selfHosted — julian

Immich -- Awesome Open Source

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In our family we look after our own photos — we don't want Google or any other company deciding what we can and can't do with them.

In the past we used various desktop/laptop based open source viewer software, with storage on local disks. More recently we have been running the awesome open source PhotoPrism, with its smartphone-compatible web interface and photo library management features. Although PhotoPrism is impressive judged on its own merits, and has indeed allowed us to manage our photos ourselves, it's just not quite as usable as we'd wish.

Next up is Immich.

Immich promises “partner sharing”, where for example husband and wife might choose to share their whole photo libraries with each other. Immich offers stronger photo library management such as tagging, metadata manipulation, and deduplication of identical photos. Immich performs face recognition. Immich viewer apps seem to be user friendly and slick.

What's Good, What's Not So Good

For viewer apps we use the official Immich app from F-Droid on our degoogled phones and tablet, and the Immich web interface which works well on both mobile and desktop. The general impression is slick. It's fun to see a selection from “N years ago”. It's nice that various features of the viewer, such as the side-bar options to view by folder and view by people, can be turned on or off in the settings, depending on how we prefer to use the system. The main “time line” view works very well. Other views such as the view by people, by tags, on a map, and so on are functional but much less developed.

The user interface could be improved a lot by allowing us to use the different selection criteria together: having begun to explore a region on the map, we then want to narrow the results by people or by tags. As it stands, the interface is an example of the all-too-common anti-pattern in which every time we select a new option the computer “forgets” what we just told it a moment ago. (Nearly every shopping web site is a dire example of that anti-pattern. We might filter our results by “category=hardware” and by “material=metal”, and then adjust our search terms, and watch the computer immediately throw away our carefully chosen filters.)

Face Recognition

Face recognition is impressive. I set Immich to scanning my existing library of thousands or tens of thousands of photos dating back twenty years, which took it a few hours on my few-years-old server. Immich created groups of faces that the algorithm considered to be the same person. These groupings were amazingly accurate. The few false matches were predominantly small blurry faces picked out of the background (but still the majority of these appeared accurate), or baby faces (where to be fair I can't tell the difference even among members of my own family), or where only a small part of a face could be seen (and even many of these were accurate).

For naming the people, Immich presented a list of faces, one from each identified “person” group. The faces it chose were unfortunately often a small blurry image. It would be helpful if it could choose a “clear” image as the representative of each “person” group. On clicking this image we get to see all the photos in which that same person was identified, and there we can set the name of that person, and we can also choose a different representative image. This view of all the photos containing that person doesn't indicate where in the photo the person was detected, which in some cases puzzles me as they don't seem to be there at all, but perhaps knowing what the algorithm “saw” would just give me somewhere to direct my scorn and derision at its folly and might not really add anything helpful to the overall purpose.

An enthusiast has created a better user interface for naming and managing the faces more quickly, all on one screen. It's the main feature so far of Varun Raj Manoharan's Immich Power Tools, and the demo video there shows it in action.

The partner sharing works by including both my photos and my wife's photos in my time line view. The same for her view, if it is set up reciprocally. That is a good start. It would be more useful if we could see which photos are “ours” and which are “theirs”. I would like to see them tagged with our initials, or perhaps distinguished by a colour or styling. I would like to be able to quickly show or hide each set, and to select by partner in the search.

I hoped the partners would be able to share the same categorisation, tagging, face recognition and so on. At present unfortunately this is not possible. It is discussed as a potential future improvement in Show Face Recognition for Partner #5089.

Because the current implementation of Partner Sharing isn't close enough, I am thinking about using just one “family” account in Immich, with both (or all) partners' photo libraries in it. That might be the best way for our family to use the existing capability. Whether this would suit us depends on whether we use the upload/sync feature from our smartphones. If we do, then Immich's sync feature would place all of our photos into the same library. (I haven't found a feature to separate or tag them on upload based on which camera-phone they came from, although there might be a way.) Currently we are not using Immich's upload: we are using 'syncthing' for that, copying our photos directly to our respective photo libraries on the server. Then in Immich we define these as “external” libraries (meaning they are outside Immich's built-in upload storage area).

