Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
Israel hat nun auch den Iran angegriffen. In Deutschland juckt das kaum jemanden. Schnell hat man sich bei uns an Krieg als Mittel der internationalen Politik gewöhnt, findet Christoph Ruf. nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1191921.…
@Friendica Support Hi! When following a peertube channel through friendica - should posted videos appear in the timeline? I added two channels, put them in a circle and in the meantime videos got published. But the circle stays empty. If I'm visiting the profile through Friendica, the videos are there. Am I missing something?
@Jonas ✅ I think I remember it was the same way, when I tried that. I was also wondering. I think you will only receive videos when a new one is posted, or some reaction happens on one. A comment or a like. But I am not sure if it has to be a reaction from friendica, or if one from somewhere else is sufficient.
@Jonas ✅ Maybe something is wrong when you don't receive new ones. You can try to put the peertube video url in the friendica search and look if you receive it then. But if something is wrong, this is not the solution, of course..
Cette association entre jacobinisme et « centralisation féroce » naît avec la légende noire forgée après le renversement de Robespierre et de ses partisans. De la même manière que les thermidoriens3 inventèrent l’existence d’un « système de terreur », ils créèrent de toutes pièces le mythe d’une centralisation à outrance de l’administration, qui aurait été réalisée par Robespierre pour régner en despote. Les travaux de Jean-Clément Martin ont déjà fait un sort à cette idée. Ils ont notamment démontré la grande difficulté pour la Convention de contrôler – non seulement le territoire français dont des pans entiers étaient insurgés contre elle, voire occupés par des troupes étrangères – mais aussi ses propres troupes et agents, munis de consignes floues qui les rendaient relativement autonomes sur le terrain.
« Cet air de liberté au-delà des frontières, aux peuples étrangers qui donnaient le vertige et dont vous usurpez aujourd’hui le prestige, elle répond toujours du nom de Robespierre : ma France ».
Uninterrupted access to satellite navigation is essential in our modern world, but it is threatened daily by external interference, such as jamming and spoofing. New technologies and concepts can help increase the resilience of our satellite navigation solutions. ESA and Leonardo are embarking on a joint project to explore smart antennas powered by Machine Learning to block unwanted signals
Proba-3 artificially created what is normally a rare natural phenomenon: a total solar eclipse.
In a world first, ESA’s Proba-3 satellites flew in perfect formation, blocking the Sun’s bright disc to reveal its fiery corona. This enigmatic outer layer burns millions of degrees hotter than the Sun’s surface and drives the solar storms that can disrupt life on Earth.
With its first artificial eclipse, Proba-3 has captured detailed images of this mysterious region, offering scientists new insights into our star’s behaviour.
I spent time over the weekend with my #Tangara, and have written up my first impressions. Did I love it? Hate it? You'll have to read for the details - but the TL;DR is that it's a cool device that falls short and isn't quite ready for prime time.
for what it's worth, I've been using mine for months now, including on motorcycles and in cars, and I haven't had the crashes you describe. it might be worth reporting them upstream: codeberg.org/cool-tech-zone/ta…
Reporter: In anticipation of an Israeli strike against Iran, the United States has deployed F-15 fighter jets to Jordan to destroy Tehran's missiles, which will likely be launched in response to the IDF's actions.
Provided to YouTube by The Orchard EnterprisesCobwebs · Simon T Stokes · Christian WildeBlow My Mind! The Doré-Era-Mira Punk & Psych Legacy℗ 1967 Ace Records...
Provided to YouTube by DistroKidFriends Song · Panda Porn · Dwayne Jenquin · Clint StephensCamp℗ Colitas RecordsReleased on: 2023-09-23Auto-generated by YouT...
Provided to YouTube by Sony Music MediaO'Caroline · Matching MoleMatching Mole℗ 1972 Sony Music Entertainment UK LimitedReleased on: 1972-09-17Composer, Lyri...
the chile peppers from whole foods are a lot better than the other generic grocery stores like meijer and kroger. they actually have a normal amount of heat vs the ones that are bred for the gringo palette with no spice at all.
🌍 ■ Médicos Sin Fronteras urge a la UE a actuar por el patrón de genocidio y de limpieza étnica que detecta en Gaza ■ "La hipocresía de los Gobiernos de Europa alimenta el sufrimiento" en la franja palestina, afirma la ONG en una durísima comparecencia en Bruselas. Reclama una "presión real" sobre Israel para acabar con la ofensiva. huffingtonpost.es/global/medic…
La ONG Médicos Sin Fronteras (MSF) instó este lunes a la Unión Europea (UE) a ejercer una "presión real" a nivel político, económico y diplomático para detener los "patrones de genocidio" y de "limpieza étnica" que han observado en Gaza por parte de …
I’m all-in on the Fediverse as the best way to own my own data and network. It’s based on an open standard (ActivityPub), loosely-coupled and open source services, and everyday people (and, it isn’t subject to the whims of lying, narcissistic billionaires). You can think of it as the next iteration of the open web, with social features baked in.
I’ve got a number of accounts that correspond with content that the different networks are good at – posts on Mastodon, photos on Pixelfed, reading habits on Bookwyrm. If I post something on one that I think my followers on a different network may like, I can boost it directly for them to see; or, folks can follow me on whatever platform they choose. My WordPress blog has federation switched on, too, so you can if you like follow @andypiper, and read my blog posts directly in your Fediverse platform of choice. (of course, RSS remains another excellent way to follow my blog).
By the way, if you’re curious what the buzz about the Fediverse is all about, I recommend Elena Rossini’s newsletter The Future is Federated – in the edition that was published today, she did a great job of explaining some of the interoperability between federated networks, from the perspective of, you know, just actually, using them, rather than from a deep technical angle. Worth following!
One of the other services I’ve been using is PeerTube, a federated alternative to YouTube. Up until now I’ve been on Diode Zone. However, that instance recently started to run into some storage issues, and also switched off the live broadcast feature that I’d occasionally used to stream some 3D printing and pen plotter content (this is straightforward to configure in OBS, by the way). I really appreciated my time on Diode Zone, but I’ve chosen to move across to MakerTube, a relatively newer instance dedicated to “makers, musicians, artists and DIY content creators”.
One of the core elements of the Fediverse is data ownership, and some form of portability. When I first joined Mastodon I started out at mastodon.social/@andypiper – if you visit that profile page now, you’ll find my posts starting in November 2016 and ending in November 2022, when I moved over to my current home, macaw.social – there’s a large message that points you at my current location if you look at my original profile. When I switched instances, my whole follower network went with me, seamlessly – unlike, for example, Twitter, where I lost everything when I deleted all my accounts; or Facebook, which heavily relies on its lock-in – read Cory Doctorow‘s excellent book The Internet Con to understand what’s happening there.
The current state of portability is absolutely not perfect – in the case of Mastodon, there’s a process which enables to you to migrate from one server to another, and that automatically resubscribes you to your network, and your followers to your new account, but it’s currently not technically possible to take the past posts with you (there is a W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group taskforce that is working on a more complete set of specifications for data portability that may help to improve this in the future).
Here is how I moved from Diode Zone to MakerTube:
Requested an account on MakerTube. They want to know who is part of the community, their content intentions, etc. I explained that I’m a maker and I also may plan to use the streaming feature.
Requested an export of data from Diode Zone.
this was technically a little bit frustrating, as it got stuck the first time (likely because I had requested it when there were earlier storage issues), but the instance owner was really kind and helped to clear the stuck process.
it was also a bit annoying because of the size of my export including the videos, which was a lot of gigabytes; so I ended up having to run a script that kept running wget with a resume flag to get the data in chunks.
Setup the basics of my new account on MakerTube.
Imported the export from the other instance.
Modified a few places that were pointing to Diode Zone, such as my links page, and also updated a few embeds that were loading videos from my previous account, such as some of the Fedidevs.org meeting recordings.
… while I was doing that, I thought I’d take advantage of PeerTube’s multi-channel capability, and created a specific channel for Fedidevs content, which you can now follow @fedidevs from other Fediverse platforms.
There were a couple of slightly rough edges, but nothing very significant:
Unlike Mastodon, PeerTube does not run a process to tell your followers that you have moved, and to resubscribe them to your new account. In my case I didn’t have a huge number of followers, but I will be posting a video there to say that I moved, and I also updated my profile information to point to the new instance. It did re-follow the accounts I had followed, but didn’t do the other side of the process.
The new instance imported my playlists, which was great – but some of them were playlists of my own videos, which I tend to create for curation and organisation, and of course, they still pointed at the videos on the previous instance. This was fairly straightforward to fix, just removed and re-added the videos on the new instance.
So there you are. You can follow my entire MakerTube account, my main channel, or the Fedidevs channel, if you like. I also have it set up to import future content that I may choose to post to YouTube, so that it has a free and open backup that Google can’t delete if I ever lose my account there.
I’m still frustrated that WordPress doesn’t seem to have a good integration for PeerTube content yet – I can paste a YouTube link here and get an embedded video, that’s less easy for PeerTube – but, I’m hopeful that will improve in the future.
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In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.
Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.
There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.
Why so many?
Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.
Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.
Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X. In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.
… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!
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I had this idea that I’d love a shirt like that, with the names of the Fediverse platforms I use most often (referring back to my post about moving PeerTube instances, you’ll know I use quite a few). So, I designed one; Heidi typeset and kerned the design and vinyl cut it for me, using the Cricut Maker and heat press in the studio; and, eventually, I’d had enough expressions of interest that we went ahead and put a printed version up on our studio shop.
