Over the last decade, it has become a common experience to be using a social media app, and to perceive that app as saying something specific to you. This manifests in statements like “Twitter thinks Rudy Giuliani has lost his mind”, “Facebook is up in arms about DEI”, “Instagram is going crazy for this new water bottle”, “BlueSky loves this bigoted substack”, or “Mastodon can’t stop talking about Linux”. Sometimes this will even be expressed with “the Internet” as a metonym for the speaker’s preferred social media: “the Internet thinks that Kate Middleton is missing”.

However, even the smallest of these networks comprises literal millions of human beings, speaking dozens of different languages, many of whom never interact with each other at all. The hot takes that you see from a certain excitable sub-community, on your particular timeline or “for you” page, are not necessarily representative of “the Internet” — at this point, a group that represents a significant majority of the entire human population.

If I may coin a phrase, I will refer to these as “Diffuse, Amorphous, Nebulous, Generalized Internet Takes”, or DANGITs, which handily evokes the frustrating feeling of arguing against them.

A DANGIT is not really a new “internet” phenomenon: it is a specific expression of the availability heuristic.

If we look at our device and see a bunch of comments in our inbox, particularly if those comments have high salience via being recent, emotive, and repeated, we will naturally think that this is what The Internet thinks. However, just because we will naturally think this does not mean that we will accurately think it.

It is worth keeping this concept in mind when participating in public discourse because it leads to a specific type of communication breakdown. If you are arguing with a DANGIT, you will feel like you are arguing with someone with incredibly inconsistent, hypocritical, and sometimes even totally self-contradictory views. But to be self-contradictory, one needs to have a self. And if you are arguing with 9 different people from 3 different ideological factions, all making completely different points and not even taking time to agree on the facts beforehand, of course it’s going to sound like cacophonous nonsense. You’re arguing with the cacophony, it’s just presented to you in a way that deceives you into thinking that it’s one group.

There are subtle variations on this breakdown; for example, it can also make people’s taste seem incoherent. If it seems like one week the Interior Designer internet loves stark Scandinavian minimalism, and the next week baroque Rococo styles are making a comeback, it might seem like The Internet has no coherent sense of taste, and these things don’t go together. That’s because it doesn’t! Why would you expect it to?

Most likely, you are simply seeing some posts from minimalists, and then, separately, some posts from Rococo aficionados. Any particular person’s feed may be dedicated to a specific, internally coherent viewpoint, aesthetic, or ideology, but if you dump them all into a blender to separate them from their context, of course they will look jumbled together.

This is what social media does. It is context collapse as a service. Even if you eliminate engagement-maximizing algorithms and view everything perfectly chronologically, even if you have the world’s best trust & safety team making sure that there is nothing harmful and no disinformation, social media — like email — inherently remains that context-collapsing blender. There’s no way for it not to be; if two people you follow, who do not follow and are not aware of each other, are both posting unrelated things at the same time, you’re going to see them at around the same time.

Do not argue with a DANGIT. Discussions are the internet are famously Pyrrhic battles to begin with, but if you argue with a DANGIT it’s not that you will achieve a Pyrrhic victory, you cannot possibly achieve any victory, because you are shadowboxing an imagined consensus where none exits.

You can’t win against something that isn’t there.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you’ve read here and you’d like to read more things like it, or you’d like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor!

Kamala Harris lost. Here we are. So it goes.

Are you sad? Are you scared?

I am very sad. I am very scared.

But, like everyone else in this position, most of all, I want to know what to do next.

A Mission For Progress

I believe that we should set up a missionary organization for progressive and liberal values.

In 2017, Kayla Chadwick wrote the now-classic article, “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People”. It resonated with millions of people, myself included. It expresses an exasperation with a populace that seems ignorant of economics, history, politics, and indeed unable to read the news. It is understandable to be frustrated with people who are exercising their electoral power callously and irresponsibly.

But I think in 2024, we need to reckon with the fact that we do, in fact, need to explain to a large swathe of the population that they should care about other people.

We had better figure out how to explain it soon.

Shared Values — A Basis for Hope

The first question that arises when we start considering outreach to the conservative-leaning or undecided independent population is, “are these people available to be convinced?”.

To that, I must answer an unqualified “yes”.

