A communication is distributed property. (It's my data and your data at the same time.)
My data, my rules. (Your data, your rules.)
Retention is non-binary. (There are degrees of accessibility and modes of retention.)
I like real-world analogies.
When I send you a paper letter, I choose whether to keep a copy, and you choose whether to keep the copy you receive. Together we agree how confidential it is, whether we should share it or publish it or destroy it. In light of that agreement I decide where to keep my copy, perhaps in my office, or pinned to my front door where any passer-by can read it, or in a vault that will only be unlocked once I die. If we publish it, we accept there's a public copy out of our direct control but still subject to laws and our stated wishes.
Any electronic system should give me and you those options, no matter how it's structured internally, if it claims to be serving us well.
Pinecil Accessories include a flexible heat-proof cable and sets of tips.
Would I Use It?
Since I was a teenager I have been using my father's trusty old 15W Antex Precision Model C soldering iron, which has gone through a couple of new tips back in the days when I was building a lot of circuits, and otherwise just keeps working.
However, the old soldering iron's mains cable, very thin though it is, has become so hardened and springy that I have to pull against it to move the iron where I want it. And it heats up slowly so after plugging it in, and waiting for minutes before tinning it, I end up leaving it on, its tip smoking and charring, until clearing up time at the end of the project.
I would love a Pinecil, especially for its temperature regulation and for its quick heat-up, claimed as 6 seconds.
But the 32-bit microprocessor? The control buttons, the USB connector? I can't see it lasting 50 years. This would not be a purchase for lifetime reliability. This would be for fun, for utility, and for the sake of supporting open hardware design.
UPDATE 2023-2024:YES — Thanks to my father, I now have a Pinecil. It works well. I am very pleased with it.
These are my addresses on different systems. See how they are all substantially the same (except for formatting and a subdomain)? They all take the form: <my-name> <at> <my-domain>. More importantly, see how they are all owned by myself? My addresses all belong to my domain, not to any service provider's domain.
In today's broken Internet we're told it's normal to identify ourself using addresses we don't own:
my.whole.name @ megacorpmail.com
an.other.name @ big.mastodon.instance
choose.a.name @ matrix.org
Two problems. First, what we call “our” addresses are in fact not ours at all, they are owned and controlled by the service providers. Second, we are forced to use lots of different addresses, a different one for each provider.
In a discussion room about the Fediverse, bkil drew my attention to “The age of average” by Alex Murrell, and questions whether like cars, cities and coffee shops, all social media posts should end up looking the same. Why not let the senders and recipients style them?
Should we not expect and enjoy seeing messages or “posts” reflecting the creative expression of the different individuals and groups we interact with — our friends, family, colleagues, employers?
Yes, yes, YES! I've been thinking the same for Matrix, and it applies of course equally to the (ActivityPub) Fediverse too. But it's so “radical” to many people's ears today, accustomed to the strictly limited silo offerings from Big Tech.
I think the way I would explain is with Real World analogies like this: When I hear from my friend D, it's usually a picture-postcard and their writing is scrawly and fills all the space including the margins. When I hear from my friend E, it's usually a tidy note on posh quality off-white paper, with their logo in the corner.
I would LOVE to be able to receive the same richness in indie social protocols, for more than just aesthetic reasons.
I would love to work for or with Murena on their /e/-OS phone. UnifiedPush support is one of the first things I would propose to do.
UnifiedPush is in my humble opinion one of the most important recent developments for freedom phones. It grants us freedom from Google’s near monopoly push notification system FCM. I have followed the development of UnifiedPush it from its OpenPush origins.
What have I done so far?
I have deployed ‘ntfy’, a UnifiedPush compatible server implementation, on my home network. I documented and published my installation script (which uses Ansible and Docker), and successfully submitted it for inclusion in the popular Matrix installer matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, so matrix self-hosters can deploy it easily.
My self-hosted push service now serves notifications to several of the apps I use.
If given the chance to advance UnifiedPush support, I would propose a plan something like this:
deploying a UP server for /e/ users (one for the Murena central server, and one in each self-hosted deployment), initially choosing one of the existing kinds of UP server (probably NextPush because obviously it's built to fit into nextcloud);
creating a UP distributor as an /e/-OS system app, by adapting an existing one (NextPush, to match the server), and making it auto-discover/configure the server from the /e/-OS account info;
working with important client apps (/e/-OS default apps first) to add support to them;
perhaps tweaking the U.P. server and distributor to better suit this use case, if and when needed.
In practice, what do ninety-something percent of small FOSS projects do? They sign up on Microsoft Github. If we are one of these, then we feel our little project has a home on the Internet, its own address: https://github.com/our-name/our-repo. Oops, but did I say an address of its own? Well, there's the catch. I meant an address of Microsoft's own.
Github is a Gatekeeper. Every link to our project now takes the reader through a virtual gateway owned and ruled by Github's owner, Microsoft. The domain name is the gate, and its owner holds the key. Want to visit the source code? Before we reach our-name/our-repo we must walk through their gate at github.com. We must pass through whatever they put in the gateway. Ads? Nagging to sign up? Then they will let us visit the source code that we feel is “ours”.
The famous inventor Zangemann lives in a huge villa high above the city. Adults and children alike love his inventions and are desperate to have them. But then... the inventor makes a momentous decision... The clever girl Ada sees through what is going on. Together with her friends, she forges a plan...
Ada begins to experiment with hardware and software, and in the process realises how crucial it is for her and others to control technology.
Decentralised linking from the Web (HTTP contexts) to a matrix user or room.
Status: This is a proposed, draft specification for consideration by the matrix development community. This version was initially posted before any discussion or feedback.
Matrix is supposed to be a decentralised protocol [MATRIX]. While much of it is, an important part isn’t. Matrix uses matrix.to [SPEC-TO] as a centralised mechanism for linking and invitation to matrix resources from HTTP contexts.
We can do better than centralised.
This is a proposal to fix an important part of that problem.