I’m really happy with the way this came out. I’ve also designed a few other shirts (albeit, not Fediverse-related), so those may hit the shop in the future.
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I’m all-in on the Fediverse as the best way to own my own data and network. It’s based on an open standard (ActivityPub), loosely-coupled and open source services, and everyday people (and, it isn’t subject to the whims of lying, narcissistic billionaires). You can think of it as the next iteration of the open web, with social features baked in.
I’ve got a number of accounts that correspond with content that the different networks are good at – posts on Mastodon, photos on Pixelfed, reading habits on Bookwyrm. If I post something on one that I think my followers on a different network may like, I can boost it directly for them to see; or, folks can follow me on whatever platform they choose. My WordPress blog has federation switched on, too, so you can if you like follow @andypiper, and read my blog posts directly in your Fediverse platform of choice. (of course, RSS remains another excellent way to follow my blog).
By the way, if you’re curious what the buzz about the Fediverse is all about, I recommend Elena Rossini’s newsletter The Future is Federated – in the edition that was published today, she did a great job of explaining some of the interoperability between federated networks, from the perspective of, you know, just actually, using them, rather than from a deep technical angle. Worth following!
One of the other services I’ve been using is PeerTube, a federated alternative to YouTube. Up until now I’ve been on Diode Zone. However, that instance recently started to run into some storage issues, and also switched off the live broadcast feature that I’d occasionally used to stream some 3D printing and pen plotter content (this is straightforward to configure in OBS, by the way). I really appreciated my time on Diode Zone, but I’ve chosen to move across to MakerTube, a relatively newer instance dedicated to “makers, musicians, artists and DIY content creators”.
One of the core elements of the Fediverse is data ownership, and some form of portability. When I first joined Mastodon I started out at mastodon.social/@andypiper – if you visit that profile page now, you’ll find my posts starting in November 2016 and ending in November 2022, when I moved over to my current home, macaw.social – there’s a large message that points you at my current location if you look at my original profile. When I switched instances, my whole follower network went with me, seamlessly – unlike, for example, Twitter, where I lost everything when I deleted all my accounts; or Facebook, which heavily relies on its lock-in – read Cory Doctorow‘s excellent book The Internet Con to understand what’s happening there.
The current state of portability is absolutely not perfect – in the case of Mastodon, there’s a process which enables to you to migrate from one server to another, and that automatically resubscribes you to your network, and your followers to your new account, but it’s currently not technically possible to take the past posts with you (there is a W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group taskforce that is working on a more complete set of specifications for data portability that may help to improve this in the future).
Here is how I moved from Diode Zone to MakerTube:
Requested an account on MakerTube. They want to know who is part of the community, their content intentions, etc. I explained that I’m a maker and I also may plan to use the streaming feature.
Requested an export of data from Diode Zone.
this was technically a little bit frustrating, as it got stuck the first time (likely because I had requested it when there were earlier storage issues), but the instance owner was really kind and helped to clear the stuck process.
it was also a bit annoying because of the size of my export including the videos, which was a lot of gigabytes; so I ended up having to run a script that kept running wget with a resume flag to get the data in chunks.
Setup the basics of my new account on MakerTube.
Imported the export from the other instance.
Modified a few places that were pointing to Diode Zone, such as my links page, and also updated a few embeds that were loading videos from my previous account, such as some of the Fedidevs.org meeting recordings.
… while I was doing that, I thought I’d take advantage of PeerTube’s multi-channel capability, and created a specific channel for Fedidevs content, which you can now follow @fedidevs from other Fediverse platforms.
There were a couple of slightly rough edges, but nothing very significant:
Unlike Mastodon, PeerTube does not run a process to tell your followers that you have moved, and to resubscribe them to your new account. In my case I didn’t have a huge number of followers, but I will be posting a video there to say that I moved, and I also updated my profile information to point to the new instance. It did re-follow the accounts I had followed, but didn’t do the other side of the process.
The new instance imported my playlists, which was great – but some of them were playlists of my own videos, which I tend to create for curation and organisation, and of course, they still pointed at the videos on the previous instance. This was fairly straightforward to fix, just removed and re-added the videos on the new instance.
So there you are. You can follow my entire MakerTube account, my main channel, or the Fedidevs channel, if you like. I also have it set up to import future content that I may choose to post to YouTube, so that it has a free and open backup that Google can’t delete if I ever lose my account there.
I’m still frustrated that WordPress doesn’t seem to have a good integration for PeerTube content yet – I can paste a YouTube link here and get an embedded video, that’s less easy for PeerTube – but, I’m hopeful that will improve in the future.
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A short talk about why civic institutions should own and host their own presence in the Social Web. This talk was originally given at the end of the "Social Web After Hours" meetup in Brussels HSBXL, for FOSDEM 2025.
I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.
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I was pretty actively commenting from the event and taking part in the live uStream channel… others have written up some of their experiences and thoughts, so I don’t propose to say much here. My main contribution was to make a (shaky!) video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk towards the start of the morning – a half hour overview of his home automation projects. I’ve posted it on Viddler, and if you are interested you are very welcome to comment on it, embed it in your own sites, or add annotations on the video timeline.
[viddler id=e4676600&w=400&h=267]
The nice part about Viddler over, say, YouTube is that it let me post the whole thing as a single video rather than having to chop it up into 10 minute chunks. I’ll try to post some notes on how I went about producing the video at some stage soon.
Some very general comments on the day:
Well-organised, well-run, great venue, nice to have wireless access – thanks to everyone involved in the logistics!
A brilliant, exciting array of skills, talents and interests. It was kind of funny to realise just how many of the folks I knew of as we were doing introductions at the start, and great to find that it wasn’t only a bunch of IBM hackers – this movement is really building momentum.
I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.
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IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, has been speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York today. He’s been discussing how the planet is getting smarter:
These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technically and socially. But we’re also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get “flatter.” And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.
In the speech, Sam talks about how the world has become instrumented, more interconnected, and devices more intelligent. And he talks about how the current world crises – ecological, financial, and others – represent an opportunity for change. The next step for the globally integrated economy is a globally integrated and intelligent economy and society.
Some of the problems and solutions that are being mentioned are interesting.
67 per cent of all electrical energy is lost due to inefficient power generation and grid management… utilities in the U.S., Denmark, Australia and Italy are now building digital grids to monitor the energy system in real time.
Congested roadways in the U.S. cost $78 billion annually in wasted hours and gas… Stockholm’s new smart toll system has resulted in 22 percent less traffic, a 12 to 40 percent drop in emissions and 40,000 additional daily users of the public transport system
This is exciting for me on many levels. Let me step up through them.
As regular readers will know, I’ve become increasingly interested in pervasive computing and home automation. The little “Current Cost craze” that has swept through my group of friends at work could be seen as a mark of the individual interest in applying technology in a smarter way. I’m excited that this has widened out to a group of folks who are supportingChris Dalby’s Home Camp idea in London later this month.
First on stage were hosts Brady Forrest [http://radar.oreilly.com/brady/] of
O’Reilly Media [http://oreilly.com/] and Jennifer Pahlka
[http://blog.pahlka.com/] of TechWeb [http://www.techweb.com/home].
The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.
Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.
This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.
I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.
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The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).
This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).
So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.
I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and foreign objects.
There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.
Things I learned
Facebook (not Bebo) is now where it’s at.
If a tornado is coming, get out of the way or into a safe room.
Girls are much better than boys at listening to multiple streams of conversation (actually I think I worked this out a long time ago!).
A now, some notes just for my team…
Here are links to a few of the other things we talked about during the day:
Home Camp, the home automation and green energy event (next one is at the end of April).
And most importantly, here’s the evidence that we started off in first place 🙂 and I think you were an awesome team throughout. Well done, it was brilliant spending the day with you.
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For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.
Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.
This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.
I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.
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i want to explore the various way we can highlight content.
Currently, on the threadiverse, we use vote to show our approval, discontent...and we can couple it with a bot for moderation. Or hide post below a certain score...
Some instance completly removed downvote as Beehaw. Piefed is experimenting private vote. On other fediverse software, mastodon, iceshrimp, there is no downvote and we use emojis to express our feelings.
You also have website as slashdot.org/ where you can tell that comment was insightfull or a troll, or funny...
There is also also website that compare software or video as tournesol.app/
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
Making them private is absolute idiotic. People participating in a discussion forum are willing to engage in a public conversation, if you are not willing to respond in public, then don't respond at all. And if you think that the original comment is in bad faith or harmful to the community, report it and move on.
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
"Votes" are not real votes. It's just a terrible misnomer for "Liking" and "Disliking". I think we should get rid of votes altogether and use the real vocabulary.
I'd also would like a system where users could define their own scoring algorithm, and I would like to assign different weights depending on the person and the topic/community. I for one think that downvotes (dislikes) should only be counted if you are a member of the community and if you have made a positive contribution to the discussion.
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
I'd like to be able to follow people just to see what they are liking/commenting on. Also, given that this is a discussion forum, I wonder whether we could build a wiki-like system where people could annotate parts of a comment/post and challenge/elaborate/investigate specific parts of an statement. This could be used either for a "Change My View" style of discussion or even full-on adversarial collaboration projects.
