The Solid project is a related initiative with similar goals. Turns out to really get away from centralised systems you need a bit more than just a server and a few mobile phone clients. The Solid community has been working on protocol specs and implementations for quite some time, probably worth aligning with them.

What API are they talking about? I thought Threads was already part of the Fediverse and as such supports ActivityPub, which specifies an API?

I will be teaching a bit of computer science to business people and cloud is one of the topics. Anybody knows of case studies described in enough technical detail so that students can derive an architecture and calculate cost for cloud vs. on-premise?

I started with an S2 and now own a couple of S3s.

When the bikes work, they are great and fun to ride. Electronic buttons, motor power boost to 500W and automatic gear changes are really innovative and make for a well-balanced product.

The sad part with VanMoof is that they never got their quality issues under control. Given the quality issues, support could not cope, and I guess the frequent required repairs were a bit too much in terms of cost.

I hope they pull through because their bikes are great.

Does Damus interoperate with Mastodon? If their app only supports their proprietary protocol and does not play nicely with other systems, they create a walled garden again, which happened so often in the history of the internet. In other words, is Nostr compatible to W3C's ActivityPub protocol (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/)?

Internet != Web

WebID provides a "single signon" but based on a decentralised way of managing user ids.

With WebID it is in principle possible to host your own identity provider (identified via a HTTP URI), which takes care of authentication. So you can control yourself what login to use.

If somebody wants to give you access to a resource, they add your WebID (the HTTP URI) to the access control list of the resource, which takes care of authorisation.

A pity that WebID+TLS, with which you can easily set up WebID via your web server, is not well supported with the current tools. IIRC they had to switch to an OpenID/OAuth2-based approach to support delegation.

The goal is to separate data from applications and to provide a decentralised way for authentication. Users can store and manage their data in so-called pods (personal online datastores).

Pods are essentially souped-up HTTP servers (based on Linked Data Platform containers) that allow the management of graph-structured data (RDF) via HTTP. Authentication for accessing and manipulating data is done via WebID, which builds on OpenID and OAuth.

Overall, the technologies (unsurprisingly) fit well into web architecture and are simpler and more developer-friendly than the previous technologies around the Semantic Web. With a focus on running code and practical applications, I see that his effort is gaining traction. I hope he succeeds, it is time to get alternatives to the centralised cloud systems run by big companies.

Try https://meet.jit.si/. You can also set up your own Jitsi installation, but meet.jit.si is more stable as they use geographical cascading with several servers, presumably AWS.

OpenStreetMap identifiers are not stable (at least according to a 2011 post), which makes reusing and linking OpenStreetMap data a bit challenging. Did that change?

There are two factors that affect the performance of web (HTTP) lookups: latency and bandwidth. Latency depends on the distance between client and server. You won't be able to send data faster than the speed of light. Bringing the data closer to the client helps to reduce latency, especially for small lookups. Bandwidth becomes the limiting factor when you transfer (large amounts of) data over under-dimensioned pipes. In general, I'd be a much more happy person if people would use HTTP caching headers (Expires and such) more often, as then a Squid proxy can bring substantial performance gains.

Parallel programming is hard. Bummer. I'd rather be interested in an article that talks about *monitoring and debugging* parallel programs (I currently struggle to monitor parallel algorithms implemented in Java). Anybody?

Semantic Web technologies (in particular RDF, a graph-structured data format) are ideally suited for publishing data. Also, these technologies facilitate the integration of separate pieces of information; integration is what you want to do if thousands of people start publishing structured data. Linked Data (RDF using HTTP URIs to identify things) is already used by the NYT and the UK government to publish data online.

Yes, the better the data the better the system will work. However, VisiNav works quite well on relatively scruffy web data due to the integrated ranking component.
The underlying data has to be in graph-structured format (in RDF syntax); reasoning, most notably object consolidation, is supported via OWL. Once the data is indexed, users can search and browse right away. There's no configuration needed, because the ordering of data is done based on the calculated ranks. The UI can be configured via XSLT and CSS for adding a logo or changing the look and feel.
We've developed VisiNav as part of a research project, and the university owns (and manages) the IP. I guess they will make it available free of charge for educational and research organisations, but commercial applications would require a license.

Hi, there's also VisiNav which lets you assemble complex queries over data, covering keyword search and faceted browsing (as Flamenco) and a bit more (path navigation). Drag and drop UI, where people who don't know facets or path navigation can do keyword search without being distracted. -- Andreas. Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers of VisiNav.