall in npm versus crates versus rubygems. Do some ecosystems have deeper ocean floors, slower decomposition, longer-lasting structural influence? The data exists in package registries and forge APIs, but I haven’t seen anyone ask the question. An open source ecosystem where every large project is owned by a platform company, maintained indefinitely or quietly absorbed on death, is one where those enrichment and chemosynthetic stages rarely get a chance to develop, and the small specialised organisms that depend on whale falls for food never get a chance to evolve. The healthiest ecosystems have a steady supply of whale falls, which is an odd thing to root for since it means wishing for the death of large projects, except that the deep ocean floor has no other food source.

What happens when a large open source project dies?

https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/21/whale-fall.html

@alisynthesis EasyTag her as well. Not perfect but good enough for what I'm doing.

I have a new post at Techdirt that is both a look back at just about everything I've written about Section 230 since its 20th birthday, and a crash course in how it works and why we need it […]

Graffiti wall at Rennweg train station in Vienna

Graffiti wall at Rennweg train station in Vienna, platform to the right

When changing trains on my way from Vienna airport, I noticed someone tagged "CURL" on a wall. Obviously, there's an open source minded individual running by the street name of #curl somewhere around Vienna ;-)

@b0rk Two things I tell my kids quite often is:
- "I don't know." is a valid answer.
- Life is not! a contest.
I was not aware that there is something called "contest culture" but I think I instinctively refuse to have any of it.

RE: https://tilde.zone/@enron/115964677621571164

This points to one of a jillion reasons that art and culture are important. Not the images themselves, but a cultural linchpin like Andor that can help us all come together around a large set of abstract concepts.

It makes me know that I have […]

@derpostillon
Also das mit den Leserbriefen der Woche vom Postillion. Ich derzah's nicht. Z.B. www.der-postillon.com/2026/01/leserbriefe-der-...
Was ich nicht check, wie kommen die auf den Postillion? Und wie checken die dann nicht dass das Satiere ist? Ich kann das nicht […]

Eine Lichtschleife in Form einer liegenden Acht rund um die neogothischen Türme der Wiener Votivkirche.

@richard Ja, extrem leiwand...

[crowdsource advice-seeking on latex/markdown]

@sundogplanets vim

In my ongoing series of "Alison discovers guitarists that are good and everyone else already knows about," I present to you: Julian Lage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTnpqVbla50

#guitar

@briankrebs At least its in Times New Roman and not wasteful Calibri...
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/r...

Holy schneikies (sp.?), it 👆 worked! If I record an instrument w/ no click, let Melodyne create a tempo map, and then use that tempo map to drive my drum machines and synths, shit sounds ALIVE!

So in the video below, the tempo changes are created by […]

[Original post on io.waxandleather.com]

Auf einer Straße vor einem Park im frischen Schnee zahlreiche Reifenspuren bis Absperrung, die wenden

Auch diesen Winter die schöne Visualisierung: Menschen, die nicht an Sackgassenschilder glauben.

In einem immer rechter werdenden Deutschland ein zentrales Register von trans und nicht-binären Personen anlegen?

Das will unsere Regierung. 😱

Wenn dir das auch unheimlich vorkommt:

Es fehlen noch 4000 Stimmen für die Bundestagspetition dagegen […]

Lately I have noticed that when you purchase a ticket you don’t get a static PDF/PNG anymore.

Increasingly often, you get a .pkpass file, which is supposed to be opened in wallet apps (like Google Wallet or any 3rd-party).

Since I don’t like to share information about the events I attend with […]

@derbadian Way not enough Bountys in the box.
Also where is the line chart over time?

Sorgt mal für ein kleines Weihnachtswunder:

Meine Frau hat gerade ein Geschenk im RE14 (4497) von Mainz nach Mannheim liegen gelassen.
Ankunft in Mannheim war 16:06.

@SomeGadgetGuy I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.

RE: https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/115622299444846502

if you want to know a little more about all the zines that are on sale today at https://wizardzines.com I made a Big Thread yesterday talking about all of them!