Folders, Albums, Tags

I have a collection of (older) photos that I already organised into folders with descriptive names. I would like these to be shown as “Albums” or “Tags”. Immich imports tags if found in embedded metadata, and a few of my photos had these. Due to the sad state of standardisation of photo metadata, however, naming the files and folders is a more universal solution than embedding descriptions and tags in the photo metadata.

The way I would expect or wish to get albums and tags from my collection would be to specify a set of patterns that match my folder and file names, and to specify rules to derive album names and tags from these patterns.

There are open issues about potential future development of folder imports in Immich. In the meantime I might try the extension Salvoxia/immich-folder-album-creator noted below.

Extensions

Extensions I have noted to investigate further:

– immich-folder-album-creator — “Automatically create and populate albums in Immich from a folder structure in external libraries” – Immich Power Tools — alternative UI for face naming and management – Immich-Kiosk — “A web slideshow for Immich”

Freedom Software Ethics

In terms of open source “freedom software” ethics, Immich sits somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.

On the positive side, Immich is open source under the GNU AGPL v3 license: that's very good for maintaining the freedoms granted to its users. Immich has its own website at its own domain, immich.app, where it hosts its blog and documentation.

On the other hand, like too many other good projects, the development is hosted in Microsoft Github rather than in a freedom-respecting forge such as Codeberg or at its own address. Use of MS Github is a real and present danger to the open source ecosystem: freedom software lives in freedom-respecting software forges. And development discussion is invited inside the proprietary Discord instead of through a freedom-respecting method such as Matrix: see Discord vs community values. Immich in its website footer also promotes other proprietary silos (Reddit, Youtube) and does not even mention any open/freedom tech channels such as the Fediverse.

Immich advertise that their client app is available through the big silo stores (Google, Apple). They also also distribute it through the freedom-respecting app store F-Droid, for Android and android-compatible degoogled phones. They mention this in the docs but not on the main page.

#awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #degoogled

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A non-Amazon wish list, anyone?

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 13:19:33 +0000

A non-Amazon wish list, anyone?

I once thought I was making a neutral choice to shop at Amazon, and that their wish list was a nice convenience.

Just like I one thought Google was my friend, and signed up for their “free” email. I deeply regretted that and have now deeply deGoogled.

Nowadays I recognise a greedy mega-corp when I see one, with everything wrong that goes along with that, and so I shut down my wish list there and almost completely avoid shopping there.

Each year my family conducts an awkward but functional exchange of emails: “I want a U and a V, any colour, size W.” “Here's my list in plain text inside attached ms word doc.” (ick!) “Dad told me earlier he wants an X as well.” “I'm getting Y for mum; is that ok with everyone else?” “I already got him a Z last year so don't get that.”

I don't really mind that. Although a bit awkward, it's a social conversation between us, and it takes place over a decentralised standard communication medium. I appreciate that about it.

Until somebody points to a wish list hosted by Amazon. That irks me. (It's not personal: all mega capitalism irks me these days.) One, I hate to associate with such a commercial giant and all it stands for. Two, people are taught to refer to it as “their” wish list when it's really Amazon's.

Each year I want to tell all my friends and family about a nice, clean, tidy, easy, freedom software (open-source self-hostable) alternative. Something my non-techie aunt would use. Something that might even persuade her to ditch her Amazon list.

To my surprise I haven't yet found it. I was and am still hoping to find it's already made and suitable for non-techies. However, so far I have found nothing.

The closest I've found is https://whattogive.com which is a small (single-person) proprietary service which you can use for free or make a donation. Functionally, although a bit clunky, it has the right kind of feature set that I'm looking for. I used it a few years, but I'm through with proprietary solutions, even small friendly ones. I want to be able to modify it, attach it to my own domain, have those kinds of freedom.