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
Public. Lots of downvotes is information that could indicate that the commenter is lying, or just saying something unpopular. But either way, it's information. Before youtube started hiding downvotes, it was easy to tell that a video was full of it based on downvotes. Now clickbait dominates the platform.
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
No. I agree that the slashdot method with more than just upvote/downvote is better. In a perfect world I imagine we could have every emoji be a reaction option, and then you could sort by putting an emoji in a bar at the top. In reality I imagine this would be a challenge from a backend perspective, but maybe like the top 5 or 10 emoji reactions could be an option for selection.
What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?
I'll do the opposite and say - please do not remove downvotes like Twitter/Bluesky/mastodon etc. Downvotes are super important. People need to be able to boo, the only place people aren't allowed to boo are in church or at cult rallies. And that's why those platforms are especially bad for misinformation, hyperbole, and overall depravity.
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
Remove all as a forced/default option on the main page. Back in the day before reddit had r/all, communities were much more diverse and niche, and this helped separate communities flourish in their own way. When r/all was added, the content started to resemble twitter, if not just becoming screenshots of twitter, on just about every sub. This actually improves discoverability because it would force users to branch out and look at subs instead of just looking at what's on all.
I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.
What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.
Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.
We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.
Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.
Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.
I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.
A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:
Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service
I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.
In late 2011, I was contacted by a very charming, smart and persuasive French gentleman who spoke of clouds, platform-as-a-service, and polyglot programming. It took him and his team a couple of months to get me thinking seriously about a career change, after 10 great years at IBM. I’d spent that period with “Big Blue” coding in Java and C, and primarily focused on enterprise application servers, message queueing, and integration – and yet the lure of how easy vmc push[1] made it for me to deploy and scale an app was astounding! Should I make the transition to a crazy new world? Over Christmas that year, I decided it would be a good thing to get in on this hot new technology and join VMware as Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry team. I joined the team early in 2012.
The Cloud Foundry adventure has been amazing. The day after I joined the team, the project celebrated its first anniversary, and we announced the BOSH continuous deployment tool; I spent much of that first year with the team on a whirlwind of events and speaking engagements, growing the community. The Developer Relations team that Patrick Chanezon and Adam Fitzgerald put together was super talented, and it was brilliant to be part of that group. Peter, Chris, Josh, Monica, Raja, Rajdeep, Alvaro, Eric, Frank, Tamao, Danny, Chloe, D, Giorgio, friends in that extended team… it was an honour.
A year after I joined, VMware spun out Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and other technologies into a new company, Pivotal – headed up by Paul Maritz. I’ve been privileged to work under him, Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs, and most closely, my good friend James Watters on the Cloud Foundry team. I’ve seen the opening of our new London offices on Old Street, welcomed our partners and customers into that unique collaborative and pairing environment, and observed an explosion of activity and innovation in this space. We launched an amazing product. James Bayer heads up a remarkable group of technologists working full-time on Cloud Foundry, and it has been a pleasure to get to know him and his team. Most recently, I’ve loved every minute working with Cornelia, Ferdy, Matt, Sabha and Scott (aka the Platform Engineering team), another talented group of individuals from whom I’ve learned much.
Over the course of the last two years I’ve seen the Platform-as-a-Service space grow, establish itself, and develop – most recently resulting in my recent talk at bcs Oxfordshire:
Last week, we announced the forthcoming Cloud Foundry Foundation – and one could argue that as a community and Open Source kinda guy, this was the direction I’ve helped to move things in the past two years, although I can claim no credit at all for the Foundation announcement itself. I’ve certainly enjoyed hosting occasional London Cloud Foundry Community meetups and drinks events (note, next London PaaS User Group event has 2 CF talks!), and I’ve made some great friends locally and internationally through the ongoing growth of the project. I’m proud of the Platform event we put on last year, I think the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit will be just as exciting, and I’m happy to have been a part of establishing and growing the CF community here in Europe.
Cloud Foundry is THE de facto Open Source PaaS standard, the ecosystem is strong and innovative, and that has been achieved in a transparent and collaborative way, respectful to the community, in a good-natured way in the face of competition. Rest assured that I’ll continue to watch the project and use PaaSes which implement it (I upgraded to a paid Pivotal Web Services account just this past week, I tried BlueMix, and I’m an ongoing fan of the Anynines team).
There are many missing shout-outs here… you folks know who you are, and should also know that I’ve deeply enjoyed learning from you and working with you. Thank you, Pivotal team! I do not intend to be a stranger to the Bay Area! In my opinion, Pivotal is positioned brilliantly in offering an end-to-end mobile, agile development, cloud platform and big data story for the enterprise. I look forward to continuing the conversations around that in the next couple of weeks.
[…]
What happens after “the next couple of weeks”? Well, this is as good time as any (!) to close that chapter, difficult though it is to leave behind a team I’ve loved working with, on a product and project that is undoubtedly going to continue to be fantastically successful this year and beyond. So, it is time to announce my next steps, which may or may not be clear from the title of this post… 🙂 Joining Twitter! I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007. On the same day, seven years later, I accepted a job offer to go and work with the Twitter team as a Developer Advocate, based in London.
If you’ve been a long-term follower of mine either here on this blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere, you’ll know that Twitter is one of my favourite tools online. It has been transformational in my life and career, and it changed many of my interactions. True story: between leaving IBM and joining VMware I presented at Digital Bristol about social technologies, and I was asked, which one I would miss the most if it went away tomorrow; the answer was simple: Twitter. As an Open Source guy, too, I’ve always been impressed with Twitter’s contributions to the broader community.
I couldn’t be more #excited to get started with the Twitter Developer Relations team in April!
Follow me on Twitter – @andypiper – to learn more about my next adventure…
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.
What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.
Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.
We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.
Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.
Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.
I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.
A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:
Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service
I’m very excited to announce that, from April 10th, I will be joining the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry at VMware.
This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.
from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
it is Open Source. The code is on Github. You can run your own cloud if you like. You can add support for your own languages and frameworks, much as AppFog have done for PHP, Tier 3 and Uhuru have done with .NET in Iron Foundry, and so on. This provides a huge amount of flexibility. Oh, and of course mobile and cloud go hand-in-hand, so last week’s announcement of FeedHenry providing tools to develop HTML5 apps to deploy on Cloud Foundry was really significant, too.
you can take your cloud with you using Micro Cloud Foundry – so the development and deployment model remains the same whether you are online or offline. I love this idea.
for me, personally: it’s a natural evolution of much of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years – focusing on developer communities and promoting technology adoption, as much as top-down solution selling. As my good friend James Governor is fond of saying and as his colleague Steve O’Gradywrote, developers are the new kingmakers – and with trends like mobile, cloud, and devops, nurturing those communities is more important than ever. You don’t impose technology on a community – you explain it and earn your place and reputation.
I’m looking forward to more speaking, more writing, more mentoring, and more online community building. These are things I’ve grown to enjoy (and in the case of the latter, appear to do naturally).
I’ve followed Patrick Chanezon, the Senior Director of the team, since he was setting up the developer advocacy programme back at Google – I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved and the way he operates, so I’m delighted to have the chance to work closely with him. I’m excited to join everyone in the team, of course – I have spoken with most of the group already and I’m really looking forward to learning from their diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.
Between now and April 10th, I have a few things planned including a vacation (!), heading to EclipseCon to talk about MQTT and M2M topics, and some other speaking engagements. After I start the new role, I expect I’ll join in on the Cloud Foundry Open Tour and start to meet folks. I’ll also be on the team for the GOTO conference in Aarhus in October – exciting times ahead!
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In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.
Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.
There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.
Why so many?
Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.
Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.
Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X. In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.
… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!
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How Government Agencies Can Embrace the Fediverse for Public Communications
In recent years, there has been a significant shift in how government agencies communicate with the public. Social media has become an indispensable tool for agencies to dissemin
How Government Agencies Can Embrace the Fediverse for Public Communications
In recent years, there has been a significant shift in how government agencies communicate with the public. Social media has become an indispensable tool for agencies to disseminate emergency information, public health alerts, engage with citizens, and provide services. Among the various platforms available, the Fediverse and its most popular component, Mastodon, have emerged as potential alternatives to mainstream social media networks.
Algorithmic news selection and recommendation engines further complicates the deliverability of important messaging: 48% of respondents worry about missing out on important information due to over-personalised news feeds. Not to mention, placing important safety messages in a social media news feed co-mingles it with a broad range of untrusted news and opinion, competing with disinformation and misinformation across each of the network platforms.
How is the Fediverse Different?
Traditional social media has grown into distinct services that require users to be on the very same service using the very same provider to exchange messages such that, for example, Facebook users cannot communicate with X (formerly Twitter) users directly.
An emergency alert would need to be posted to Facebook and X separately by an agency seeking to reach both audiences. This is because most traditional social media services do not use an accepted technology standard, instead creating “walled gardens” that do not allow the sharing of information outside their walls.
Contrast this with email where users can send to and receive from anyone using an email service. Gmail users can send and receive messages to Outlook users, because email is an accepted technology standard and freely interconnects.
The Fediverse offers this open model like email, but in social media networks. It is a collection of interconnected services that publish social media feeds operated by companies, nonprofits, governments, media organisations and communities, just like traditional social media. But, unlike traditional social media, it uses open technology standards. When a message is posted by one of these providers it is broadcast to the entire network of connected services, and delivered by each service to the relevant audience.
