In this corner of my world, I seek a better digital life, one where I own my own digital identity, where I am not forced to be a microsoft or facebook user just because my school or family use them, one where I get to choose my digital service providers to suit my values...
In this corner of my world, I plan how I might achieve this using open-standard protocols, open-source software, replaceable services...
In this corner of my world, in order to get some of this digital sovereignty in my own life, and to learn skills to help build the better world, I practice “self-hosting”, but in great frustration knowing full well it's so far away from the needed solutions...
In this corner of my world, I am meeting lots of people with similar views, and hearing lots of comments like X is bad, Y is an open-standard protocol, Z is an ethical service...
But I am rarely hearing people's imagination of how it all works in this new, better world.
Time to shake off another Big Tech and feel that delightful breath of fresh air, health and freedom.
Pruning the old overgrowth of commercial Big Tech and letting the new shoots of indie tech flourish.
“THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING”
Facebook Status:
Deactivating Facebook prior to deleting it from my life. (Not that it was in my life anyway. Hardly touched it in ten years. But because this account existed it looked like I was here. If you thought I was here, I wasn't; Zuck's system wanted you to think that. If you thought I was receiving your kind messages and rudely ignoring you, I wasn't; Zuck's system wanted you to think that.)
A computer program that generates music. How quaint.
I remember when I first heard computer-generated music. My father showed me a book, “Music By Computers,” and we listened to some of the recordings of music generated by various kinds of programs.
That was in the 1980s. “Music By Computers” had been published in 1969, compiled from papers presented in 1966.
I'm caught in a self-sovereignty self-hosting knot of ambition. Some days it seems everything I want to simplify or improve or upgrade is blocked by something else. I want to blog more from my WriteFreely instance, and for the time being I can, but it's bothering me that it's out of date, running on an out-of-date Yunohost-11. I'm proud to have set up staging copies of much of my infrastructure so I can try a test upgrade, but that reveals the upgrade is broken, so instead I want to migrate it either to a fresh Yunohost-12, but I discover that no longer supports exactly the same way of logging in with its SSO at my base-domain which is managed separately outside Yunohost (I'm skipping lots of details, they're beside the point here), and it reminds me WF is one of my last few “production” services still running in YNH. I want to get them out of YNH because for all its good points it's designed as a monolith, not to plug and compose with other infrastructure, so... I could migrate Writefreely instead to another hosting method outside Yunohost, like MASH, so I try that and find support for Mariadb isn't yet implemented in MASH-WriteFreely, so I could either add Mariadb support myself and then migrate the DB directly, or let it use another DB and instead try to migrate the posts and subscribers and metadata through WriteFreely's API... and so on for my other services. Ugh. I mean, I knew it would be like this. I chose this path, and I kind of like it. Sometimes I even find that software has been developed in the meantime that does indeed simplify and improve things for me, like when projects add support for SSO, and that's wonderful! But just so much still remains to do... And I'm trying to skip some of the nitty-gritty by looking ahead to better technologies: want to move infrastructure from Docker in VMs in Proxmox to mostly LXCs in Incus, eventually learn Nix and K8s, want to get involved in improving, unifying, standardising some of the best of small-medium scale hosting frameworks like Yunohost, Co-op Cloud, SelfHostBlocks/Skarabox, Fediversity. I realised at this stage any more tweaking I do to my private infra is more or less a waste, now that I've learnt from it. What matters is what I can contribute to projects that others share, so I'm aiming that way now. And thinking of some ways to “level up” this world of personal data self-sovereignty and make things that ordinary people can use, plug-and-play kit for family and friends and schools to store and easily manage their identity and data. Have (some) skills and (maybe good) ideas; lack money and time. Must get around to writing about the ideas at least. Is my WriteFreely still holding up for now? Whew.
An article about Building the Self-Agency Mobile Ecosystem: Push Messaging
Push messaging is the system that enables incoming messages to wake up and reach our apps, instantly and efficiently. But Who Cares Who Delivers Our Notifications? Our answer is: we care, and we do not like being locked in to depending on one mega-corp's system.
Therefore, in our libre mobile computing devices, we require a push-messaging infrastructure built from open standard technology that gives us freedom to choose our service providers and authority over them.
Should we consider standardising a UP client-server protocol so that a built-in distributor can work with several different server implementations and vice-versa?
Not necessarily, and I will attempt to explain why.
