Alan Zimmerman @alanz@social.coop

allow me to criticize the state of the fediverse as much as love it:

- tiny brain: mega-node such as mastodon.social oh dang it we've reinvented twitter
- regular brain: I'll just choose an instance off of joinmastodon.org oh dang it got shut down everything I love is lost
- galaxy brain: I'll self host fedi software oh god this is hard I'm afraid to upgrade
- universe brain: we need to merge the fediverse with p2p network designs so a node going down isn't catastrophic

The more Mastodon servers there, are, the better. The more spread out people are across them, the more the network is resilient to various failure modes.

The basic premise of Mastodon is that you follow your friends from different servers! So go forth, and explore the fediverse ☺️

This is a statue located in Berlin, entitled "Politicians Discussing Global Warming."

Sunbeam City just launched a federated blogging instance through the Plume software! Check it out at https://cafe.sunbeam.city/

@deni @ekaitz_zarraga Any business model that can achieve exponential growth so that they can have their exit (can be sold). None of the business models capable of fulfilling that core requirement are compatible with our welfare as individuals or with the continued existence of our habitat or of the commons.

Wise words on technology creep from a former coworker:

"But again, be forewarned. We were told this same thing with the advent of word processors, and in the end, we didn’t go home early because we got our work done. Instead we output more letters."

#Introductions

We are proud to announce the birth of the Free Silicon Foundation (https://f-si.org)!

We organize a conference in Paris, March 14-16 2019, to promote:

1. Free and Open Source (FOS) CAD tools for designing #VLSI circuits
2. the sharing of hardware designs
3. common standards
4. the freedom of users in the context of #silicon technology

Program and submissions:
https://wiki.f-si.org/index.php/FSiC2019

#Hardware #FSiC

Digital Empowerment in Rural India - powered by FreedomBox.

Sudhamsh Kandukuri and I presented yesterday at XConf India 2018.

An inspiring story of a grassroots movement where people rejected Facebook's Free Basics and installed low-cost community Wi-Fi networks instead.
A FreedomBox on the network provides most of the essential digital services required, offline.

Slides:
https://njoseph.me/~joseph/Digital%20Empowerment%20in%20Rural%20India.pdf

Video recording: coming soon!

#FreedomBox #Swecha #FSMI #XConfIndia #ThoughtWorks

I feel bad for the word avatar. It has gone from meaning “living incarnation of a god” to “teeny square of pixels representing some rando.”

For the holidays, you could say thank you to some of the people who write free software you use, especially software that isn't hugely popular.

Those of us who write little-known software may go for months without hearing from a user, and it can be a little de-motivating.

Hearing from someone who actually uses one's software gives an energising jolt that can carry one through several weeks of darkness and cold and wet.

Following along with the excellent Kappa Architecture Workshop (https://kappa-db.github.io/workshop/build/01.html)

Multiple writer P2P replicated chat in under 100 lines of code, did you say? Sure: https://github.com/aral/kappa-architecture-workshop-work-files/blob/master/multi-chat.js

(Very simple example.)

Check out the excellent workshop if you’re interested in creating P2P apps.

@lanodan
the body is a proprietary (or at least undocumented) software package. but a clan of hackers called "medical doctors" are working to fix that! they have this whole jargon:

- anatomy is reverse engineering most of the constituent systems
- genetics is doing the same but using only static analysis
- general practitioners are user support
- pharmacology mostly just fixes small bugs all day, sometimes really big or rare ones though
- immunology/epidemology is security

@GeorgeCheney

Jane Slaughter, of #LaborNotes tells a similar story of the evolution of management terminology from "Quality of Work Life," popular in the 1970s to "Total Quality Management" in the 1980s/90s, then "Lean Production" aka management by stress.

@soapdog HA! Found this little thing! AWESOME! Thank you! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mastodon-as-a-sidebar/

« [...] surveillance capitalism makes it harder to organize effective long-term dissent. In an setting where attention is convertible into money, social media will always reward drama, dissent, conflict, iconoclasm and strife. There will be no comparable rewards for cooperation, de-escalation, consensus-building, or compromise, qualities that are essential for the slow work of building a movement. »

― Maciej Cegłowski https://idlewords.com/talks/build_a_better_monster.htm

@awilfox

Ehm... #Mozilla is likewise broken.

Blaming #Sqlite is convenient and easy to fix.
But the problem is deeper and we should address it, instead of hiding our heads in the sand.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487081

https://rain-1.github.io/in-browser-localhostdiscovery

https://dev.to/shamar/the-meltdown-of-the-web-4p1m

#InfoSec #InfoSuck #JavaScript #HTTP #JS #security #CyberSecurity

More Than 1,000 Institutions Are Now Divesting From Fossil Fuels #fossilfuels https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/14/more-than-1000-institutions-are-now-divesting-from-fossil-fuels/

New Show Up! The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Free Software! https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-4-the-universal-declaration-of-human-rights-and-free-software.html

No, @Matomo (previously Piwik) doesn’t give two shits about privacy; releases tag manager product, hints at first-party tag manager integration of third-party trackers as method for circumventing tracker blockers.

https://matomo.org/blog/2018/12/matomo-tag-manager-out-of-beta-now-available/

#SurveillanceCapitalism #Matomo #Piwik

History repeats ....
https://www.cbronline.com/feature/openbook-opensource-socialmedia