It is useless to build the perfect technological FOSS & private alternative if people aren't culturally and socially predisposed to use it. Think network externalities, peer pressure... but also the influence of capital on people, via marketing and brand associativity.
Don't get me wrong. I'm so very glad places like Mastodon exist. But they are just a foundation. The direct action needs its cultural counterparts. It's Gramscian:
War of Maneuver is the things you do as a direct affront to the system, physical or otherwise (like licensing your projects under the CNPL or GPL, enacting strict anti -trust legislation, incentivizing cooperatives and decommodification).
War of Position is how you reorient and predispose people towards more productive outcomes, especially culturally. This is what we LACK.
Get people on Stoat (former Revolt). Campaign for it if you must. Not because it's perfect, no, not at all. It's the onboarding. It's a temporary solution. It gives people breathing room from the failures of Discord and Telegram, and renews their sense of a better future being possible. The better ecosystem will bake in the oven, until we are ready to bring them over. Plant the seeds of a free Internet one step at a time.
This is the human side of the technological operation... like I said, the War of Position.
My thoughts on the recent #Discord news, software updates and launches, a spotlight on #HabitSync -- a mobile-first #habit tracker, and more in this week's #selfhosted recap!
Sysadmin et self-hôte basé à Aspiran, un petit village de l'Hérault entre Montpellier et Lodève.
Je lance un club informatique : infrastructure partagée, projets collaboratifs, un espace pour ceux qui aiment faire tourner des systèmes et pas juste en parler. Inspiré par l'esprit du Homebrew Computer Club : collectif, local, ancré dans la vraie vie.
Pas de sponsors corporate, pas de vibes bootcamp. Seulement des nerds qui construisent ensemble.
Si vous êtes dans le coin ou intéressé par ce genre de projet, discutons.
I'm in the process of putting together a real home server for the first time. In the past, I've used repurposed hardware, but this time I have a 4 port NAS on which I plan to install Debian.
I'm planning to run Docker so that I can run:
pi-hole for DNS based network-level ad-blocking and stop-shit-that-thinks-it-is-smart-from-calling-home (migrated from different hardware)
calibre-web for ebook management and sharing
immich for photo and video management
ssh, stfp, and rsync for general file storage
plex for media (though it may be a while before I do anything useful with this)
Are there any other (self-hosted) services I should look into, especially since I will have serious storage space for the first time?
Hello #fediverse! Thanks to my new DFF grant, I'm now looking to hire a PhD student to join me at AAU in Aalborg 🇩🇰 to work on "usable decentralization", i.e. on making distributed and federated cloud services accessible to the everyday user. For more details, see link below, and please don't hesitate to DM me with questions!
#AI tags (and the #lobster everyone is going crazy over), software updates and launches, a spotlight on #VanillaCookbook - a simple #recipe platform, and more in this week's #selfhosted recap!
Hello social.lol 👋 Happy to have moved to this new instance, time for a real introduction.
I'm Hervé, a millennial developer (he/him) from Eastern France.
I'm into video games, movies, and tinkering with my homelab (#linux#selfhosted#opensource).
But I also step away from screens to go hiking or cycling in the mountains near my home, and share a few photos when I do.
Climbing back in the #Crowsnest.
Third (or fourth?) time's the charm! I’ve had previous incarnations of crowsnest.social that unfortunately succumbed to technical difficulties, but after some serious 'dry dock', this version of the ship is hopefully in for some smooth sailing. 🌊
Стилизованная цифровая иллюстрация, на которой изображен мужчина с бородой и легкой улыбкой, одетый в синий свитер с узором в виде листьев. Он находится в технической среде, заполненной серверными стойками, а на нем сидит красочный попугай с очками виртуальной реальности.
✨ Le parcours d'un autodidacte vers la souveraineté numérique
Un Marseillais transforme son invalidité en moteur pour construire un écosystème numérique #Libre et auto-hébergé, défiant les GAFAM.
I've been wondering about Bluesky's decentralization again. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to self-host Bluesky in its current form. I cannot 100% self host "my own Bluesky".
Their main selling points for building their own protocol were easier migration and better discoverability, but right now there's no simple way to migrate my Bluesky account to my own instance. And hosting the centralized parts yourself isn't really possible, or if it were, not affordable, they haven't made that feasible, by design, it seems.
Even if you self-host a PDS, Bluesky's Relay only indexes up to 10 accounts from it. You can run more, but they won't federate, the central infrastructure decides what gets seen. They control this (source: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation#:~:text=For%20a%20smooth%20transition%20into,for%20everyone%20in%20the%20ecosystem.). You can self-host a PDS (Personal Data Server), but you still depend on Bluesky's centralized Relay and AppView. There's no production-ready alternative infrastructure from what I gather.
It feels like I'd be renting a room in a hotel that someone else is running anyway, when I want my own hotel.
If Mastodon gGmbH vanishes tomorrow, my instance keeps running and federating with everyone else. If Bluesky PBC vanishes, the ecosystem would need to scramble to stand up replacement infrastructure that doesn't really exist yet.
ATProto keeps getting evaluated on its promises while other systems get evaluated on their merits. The "portability" selling point depends on infrastructure that isn't mature enough to actually catch you if Bluesky falls.
I trust W3C, the builders and fathers of the World Wide Web, ActivityPub and the Fediverse.
#Software celebrations, updates, and launches, a spotlight on #Rackula - a visual interface for designing #server rack layouts, and more in this week's #selfhosted recap!
Is anyone else completely exhausted by the "Suggested For You" era of the web?
I feel like 2025 broke something in my tolerance for algorithmic feeds. I caught myself scrolling my personal insta yesterday and realized I hadn't seen a post from an actual human friend in ten minutes. It was just engagement bait and AI-generated slop. Uggh!
Thinking about moving my web reading habits to RSS.
#introduction : repost et mise à jour French
#introduction Coucou ! Moi c'est Fouad (Carlos c'est mon chat, je vous ai eu hein ?). ...