I was just preparing a Merge Request to contribute upstream, when I noted,
You can review my merge request in the web UI at my TraxLab (gitlab) repo. Obviously you can't click the “Merge” button (until Forge Federation is done — there's an awesome project to check out).
It still grieves me that open source devs push me into working with Microsoft Github. Sure I understand the argument to use it “because it's convenient right now and 'everyone' is there” but to me there's a more important value I wish to uphold:
Millions of Free Software developers forgot why it matters to own their tools.
Last week I was setting up Draupnir on my matrix test rig, in order to become familiar with Draupnir deployment before I integrate it with PubHubs.
Now I need to address end-to-end-encryption (E2EE). PubHubs exclusively uses encrypted matrix rooms, and Draupnir doesn't yet have E2EE functionality built-in. (Why is that? Moderation in public rooms is Draupnir's main use case, and for several reasons public matrix rooms are usually not encrypted. However PubHubs is different.)
There is a generic solution for adding E2EE to a matrix bot, and it's called Pantalaimon, an “E2EE aware proxy daemon for matrix clients.” So this week I'm setting up Pantalaimon.
You know that feeling when they send you a PDF to sign? “Simply print, sign and scan!” Or the more sophisticated ones, “Sign it digitally in our partner's secure signing system!”
Well, thanks to this awesome open source SignaturePDF, created by 24eme.fr, now we can sign a PDF file digitally, in our own home network.
Communicate confidently and respectfully with the public
Congratulations to GNU/Linux.ch and FSFE-CH for this initiative! I love what you're doing here. I think maybe I want to get involved.
I'm a FLOSS dev and thinker, and recently blogged about how we need to be doing exactly this kind of campaign. I'm delighted that you are! Though I'm no PR expert I have some ideas. In my Social Media Links for A People-Centred Community, the messaging I made up begins,
Related to development of all social (people-focused) communications and sharing systems, fediverse included.
Own Domain
We can't build people-oriented social tech in the way that Big Tech do, where they say “this is our system, you'll have an address @ our-big-tech-domain, and all your links belong to us.”
I also want to automate, with Ansible, as much as possible of the set-up that is required before running that playbook. I aim to document here what I have done and open questions about it. The numbered steps here correspond to the manual instructions in that documentation linked above.
I hate intrusive advertising on the web. I always install ad blockers to manage my own experience but I often forget that many of my friends and family are oblivious and see ads as a routine annoyance. Presumably they assume it's an inevitable part of modern life. And they don't even see the adjacent class of content, the invisible, nefarious, mass surveillance and tracking.
Could I do something to help my friends and family? Presumably these people are likely to share my values.
Privacy is over-rated. It's not unimportant, but what I mean is privacy is an over-used trigger word, easy to mention, but it (the lack of it) is not one of the main harms of big tech. The main harms of big tech are more subtle, to do with opportunity cost, diverting the direction in which societal tools are built, towards capitalism investment value return, away from the shapes of technology that would be in society's best interests and values. Wish we had a word to express that. Oh, we do, thank you Cory Doctorow. Enshittification.
You can see it at the bottom of my blog posts, and in some of my other web pages.
At last I have got around to making a picture with a whole bunch of logos or icons of projects, products and organisations I love. Mostly open-source related, some real-life.