So: Anyone know a nice open tech wish list?

Until I asked a techie community, I hadn't guessed quite how many different functions and modes of operation are potentially “wish list” related. It seems I need to specify “it” more precisely.

For my family, the basic need is:

Private, restricted to a small group of participants.
each person or family can write their wish list(s)
basic format is free-form text
free-form includes the ability to list things “for us jointly” and so on (not only for a specific person)
free-form includes the ability to list non-specific things in one sentence: e.g. “also I always appreciate any nice sweets, chocolates, cosmetics etc.”
optional images and links; no attempt to make these point to a commercial service

Nice to have

ability to add new people to the group
ability to semi-anonymously mark things as “promised”
ability to suggest/recommend things for someone else
rich text
ability to make part of my list publicly visible (but with no input of any kind from unauthenticated people).

Not Wanted

integration with shopping, shipping, payment or comparison services.

#selfHosted #awesomeFOSS

Matrix Extensible User Profiles -- How Do We Get There?

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 10:42:48 +0000

More and more I find myself using the fediverse (based on ActivityPub) alongside Matrix, and the two protocols complement each other nicely in some ways. In other ways their differences seem needless and jarring, only getting in the way. I'd like to be able to offer my contacts the free choice of which protocol to use, depending on what kind of communication they intend (public-ish versus private or group-ish), without everything else being different — especially the user identifier/addressing but also many lesser issues such as the existence of user profiles.

I have long remained hopeful we'd get use profiles eventually. Conceptually it's not a big deal. So where are we now and where are we going?

As a matrix user, I want to be able to advertise information about myself, including some semi-well-known kinds of preferences/facts about myself (languages, various contact details, pronouns, ...), free-form text (maybe with mark-up), maybe an additional picture, URLs, etc.
As a matrix user, I want to be able to quickly find and view any public profile of another user. Preferably also their not-public profile if I already established a relationship with them or was given permission.
As a client author, I want to be able to provide profile creation/editing of the logged-in user, and profile look-up/display of other users, in ways compatible with other clients.
As a matrix fan, I want matrix to support user profiles at least on par with comparable systems (e.g. Mastodon). Some compatibility in the profile data capabilities and content format would be especially nice to have, so that I can build social web systems that span across protocols.

I had been thinking there would have been enough demand from client makers to make this happen by now. Unfortunately, despite being on the wish list for nine years now, with sporadic contributions from many people interested, it's still stalled.

On the Spec Side

State of the spec. These seem to be the main issues:

Many more specific issues are linked to those.

Technical hurdles: one main blocker:

MSC2444: peeking over federation via /peek #2444

Can anyone comment from the spec perspective, design or implementation?

Client Design or Support

So, where do we go next? I'm interested to know if there's any working proof of concept in a client? I even created a profile room for myself manually a year ago, following one of the specs, hoping maybe some client would eventually see it.

Can anyone summarise from a client-app perspective?

(Maybe in the #matrix-design:matrix.org room. I'm raising the issue there.)

#matrix #awesomeFOSS #selfHosted

Tandoor Recipe Manager

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 10:09:20 +0000

A Mini Review

Tandoor is a self-hosted open source recipe manager. I have been running it in my YunoHost test server, in order to try it out, for about a year, collecting 21 recipes in it.

Basically I'm not satisfied with it, for my needs.

It's quite nice in some ways but terribly limited to one particular fussy attempt to organise a recipe in a particular way with steps, ingredients categorised by name and quantity, etc. There's no way to include recipes that don't fit this format. No way to include a web page (that doesn't import neatly into this very precise format) or a text document that I wrote or a PDF scan of a paper page. No way even to represent “fuzzy” ingredients like “some herbs of your choice” or “about 2 or 3 cloves of garlic”. Each ingredient has to have a number and a unit specified, and there are only hacky work-arounds like defining the word “some” as a custom unit. So I'm still running it for fun, for a small handful of recipes I imported (sometimes with awkward manual clean-up required) from web sites, while most of my recipes are still on scraps of paper or PDF scans or books or web sites that don't import.