I know that some of you are already objecting. For those of us with an understanding of history and the mechanics of bigotry in the United States, it might initially seem like the answer is “no”.

As the Nazis came to power in the 1920s, they were campaigning openly on a platform of antisemitic violence. Everyone knew what the debate was. It was hard to claim that you didn’t, in spite of some breathtakingly cowardly contemporaneous journalism, they weren’t fooling anyone.

It feels ridiculous to say this, but Hitler did not have support among Jews.

Yet, after campaigning on a platform of defaming immigrants, and Mexican immigrants specifically for a decade, a large part of what drove his victory is that Trump enjoyed a shockingly huge surge of support among the Hispanic population. Even some undocumented migrants — the ones most likely to be herded into concentration camps starting in January — are supporting him.

I believe that this is possible because, in order to maintain support of the multi-ethnic working-class coalition that Trump has built, the Republicans must maintain plausible deniability. They have to say “we are not racist”, “we are not xenophobic”. Incredibly, his supporters even say “I don’t hate trans people” with startling regularity.

Most voters must continue to believe that hateful policies with devastating impacts are actually race-neutral, and are simply going to get rid of “bad” people. Even the ones motivated by racial resentment are mostly motivated by factually incorrect beliefs about racialized minorities receiving special treatment and resources which they are not in fact receiving.

They are victims of a disinformation machine. One that has rendered reality incomprehensible.

If you listen to conservative messaging, you can hear them referencing this all the time. Remember when JD Vance made that comment about Democrats calling Diet Mountain Dew racist?

Many publications wrote about this joke “bombing”¹, but the kernel of truth within it is this: understanding structural bigotry in the United States is difficult. When we progressives talk about it, people who don’t understand it think that our explanations sound ridiculous and incoherent.

There’s a reason that the real version of critical race theory is a graduate-level philosophy-of-law course, and not a couple of catch phrases.

If, without context, someone says that “municipal zoning laws are racist”, this makes about as much sense as “Diet Mountain Dew is racist” to someone who doesn’t already know what “redlining” is.

Conservatives prey upon this confusion to their benefit. But they prey on this because they must do so. They must do so because, despite everything, hate is not actually popular among the American electorate. Even now, they have to be deceived into it.

The good news is that all we need to do is stop the deception.

Politics Matter

If I have sold you on the idea that a substantial plurality of voters are available to be persuaded, the next question is: can we persuade them? Do we, as progressives, have the resources and means to do so? We did lose, after all, and it might seem like nothing we did had much of an impact.

Let’s analyze that assumption.

Across the country, Trump’s margins increased. However, in the swing states, where Harris spent money on campaigning, his margins increased less than elsewhere. At time of writing, we project that the safe-state margin shift will be 3.55% towards trump, and the swing-state margin shift will be 1.69%.

This margin was, sadly, too small for a victory, but it does show that the work mattered. Perhaps given more time, or more resources, it would have mattered just a little bit more, and that would have been decisive.

This is to say, in the places where campaign dollars were spent, even against the similar spending of the Trump campaign, we pushed the margin of support 1.86% higher within 107 days. So yes: campaigning matters. Which parts and how much are not straightforward, but it definitely matters.

This is a bit of a nonsensical comparison for a whole host of reasons², but just for a ballpark figure, if we kept this pressure up continuously during the next 4 years, we could increase support for a democratic candidate by 25%.

We Can Teach, Not Sell

Political junkies tend to overestimate the knowledge of the average voter. Even when we are trying to compensate for it, we tend to vastly overestimate how much the average voter knows about politics and policy. I suspect that you, dear reader, are a political junkie even if you don’t think of yourself as one.

To give you a sense of what I mean, across the country, on Election day and the day after, there was a huge spike in interest for the Google query, “did Joe Biden drop out”.

Consistently over the last decade, democratic policies are more popular than their opponents. Even deep red states, such as Kansas, often vote for policies supported by democrats and opposed by Republicans.

This confusion about policy is not organic; it is not voters’ fault. It is because Republicans constantly lie.

All this ignorance might seem discouraging, but it presents an opportunity: people will not sign up to be persuaded, but people do like being informed. Rather than proselytizing via a hard sales pitch, it should be possible to offer to explain how policy connects to elections. And this is made so much the easier if so many of these folks already generally like our policies.

