Hello and welcome friends of the Wider Web!
As complex and dangerous as Earth was this week, the people in our community somehow put one foot in front of the other on the path towards the Wider Web and Agreement Bedrock. Insights were made. Software was released. Experiences were shared. I’m grateful for each of you and for our collective effort to build a strong foundation for factual information and international connection.
As always, send your tips, corrections, and offers of support to trevor@TransmutableNews.com or @TransmutableNew on Twitter.
Opportunities for support
If you appreciate my work and want it to continue then I hope that you’ll head to my Ko-fi for a single contribution 🎉 or to Patreon for a subscription 🎉🎉.
I plan to set up a federated link aggregator to collaboratively gather and discuss news and events for each issue of the Transmutable News Weekly. I have considered a number of configurations including limiting the entire site to only Patreon supporters, making it world readable but only supporter writable, or giving access as a “thank you” gift to supporters of all sorts. As always, send your ideas and suggestions my way.
News
Bodies In Motion Tend to Stay in Motion
The folks at M3 will host a digital body interop meeting today at 1pm ET (1800 UTC) on their Discord group. You can also find previous meetings’ notes on their research document.
Document Drop about Dropped Frames
Dave Hill from Meta mentioned that they’ve published helpful documentation about increasing WebXR performance using their fork of the RenderDoc tool.
Two Lenses, Two World
If you’ve worked behind the scenes of large web services then you may be familiar with the Consistency, Availability, and Partition (CAP) tolerance theorem which posits that only two of those goals can be solved by any networked system. This week I learned about the “blockchain trilemma” which makes similar claims about security, decentralization, and scalability. As we work toward an Agreement Bedrock on which to build the Wider Web, both theorems will be useful lenses with which to inspect proposed technologies.
Who Feeds the Wolf?
The Wolvic team at Igalia published a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page that includes information about their sources of funding, how much Mozilla paid Igalia, the size of the team, as well as answers to technical questions like whether they’ll stick with Mozilla’s GeckoView. If you’re interested in contributing code to Wolvic then head over to their GitHub Issues to see if anything catches your fancy.
REST is Dead, Long Live REST
Decentralized storage startup Filebase announced a new API that is compatible with Amazon Web Services clients but is backed by two decentralized systems, IPFS and Sia. While the combined energy of IPFS and Sia are immense on a watt-per-byte basis compared to storage in buckets on Amazon’s S3 service (and thus is not appropriate for the Agreement Bedrock) it is interesting to see another crypto-first company wrap decentralized services in relatively ancient, boring, and centralized web APIs in order to attract business.
We Can Do Better than 50 Percent
Gabe Newell revealed that Valve stopped accepting Bitcoin because transactions were expensive and “50% of those transactions were fraudulent”. To turn the ship in a better direction we have quite a bit of work to do.
Two Ws at the Three Es
The IEEE’s fully virtual Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces is scheduled for March 12 through 16. Tickets start at US$120 for non-members. Looking a bit further out, their XR Awards event is open for entries until April 8. It would be excellent to see Wider Web experiences among the nominees and winners.
Stay open and safe, friends.