Unfortunately Tandoor doesn't match my use case, which is a need to keep track of all the recipes that I like, no matter what they look like or what they came from.

Until we find a recipe manager that can cope with variety and messiness it's just a toy for me and not really useful.

Tandoor's Strengths

I can see that there are use cases where it might shine, which could be where the goal is to publish a collection of recipes, let's say for a club or a school, where the need is to have a place all the recipes can be found together, and where the effort of inputting them into the prescribed format is worth it. It's in my Awesome FOSS tag for this reason.

Freedom Software Ethics

In terms of open source “freedom software” ethics, Tandoor sits towards the freedom side of the spectrum.

It's open source, and it's got a recipe-hosting subscription business attached: that's all good.

On the other hand, like too many other projects, the development is hosted on Microsoft-Github instead of a freedom-respecting forge. That's a real and present danger to the open source ecosystem: freedom software lives in freedom-respecting software forges. And development discussion is invited inside the proprietary Discord instead of through a freedom-respecting communication protocol: see Discord vs community values.

On the positive side it has its own website at its own domain, tandoor.dev, and some other freedom-respecting resources of its own, for example a no-tracking cookies policy.

#awesomeFOSS #selfHosted

Open tech, be afraid.

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 21:24:00 +0000

Open tech, be afraid. Be very afraid. Microsoft owns both Visual Studio Code “VSCode” and MS-GitHub, two intertwined and utterly proprietary product-service ecosystems with a bit of open-source in their core to lure us in. Because they love open source? Yeah, no.

Soon after leaving GitPod whose technology links the two, Geoffrey Hunt last year explained their strategy and what it's doing to our open tech world, in a great and “harrowing” article, “Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture” https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

“The future of software development tooling that is being built is closed as ****, and people seem to be okay with it...”

This is why MS-GitHub is not our friend.

This is why falling for their trick, disguising MS-VSCode as a neat “free” editor, will come back and haunt and hurt us.

Vendor lock-in double-whammy. Using open source as “a financial weapon”.

”... the biggest challenge for Gitpod, GitLab, Datacoves, OpenBB, Foam, et al lies ahead – developing open language tooling for each community where Microsoft has forked the communities over to proprietary language servers...”

If we have a grain of public spirit, if we are motivated at all by the Freedom that's supposed to be afforded by Free-Libre Open-Source Software, we must #GiveUpGithub, we must recognise the trap, we must choose truly open #FreedomTech.

On Open Source and the Sustainability of the Commons, Ploum, 2024
We need to talk about your Github addiction, Ploum, 2023
I Can't Wait for Forge Federation, Wrily, 2023
Your FOSS Project Deserves its Own Domain, Wrily, 2023
FOSS Apps Live in FOSS Forges, Wrily, 2022
FOSS Apps Live in FOSS App Stores!, Wrily, 2022

#awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #GiveUpGithub #DitchDiscord #forgeFed #forgeFederation #Forgejo #Codeberg #useOpenTools

I Can't Wait for Forge Federation

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 09:19:34 +0000

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.

... says ForgeFriends.org, continuing ...

They know, better than anyone, how to fix and improve them. But when they choose to collaborate only via the most popular proprietary software forges, they are denied the right to use their skills and cannot work with fellow developers who are banned because they reside in the wrong country. They have been made to believe that the tools they use daily to craft their own software are out of reach. As if their software was a product that could be separated from the other software running the tests, allowing changes to be merged or bugs to be filed. But software is a process, and whoever controls it ultimately decides what the developers can do and how they communicate.

I'm looking eagerly to the great work of the forward thinking folks involved in ForgeFriends, the ForgeJo forge and Codeberg.org hosting, who are turning forge federation from a dream into reality. They are creating one of the most important movements in the open source software world today. I am keeping my eyes open for a grant opportunity or other financial support, as I would love to join them in making it happen.