The Challenge Is Enormous

I’ve listed some reasons for optimism, but that does not mean that this will be easy.

Republicans have a tremendously powerful, decentralized media apparatus that reinforces their culture-war messaging all the time.

After some of the post-election analysis, “The Left Needs Its Own Joe Rogan” is on track to become a cliché within the week.³ While I am deeply sympathetic to that argument, the right-wing media’s success is not organic; it is funded by petrochemical billionaires.

We cannot compete via billionaire financing, and as such, we have to have a way to introduce voters to progressive and liberal media. Which means more voters need social connections to liberals and progressives.

Good Works

The democratic presidential campaign alone spent a billion and a half dollars. And, as shown above, this can be persuasive, but it’s just the persuasion itself.

Better than spending all this money on telling people what good stuff we would do for them if we were in power, we could just show them, by doing good stuff. We should live our values, not just endlessly reiterate them.

A billion dollars is a significant amount of power in its own right.

For historical precedent, consider the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast For Children program. This program absolutely scared the shit out of the conservative power structure, to the point that Nixon’s FBI literally raided them for giving out free food to children.

Religious missionaries, who are famously annoying, often offset their annoying-ness by doing charitable work in the communities they are trying to reach. A lot of the country that we need to reach are religious people, and nominally both Christians and leftists share a concern for helping those in need, so we should find some cultural common ground there.

We can leverage that overlap in values by partnering with churches. This immediately makes such work culturally legible to many who we most need to reach.

Jobs Jobs Jobs

When I raised this idea with Philip James, he had been mulling over similar ideas for a long time, but with a slightly different tack: free career skills workshops from folks who are obviously “non-traditional” with respect to the average rural voter’s cultural expectations. Recruit trans folks, black folks, women, and non-white immigrants from our tech networks.

Run the trainings over remote video conferencing to make volunteering more accessible. Run those workshops through churches as a distribution network.

There is good evidence that this sort of prolonged contact and direct exposure to outgroups, to help people see others as human beings, very effective politically.

However, job skills training is by no means the only benefit we could bring. There are lots of other services we could offer remotely, particularly with the skills that we in the tech community could offer. I offer this as an initial suggestion; if you have more ideas I’d love to hear them. I think the best ideas are ones where folks can opt in, things that feel like bettering oneself rather than receiving charity; nobody likes getting handouts, particularly from the outgroup, but getting help to improve your own skills feels more participatory.

I do think that free breakfast for children, specifically, might be something to start with because people are far more willing to accept gifts to benefit others (particularly their children, or the elderly!) rather than themselves.

Take Credit

Doing good works in the community isn’t enough. We need to do visible good works. Attributable good works.

We don’t want to be assholes about it, but we do want to make sure that these benefits are clearly labeled. We do not want to attach an obligation to any charitable project, but we do want to attach something to indicate where it came from.

I don’t know what that “something” should be. The most important thing is that whatever “something” is appeals to set of partially-overlapping cultures that I am not really a part of — Midwestern, rural, southern, exurban, working class, “red state” — and thus, I would want to hear from people from those cultures about what works best.

But it’s got to be something.

Maybe it’s a little sticker, “brought to you by progressives and liberals. we care about you!”. Maybe it’s a subtle piece of consistent branding or graphic design, like a stylized blue stripe. Maybe we need to avoid the word “democrats”, or even “progressive” or “liberal”, and need some independent brand for such a thing, that is clearly tenuously connected but not directly; like the Coalition of Liberal and Leftist Helpful Neighbors or something.

Famously, when Trump sent everybody a check from the government, he put his name on it. Joe Biden did the same thing, and Democrats seem to think it’s a good thing that he didn’t take credit because it “wasn’t about advancing politics”, even though this obviously backfired. Republicans constantly take credit for the benefits of Democratic policies, which is one reason why voters don’t know they’re democratic policies.

Our broad left-liberal coalition is attempting to improve people’s material conditions. Part of that is, and must be, advancing a political agenda. It’s no good if we provide job trainings and free lunches to a community if that community is just going to be reduced to ruin by economically catastrophic tariffs and mass deportations.

We cannot do this work just for the credit, but getting credit is important.

