Erlend Sogge Heggen

@erlend.sh

2200 Followers 1012 Following

Open Source Practitioner, bullish on kindness. https://erlend.sh – about me @roomy.space – make space

screenshot of Mu/Bluesky account switcher.
Roomy error message
screenshot of Bluesky DM invites and people who “can’t be messaged”
Unpopular Opinion Meme
screenshot of railway blog post saying "follow us on x"; no mention of bluesky as an alternative.
freeq.at oauth scopes
Text in picture: Unichicken What the duck's a unichicken?! Well, glad you asked. This cute and comical piece of artwork has a serious message. Let's start with the chicken. Startups are like factory farmed chickens: we force feed them with investment capital so they can grow plump and juicy until the moment of liquidation, at which point the financial value is pulled out of them and we're left with a dysfunctional carcass of a company. Then there's the unicorn. The whole idea with these startup chickens is that we're supposed to turn them into unicorns. In reality, however, 90% of unicorns are bleeding cash and never reach profitability. What's more, "unicorn" is actually a fancy way of saying "pension fund subsidised monopoly forming"—which has a number of detrimental effects on the economy. In the United States, ~65% of investment into Venture Capital funds comes from pension funds. So these cash-bleeding companies are spending the retirement money of taxpayers. Plus, it's very difficult for companies that rely on customer revenue to compete with (aspirant) "unicorns", which can endlessly bleed cash and still survive on the market. This deforms entire industries, causing them to evolve illogically and incorrectly. Unichicken questions both the hyper-growth model of startup incubation as well as our endless pursuit of unicorns.
From Digg.com, part 1: A Hard Reset, and What Comes Next Building on the internet in 2026 is different. We learned that the hard way. Today we're sharing difficult news: we've made the decision to significantly downsize the Digg team. This wasn't a decision made lightly, and it's important to say clearly: this is one of the strongest groups of people we've ever had the privilege of working with. This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed. We faced an unprecedented bot problem When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we'd only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on. This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product. Building social is hard, incumbents are harder We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. The loyalty users have to the communities they've already built elsewhere is profound. Getting people to move is a hard enough problem. Getting them to move and bring their people with them is something else entirely.
Bluesky login screen for account reactivation
Roomy product discussion on Discord about co-editable pages.
A screenshot of arbeidstilsynet.no page on minimum wages in Norway, listing the major/notable sectors of profession and their respective wages. «On this page: Construction Electricians Fish processing enterprises Freight transport by road Agriculture and horticulture Hospitality Passenger transport by tour bus Cleaning Maritime construction Other sectors (..) »
Quote screenshot of https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/age-assurance-methods-explained Age inference includes but not limited to: Partnering with data brokers to gather data associated with an email, like utility use or mortgage purchases, or associated with a name, such as transaction history from a credit bureau; Other AI model-assisted deployments that infer age based on existing account or web activity, such as account age or “happy birthday” messages; Credit card ownership checks.
Collections of erlend.sh on semble.so
GitHub backlinks
Screenshot of event: https://smokesignal.events/pfrazee.com/3mdnyftabdn2q
atproto illustration from https://overreacted.io/open-social/
The curb-cut effect (illustrated): when we design for disabilities, we make things better for everyone. Source: https://sketchplanations.com/the-curb-cut-effect
Screenshot of Erlend’s podcast subscriptions, 2026
Login screen for newmode.net
Screenshot of https://scour.ing/browse/posts/popular with standard.site listed at the top.
Deviantart login demonstrating login flow with only username, no password.
Making apps “incredible-journey-proof” No proprietary server. 1. Open-source server, can self-host 2. Peer-to-peer 3. Sync via Dropbox / Google Drive / iCloud 4. Multiple interoperable sync providers
Leaflet comments on leaflet post.
screenshot of index.network
Settings for customer Roomy domains.
Sarah Kandzior’s substack comments about account closure.
Roomy login screen
Signup page for OpenStreetMap.org
Screenshot of a Mastodon edit-notification.
Two anonymized Bluesky posts, saying: 1: It's also showing anyone who's actually interested in Bluesky as a Fediverse that the CEOs have a kill switch which essentially defeats the purpose. 2: It really makes me wonder what the value proposition of ATProto even is, if federation is more fragmented than Mastodon in practice, harder to set up than Mastodon, and if Bluesky the company is going to run the main instance as unprofessionally as a Mastodon instance owner on a power trip.
Screenshot of Bluesky post: https://bsky.app/profile/rvbdrm.com/post/3m2jxe5ly722x So… Łink’s account is permabanned from Bluesky’s appview, but also gets banned from: WhiteWind Skylight Bluescreen Flashes Basically all ATproto apps/projects? WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF THIS PROJECT THEN?
As the economy was transformed by industrialization and then by consumer banking, powerful new players such as Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, and a handful of others threatened the freedom of citizens. In order to provide a counterweight to these new powers, citizens joined together to form trade unions and cooperative banking institutions, which were federally chartered to represent their members’ interests. These citizen organizations helped balance the economic and social power between large and small players and between employers and worker. The same collective organization is required to move from an individualized asset-based understanding of data control to a collective system based on rights and accountability, with legal standards upheld by a new class of representatives who act as fiduciaries for their members. In the U.S. almost 100 million people are members of credit unions, not-for-profit institutions owned by their members, and already chartered to securely manage their members’ digital data and to represent them in a wide variety of financial transactions, including insurance, investments, and benefits. The question then is, could we apply the same push for citizen power to the area of data rights in the ever-growing digital economy?