FOSS Apps Live in FOSS Forges
GitLab: some discussions ongoing

#awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #giveUpGithub #forgeFed #forgeFederation #ForgeJo #Codeberg #FreedomTech

Our Own SignaturePDF -- Awesome Open Source

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 08:45:38 +0000

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.

Here it is running in my private network. I installed it inside YUNoHost, which is nice and easy. We start by uploading a PDF file:

Then we add our signature (draw it, type it, or upload an image) and other annotations:

Then either we download it, or we share a link for other people to add their signatures:

SignaturePDF supports not only signing but more: organising pages (rotate, delete, etc.), editing the embedded metadata (author, title, etc.) and (in development) compressing a PDF file.

I have been running SignaturePDF since I heard of it a few months ago. It was already very neat, both useful and pleasant. Until recently the interface was only in French, which was OK for me, but now they have made it localisable and added an English translation. That, and seeing it grow new features like the sharing and the page organiser, while maintaining simplicity and quality, are the reasons I decided to blog and recommend it to you now.

Try it on their site — SignaturePDF — and then self-host it!

Alternatives

Here are some other open-source document signing systems.

SignaturePDF is for small scale use and making a document that looks similar to one that was printed, signed and scanned.

By contrast, DocuSeal and OpenSign and Documenso are more powerful, commercial, systems. DocuSeal and OpenSign can also attach cryptographic signatures in accordance with e-signing standards, and feature APIs for managing them programmatically.

FOSS Ethical Stance

SignaturePDF stats show steady development since 2021, and Documenso since 2022, both with community contributions. DocuSeal stats and OpenSign stats both indicate they suddenly published their source code in 2023, with OpenSign showing some community involvement, and DocuSeal showing only two significant contributors, at the time of review (February 2024).

The documentation sections for self-hosting DocuSeal and OpenSign look rather sparse in both cases — figure out the details yourself. Documenso and SignaturePDF look more committed to self-hosting.

All four of these projects appear to be living entirely in Big Tech land for their code hosting (Microsoft Github — why's that bad?) and communication channels (Discord, ExTwitter, Facebook and the like — why's that bad?).

Documenso presents itself as an “open startup” with published seed funding and salaries.

[EDIT 2024-02-29: add Alternatives and FOSS Ethical Stance sections.]

#awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #yunohost

Your FOSS Project Deserves its Own Domain

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 21:09:28 +0000

Where does your project live? Where do people find it? Who controls how people access your project's resources on the Internet?

https://our-project.org/

Github the Mega-Mall

See also: Open Tech, Be Very Afraid

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”.

Of course they make it appealing: if we're signed up and logged in already, we don't see the nagging, the self-advertisement to log in or sign up. But other visitors do.

Github operates on the model of free-as-in-free-beer, convenient-to-start, you-are-the-product, pay-with-your-data-and-your-attention, we-got-you-cornered, now-we-got-your-users-too.

Beyond source code...

Want to distribute the builds from your project? Github provides easy ways to automate the builds of your software using generous amounts of compute time and storage “for free”, and ways to publish the results.

Want to publish documentation? Easy. Remember, Github provides features that are convenient to start with. Github helps your users read the docs, conveniently hosted at our-project.readthedocs.io/. That's a Github domain name too. Microsoft now controls everybody's access to “our” docs. They can add things — such as adverts — and prevent us doing certain things with our docs. They can redirect readers' attention to their own business. They do this to millions of projects at once, manipulating the users of these millions of projects, all to drive their business goals.

Feeding The Corporate Interest

It's the network effect, as in social media, combined with the ease of use that comes from letting somebody else do the administration. People and small projects feel they are getting value, individually, out of this system, and in an individual and short-term sense indeed they are; but all the while being coerced into feeding the corporate interest, and all the while putting bigger obstacles in the way of other people's freedom to choose a different path.