Let’s You And Me — Yes YOU — Get Started

I think this is a good idea, but I am not the right person to lead it.

For one thing, building this type of organization requires a lot of organizational and leadership skills that are not really my forte. Even the idea of filing the paperwork for a new 501(c)3 right now sounds like rolling Sisyphus’s rock up the hill to me.

For another, we need folks who are connected to this culture, in ways that I am not. I would be happy to be involved — I do have some relevant technical skills to help with infrastructure, and I could always participate in some of the job-training stuff, and I can definitely donate a bit of money to a nonprofit, but I don’t think I can be in charge.

You can definitely help too, and we will need a wide variety of skills to begin with, and it will definitely need money. Maybe you can help me figure out who should be in charge.

This project will be weaker without your support. Thus: I need to hear from you.

You can email me, or, if you’d prefer a more secure channel, feel free to reach out over Signal, where my introduction code is glyph.99 . Please start the message with “good works:” so I can easily identify conversations about this.

If I receive any interest at all, I plan to organize some form of meeting within the next 30 days to figure out concrete next steps.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you’ve read here and you’d like to read more things like it, or you’d like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor! My aspirations for this support are more in the directions of software development than activism, but needs must, when the devil drives. Thanks especially to Philip James for both refining the idea and helping to edit this post, and to Marley Myrianthopoulos for assistance with the data analysis.

It’s the weekend, and I have some Thoughts about federated social media. So, buckle up, I guess, it’s time to start some fights.

Recently there has been some discourse about Bluesky’s latest fundraising round. I’ve been participating in conversations about this on Mastodon, and I think I might sometimes come across as a Mastodon partisan, but my feelings are complex and I really don’t want to be boosting the ActivityPub Fediverse without qualification.

So here are some qualifications.

Bluesky Is Evil

To the extent that I am an ActivityPub partisan in the discourse between ActivityPub and ATProtocol, it is because I do not believe that Bluesky is a meaningfully decentralized social network. It is a social network, run by a company, which has a public API with some elements that might, one day, make it possible for it to be decentralized. But today, it is not, either practically or theoretically.

The Bluesky developers are putting in a ton of effort to maybe make it decentralized, hypothetically, someday. A lot of people think they will succeed. But ActivityPub (and, of course, Mastodon specifically) are already, today, meaningfully decentralized, as you can see on FediDB, there are instances with hundreds of thousands of people on them, before we even get to esoterica like the integrations Threads, Wordpress, Flipboard, and Ghost are doing.

The inciting incident for this post — that a lot of people are also angry about Bluesky raising millions of dollars from Evil Guys Doing Evil Stuff Capital — is indeed a serious concern. It lights the fuse that burns towards their eventual, inevitable incredible journey. ATProtocol is just an API, and that API will get shut off one day, whenever their funders get bored of the pretense of their network being “decentralized”.

At time of writing, it is also interesting that 3 of the 4 times that the CEO of Bluesky has even skeeted the word “blockchain” is to say “no blockchain”, to reassure users that the scam magnet of “Blockchain” is not actually near their product or protocol, which is a much harder position to maintain when your lead investor is “Blockchain Capital”.

I think these are all valid criticisms of Bluesky. But I also think that the actual engineers working on the product are aware of these issues, and are making a significant effort to address them or mitigate them in any way they can. All that work can still be easily incinerated by a slow quarter in terms of user growth numbers or a missed revenue forecast when the VCs are getting impatient, but it’s not nothing, it is a life’s work.

Really, who among us could not have our life’s ambitions trivially destroyed in an afternoon, simply because a billionaire decided that they should be? If you feel like you are safe from this, I have some bad news about how money works. So we are all doing our best in an imperfect system and maybe Bluesky is on to something here. That’s eminently possible. They’re certainly putting forth an earnest effort.

Mastodon Is Stupid

Meanwhile, not nearly as much has been made recently of Mastodon refusing funding from a variety of sources, when all indications are that funding is low, and plummeting, far below the level required to actually sustain the site, and they haven’t done a financial transparency report for over a year, and that report was already nearly a year late.

Mastodon and the fediverse are not nearly in a position to claim moral superiority over Bluesky. Sure, taking blockchain VC money might seem like a rookie mistake, but going out of business because you are spurning every possible source of funding is not that wise either.

