The Revolution Will Not Make the Hacker News Front Page - Dhole Moments

(with apologies to Gil Scott-Heron) If you get all of your important technology news from “content aggregators” like Hacker News, Lobste.rs, and most subreddits, you might be totally unaware of the important but boring infrastructure work happening largely on the Fediverse, indie web, and other less-centralized communities. This is no accident. The rough consensus of these spaces has been strongly in favor of the sort of centralized tech monopolies, venture capitalists, private equity ghouls, and “innovation” that weakens the position of workers against the wealthy (i.e., most use cases for Large Language Models). Occasionally they sprinkle in a bit of faux resistance-just enough to be able to pretend they’re counterculture, so they can pretend that Silicon Valley spirit hasn’t been thoroughly sold out to Palantir over the past two decades. That’s why a few “anti-AI” rants will occasionally slip through. If you’re interested in the substance that underpins this mild rant, I’ve written about technology that causes massive cultural harm recently. Earlier this week, I announced the immediate availability of a reference implementation for the Public Key Directory-a project I’ve been working on since June 2024 . Hundreds of people shared it on Mastodon and BlueSky. Comparatively, almost nobody on Hacker News ever saw it . Today, the COCKTAIL-DKG specification is now live ( previous blog post ). It’s an early version (v0.1.0), and the reference implementations are still a work-in-progress, and there’s still a lot of work to do , but it’s a tangible specification. With test vectors (from my hacky implementation that isn’t clean enough to publish)! Two months ago, I wrote a blog post titled The Dreamseeker’s Vision of Tomorrow . In the time since, I’ve gotten two of my three current projects to the next stage of maturity (and the third one was blocked by one of those two). I have no illusions that the larger tech industry will do anything but collectively shrug at this sort of progress. I’m sure you’ve all heard it before. This is boring infrastructure work! There’s no drama; no scandal. There’s nothing sexy. No one is bleeding. Why would anyone want to read about this? Hell, why are you even blogging instead of making short-form video content ? Get with the times . The attention economy demands tribute. Don’t you want to be important ? Don’t you want money ? While you’re at it, cut the furry crap; it’s totally unprofessional . AJ 2026 Will Be More Boring Infrastructure Work While the rest of the Internet descends slowly into AI-induced mass psychosis , I’ve got different plans. Push the Fediverse Key Transparency project closer to v1.0. Begin working on a realistic proposal for end-to-end encryption for ActivityPub-enabled software. I plan on building atop MLS. If your opinion of MLS was tainted by Evgeny’s disingenuous rant , I already wrote a rebuttal earlier this year. W3C-affilited folks are also planning to build atop MLS . I’m already talking with them about Key Transparency . I plan on building atop MLS. If...

Preview: ~500 words