In our new place and I’m looking forward to finally getting back to working on the Small Web¹ with Kitten², Domain³, and Place⁴.
Only a few bits left to implement in all three before there is a minimum working implementation that others can also easily deploy and play with.
And, hopefully, with the launch of our own Domain instance at small-web.org in 2024, Small Technology Foundation⁵ can start down the road of becoming sustainable (or at least covering our mortage payments) eventually.
Remember when #photography was about the #art of it, not clout-chasing or product-pushing? For example, in the late 2000s so many cool (not just meaning 'popular') photographers were on #Flickr. Then #Instagram came around in 2010 and #Facebook bought them out in 2012.
IMHO the mid-2000s was when #tech & online platforms started going downhill quick and tech #enshittification began to spread. I think the introduction of the #iPhone had a lot to do with it, not to mention the many tech acquisitions that have been happening ever since. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, the 'art' of photography feels lost now; pay-walled, plundered, copied, capitalized, and even censored. All of it beholden to whatever satisfies the venture capitalists, advertisers, and/or shareholders. Fuck all that. Let's take back the web. Let's take back tech. This is why the #Fediverse (including #pixelfed) and more broadly, concepts like #smalltech, #indieweb, #smallweb and #selfhosting etc gives me glimmers of hope.
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:
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.
Professor Francesca Bria at #OSORturns15 on #OpenSource alternatives to social media: "We need those alternatives to be solid, to scale, to be used by millions and billions of people. So we need to invest now!" 👇
Removed table-level proxies for the table delete(), addEventListener(), and removeEventListener() methods. These were erroneously being injected not just into table objects but into every data object in them (which was destructive in the case of delete()).
Given you can persist custom JavaScript objects in JSDB, this namespace pollution was a problem.
Just got notice that RIPE NCC will not be funding the #SmallWeb. Not surprising, since we haven’t had a single successful funding application and I’m done wasting my time with this crap.
small-web.org will launch as a commercial service (host your own Small Web place for ~€10/mo) and hopefully that will make Small Technology Foundation sustainable. Since everything we do is free and open, others will also be able to host Small Web places.
Once it has launched, and hopefully as people start to use it, we’ll review who we might want to partner with to possibly support Small Web places from the commons. (Like the prototyping we carried out with the City of Ghent a few years ago or possibly with EU funding once they see it works and FOMO kicks in… That seems to be a powerful driver in those circles.)
But I won’t be wasting another minute of my time this lifetime filling out another funding application.
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.
@openfuture@glynmoody@paulk (Of course, once it launches, I’m sure we’ll be able to get funding for new features, etc., or just because – especially if people start using it – they’ll be afraid of being seen as irrelevant or missing out. But a bit too late then, no? Where were you when we actually needed you at the beginning?)
I love how this “Created by AI, edited by humans” summary of the chat I had with Doc this month starts off mildly enough with “A great chat on FLOSS Weekly regarding alternate funding models to support ethical tech projects…“ and ends a few paragraphs later with “…Balkan provided an urgent call to action to avoid extinction at the hands of unchecked capitalism.”
@itnewsbot@aral it seems that multi-tenant cloud services got so complicated that it even causes problems with selling more of cloud services.
This news about AWS Cloud Institute initiative sounds as another wake call for people to go further into way of single-tenant decentralized platforms and software that implement #SmallWeb and #smalltech principles instead try to wrap head around yet another complicate cloud solution leading to further centralization of internet.
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.
Good morning everyone. Some time ago I said that the left needs to stop idolizing the GDPR.
I decided to elaborate on that and explain how and where the political economy of neoliberalism is alive and kicking in the GDPR, how alternatives would look like and how we (don't) get there 👇
In a few weeks @w3c social web community group meeting may receive a proposal to explore chartering new social web working group that would only be open to people who work at W3C member companies. (The CG is open to all). Today there was an in person discussion at TPAC, the yearly W3C-wide f2f. It was a day-of addition to the agenda. Now is a good time to join the CG, subscribe to mailing list, and start participating in the discussions. https://www.w3.org/community/SocialCG/#vote#activitypub
(This was before Kitten so at the end I’m demoing its precursor, Site.js. Although a lot of the core pieces are similar. If you want to see how far it has come since then, see the peer-to-peer end-to-end encrypted Kitten chat recording below¹)
Only feedback after watching the vid: Please, don't let AI handle #a11y .. maybe take inspiration from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson (Google Doc 😬 link at the bottom): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696
Just before watching this presentation I viewed 2 presentations about #LocalFirst Apps by @schickling
In combination with the above I am thinking a) this is great #SmallTech@aral and b) this tech direction might eventually give #browser lock-in the boot. Up yours Google. Though that is a far stretch. One can dream, right 😊
I needed a pick-me-up so I took a break from the back-end stuff to make a logo for Domain¹ :)
(The main page for public instances will have a very different design before launch – one based on the prototype we created while working with the City of Ghent a few years ago.)
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.
Hey folks, quick announcement: we’re not going to keep doing the monthly Small is Beautiful streams going forward.
Instead, I’ll be doing impromptu streams¹ and releasing recordings of new features, etc., as I add them to Kitten, Domain, etc., and Laura might join me for some of those.
We’re both very busy so we’re trying to make the best use of our time.
I guess it tells you more about “FOSS”todon than anything else that they chose to block a human rights activist/privacy advocate who wakes up and works at a not-for-profit on free and open software every day. Maybe if I were to work at Google and hack on a hobby open source project in the evenings I’d be acceptable?