Some might think that, sure, Mastodon the company might die but at least the Fediverse as a whole will keep going strong, right? Lots of people run their own instances! I even find elements of this argument convincing, and I think there is probably some truth to it. But to really believe this argument as claimed, that it’s a fait accompli that the fediverse will survive in some form, that all those self-run servers will be a robust network that will self-repair, requires believing some obviously false stuff. It is frankly unprofitable to run a Fediverse instance. Realistically, if you want to operate a mastodon server for yourself, it is going to cost at least $100/year once you include stuff like having a domain name, and managing the infrastructure costs is a complex problem that keeps getting harder to manage as the software itself gets slower.

Cory Doctorow has recently argued that this is all worth it, because at least on Mastodon, you’re in control, not at the whims of centralized website operators like Bluesky. In his words,

On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server

He concludes:

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none

(Emphasis mine).

This is a beautiful vision. It is, however, an incorrect assessment of the state of the Fediverse as it stands today. It’s not true in two important ways:

First, if you look at any account of a user’s fediverse account migration, like this one from Steve Bate or this one from the Ente project or this one from Erin Kissane, you will see that it is “painful for the foreseeable future” or “wasn’t as seamless as advertised”, and that “the best time to […] migrate instances […] is never”. This language does not presage a pleasant experience, as Doctorow puts it, “without pain”.

Second, migration is an active process that requires engagement from the instance that hosts you. If you have been blocked or banned, or had your account terminated, you are just out of luck. You do not have control over your data or agency over your online identity unless you’ve shelled out the relatively exorbitant amount of money to actually operate your own instance.

In short, ActivityPub is no panacea. A federated system is not really a “decentralized” system, as much as it is a bunch of smaller centralized systems that all talk to each other. You still need to know, and care, about your social and financial relationship to the operators of your instance. There is probably no getting away from this, like, just generally on the Internet, no matter how much peer-to-peer software we deploy, but there certainly isn’t in the incomplete mess that is ActivityPub.

JOIN, or DIE.

Neither Mastodon (or ActivityPub) nor Bluesky (or ATProtocol) has a comprehensive solution to the problem of decentralized social media. These companies, and these protocols, are both deeply flawed and if everything keeps bumping along as it is, I believe both are likely to fail. At different times, on different timelines, and for different reasons, but fail nonetheless.

However, these networks are both small and growing, and we are not yet in the phase of enshittification where margins are shrinking and audiences are captured and the screws must be tightened to juice revenue. There are stil possibilities. Mastodon is crowdfunded and what they lack in resources they make up for in flexibility and scrappiness. Bluesky has money and while there will eventually be a need to monetize somehow, they have plenty of runway to come up with that answer, and a lot of sophisticated protocol work has been done. Not enough to make a complete circut and allow users true, practical decentralization, but it’s not nothing, either.

Mastodon and Bluesky are both organizations with humans in them, and piles of data that is roughly schema-compatible even if the nuances and details are different. I know that there is a compatible model becuse thanks to both platforms being relatively open, there is a functioning ActivityPub/ATProtocol bridge in the form of Brid.gy Fed. You can use it today, and I highly recommend that you do so, so that “choice of protocol” does not fully define your audience. If you’re on bluesky, follow this account, and if you’re on Mastodon or elsewhere on the Fediverse, search for and follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy.

The reality that fans of decentralized, independent social media must confront is that we are a tiny audicence right now. Whichever site we are looking at, we are talking about a few million monthly active users at best, in a world where even the pathetic husk of Twitter still has hundreds of millions and Facebook has billions. Interneceine fights are not going to get us anywhere. We need to build bridges and links and connect our networks as densely as possible. If I’m being honest, Bridgy Fed looks like a pretty janky solution, but it’s something, and we need to start doing something soon, so we do not collectively become a permanent minority that mass markets can safely ignore.

As users, we need to set an example, so that the developers of the respective platforms get their shit together and work together directly so that workarounds like Bridgy are not required. Frankly, this is mostly on the ActivityPub and Mastodon devs, as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, not a lot of this seems to be public, or at least I haven’t witnessed a lot of it directly, but I have heard repeatedly that the ActivityPub developers are prickly, and this is one high-profile public example where an ActivityPub partisan is incredibly, pointlessly hostile and borderline harrassing towards someone — Mike Masnick, a long-time staunch advocate for open protocols and open patents, someone with a Mastodon account, and thus as good a prospective ally as the ActivityPub fediverse might reasonably find — explaining some of the relative benefits of Bluesky.