Similar to email, agency alerts are delivered by the agency itself, federating out to the broader network and directly into the inboxes of people who have requested to follow the specific feed. Thanks to the use of technology standards, this removes the walls between networks.
People familiar with the RSS publishing format may find it helpful to think of Fediverse as “Really Simple Social Syndication”. Similar to RSS an agency can publish subscribable feeds, but with the added bonus of social interaction with citizens and stakeholders.
In effect, this combines the deliverability and reach of email with the personalisation and device-alerting capabilities of social media apps.
Mastodon stands out as one of the most popular platforms in the Fediverse, functioning similarly to X but with a focus on privacy and individual controls. Other platforms include WordPress (Web sites and blogging), Pixelfed (photo sharing), and PeerTube (an alternative to Youtube).
All these platforms use the standard Web technology “ActivityPub”, a publishing standard that allows all of these services and content creators to interconnect and interoperate, delivering messages and images and videos to each other.
This then forms the “Fediverse”, a federated universe of standards-based messaging. Just as an agency Web site can be viewed on any browser from any location by any constituent, agency messages published on the Fediverse can be found and followed by any user on any connected platform.
Benefits of Using Mastodon
Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms allow agencies to operate their own servers, giving them complete control over their content and moderation policies. This autonomy can be crucial for maintaining the integrity and appropriateness of government communications.
Deliverability is not subject to third-party rate limits or external content moderation. Examples of the National Weather Service and New York City’s Transit Agency encountering problems with X highlight the precarious nature of relying on a for-profit media corporation to deliver vital public messaging.
Mainstream social media platforms are often criticised for algorithms that can amplify sensational and unsavory content. The Fediverse’s general lack of such algorithms reduces the risk of misinformation and platform manipulation, providing a more straightforward and reliable channel for government alerts and services. The predominant model is a chronological feed of content, searchable by keyword and hashtag.
By not relying solely on mainstream social media platforms, agencies can avoid the potential pitfalls of corporate policies and biases, ensuring a more neutral and independent stance in their communications.
Lastly, the Fediverse is known for its inclusive community standards and customisable accessibility features. This inclusivity can help agencies reach and engage with a more diverse audience.
Disadvantages
One of the significant drawbacks of using Mastodon and the Fediverse is the relatively smaller user base (15 million members) compared to established platforms. This limited reach can hinder the effectiveness of communication efforts today. However, it is important to note that 2024 will likely see the onboarding of Meta’s Threads platform (160 million users) and Tumblr (210 million users). As more and more networks begin to interoperate with the Fediverse, more and more audiences will be able to find and follow an individual agency social media feed, across all those platforms.
The decentralised and varied nature of the Fediverse can be complex for users unfamiliar with its workings. Government agencies might face challenges in training staff and educating the public about using these platforms effectively. Running a Mastodon service requires technical expertise and resources. Government agencies would need to allocate funds and personnel for server maintenance, moderation, and support, which could be more demanding than using a mainstream platform. This can be countered by creating an account on an existing Fediverse service, or following the German and French models, where a central agency operates the service and onboards individual agencies and bureaus independently.
The Fediverse’s decentralised structure can lead to fragmentation, where users are spread across different communities with varying levels of interaction between them. This fragmentation can make it challenging to disseminate information broadly and uniformly. A staggered approach might mean creating an account on an existing, well-connected service, then bringing the social graph – the followers – to an agency-created service at a later date.
Pathways to Adoption
Similar to how agencies create accounts on commercial platforms today, agencies could create an account on an existing service provider, choosing from a general service like mastodon.social, a topic-focused provider such as sciences.social, or a regional service like masto.nyc. All these servers are interconnected, agencies do not need to create accounts on multiple providers. The agency profile would then be something like “@agencyname@mastodon.social” (the Fediverse uses two @ signs).
A quick way to set up a more prominent presence in the Fediverse is to make use of a managed service from a reputable provider like Masto Host or Toot.io and choose a domain name like agencyname.social. This service would be restricted to agency staff, meaning all messages coming from that service would be agency specific. In this example, the profile could be “@alerts@agency.social”.
The last and perhaps most challenging method is to operate a service directly, similar to the governments and agencies listed above. While use of a .gov domain can be a non-trivial request to approve, publishing from an official account on a government domain adds trustworthiness and verification of the message’s source. An address along the lines of social.agency.gov would need to be requisitioned from the relevant agency OCIO or in some cases, the Chief Data Officer. In this example, the ActivityPub profile would be “@alerts@social.agency.gov”.
Each of these options offer the same overall benefit. Just as podcasts are freely available on any and all podcast feed, as we transition to interoperable networks we’ll soon be hearing the call to “follow us wherever you get your social”.
No matter which pathway is chosen, your feed is freely findable and followable from any of the interconnected platforms.
Publishing Workflow
Numerous social media management platforms like Buffer and Fedica support cross-posting to Mastodon. This could be used to mirror content already being posted to agency accounts on X or similar feeds. Chances are the social media team can easily add a Mastodon channel to their existing workflow.
Onboarding and integration advice is freely available from IFTAS, a nonprofit trust and safety organisation focused on supporting a safe and civil Fediverse. Traditional public affairs services are available from agencies like Dewey Square Group and other PR and social media consultants.
In summary, the use of the Fediverse and Mastodon by government agencies offers a new paradigm in public sector communication, marked by increased security, autonomy, and inclusivity. However, it also brings challenges in terms of reach and complexity. As the digital landscape evolves, it is crucial for government agencies to stay informed and agile, adapting their communication strategies to serve the public effectively and responsibly. The decision to use platforms like Mastodon should be a considered one, aligned with the broader goals of transparency, engagement, and public service.
Agency staff that wish to advocate for using the Open Social Web to take better control of social media messaging can use the following high level talking points to begin the conversation.
ActivityPub is the accepted global Web standard for open social networking. It is published by the World Wide Web Consortium, the non-profit body that oversees Web standards.
The Fediverse is the real world collection of platforms, apps, and services that implement ActivityPub. They constitute a “federated universe” of interconnected social networks and can freely communicate with one another.
The Fediverse is considered to be the “next big thing” in social media. See The Verge, the EFF, Fortune, Mark Zuckerberg, and Matt Mullenweg. Usage has roughly tripled over the past year, and as larger platforms begin adopting we can expect a tenfold increase in adoption in 2024. So why should a public agency care?
Autonomy. Government agencies should not be reliant on advertising-driven media companies to broadcast vital public messaging. You wouldn’t let any of these companies restrict access to your public Web site. Why let them restrict who can or who should see your public messages?
Alignment. Support a person-centric, privacy-focused social network environment grounded in diversity and inclusivity. In many ways it is being built to counter the harms of for-profit social media.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Urgent sanitary transfers of the seriously wounded soldiers from front line between Russia and Ukraine have been established, Medinsky said.
"Families were locked in their homes and burnt alive. Children woke up to silence. Mothers are still searching for sons" The dying legacy media continues to keep shtoom about Islamic atrocities against non-Muslims.
[T]here is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms
He goes on to mention both BlueSky and Mastodon as obvious contenders.
I certainly agree that governments — and any organisation that values its reputation, for that matter — should be moving away from X, but simply moving to another platform amounts to a sticking-plaster solution at best.
The problem with being on someone else’s platform is that you are giving that someone else control over which messages you see and which of your messages are seen. Indeed, the EU’s Digital Services Act recognises this by identifying Very Large Online Platforms, and imposing additional requirements on them around areas such as transparency and disinformation.
Federated technologies, such as Mastodon (andmanyothersexist) resolve the problem of ownership far more effectively by allowing you install and run your own instance. Many governments — and even the European Commission — already use these solutions, thus putting themselves in control of their own communication and ensuring that individuals can access these communications without putting themselves at the mercy of commercial priorities.
Obviously, there are both costs and challenges associated with running your own instance, but none of these are insurmountable and if organisations truly want to ensure that their communications remain free (as in speech) they really should be investing in the already existing infrastructure that allows them to do so.
Any organisation should be taking steps to protect the integrity of it’s communication. This is especially true in the case of governments, political parties and campaigners, for whom free and open discussions are essential.
Elon Musk's use of his X platform to promote murderous voices of hate is unacceptable. One way of fighting back would be to try to break the co-ordination problem that underpins X's power.
I am by no means the only blogger to propose that this is a good way to avoid being locked-in or censored by commercial “Big Tech” or other interests. It turns out that George Peretz had posted something along the same lines as me only a few days earlier (How the Labour Government, and others, should respond to Musk); I was unaware of that post until I ran into it via Seize The Means Of Communication!1 on the Lightly Seared blog much more recently.
Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz went on to cover my post on their For Immediate Release podcast, and in particular Neville asked for me to share more about what I know in relation to existing government or state owned-and-operated Mastodon instances. I’m happy to do so!
Für die vielen neuen Menschen hier gibt es nochmal ein paar aktualisierte Informationen von uns, die wir anheften können:
1. Eine Übersicht über alle Accounts unserer Instanz gibt es unter: social.bund.de/directory (Filtereinstellungen nicht vergessen) 2. Pixis gibt es kostenlos hier: bfdi.bund.de/DE/Service/Publik… 3. Merch verlosen wir immer mal wieder hier oder verteilen es auf Veranstaltungen.
I’m curious to learn of more of these, let me know in the comments if you are aware of others.