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021
No automatic browser truncation for leaflet posts on iOS.
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
Leaflet blog page without scroll bar on iOS.
The Geek Hierarchy is a flowchart created by Lore Sjöberg. It was published on the now-defunct humor website Brunching Shuttlecocks in January 2002. The hierarchy was a complicated chart that shows what fan groups consider themselves 'less geeky than' other groups. The group placed highest on the chart, which considered themselves the least geeky, was "Published Science Fiction/Fantasy Authors and Artists," followed by "Science Fiction/Fantasy Literature Fans." The lowest, geekiest group was "People Who Write Erotic Versions of Star Trek Where All the Characters Are Furries, Like Kirk is an Ocelot or Something, and They Put a Furry Version of Themselves as the Star of the Story," just below "Erotic Furies," which was below "Furries." Its purpose was to illustrate that there were always fans geekier than the individual. Unless you were a Star Trek furry.
THE OLD CYPHERPUNK DREAM IS DEAD "Privacy is not a bunker; it's a commons." "Sovereignty is never in isolation; it's always in relation." "We refuse acceleration without direction, optimisation without ethics, and autonomy without care." "We do not merely seek privacy, we seek solidarity." "We reimagine cryptographic tools as instruments of communion, not alienation." "There is no security through insecurity." "To act as a Sapphirepunk is to believe that privacy is not the endpoint, but rather a necessary starting condition for imagination, resistance, and community." A CALL TO REIMAGINE "We summon forth new political, and poetic, imaginaries" "A being who blurs the hardened lines between body and code, self and system" "Let these new worlds be plural, caring, and free." "The design, implementation, and operation of technological systems are the ground on which future struggles will be fought." "We build in plurality, and in parity, but not in purity or with impunity." "Engineer technologies rooted in justice, and infrastructures grounded in togetherness." CRYPTOGRAPHIC TRUTHS "The world cannot be protected by cryptography alone." "Zero knowledge does not equal zero harm."
A 20-foot-tall statue in Oslo (2018) by artist Paul McCarthy, officially named Santa but known colloquially as the “Butt Plug Gnome”.
Metro wallet-validation QR code.
Screenshot of account @brettbobculbert.bsky.social
Header: no timeline, just posts “Tusks transforms Mastodon to feel like your blog.”
Nandi: scroll position + race condition == 😭 Zicklag: Yeah man, the scroll position for the virtualized chats is a really tricky one. Nandi: i figured out a good way to control the scroll but it's changing after update. my number one issue with frontend dev is trying not to create updates that cause updates sameoldlab: this works really well with svelte https://youtu.be/kMBDsyozllk. Helps to store the bulk of state outside of components, then they don't need to refetch in conditionals or virtualized lists
Screenshot of text: When I publish a mutable link to some data, I give agency to the author of that data. They are free to change the contents in the future, or even to fully remove the data. Like a verbatim copy, an immutable link would not award this agency. By granting this agency, I voluntarily cede control. The quality of my work will vary based on the future actions of another human. A web of mutable references is a web of human interdepence, and builds on the voluntary giving of trust. Freely given trust and consensual interdependence are deeply human, they sit at the root of the most positive relationships we can form. I want to immerse myself (and have others immerse themselves) in a medium that fosters these notions, and I want to stay clear from media whose design choices eliminate them. A medium of mutable links should further teach an important lesson: trust must never be without alternative. I can choose to copy content and retain full control over it. If trust is not an active choice but the only option, it becomes meaningless.
Screenshot of page with the text: In the demo, an AI bot for a style guide makes changes as another collaborator in the document. It puts changes on a branch, which you can choose to partially or completely merge—just like you would suggestions from a human coauthor. (image: Suggested changes from a style bot on a branch.) The changes are highlighted in a diff to help you review. Once you accept edits from a bot, the history timeline also shows which edits came from the bot. (image: Bot appears as a user in the document history.) One more thing: since the bots are simply text prompts, you can create your own by adding a bot prompt into your document collection! Bots can be shared, edited, and versioned just like regular documents—for example, you can view the history of a prompt, or use a branch to try a new variant of a prompt.
Screenshot of Roomy ‘board’ interface.
Roomy threads feed interface.
From person on GitHub: I still disagree both with the architecture of a new arena, and a new parameter added to each widget method. However, there is not will to implement this in a different way, so we've decided to move forward with this.
Screenshot of Erlend’s Spotify profile, with a “Your premium payment failed” warning at the top.
Screen capture of atproto documentation page listing the primary specifications comprising the initial version of AT Protocol.
Animated mockup of the group chat Roomy
Slider UI for time-stepping through revisions in a Weird page.
'minimal' Weird website theme.
Old bluesky embed in Discord
WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia. This means if you make a mistake, you can always undo it. It also means if you’re trying to figure out why something is on a page, you can see precisely the history and edits that led to it. These revisions are stored in our database. This is very important, it’s at the core of the user promise of protecting your data, and it’s why WordPress is architected and designed to never lose anything. WP Engine turns this off. They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content. It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to get your content back, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is manag
Federation may make this issue more acute, at least for rendering edits if not providing a UI to make them. PDSes can happily allow editing, mine does, but bsky.app doesn't seem to show edits/updates. It always only shows the original record. As an example, I created and then edited a post on my PDS. atproto.tools shows both the create and the update as valid, but bsky.app only shows the original create. cc snarfed/bridgy-fed#947