2026-09-04T23:06:17Z https://nostr.now 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) :nonbinary: https://nostr.now/npub1pzjfm9lymy3dnrxg2uk237vlvteefahea7s4ptjzv8n2a9uarrxqtr3zhj https://media.social.fedify.dev/avatars/22686eaf-a33c-4b76-ada5-03271c723fc5/74f411b1-b408-4e41-92ea-005803ecd332.jpg https://media.social.fedify.dev/avatars/22686eaf-a33c-4b76-ada5-03271c723fc5/74f411b1-b408-4e41-92ea-005803ecd332.jpg https://nostr.now/nevent1qqsrhwew0wy4gdhrdcer9l8zxdnd0edlce6h38g9zu788j7tydlp6vqzyqy2f8vhunvj9kvveptje28ena30898kl8h6z59wgfs7dt5hn5vvc70d3ja The more I work on Hollo, the more its Mastodon-compatible API feels like a straitjacket. I chose it for a practical reason: people could use existing clients, and I wouldn&#39;t have to build a frontend too. I still think that was the right call at the time.<br/><br/>The problem is that clients can only expose what Mastodon&#39;s API represents. I keep coming up with ideas, then asking whether the API has anywhere to put them. If it doesn&#39;t, I have no way to get the feature in front of users.<br/><br/>ActivityPub API (so-called “C2S”) might be the eventual answer, but it doesn&#39;t help much today. I don&#39;t know of any clients Hollo users could realistically use with it, and adoption is still limited.<br/><br/>So I keep coming back to the idea that Hollo will need a frontend of its own. I&#39;d keep the Mastodon API for existing apps. I&#39;m not especially eager to take on a whole frontend, but I don&#39;t see another way to try ideas that don&#39;t fit Mastodon&#39;s model.<br/> 2026-07-11T13:47:14Z https://nostr.now/nevent1qqs27mzytw6dyszdq0cx0zth4xk2nvsuqq9a32p8q8jdejv2jcgq0yqzyqy2f8vhunvj9kvveptje28ena30898kl8h6z59wgfs7dt5hn5vvcdmmhhn I&#39;ve spent a long time asking myself why open source matters so much to me, why I keep coming back to it. I once joined a company purely because they promised I could do open source full-time (it didn&#39;t turn out well). Before that, I was doing open source inside and outside of regular jobs. And now, in the age of LLMs, when the value of code itself seems to be declining, I&#39;m still here, still doing this.<br/><br/>Recently it clicked. I do open source because it&#39;s social work—in the sense that it lets me participate in society.<br/><br/>Everyone wants to belong to some community, to connect with others. But I was never good at the usual ways of doing that. Social activities that came naturally to others were difficult for me. In school, I had few friends. After class, I&#39;d stay home assembling Lego or reading books alone. Then I discovered coding.<br/><br/>Coding was a wonderful hobby for me, especially because I encountered it at the dawn of the internet era. The first programming languages I properly learned were Perl, PHP, and JavaScript—all languages of the internet age. The synergy was something else.<br/><br/>Gradually I fell into the world of open source. And there, even someone like me—awkward at conventional social interaction—could be social. My code helped people. I could collaborate by exchanging code. I could have conversations, mediated by code. IRC, mailing lists, forums—these became my social media. Over time, “the group I wanted recognition from” became the people in the open source world. I didn&#39;t care much about being recognized by classmates, but I wanted to be recognized by these people I&#39;d never met face to face.<br/><br/>That mindset still shapes me now, approaching forty. I still care more about recognition from open source programmers than from colleagues. The social activity that happens in open source communities is, after my family, the most important social activity in my life.<br/><br/>The specific things I build, the technical details—those matter less than I used to think. I just want to do the kind of social activity that suits me, and open source happens to be the way I do it.<br/><br/>That&#39;s all, really.<br/> 2026-01-14T06:14:04Z