If you are interested in managed support for this kind of instance, the team at Mastodon gGmbH would be happy to hear from you to discuss how we can help.
A case for Brazil
Finally, I want to talk briefly (but, only because I must) about X.
We talked about the events of the end of last week, when Brazil’s courts chose to block access to X in that country, on episode 3.19 of the TechGrumps podcast that was recorded this weekend, and should be released any moment.
Along with Musk’s direct personal attacks on the UK Prime Minister and his efforts to spread dangerous misinformation, this is yet another example of Musk, specifically, demonstrating his untrustworthiness, and lack of willingness to be bound by the rule of law – national or international. According to the media, there has been a swift take-up of Bluesky by many Brazilian users; it is difficult to measure Mastodon or other Fediverse instance signups because there are many individual instances that comprise the network, but we know that there was a significant surge of interest at the end of last week.
A lot of people who are up in arms over Brazil banning Xitter aren’t acknowledging the fact that the country cast off a military dictatorship in 1985 and Elon’s openly allied with the neofascist who tried to restore it, with help from Elon Social, just two years ago. Pretty unique situation.
That judge may well have a beef with Musk because of his intransigence but the stakes are much higher than that.
Whichever directions users migrate, the important thing is that more people must leave X as a platform, and disempower Musk’s efforts to disrupt the law.
As I typed this blog entry, my friend Evan Prodromou posted
So, who is in the Free/Open Source software community in Brazil, advising the government on how to move to the Fediverse? And how can I help you?
I don’t speak Portuguese, but add my name and voice to this offer of support!
@evan I am somehow surprised that the actual Brazilian government still doesn't have an instance of some software compatible with activity pub.
Before leaving Brazil, I was part of a group engaged in open government data and civic hacking. I really hope these groups are still strong as they were a few years ago!
By the way, in 2011, I was advocating the City Council of São Paulo to have an identi.ca server, instead of Twitter. This didn't work, but at least I could open up some government data.
… a title which is delightfully reminiscent of Cory Doctorow’s book The Internet Con, subtitled How To Seize The Means Of Computation, which I think about a lot. And obviously, as an historian, I’m very aware of the original quotation from which both of these derive. ↩︎
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[T]here is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms
He goes on to mention both BlueSky and Mastodon as obvious contenders.
I certainly agree that governments — and any organisation that values its reputation, for that matter — should be moving away from X, but simply moving to another platform amounts to a sticking-plaster solution at best.
The problem with being on someone else’s platform is that you are giving that someone else control over which messages you see and which of your messages are seen. Indeed, the EU’s Digital Services Act recognises this by identifying Very Large Online Platforms, and imposing additional requirements on them around areas such as transparency and disinformation.
Federated technologies, such as Mastodon (andmanyothersexist) resolve the problem of ownership far more effectively by allowing you install and run your own instance. Many governments — and even the European Commission — already use these solutions, thus putting themselves in control of their own communication and ensuring that individuals can access these communications without putting themselves at the mercy of commercial priorities.
Obviously, there are both costs and challenges associated with running your own instance, but none of these are insurmountable and if organisations truly want to ensure that their communications remain free (as in speech) they really should be investing in the already existing infrastructure that allows them to do so.
Any organisation should be taking steps to protect the integrity of it’s communication. This is especially true in the case of governments, political parties and campaigners, for whom free and open discussions are essential.
Elon Musk's use of his X platform to promote murderous voices of hate is unacceptable. One way of fighting back would be to try to break the co-ordination problem that underpins X's power.
Today, I received some fun post from some lovely people in New York City. Those in the know, may recognise these stickers as the logos of Glitch and Fastly.
I’ve been using Glitch to write and host web apps for quite a few years now – it is super helpful when working in a role like developer relations, needing to rapidly spin up demos, examples, or to demonstrate new features. A couple of years ago, Glitch came together with Fastly, and in the past couple of months their new developer platform vision really started to come together.
If you haven’t been keeping up with what they have been up to, and were not able to be at their recent special developer event in NYC (don’t worry, I couldn’t get there either), there’s a helpful ~6 minute video that summarises the announcements. I’m particularly interested and excited about this because I know and respect the folks involved – Anil Dash, Jenn Schiffer, Hannah Aubry, many others across their teams – and I know that they get and they care about developer experience, Open Source, and the free and open web. I’m talking about the big stuff, the infrastructure, the stuff that needs to invisibly just work in order for the web to run; and also the smaller things, the quirky indie little pieces, the fun and new experiences, helping people to learn to code and to be creative. It’s no exaggeration to say that Fastly’s Fast Forward program is a massive supporter of Open Source, open standards and the Fediverse. All of these things are reasons why I love Glitch & Fastly.
[ if you’re curious about the sorts of things I’ve been building or working on from a code and web perspective, I’ve also spruced up my GitHub bio, and I have a more general gallery page on GitHub that has links to the source and deployments of different projects – some of which are links to those Glitch apps above ]
Thank you for the stickerage, Glitch friends! And, congratulations on the new Fastly Developer Platform! I’m looking forward to continuing to use your cool technologies 👍🏻
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Resources page for Andy Piper's talk on the history of Computer Art, pen plotters, and more. Explore further with links to exhibitions, contemporary artists, tools, and reading materials.
@andypiper@Stickman Hook Don’t underestimate the “tiny” sound effects in Stickman Hook. Every swing, every bounce or collision has its own effect, combined with the gentle background music, helping you feel more relaxed and still excited when playing.
I made a simple site so that you can grab some stickers to celebrate your support for the open internet and Fediverse. Be a part of the Rebel Alliance! #FediverseForFreedom
Last year, I wrote a blog post, Fediverse for Freedom – which was about the importance of a free and open Fediverse, and how and why public institutions can support it. Since then, I’ve referred to this blog post in many of my talks and in conversations, and started to use the hashtag #FediverseForFreedom.
Ahead of FOSDEM back in February, I created some stickers to share – a Fediverse logo, overlaid with the text “I Am Part Of The Rebel Alliance #FediverseForFreedom”. They were quite a hit at the time, and since then I’ve used the same image in presentations. When people have seen them, I’ve quite often been asked where they came from.
Last week, Elena Rossini – writer of the fantastic The Future is Federated blog/newsletter, talented filmmaker and photographer, and (perhaps) the Fediverse’s Number One Fan – released a great, four minute video that both explains and promotes the Fediverse and open platforms not owned by billionaires1
One of the stickers shows up in several shots of the the video, and once again, I heard that people would like to be able to get some for themselves.
A simple site
I’ve been wanting to make the stickers available for a while, but the release of the video finally pushed me into getting this done!
I’d recently bought some stickers myself, from the talented Robb Knight, and he mentioned that he used Stripe Payment Links for his site. I already had a Stripe account, so thought I’d try the same thing.
So: now you can visit fediverseforfreedom.org (.com points to .org), and click on a link to to get a handful of stickers shipped in your direction! You can also easily just tell your friends, “oh yeah, I got them from Fediverse For Freedom dot org”. Nice and straightforward. A small pile of I Am Part Of The Rebel Alliance stickers There’s a bit more information about it all on that simple site, but I thought it might be interesting to write down a bit more about how I made it.
The site is running on Codeberg Pages. Previously I’ve put these kinds of one-off, single page sites up on GitHub Pages, or on Glitch. I’m feeling increasingly less comfortable about having all of my stuff on GitHub and hosted in the US; and, unfortunately, Glitch is going away soon (more on this in a future post). So in this case I chose Codeberg Pages, although I’m aware that they are themselves a platform that is currently in maintenance mode. I’m open to suggestions for similar sites, as I’ll need to migrate some Glitch apps somewhere very soon!
Apart from that: the whole operation is very low tech. Stripe Payment Links are convenient – Stripe itself can handle a huge variety of payment types – but, on the backend… it does not do much. No order acknowledgement emails, order management tools, or anything like that. All I get is a basic dashboard with information about the orders. I whipped up some simple Python that uses the Stripe API to grab the postal addresses of orders, and then creates SVG address labels for printing. The same code also grabs the email addresses so that I can send an email thanking the customer for the order.
In terms of shipping, that’s also a manual process – no “drop-shipping” here, I’m getting the stickers from my regular supplier (StickerApp), putting them in envelopes, and posting them out myself. That also means that delivery times will vary – although I had enough in stock to cover all of the initial orders, I’ve also been in Amsterdam for the past 3 days, so the first batch will go out on Monday.
One more thing I’m experimenting with here is GoatCounter, just to get a sense of traffic and interest. I didn’t want to put a load of invasive Google Analytics onto such a basic page, and I’ve had GoatCounter recommended to me a few times now – like Mastodon, it has also benefited from NLNet funding from the European Union in the past, and I wanted to see what was possible. It seems to do just what I wanted, whilst also being unintrusive.
What’s next?
Look… I don’t intend to become some kind of merch magnate, but I do know that some people share my own desire to display our commitment to the Fediverse and related causes, and if I can help folks to do so, then I will (did you know we already made a t-shirt? Elena has asked me for more in the same vein!).
If you want to look for other ways to show your support in public, and to give back to people or projects that work on tools that you use, take a look at the Awesome Fediverse Merch list that Jeff Sikes is curating. Plenty of options for everyone.
Finally – remember to support the creators of your favourite sites, services, and open source software directly, whenever you can!
