EU leaving Fediverse (Mastodon & PeerTube) because no one wants to operate the servers
“In recent years, a total of 40 institutions have opened an account with EU Voice, including the EU Data Protection Supervisor, the European Court of Justice and the EU Commission. The video platform, on the other hand, was used by six institutions … the EU institutions were thus the largest group of public institutions in the Fediverse worldwide.”
So what do we need, ideally? The equivalent of VC but for tech for the common good.
Pick ten organisations working the common good and give them €5M each. Let them experiment. Let them pivot. Let them cooperate. The only thing you don’t let them do is exit. You can’t sell. Build something for the commons that will live on for the next ten, twenty, fifty years… if not more.
I said as much 5 years ago at the European Parliament:
(Basically, I want to see a web where every one of us has their own place and where we’re all equals. It’s not a complicated concept. But that doesn’t mean realising it is easy either.)
PS. If you want to support our ongoing work, please fund us. The funding we get from donations/patronage doesn’t pay the rent but it does help.
Just discovered the concept of "small tech" / "small web" boosted by @laura and @aral :black_bloc_blob:
More interesting than "low tech" or "low web" fashion, powered by and for privacy, interoperability, inclusion with non-colonial nor non-commercial ideas.
Some fights and ideas picked from libre and ethical software movements, cool and mandatory nowadays :blobnomcookie:
Just got an email saying Kitten’s been rejected for funding by Sovereign Tech Fund. No reason given.
I don’t even know why I try anymore, really.
We’ve never received a single penny of public funding for our work even though everything we make is free and open source and all our work is for the common good.
We do have a group of folks who support us via patronage – thank you all so much. It doesn’t pay the rent but it means a lot.
So did I mention that no company or government pays me for the work I do?
But you can support my work if you want to live in a world where we have the Small Web as an alternative to the Big Web of Google, Facebook, and other people farmers.
Like Kitten itself, it’s a baby but will be evolving quickly as they approach API version 1 together.
Enjoy!
💕
PS. Of course it’s written in Kitten itself. It doesn’t do anything fancy but here’s the source code if you’re interested: https://codeberg.org/kitten/site
Every word in this article speaks directly to my soul. I have no desire to burn down the world we live in yet every desire to try and help bring about the kind of world I want to live in: a kinder, fairer, more equal and – to steal a phrase from the piece – more joyous one for us all.
On the Internet, public space is not a place like Facebook or Xitter. It is the sum total of the interconnections between individually owned and controlled places.
This is why I’m designing the Small Web to enable everyone to have their own place on the web.
Just saw that the Fetchiverse, Streamiverse, and Kitten Chat tutorials in the Kitten readme were still showing the old way of doing things so I just updated them.
Introducing the Small Web, where you own and control your space online. Join Aral Balkan in a live coding demo using Kitten, a Small Web server empowering everyday folks to craft their own corner of the internet. Let's reclaim the web for people, not profits!
Watch: https://buff.ly/497SHNg and join us at the Conference!
Coming soon: it’s going to be trivial to deploy a different app on your Small Web server. Useful if you’re a dev and you’re playing around with different apps.
(Also, notice the speed at which deployment happens. I’m one step away from implementing this in Domain using pre-warmed Kitten instances – called toasty kittens – thereby bringing the time it takes to deploy your own Small Web place down to a handful of seconds.)
When I speak about spending the last few years “building infrastructure”, you might be wondering what sorts of things I’m talking about.
Here are some examples:
JSDB: an in-memory, in-process database that writes to a JavaScript append-only transaction log and which you can use as if you were interacting with regular JavaScript objects.
Similarly, Auto Encrypt Localhost does the same thing – in pure JavaScript, without using mkcert, etc. – for keeping your dev and production environments identical:
And while Kitten is new, it uses those elements and more as well as all the lessons learned building Site.js (https://sitejs.org) – going back five years.
All-in-all I’ve been working towards creating the Small Web—and Kitten, Domain, and Place—for half a decade and, on the greater problem of trying to formulate alternatives to Big Tech for the last decade. All without any funding from the commons/EU.
Since the Streamiverse (streaming updates of my public Mastodon feed) and Kitten Chat (WebSocket chat examples, starting simple and leading to end-to-end-encrypted peer-to-peer Small Web chat) examples are rather long, I just added a simple WebSocket echo tutorial to the list to hopefully better highlight the basics of working with WebSockets in Kitten:
Kitten now has a lovely new multi-page Settings screen and… drumroll… a new 🐢 interactive shell (REPL) for you to play with the running state of your Small Web site/app/place and debug your app, inspect/manipulate its database, etc.
I plan on recording demos of each of them tomorrow but you can play with them now.
And here’s a little tutorial to get you started with the shell:
Trust me, you will save thousands of dollars if you never got excited about #AI hardware and #Tech nor go out and buy an AI hardware thing that would have been better as an app. Same for phones. Seriously, save the money. It will go far past the honeymoon phase faster than you will know. If your phone still works, you honestly don't need a new one. If you use #SmallTech you don't have to upgrade your laptop every year. Best thing I ever did was save my money and give it to writers and audiobook narrators instead of AI hardware.
Realised last night that JavaScript Database (JSDB) doesn’t run the constructor on persisted custom objects (https://codeberg.org/small-tech/jsdb#custom-data-types) when deserialising them because I didn’t know that you apparently have to define your constructor manually when using Object.create().
Will fix it today but it’s something to watch out for if you’re using Object.create() directly.