Most of us are technology nerds in one way or another. In that way we can look at signifiers like “ActivityPub” and “ATProtocol”, and feel like these are hard boundaries around different all-encompassing structures for the future, and thus tribes we must join and support.

A better way to look at this, however, is to see social entities like Mastodon gGmbH and Bluesky PBC — or, more to the point, Fosstodon, SFBA Social, Hachyderm (and maybe, one day, even an instance which isn’t fully just for software development nerds), as groups that deploy these protocols to access some data that they publish, just as they might publish their website over HTTP or their newsletters over SMTP. There are technical challenges involved in bridging between mutually unintelligible domain models, but that is, like, network software’s whole deal. Most software is just some kind of translation from one format or context to another. The best possible future for the fediverse is the one where users care as much about the distinction between ATProtocol and ActivityPub as they do about the distinction between POP3 and IMAP.

To both developers and users of these systems, I say: get it together. Be nice to each other. Because the rest of the social media ecosystem is sure as shit not going to be nice to us if we ever see even a hint of success and start to actually cut into their user base.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you’ve read here and you’d like to read more of it, or you’d like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor!

When you build Python, you can pass various options to ./configure that change aspects of how it is built. There is documentation for all of these options, and they are things like --prefix to tell the build where to install itself, --without-pymalloc if you have some esoteric need for everything to go through a custom memory allocator, or --with-pydebug.

One of these options only matters on macOS, and its effects are generally poorly understood. The official documentation just says “Create a Python.framework rather than a traditional Unix install.” But… do you need a Python.framework? If you’re used to running Python on Linux, then a “traditional Unix install” might sound pretty good; more consistent with what you are used to.

If you use a non-Framework build, most stuff seems to work, so why should anyone care? I have mentioned it as a detail in my previous post about Python on macOS, but even I didn’t really explain why you’d want it, just that it was generally desirable.

The traditional answer to this question is that you need a Framework build “if you want to use a GUI”, but this is demonstrably not true. At first it might not seem so, since the go-to Python GUI test is “run IDLE”; many non-Framework builds also omit Tkinter because they don’t ship a Tk dependency, so IDLE won’t start. But other GUI libraries work fine. For example, uv tool install runsnakerun / runsnake will happily pop open a GUI window, Framework build or not. So it bears some explaining

Wait, what is a “Framework” anyway?

Let’s back up and review an important detail of the mac platform.

On macOS, GUI applications are not just an executable file, they are organized into a bundle, which is a directory with a particular layout, that includes metadata, that launches an executable. A thing that, on Linux, might live in a combination of /bin/foo for its executable and /share/foo/ for its associated data files, is instead on macOS bundled together into Foo.app, and those components live in specified locations within that directory.

A framework is also a bundle, but one that contains a library. Since they are directories, Applications can contain their own Frameworks and Frameworks can contain helper Applications. If /Applications is roughly equivalent to the Unix /bin, then /Library/Frameworks is roughly equivalent to the Unix /lib.

App bundles are contained in a directory with a .app suffix, and frameworks are a directory with a .framework suffix.

So what do you need a Framework for in Python?

The truth about Framework builds is that there is not really one specific thing that you can point to that works or doesn’t work, where you “need” or “don’t need” a Framework build. I was not able to quickly construct an example that trivially fails in a non-framework context for this post, but I didn’t try that many different things, and there are a lot of different things that might fail.

The biggest issue is not actually the Python.framework itself. The metadata on the framework is not used for much outside of a build or linker context. However, Python’s Framework builds also ship with a stub application bundle, which places your Python process into a normal application(-ish) execution context all the time, which allows for various platform APIs like [NSBundle mainBundle] to behave in the normal, predictable ways that all of the numerous, various frameworks included on Apple platforms expect.

Various Apple platform features might want to ask a process questions like “what is your unique bundle identifier?” or “what entitlements are you authorized to access” and even beginning to answer those questions requires information stored in the application’s bundle.