Remember, as I heard in a keynote at the PublicSpaces conference this week: “the Internet is currently controlled by four or five fucked up right wing white men” – it’s time to rewild the internet, and take ownership of our data and choices. ↩︎
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The writing trigger today was largely prompted by reading the latest edition of Tedium, specifically, commenting on the Patreon situation with the App Store.
[…] it is also reflective of a mistake the company made many years ago: To allow people to support patrons directly through its app. Patreon did not need to do this. It was just a website at first, and for all the good things that can be said about the company, fact is they built on shaky land. To go to my earlier metaphor: They built their foundation on quicksand, perhaps without realizing it, though the broken glass wasn’t thrown in just yet. […] That shaky land isn’t the web, and if Patreon had stayed there, this would not be an issue. It’s the mobile app ecosystem, which honestly treats everyone poorly whether they want to admit it or not.
Look at that – hyperlinks between content published freely on open platforms, that can be read, studied, accessed around the world, and discussed, all within minutes and hours of publication. Mind blowing! Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!
I spend a bunch on apps, and in apps, and with Apple, directly and indirectly. They have a good ecosystem, it is all convenient (but spendy) to me as a consumer… but, I don’t think this whole situation with them milking creators and creatives is OK at all. The trouble is, that the lines are all kinds of blurry here – if they carved out a new category and set of rules around apps that sell subscriptions for creators that had, say, a zero or just a lower fee than other categories, then you’ll get into situations where others try to find ways into that category to avoid the higher fees.
The closed ones make me increasingly sad and frustrated.
The open ones can take more tinkering and effort, but I get a lot back from them. They need sustaining. They don’t come for free. They need us to contribute, and to find ways to pay to support the creators and makers and builders and engineers.
Today, I received some fun post from some lovely people in New York City. Those in the know, may recognise these stickers as the logos of Glitch and Fastly.
I’ve been using Glitch to write and host web apps for quite a few years now – it is super helpful when working in a role like developer relations, needing to rapidly spin up demos, examples, or to demonstrate new features. A couple of years ago, Glitch came together with Fastly, and in the past couple of months their new developer platform vision really started to come together.
If you haven’t been keeping up with what they have been up to, and were not able to be at their recent special developer event in NYC (don’t worry, I couldn’t get there either), there’s a helpful ~6 minute video that summarises the announcements. I’m particularly interested and excited about this because I know and respect the folks involved – Anil Dash, Jenn Schiffer, Hannah Aubry, many others across their teams – and I know that they get and they care about developer experience, Open Source, and the free and open web. I’m talking about the big stuff, the infrastructure, the stuff that needs to invisibly just work in order for the web to run; and also the smaller things, the quirky indie little pieces, the fun and new experiences, helping people to learn to code and to be creative. It’s no exaggeration to say that Fastly’s Fast Forward program is a massive supporter of Open Source, open standards and the Fediverse. All of these things are reasons why I love Glitch & Fastly.
[ if you’re curious about the sorts of things I’ve been building or working on from a code and web perspective, I’ve also spruced up my GitHub bio, and I have a more general gallery page on GitHub that has links to the source and deployments of different projects – some of which are links to those Glitch apps above ]
Thank you for the stickerage, Glitch friends! And, congratulations on the new Fastly Developer Platform! I’m looking forward to continuing to use your cool technologies 👍🏻
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Resources page for Andy Piper's talk on the history of Computer Art, pen plotters, and more. Explore further with links to exhibitions, contemporary artists, tools, and reading materials.
Over the past week, there’s been a noticeable shift away from X in the UK, and it feels long overdue. According to Bluesky’s PR, the platform has seen a surge in new users and activity from the UK. I’ve personally noticed more people finding my profiles on both Threads and on Bluesky, and I’ve seen a significant number of “I just deleted my X account” posts on Threads. However, due to the algorithm, these posts often appear in bursts, sometimes delayed by a day or two.
My friend Neville Hobson wrote a piece today titled “Finally, the Unravelling of X,” where he discusses this migration, the reasons behind it, and the pros and cons of choosing between Bluesky and Threads. Neville touches on the idea of a “more respectful, decentralized web,” (to quote him on the Fediverse), and even highlights something I said on Threads yesterday. In response to a question about where politicians should go in a post-X world, I suggested that governments should own their own social platforms: I wanted to expand on what I meant by a “sovereign owned/operated Mastodon instance” for the UK Parliament, and why I believe this is important.
One of the major tensions between Big Tech and national governments over the past 15 years has revolved around platform ownership and control. The European Union has even labeled several tech companies as “gatekeepers” in the Digital Markets Act. This term is telling—these companies essentially gatekeep the digital rights, data, and access of national citizens.
If governments are concerned about the dominance of privately-owned online platforms, they have a responsibility to run and own their own. At FOSDEM in Brussels this February, we noticed growing interest in Fediverse platforms and technologies like Mastodon from several national governments and the EU itself. Many of these institutions are already running their own social media instances and actively encouraging their politicians to use them. In the EU, there’s no reason to switch to Threads since Meta has restricted the platform’s availability in the bloc. Moreover, Threads doesn’t allow users to run their own instances, unlike Mastodon or even Bluesky, which, while less common, does technically support setting up a external ATProto instance (I don’t think that’s really happening though? happy to be informed and to learn otherwise – I’ll readily admit that it has not been at the centre of my attention).
For years, governments, newsrooms, and other organisations have protested the idea that private companies should control and limit their messages. A logical response would be for these entities to run their own instances of software like Mastodon—or any Fediverse-compatible, ActivityPub-based service. This would allow them to own their content, domain, and user verification, ensuring greater control and independence.
The UK is lagging behind in this area. While the EU has embraced Mastodon, and in the US, many organisations have moved to Threads, the UK has yet to take similar steps. For example, I follow @POTUS@threads.net and @whitehouse@threads.net from my Mastodon account, because they’ve enabled Fediverse sharing. Even though Threads is owned and operated by Meta, it’s positive that their content can reach into the wider Fediverse. Ideally, Threads will eventually fully integrate with the ActivityPub network, offering a two-way interaction and allowing for account, network, and maybe content portability—hence why I said, “in principle, with federated social accounts, the location does not matter so much, as long as they can be discovered and followed.” Owning the network and identity allows for broader discoverability and avoids corporate chokeholds.
Running digital services requires consistent investment and maintenance.
Discovery isn’t always straightforward, and organisations seek reach and measurement—areas where Fediverse platforms currently fall short.
Deciding who qualifies for an account on a sovereign platform is tricky. While it makes sense for current MPs to have official accounts on a national Fediverse server, it’s harder to justify the inclusion of political parties or other entities on the same platform. This is an area where we need to improve data and account portability as the Fediverse grows.
These are important discussions that we need to be having. Politicians and the media should advocate for greater decentralisation and digital sovereignty to protect the freedom of democratic institutions.
Update 16/08/2024 – my friend Stefan Bohacek reminded me that he put together a useful resource on this same topic several months ago, Fediverse: an overview for government agencies. Well worth sending to your representatives, or sharing with your network if asked.
Update 27/08/2024 – the conversation continues in episode #425 of the For Immediate Release podcast (discussion starts around 13 min into the show). I appreciate Neville and Shel talking about my post here. Take a listen, if you want to hear how they expanded on and debated this idea – available wherever you get your podcasts.
Update 09/09/2024 – I wrote a second piece expanding on this and listing existing governments that are already in the Fediverse.
Update 13/09/2024 – I was reminded of this piece from IFTAS, Open Social for the Common Good, that is also excellent on this topic.
Finally – if you’re leaving X – congratulations – don’t look back.
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The desire to stand out has declined significantly over the last 20 years, according to a new study. That has serious implications for society, business, and communicators.
The writing trigger today was largely prompted by reading the latest edition of Tedium, specifically, commenting on the Patreon situation with the App Store.
[…] it is also reflective of a mistake the company made many years ago: To allow people to support patrons directly through its app. Patreon did not need to do this. It was just a website at first, and for all the good things that can be said about the company, fact is they built on shaky land. To go to my earlier metaphor: They built their foundation on quicksand, perhaps without realizing it, though the broken glass wasn’t thrown in just yet. […] That shaky land isn’t the web, and if Patreon had stayed there, this would not be an issue. It’s the mobile app ecosystem, which honestly treats everyone poorly whether they want to admit it or not.
Look at that – hyperlinks between content published freely on open platforms, that can be read, studied, accessed around the world, and discussed, all within minutes and hours of publication. Mind blowing! Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!
I spend a bunch on apps, and in apps, and with Apple, directly and indirectly. They have a good ecosystem, it is all convenient (but spendy) to me as a consumer… but, I don’t think this whole situation with them milking creators and creatives is OK at all. The trouble is, that the lines are all kinds of blurry here – if they carved out a new category and set of rules around apps that sell subscriptions for creators that had, say, a zero or just a lower fee than other categories, then you’ll get into situations where others try to find ways into that category to avoid the higher fees.
The closed ones make me increasingly sad and frustrated.
The open ones can take more tinkering and effort, but I get a lot back from them. They need sustaining. They don’t come for free. They need us to contribute, and to find ways to pay to support the creators and makers and builders and engineers.
Last year, I wrote a blog post, Fediverse for Freedom – which was about the importance of a free and open Fediverse, and how and why public institutions can support it. Since then, I’ve referred to this blog post in many of my talks and in conversations, and started to use the hashtag #FediverseForFreedom.