There is no technical reason why a big company should not offer services that it provides on your own domain, so that you retain the addressability if you should decide to move to a different service provider. Services that we pay for, such as many email providers, offer bring-your-own-domain service. But the big “free” ones? They need to monetise you some other way, and they get a huge lock-in factor by putting your stuff behind the gate of their domain.

What To Do?

Get your own domain name. Host your code, docs, forums there.

You don't have to self-host it: look for a bring-your-own-domain provider for your services.

The federated music server “funkwhale” is a good example. The project's home is https://funkwhale.audio with many of its resources at subdomains like {forum,docs,dev,blog}.funkwhale.audio.

Owning the address of our project is key to owning our project.

“Millions of Free Software developers forgot why it matters to own their tools.” — ForgeFriends

Postscript: Non-DNS Naming Systems

With DNS, access to a domain is controlled some person or company who we can loosely call the “owner”. Technically that is the “registrant”, somebody who registers and pays for the domain name. The registrant (“owner”) of our-project.org has ultimate control over access to all resources under that domain name and all its subdomains.

In the near future, DNS is set to remain the dominant naming system. However, DNS is not perfect. In fact it has serious problems. You may have heard of several other systems for naming things on the Internet. A lot of work is going into these, and I am hopeful that we will see widespread use of one or more alternative naming systems. If you are involved with any of those, you might want to consider how we can apply the principle that people and projects deserve to own their own name space.

More: #awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #GiveUpGithub #DitchDiscord #ownDomain #FreedomTech #useOpenTools

FOSS Apps Live in FOSS Forges

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 21:41:09 +0000

Software is a process, and whoever controls it ultimately decides what the developers can do and how they communicate.

The elephant in the room is Microsoft. Open tech, be afraid. Be very afraid. Microsoft owns both VSCode and MS-GitHub, two intertwined and utterly proprietary product-service ecosystems with a bit of open-source in their core to lure us in.

Have the Freenode sell-out (2021) and the Twitter fiasco (2022) taught us nothing?

FOSS thrives in FOSS ecosystems.

In their “State of the Forge Federation” newsletter, ForgeFriends said it best:

Millions of Free Software developers forgot why it matters to own their tools. They know, better than anyone, how to fix and improve them. But when they choose to collaborate only via the most popular proprietary software forges, they are denied the right to use their skills and cannot work with fellow developers who are banned because they reside in the wrong country. They have been made to believe that the tools they use daily to craft their own software are out of reach. As if their software was a product that could be separated from the other software running the tests, allowing changes to be merged or bugs to be filed. But software is a process, and whoever controls it ultimately decides what the developers can do and how they communicate.

The source code and the development process of so many great Free-as-in-Freedom projects are currently hosted on the proprietary Microsoft Github. This makes me sad. In my strong opinion, to better serve FOSS as a whole they would GiveUpGithub and move to a FOSS software forge provider such as Codeberg.org and/or host a FOSS forge at their own domain.

How to Choose Freedom

provide a forge at one's own domain, using FOSS forge software such as Forgejo or Sourcehut or self-managed Gitlab-CE, either self-managed or rented from a service provider — Best option for freedom, independence, self-agency, large projects
choose a home at a public FOSS forge such as Codeberg or Framagit — Best option for new small projects, quick start, finding an existing community

These fine FOSS people do it right

... either at their own domain, or in a FOSS public forge:

Domain at Codeberg
FediLab at Codeberg
Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) at Codeberg
ForgeFed at Codeberg
Funkwhale at their own domain
GadgetBridge at Codeberg
Gnome at their own domain
Hubzilla at FramaGit.org
Interpeer Project at Codeberg
KDE at their own domain
KeyOxide at Codeberg
Libravatar at Ubuntu's LaunchPad.net
Mobilizon at FramaGit.org
Murena /e/OS at their own domain
NextPush at Codeberg
Plume at their own domain
Purism at their own domain
Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib at Codeberg
(streams) at Codeberg
Ubuntu at their own domain
UnifiedPush at Codeberg
Vocata at Codeberg
Wordpress at their own domain
... and thousands more.