Python does not ship with a wrapper around the core macOS “cocoa” API itself, but we can use pyobjc to interrogate this. After installing pyobjc-framework-cocoa, I can do this

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2

>>> import AppKit
>>> AppKit.NSBundle.mainBundle()

On a non-Framework build, it might look like this:

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NSBundle </Users/glyph/example/.venv/bin> (loaded)

But on a Framework build (even in a venv in a similar location), it might look like this:

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NSBundle </Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.12/Resources/Python.app> (loaded)

This is why, at various points in the past, GUI access required a framework build, since connections to the window server would just be rejected for Unix-style executables. But that was an annoying restriction, so it was removed at some point, or at least, the behavior was changed. As far as I can tell, this change was not documented. But other things like user notifications or geolocation might need to identity an application for preferences or permissions purposes, respectively. Even something as basic as “what is your app icon” for what to show in alert dialogs is information contained in the bundle. So if you use a library that wants to make use of any of these features, it might work, or it might behave oddly, or it might silently fail in an undocumented way.

This might seem like undocumented, unnecessary cruft, but it is that way because it’s just basic stuff the platform expects to be there for a lot of different features of the platform.

/etc/ builds

Still, this might seem like a strangely vague description of this feature, so it might be helpful to examine it by a metaphor to something you are more familiar with. If you’re familiar with more Unix style application development, consider a junior developer — let’s call him Jim — asking you if they should use an “/etc build” or not as a basis for their Docker containers.

What is an “/etc build”? Well, base images like ubuntu come with a bunch of files in /etc, and Jim just doesn’t see the point of any of them, so he likes to delete everything in /etc just to make things simpler. It seems to work so far. More experienced Unix engineers that he has asked react negatively and make a face when he tells them this, and seem to think that things will break. But their app seems to work fine, and none of these engineers can demonstrate some simple function breaking, so what’s the problem?

Off the top of your head, can you list all the features that all the files that /etc is needed for? Why not? Jim thinks it’s weird that all this stuff is undocumented, and it must just be unnecessary cruft.

If Jim were to come back to you later with a problem like “it seems like hostname resolution doesn’t work sometimes” or “ls says all my files are owned by 1001 rather than the user name I specified in my Dockerfile” you’d probably say “please, put /etc back, I don’t know exactly what file you need but lots of things just expect it to be there”.

This is what a framework vs. a non-Framework build is like. A Framework build just includes all the pieces of the build that the macOS platform expects to be there. What pieces do what features need? It depends. It changes over time. And the stub that Python’s Framework builds include may not be sufficient for some more esoteric stuff anyway. For example, if you want to use a feature that needs a bundle that has been signed with custom entitlements to access something specific, like the virtualization API, you might need to build your own app bundle. To extend our analogy with Jim, the fact that /etc exists and has the default files in it won’t always be sufficient; sometimes you have to add more files to /etc, with quite specific contents, for some features to work properly. But “don’t get rid of /etc (or your application bundle)” is pretty good advice.

Do you ever want a non-Framework build?

macOS does have a Unix subsystem, and many Unix-y things work, for Unix-y tasks. If you are developing a web application that mostly runs on Linux anyway and never care about using any features that touch the macOS-specific parts of your mac, then you probably don’t have to care all that much about Framework builds. You’re not going to be surprised one day by non-framework builds suddenly being unable to use some basic Unix facility like sockets or files. As long as you are aware of these limitations, it’s fine to install non-Framework builds. I have a dozen or so Pythons on my computer at any given time, and many of them are not Framework builds.

Framework builds do have some small drawbacks. They tend to be larger, they can be a bit more annoying to relocate, they typically want to live in a location like /Library or ~/Library. You can move Python.framework into an application bundle according to certain rules, as any bundling tool for macOS will have to do, but it might not work in random filesystem locations. This may make managing really large number of Python versions more annoying.

Most of all, the main reason to use a non-Framework build is if you are building a tool that manages a fleet of Python installations to perform some automation that needs to know about Python installs, and you want to write one simple tool that does stuff on Linux and on macOS. If you know you don’t need any platform-specific features, don’t want to spend the (not insignificant!) effort to cover those edge cases, and you get a lot of value from that level of consistency (for example, a teaching environment or interdisciplinary development team with a lot of platform diversity) then a non-framework build might be a better option.