Ahead of FOSDEM back in February, I created some stickers to share – a Fediverse logo, overlaid with the text “I Am Part Of The Rebel Alliance #FediverseForFreedom”. They were quite a hit at the time, and since then I’ve used the same image in presentations. When people have seen them, I’ve quite often been asked where they came from.
Last week, Elena Rossini – writer of the fantastic The Future is Federated blog/newsletter, talented filmmaker and photographer, and (perhaps) the Fediverse’s Number One Fan – released a great, four minute video that both explains and promotes the Fediverse and open platforms not owned by billionaires1
One of the stickers shows up in several shots of the the video, and once again, I heard that people would like to be able to get some for themselves.
A simple site
I’ve been wanting to make the stickers available for a while, but the release of the video finally pushed me into getting this done!
I’d recently bought some stickers myself, from the talented Robb Knight, and he mentioned that he used Stripe Payment Links for his site. I already had a Stripe account, so thought I’d try the same thing.
So: now you can visit fediverseforfreedom.org (.com points to .org), and click on a link to to get a handful of stickers shipped in your direction! You can also easily just tell your friends, “oh yeah, I got them from Fediverse For Freedom dot org”. Nice and straightforward. A small pile of I Am Part Of The Rebel Alliance stickers There’s a bit more information about it all on that simple site, but I thought it might be interesting to write down a bit more about how I made it.
The site is running on Codeberg Pages. Previously I’ve put these kinds of one-off, single page sites up on GitHub Pages, or on Glitch. I’m feeling increasingly less comfortable about having all of my stuff on GitHub and hosted in the US; and, unfortunately, Glitch is going away soon (more on this in a future post). So in this case I chose Codeberg Pages, although I’m aware that they are themselves a platform that is currently in maintenance mode. I’m open to suggestions for similar sites, as I’ll need to migrate some Glitch apps somewhere very soon!
Apart from that: the whole operation is very low tech. Stripe Payment Links are convenient – Stripe itself can handle a huge variety of payment types – but, on the backend… it does not do much. No order acknowledgement emails, order management tools, or anything like that. All I get is a basic dashboard with information about the orders. I whipped up some simple Python that uses the Stripe API to grab the postal addresses of orders, and then creates SVG address labels for printing. The same code also grabs the email addresses so that I can send an email thanking the customer for the order.
In terms of shipping, that’s also a manual process – no “drop-shipping” here, I’m getting the stickers from my regular supplier (StickerApp), putting them in envelopes, and posting them out myself. That also means that delivery times will vary – although I had enough in stock to cover all of the initial orders, I’ve also been in Amsterdam for the past 3 days, so the first batch will go out on Monday.
One more thing I’m experimenting with here is GoatCounter, just to get a sense of traffic and interest. I didn’t want to put a load of invasive Google Analytics onto such a basic page, and I’ve had GoatCounter recommended to me a few times now – like Mastodon, it has also benefited from NLNet funding from the European Union in the past, and I wanted to see what was possible. It seems to do just what I wanted, whilst also being unintrusive.
What’s next?
Look… I don’t intend to become some kind of merch magnate, but I do know that some people share my own desire to display our commitment to the Fediverse and related causes, and if I can help folks to do so, then I will (did you know we already made a t-shirt? Elena has asked me for more in the same vein!).
If you want to look for other ways to show your support in public, and to give back to people or projects that work on tools that you use, take a look at the Awesome Fediverse Merch list that Jeff Sikes is curating. Plenty of options for everyone.
Finally – remember to support the creators of your favourite sites, services, and open source software directly, whenever you can!
Remember, as I heard in a keynote at the PublicSpaces conference this week: “the Internet is currently controlled by four or five fucked up right wing white men” – it’s time to rewild the internet, and take ownership of our data and choices. ↩︎
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Over the past week, there’s been a noticeable shift away from X in the UK, and it feels long overdue. According to Bluesky’s PR, the platform has seen a surge in new users and activity from the UK. I’ve personally noticed more people finding my profiles on both Threads and on Bluesky, and I’ve seen a significant number of “I just deleted my X account” posts on Threads. However, due to the algorithm, these posts often appear in bursts, sometimes delayed by a day or two.
My friend Neville Hobson wrote a piece today titled “Finally, the Unravelling of X,” where he discusses this migration, the reasons behind it, and the pros and cons of choosing between Bluesky and Threads. Neville touches on the idea of a “more respectful, decentralized web,” (to quote him on the Fediverse), and even highlights something I said on Threads yesterday. In response to a question about where politicians should go in a post-X world, I suggested that governments should own their own social platforms: I wanted to expand on what I meant by a “sovereign owned/operated Mastodon instance” for the UK Parliament, and why I believe this is important.
One of the major tensions between Big Tech and national governments over the past 15 years has revolved around platform ownership and control. The European Union has even labeled several tech companies as “gatekeepers” in the Digital Markets Act. This term is telling—these companies essentially gatekeep the digital rights, data, and access of national citizens.
If governments are concerned about the dominance of privately-owned online platforms, they have a responsibility to run and own their own. At FOSDEM in Brussels this February, we noticed growing interest in Fediverse platforms and technologies like Mastodon from several national governments and the EU itself. Many of these institutions are already running their own social media instances and actively encouraging their politicians to use them. In the EU, there’s no reason to switch to Threads since Meta has restricted the platform’s availability in the bloc. Moreover, Threads doesn’t allow users to run their own instances, unlike Mastodon or even Bluesky, which, while less common, does technically support setting up a external ATProto instance (I don’t think that’s really happening though? happy to be informed and to learn otherwise – I’ll readily admit that it has not been at the centre of my attention).
For years, governments, newsrooms, and other organisations have protested the idea that private companies should control and limit their messages. A logical response would be for these entities to run their own instances of software like Mastodon—or any Fediverse-compatible, ActivityPub-based service. This would allow them to own their content, domain, and user verification, ensuring greater control and independence.
The UK is lagging behind in this area. While the EU has embraced Mastodon, and in the US, many organisations have moved to Threads, the UK has yet to take similar steps. For example, I follow @POTUS@threads.net and @whitehouse@threads.net from my Mastodon account, because they’ve enabled Fediverse sharing. Even though Threads is owned and operated by Meta, it’s positive that their content can reach into the wider Fediverse. Ideally, Threads will eventually fully integrate with the ActivityPub network, offering a two-way interaction and allowing for account, network, and maybe content portability—hence why I said, “in principle, with federated social accounts, the location does not matter so much, as long as they can be discovered and followed.” Owning the network and identity allows for broader discoverability and avoids corporate chokeholds.
Running digital services requires consistent investment and maintenance.
Discovery isn’t always straightforward, and organisations seek reach and measurement—areas where Fediverse platforms currently fall short.
Deciding who qualifies for an account on a sovereign platform is tricky. While it makes sense for current MPs to have official accounts on a national Fediverse server, it’s harder to justify the inclusion of political parties or other entities on the same platform. This is an area where we need to improve data and account portability as the Fediverse grows.
These are important discussions that we need to be having. Politicians and the media should advocate for greater decentralisation and digital sovereignty to protect the freedom of democratic institutions.
Update 16/08/2024 – my friend Stefan Bohacek reminded me that he put together a useful resource on this same topic several months ago, Fediverse: an overview for government agencies. Well worth sending to your representatives, or sharing with your network if asked.
Update 27/08/2024 – the conversation continues in episode #425 of the For Immediate Release podcast (discussion starts around 13 min into the show). I appreciate Neville and Shel talking about my post here. Take a listen, if you want to hear how they expanded on and debated this idea – available wherever you get your podcasts.
Update 09/09/2024 – I wrote a second piece expanding on this and listing existing governments that are already in the Fediverse.
Update 13/09/2024 – I was reminded of this piece from IFTAS, Open Social for the Common Good, that is also excellent on this topic.
Finally – if you’re leaving X – congratulations – don’t look back.
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The desire to stand out has declined significantly over the last 20 years, according to a new study. That has serious implications for society, business, and communicators.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun expressed deep concern over Israel's attack on Iran's nuclear facilities and the resulting escalation of military conflict. Guo urged all parties to de-escalate the situation and prevent further instability in the region.
@benda China isn't going to get involved directly in the war, but it will provide material and economic support to Iran. There's not a direct rail line from China to Iran.
we need jets. the iranians already took our israel's ability to refine jet fuel, but as soon as they did the western powers begun helping with refueling operations for the zionist air force.
@benda @chjara even regular trade is important for Iran right now, but access to technology and manufacturing will be very important if this war drags on.
So I guess bombing the Iranian state TV station with civilian employees inside, for Ursula and Starmer are MILITARY OBJECTIVES,right? #IsraelTerroristState terrorist attack killed some workers inside the building. #WeStandWithIranianPeople
Bombardear la TV estatal irani, con sus trabajadores dentro, supongo que para Ursula y Starmer serán un OBJETIVO MILITAR,no? Han matado a varios empleados. #IsraelTerroristState
@xesfur @jngorria No fallan. Al menos entonces nos engañaban por lo bajini. Ahora directamente nos mienten en la cara (tergiversando lo que vemos con nuestros ojitos en puñetero directo)
@jngorria No te creas. Nos mentían ya en toda nuestra cara.