Pwned by Big Tech: these fine FOSS people need a nudge

I love these fine people. I value what they are making. I understand these fine people had to choose something and they chose to prioritise the convenience of Microsoft Github, but I feel more and more every year that our world of FOSS overall is stifled by being owned by such megacorps and I want to take a stand in support of prioritising our FOSS values. I would be joyful to see them improve their relationship to the FOSS world by putting their assets in FOSS infrastructure under their own control.

Authelia
Authentik
Calibre-ebook
Circles
Diary by Bill Farmer
Element [matrix] software
Elementary OS: AppCentre apps “must be hosted in a Github repository”
Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP)
Gitea
Healthchecks
Homer by Bastien Wirtz
InfiniTime
Jellyfin
LibreTranslate
Mailspring
Mastodon
Navidrome
Nextcloud
ntfy
OpenAndroidInstaller
Photoprism
PocketCasts
Sandstorm
Syncthing
Traefik
Vaultwarden
WriteFreely federated blogging
YunoHost
... and thousands more.

(I'm linking only to their free/libre/open home pages, not to github.)

I'll repeat and emphasise, I love these fine FOSS projects I have listed here. I value, use, support, and/or contribute to, and recommend them to you for the fine work they are doing in free software world. I would also love to see them adopt FOSS principles when it comes to their choice of code forge.

More: #awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #GiveUpGithub #DitchDiscord #forgeFed #forgeFederation #Forgejo #Codeberg #FreedomTech #useOpenTools

FOSS Apps Live in FOSS App Stores!

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 15:43:34 +0000

Don't lock a FOSS Android app in Google's proprietary store!

Many of us are looking to FOSS solutions in order to keep our digital lives under our own control. We don't accept that any Big Tech company should hold the keys to a vast swathe of our digital life. So on our smart phones we may choose to use a FOSS version of Android. That means one that uses the open source parts of Android but avoids the proprietary Google lock-in parts. These so-called “deGoogled” Android-compatible operating systems include LineageOS, Murena /e/-OS, CalyxOS, GrapheneOS and more. Users of non-Google phones can find various “back door” ways to obtain apps from Google's play-by-our-rules-store, but that's completely the wrong way. FOSS apps should be available through FOSS app stores such as F-Droid.

F-Droid is not only an app store, it's also a protocol or “app store kit” that allows anyone to publish their own F-Droid-compatible app store. (I set up one up just to publish one camera app for myself and friends.) Each app publisher can choose whether to publish their app in the F-Droid store following its rules and conditions, or publish on their own store where they can set their own rules and conditions. Each user can decide which F-Droid-compatible stores they want to use, according to their own assessment of the publisher's reputation.

These fine FOSS people do it right

FUTO Circles a.k.a. Circuli, matrix-based private social media — published in the main F-Droid
... TODO: add lots more examples

These fine FOSS people need a nudge

Pocket Casts — issue “Add to F-Droid” disappointingly closed as “wont fix”.
... TODO: add lots more examples

These Fine People Understand

EU Pilot Project: Public Apps in F-Droid

FOSDEM '23 talk Sat 15:00 Reckoning with new app store changes: Is now our chance? — Recent legal and policy developments around app stores and what they mean for free software
FOSDEM '23 talk Sat 16:00 EU alternative to app stores — Guardian Project tooted: “At #FOSDEM, @marcel_kolaja will present the #EU pilot project to look into open-sourcing the EU's apps and publishing them outside of #BigTech including on @fdroidorg. @eighthave will join, talking about how F-Droid will help pull the EU towards #FreeSoftware. Join us!”

[1] An f-droid repo link is not a web page. To use it, you open your f-droid app's “repositories” settings and add the link there.

More: #degoogled #awesomeFOSS #selfHosted #GiveUpGithub #DitchDiscord #FreedomTech #useOpenTools

selfHosted — julian

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