"Telecommuting" is a confusing word. Since it's not commuting.

I think the biggest thing is that the sad centralized Internet has stability. 

You have to be *really* committed to set up your own status net instance (which I would never have managed but for serious amounts of help).  Although I give great credit to those running self hosted StatusNet instances who have invited others to sign on, if you don't personally know or trust the people running those instances, signing on could prove to be an even greater risk to your privacy than joining Twitter. 

I look forward to GNU social stepping up because it will make it easier for ordinary folks to join the distributed internet.  There are plenty of free software supporters who are not tech gurus.

I do have to say, I would never dream of suggesting anyone who is not a devoted techie to sign up for pump.io until the bugs are shaken out.  Maybe a year from now?

Sad to say, rather than being a service, I fear Identi.ca is more of a petrie dish.  That's a hard place to be if you're not a dedicated techie or a software developer. 

/via @fortnow on Twitter: Scott makes an excellent point: The NSA isn't breaking crypto protocols based on math and computational complexity. http://t.co/ALhXux7ocj

The last sentence is a gem: "Math could be defined as that which can still be trusted, even when you can’t trust anything else."

Computers and computation are helping us think deeply about theory and practice. I like it!

This is my first time using the new interface, so I'm sorry that I don't know how to namecheck people and ended up posting the above notice twice. In answer to some of the comments above:

If you think I came here to rant, please recall that I came here to delete my account, and was thwarted.

If you think 'microblogging is transient' then I don't want to use any microblogging platform you would create. I don't even feel the need to explain why -- this is a no-brainer.

If you think I just don't understand free software, maybe free software just doesn't understand me and will therefore never win me over as a user -- didja ever think that maybe I have absolutely no obligation to be here? That's the way I think and the way most people think. But of course that isn't true, because plenty of people who make free software understand the importance of canonical URLs, in fact there is pretty much no one on the planet who is more anal about the importance of preserving canonical URLs than the free software crowd. I'd be VERY surprised if I were the first to complain about this.

As for other complaints about pump.io, about those I have no clue. I am using it for the first time yesterday and today.

Finally to Evan, thanks for the response, I do appreciate the personal interaction. The tests I did showed that both notice and conversation URLs were broken. You say you tried to perserve them, it clearly didn't work very reliably, this is months into your product cycle and the low priority you have shown this issue, even if you didn't intend for it to happen, combined with the inability to delete my account at this stage, kind of shows me where your bread is buttered and without wanting to get into a big debate over it (I don't want to return here really) your priorities do not match what I would want to see in a developer. Please do delete my account along with the others who have asked, to whatever extent possible in your system. I'm not going to stomp my feet if there are vestiges left over -- I just don't want to publically appear to be an active user anymore, because that signifies support.

Paul.

La mañana

I came back here to delete my account. Turns out I can't, so I guess posting why I wanted to delete my account and never return is the only way to make the statement I wished to make by deleting. I am not against the idea of rebranding & migration, but it has to be done right. A few tests I just did have confirmed that all links to individual Identica posts and conversations are now broken 404. It is not enough to preserve content; one must also preserve the oriiginal canonical URLs or else on breaks the history of the web. Why should I put any more work into posting here, and linking other people to my posts on here, when it seems quite likely that another rebranding and/or migration in the future will just go ahead and break all THOSE links. I had already quit participating here *temporarily* due to what I perceived to be short-term logistical issues, but now there is a trust issue, and that is much harder to overcome. I'd like to delete my account and never return. Certainly I will be suspicioius of any future attempts to get me to join anything on the web from the same people who treated my former contributions so cavalierly. Thanks for reading, the end. #Identica

I do wish that Open Source companies were looking farther ahead than the current crop of devices, though.

It's pretty clear that we're leaving the mobile-social-local era, and heading into a new one. The previous era was defined by the confluence of sensor-enabled touchscreen devices and social network services.

I don't know what this new era is all about, but my guess is that wearable devices -- think Google Glass or the iWatch -- will play an important role. I think it's the next step in human augmentation - putting information closer to your everyday line of vision.

And we, the Free and Open Source software community, don't yet have a horse in that race.

I think the millions of dollars going into cloning the last era of devices would be better spent seizing the high ground on a next generation device.

And I think that Free and Open Source companies and the community are going to have to work together to make it happen. We can't split the potential early-adopter market three or four ways.

I believe the closer devices get to our bodies and the deeper they are integrated in our lives, the more important free software becomes. At least, it should be open source - otherwise, you never know what these "human augmentation" devices really do... On a side note: the extreme case might be medical devises: http://www.economist.com/node/21556098

'People now have to pay to read The Sun newspaper online.'

Hahahahahahahahah!

@dper Re. I take your point about the availability of multiple clients and user choice but, as that wise man, Luke Slater once said: 'The default Pump Web client is very important as it is the shop window for potential new users. If they don't like the UI, can't click on context, cant understand what they see, then they are unlikely to persist using the service'.

I guess it's better on a developer level. Look at all the external services that work with pump.io.

Thoughts After day 3 on pump.io:

 Real conversations, thanks @evan for freeing us from 140c limits
 Federation galore, can't wait till a pump.io instance is as drop in ready as postfix/exim
 Control, can send to: person, list, followers, public.. nice fine grained control of what i share to whom

All things considered I am really loving pump.io and can really see a lot of potential. I'm even inspired to do some hacking myself. Yes, the clients and web UI are a bit buggy. Yes the features aren't fully fleshed out. But it's early days and things only get better from here.. Hang on and enjoy the ride!!

I just updated the pump.io wiki to add some FAQs

• Is there a public timeline?
• Are there groups like in StatusNet?
• Why I cannot see comments in threaded view?

Yes, you should defend what you feel is right, but I'll point out that you weren't criticizing, just generalizing.

This NSA stuff is looking more and more like a smokescreen. It's old news, but rehashed. Snowdens history also seems pretty 'maneuvered'.

MT @mlinksva: In a world crazy about copyright, UbuWeb has ignored it & succeeded 17 years. Isn’t that a working definition of avant-garde?

@ratfink It's also stupid. If we didn't reinvent the wheel every once in a while, we'd all be driving rock-tired Flintstone cars.

I prefer to think of it as a metamorphosis from minimalist microblogging caterpillar into a free-flying flower-pollinating social butterfly.

RT @mcnalu: Good night identi.ca. Will you be very different in the morning? < It's an empirical question.