Why do I care?

Personally, I think it’s important for Framework builds to be the default for most users, because I think that as much stuff should work out of the box as possible. Any user who sees a neat library that lets them get control of some chunk of data stored on their mac - map data, health data, game center high scores, whatever it is - should be empowered to call into those APIs and deal with that data for themselves.

Apple already makes it hard enough with their thicket of code-signing and notarization requirements for distributing software, aggressive privacy restrictions which prevents API access to some of this data in the first place, all these weird Unix-but-not-Unix filesystem layout idioms, sandboxing that restricts access to various features, and the use of esoteric abstractions like mach ports for communications behind the scenes. We don't need to make it even harder by making the way that you install your Python be a surprise gotcha variable that determines whether or not you can use an API like “show me a user notification when my data analysis is done” or “don’t do a power-hungry data analysis when I’m on battery power”, especially if it kinda-sorta works most of the time, but only fails on certain patch-releases of certain versions of the operating system, becuase an implementation detail of a proprietary framework changed in the meanwhile to require an application bundle where it didn’t before, or vice versa.

More generally, I think that we should care about empowering users with local computation and platform access on all platforms, Linux and Windows included. This just happens to be one particular quirk of how native platform integration works on macOS specifically.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. For this one, thanks especially to long-time patron Hynek who requested it specifically. If you like what you’ve read here and you’d like to read more of it, or you’d like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor! I am also available for consulting work if you think your organization could benefit from expertise on topics like “how can we set up our Mac developers’ laptops with Python”.

If a high-status member of a community that you participate in is accused of misbehavior, you may want to defend them. You may even write a long essay in their defense.

In that essay, it may seem only natural to begin with a lengthy enumeration of the accused’s positive personal qualities. To extol the quality of their career and their contributions to your community. To talk about how nice they are. To be a character witness in the court of public opinion.

If you do this, you are not defending them. You are proving the point. This is exactly how missing stairs come to exist. People don’t get away with bad behavior if they don’t have high status and a good reputation already.

Sometimes, someone with antisocial inclinations seeks out status, in order to facilitate their bad behavior. Sometimes, a good, but, flawed person does a lot of really good work and thereby accidentally ends up with more status than they were expecting to have, and they don’t know how to handle it. In either case, bad behavior may ensue.

If you truly believe that your fave is being accused or punished unjustly, focus on the facts. What, specifically, has been alleged? How are these allegations substantiated? What verifiable evidence exists to the contrary? If you feel that someone is falsely accusing them to ruin their reputation, is there evidence to support your claim that the accusation is false? Ask yourself the question: what information do you have, that is leading to your correct analysis of the situation, that the people making the accusations do not have, which might be leading them into error?

But, also, maybe just… don’t?

The urge to defend someone like this is much more likely to come from a sense of personal grievance than justice. Consider: does it feel like you are being attacked, when your fave has been attacked? Is there a tightness in your chest, heat rising on your cheeks? Do you feel suddenly defensive?

Do you think that defensiveness is likely to lead to you making good, rational decisions about what steps to take next?

Let your heroes face accountability. If they are really worth your admiration, they might accept responsibility and make amends. Or they might fight the accusations with their own real evidence — evidence that you, someone peripheral to their situation, are unlikely to have — and prove the accusations wrong.

They might not want your defense. Even if they feel like they do want it in the moment — they are human too, after all, and facing accountability does not feel good to us humans — is the intensified feeling that they can’t let down their supporters who believe in them likely to make them feel less defensive and panicked?

In either case, your character defense is unlikely to serve them. At best it helps them stay on an ego trip, at worst it muddies the waters and might confuse the collection of facts that would, if considered dispassionately, properly exonerate them.

Do you think that I am pretending to speak in generalities but really talking about one specific recent event?

Wrong!

Just in this last week, I have read 2 different blog posts about 2 completely different people in completely unrelated communities and both of their authors need to read this. But each of those were already of a type, one that I’ve read dozens of instances of in the past.

It is a very human impulse to perceive a threat to someone we think well of, and to try to defend against that threat. But the consequences of someone’s own actions are not a threat you can defend them from.