Todavía recuerdo estar viendo los informativos durante la noche en los primeros días de la 1a Guerra del Golfo anunciando que se acababa de bombardear y silenciar a Radio Bagdad, mientras en ese mismo momento, *yo estaba sintonizando Radio Bagdad*. 🙄
Por cierto, que por entonces, Radio Bagdad tenía emisión en castellano. Aquí va una grabación que hice un día: blogdemon.eu/nibble/post/radio…
@xesfur @jngorria Si claro que nos engañaron, a lo que me refiero es a que entonces las RRSS estaban en "pañales" e íbamos descubriendo por vías más lentas,digamos ( a través de foros y blogs) Ahora nos quieren engañar igual PERO ya ni es tan factible al verlo todo en directo o casi. Muy interesante el dato de Radio Bagdad.
@jngorria En el año 90-91 ni foros ni blogs había. Lo mas parecido, las redes de BBS's con las áreas de Fidonet, etc.
Ahora lo que hay es una enorme cantidad de ruido mediático. Hace años hubo movilizaciones enormes contra la guerra. Ahora, pues no hay mas que ver el panorama. 😑
Radio Bagdad era una de tantas. Algunas se echan mucho de menos.
Aquest dimecres la CGT a AESE Serveis, monitores de menjador escolar en vaga, convoca concentració per exigir unes condicions dignes al lleure 📌 18/6, 10h Metro Fabra i Puig
Sure, because Elon would definetly inventato the neural link I'm not gonna fall for this a second time they already promosed use Overboard by 2015, we are in 2025 and nothing. Trust no one.
Fachleute sind sich einig, dass Israels Angriff auf den Iran völkerrechtswidrig war. Teheran will seine Gegenschläge fortsetzen, aber signalisiert auch Bereitschaft für Verhandlungen
Did joborun go down the drain reverting gcc to 14 ?
The last bisection step dropped ee2ab46 x86/boot: Use '-std=gnu11' to fix build with GCC 15. https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/linux/-/issues/145#note_278237
Diese Begeisterung für das Militär ist unappetitlich.
Und Klingbeil weigert sich weiterhin die Realität zur Kenntnis zu nehmen.
»Vizekanzler Lars Klingbeil hält es für möglich, dass Deutschland Israel im Kampf gegen den Iran auch weiterhin mit Waffenlieferungen unterstützt, wie er im ZDF sagte. Er halte es aber auch für richtig zu prüfen, ob die israelischen Angriffe vom Völkerrecht gedeckt seien.«
Natürlich weiss Herr Klingbeil dass Israel einen völkerrechtswidrigen Angriffskrieg führt, in Gaza Ziele verfolgt die genozidal sind und am laufenden Band Kriegsverbrechen begeht. Und Klingbeil weiss auch dass Deutschland verpflichtet ist nichts zu tun was hilft die Besatzung Palästinas aufrecht zu erhalten.
Klingbeil zieht also eine Show ab wenn er sagt dass "man prüfen sollte."
Lieferung für Verstöße gegen das Völkerrecht sind verboten. Wer tut als gäbe es keine, der lügt offensichtlich
The IDF said that, amid concerns Iran's regional proxies in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria may assist it in the conflict, the army is stationing troops along Israel's borders to guard against possible infiltration attempts or Hezbollah joining the fighti…
By Beth Ridgeway NASA’s Student Launch competition celebrated its 25th anniversary on May 4, just north of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, bringing together more than 980 middle school, high school, college, and university students from across the U.S. to showcase and launch their high-powered rocketry designs. The event marked the conclusion […]
NASA announced the winners of the agency’s 25th anniversary high-powered rocketry Student Launch competition that took place on May 4, just north of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Watch the replay of the ESA-CNES press conference held at the Paris Air Show 2025 (Le Bourget) on 16 June 2025, with Josef Aschbacher, Director General of ESA, and Lionel Suchet, Executive Vice President of CNES.
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Timecodes: 00:00 Intro 00:56 What is Vanilla OS? 02:47 App Compatibility 06:52 Updates and maintenance 09:20 Reproducibility and automation 11:14 How does it compare? 14:19 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers 15:19 Support the channel
Vanilla OS is what we would call an immutable system, meaning the base system is mostly read only by default, and updated after a reboot.
You can still install packages onto that base system, from the Debian repos, as Vanilla OS is based on a snapshot of Debian Sid. You can use any system tool that lets you change configurations, and you can still edit some config files.
So, Vanilla OS was already using the principle of distro containers, letting you create an Arch, an OpenSUSE, and a Fedora container on the fly, and install packages in any of these through a single package manager, called APX. It also of course supported Flatpaks, as that's how you'll install your software on the base system.
But this time around, they added Android app support as well. The way it works, is, of course, through Waydroid, but they've integrated it pretty well. You can simply download an APK, and double click it, to bring a graphical installer that will add this app to your applications menu.
Apart from that, you still have access to all the distro containers that Vanilla OS already had: you can create one graphically, or using the APX package manager tool, and you can see the list of programs that have been installed in each container.
The new version of APX is also more flexible, it lets you add not only distributions, but also just other package managers. If you want to add support for pacman, you can just add that, and APX will create the right distro container for you.
Vanilla OS 2 also comes with a new "smart updates" system. This is a fancy name to say "we won't download and install updates while you're working".
Smart updates just mean that the partition you're not currently using isn't getting updates while you're working or using the PC, because that would divert resources from what you're doing.
System updates are basically just snapshots of Debian Sid, that have been compiled into an OCI image that is tested by the Vanilla OS devs. Once it's ready, they'll ship it to all Vanilla OS systems, and your currently unused partition is replaced by this image, and all the customizations you've applied are of course applied to this new image as well.
And of course, flatpaks and packages from distro containers are updated normally, like any other distro.
The other major change for Vanilla OS is the addition of some NixOS like features, namely the ability to create descriptive files to reproduce your system.
There's a new tool called Vanilla Image Builder, or Vib. This lets you create a Vanilla OS Image, with a bunch of customizations already added to it. You can add specific packages, drivers, codecs, but you can also add commands that need to be run, change some configurations, and more.
The project is actually wider than just Vanilla OS images, it also lets you create container images for specific applications, by specifying a distro base. Basically lets you create Docker images.
In terms of automation, Vanilla OS comes with VSO, for Vanilla System Operator. This lets you create tasks that have conditions, and instructions. If the conditions are met, the instructions are ran. These conditions include disconnecting from the network, when you're on low battery, when a specific process starts, when a new device is connected or disconnected, when your CPU usage is high, or others, and you can also specificy a script or a command as the condition.
VSO is actually more than just a task automation system, it also lets you manage the Waydroid subsystem, export applications from a distro container to your system's applications list, so you can run it in one click, it handles sideloading of APKs and DEB packages, and more.
Hi, I'm Nick, and I run The Linux Experiment, a Youtube Channel and Podcast where I talk about Linux, Open Source, and privacy. I make 3 videos per week, including a Linux …
No self-respecting Iranian would want to bring down his government at this very moment, these rootless cosmopolitans don't understand how human beings work, they'd be mystified by how Soviet Christians and other anti-communists temporarily supported the Stalin regime when Germany invaded in the name of defending their motherland.
For media, unruly protesters are a bigger problem than Trump’s police state. FAIR calls on journalists to focus on the Trump administration's efforts to suppress dissent rather than the broken windows and property damage at protests.
While major media sources described LA protests as “mostly peaceful,” they nevertheless tended to dwell on what was depicted as rioting and protester violence.
![The Structure of a Slavoj Žižek Essay
1. "Recall this Looney Tunes scene? (sniff) It perfectly illustrates Hegel’s negation of negation."
2. "Much like when Robespierre— (wipes glasses) —ah, but you pseudo-intellectuals wouldn’t know real revolutionary history!"
3. "Freud? Lacan? (snort) Of course you’ve misunderstood them. Let me explain objet petit a using this Coke can..."
4. "The Left’s interpretation is infantile. (tugs shirt) True radicalism means agreeing with neoliberals—but dialectically."
5. "Observe how this applies to [Current Event]. (sniff, gestures wildly) The true subversion? Paying taxes joyfully!"
6. "Paradoxically, the most Marxist stance is to defend the status quo. (spills coffee) This is why revolution is impossible."
7. "Conclusion: (sniff, stares into distance) ...the real ideological fantasy was the friends we made along the way."](https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/640/7570990 "The Structure of a Slavoj Žižek Essay
1. \"Recall this Looney Tunes scene? (sniff) It perfectly illustrates Hegel’s negation of negation.\"
2. \"Much like when Robespierre— (wipes glasses) —ah, but you pseudo-intellectuals wouldn’t know real revolutionary history!\"
3. \"Freud? Lacan? (snort) Of course you’ve misunderstood them. Let me explain objet petit a using this Coke can...\"
4. \"The Left’s interpretation is infantile. (tugs shirt) True radicalism means agreeing with neoliberals—but dialectically.\"
5. \"Observe how this applies to [Current Event]. (sniff, gestures wildly) The true subversion? Paying taxes joyfully!\"
6. \"Paradoxically, the most Marxist stance is to defend the status quo. (spills coffee) This is why revolution is impossible.\"
7. \"Conclusion: (sniff, stares into distance) ...the real ideological fantasy was the friends we made along the way.\"")
I don't know.. but.. sounds.. somehow . not right.. to me .
The buzz
The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
A small pile of I Am Part Of The Rebel Alliance stickers
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