Notices by Matthew Fennell (matthew@social.fennell.dev)

@crb I think a big factor is what spare devices developers have lying around. I imagine most people won't want to work on their main device, and so most development gets done on older phones, or weird and wacky ones bought expressly for the purpose of hacking on.

Still, I agree with you that it is a shame, before I got my Librem 5, I was looking to install on my Motorola, only to see it wasn't supported yet.

@crb hopefully the day will come when it's easy to install any OS on any phone. It's amazing how many devices #PostmarketOS supports now, hopefully it will only get better over time!

@gordoooo_z that's the thing, I see so many screenshots and it looks soooo good! But then there is the logical part of my brain saying "Phosh is stable and working for you, don't mess with it" 😄

Resisting the urge to switch from #Phosh to #GnomeMobile right before travelling to #FOSDEM 😄

#MobileLinux

“We vow to be the guardians of the Treaties. But our Union is not just a treasure to be guarded. Protecting our Treaties and filling them with life is a daily task."

President Ursula von der Leyen and the College of Commissioners have taken oath today before the Court of Justice of the EU in Luxembourg.

They committed to respect the Treaties and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, as well as carry out their duties in a fully independent way and in the general interest of the Union.

@dnaod if you don't mind me asking: how are you finding #GnomeMobile? I'm using #Phosh at the moment, and I've been interested in switching for some time, but also quite scared to try it as I rely on my phone quite a bit

@fifilamoura thank you! I've read a little and it is very interesting so far 🙂

https://www.benkler.org/

While the main focus is on #PeerProduction, #FreeSoftware etc, there are some sections discussing power and control in networks, and how it affects autonomy.

https://stratechery.com/

The #AggregationTheory articles are very useful for understanding why - all else being equal - centralisation seems to be the natural state for online services.

https://www.igalia.com/chats/

I find the #WebEcosystemHealth episodes interesting. The discussions are very nuanced and cover many different aspects of centralisation. There are many topics:

How important is diversity of rendering engines vs just of UIs? Are chromium-based browsers real competition to chrome?

Does having one or two dominant browser engines mean a failure of the network, or will competitors spring up when the time comes?

What is possible if there is more diversity in web funding?

https://dustycloud.org/blog

I find all the posts interesting, but especially those with the "federation" and "decentralisation" tags.

I love the analysis of the design and structure of different networks, and how this leads to different outcomes in practice.

I also really like the precision of terminology - for instance, the distinction between federation and decentralisation. I feel we need more of a shared language around decentralised networks as we otherwise end up talking past each other.

I really enjoy learning about #federated and #decentralised networks. Especially their history, analysis of their structure/design, and how this diffuses power, encourages or discourages centralisation and other properties.

Does anyone know of reading material like this? Below are some of my favourites that I already know about.

#Decentralisation #Decentralization #Federation #Fediverse #OpenNetworks
#OpenStandards

@ij @jze @metin I think we need better terminology for open networks.

Christine Lemmer-Webber wrote a great post (https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/) which defines "federated" vs "decentralised".

Would you agree to these statements?:

Matrix and XMPP are federated.

The XMPP network is less centralised than the Matrix network (in terms of clients, server operators, who drives protocol development etc).

I feel some people really value decentralisation (🤚) but others are ok as long as there is federation

@Suiseiseki about Firefox: I get what you're saying, but it's in Debian's main repositories, that's good enough for me :)

As for "open protocol", I think we are talking about the same thing! I completely agree with your description, the most important things for me are that anyone can implement the protocol, anyone can join the network without asking for permission, and there is a balance of power so that many different parties are forming the protocol.

@Suiseiseki thanks for reading my post!

> The whole idea is that the free software is a free replacement to all proprietary software, not a mere alternative to it.

For you and I, who are already committed, absolutely! But, for people getting started on the freedom ladder, I think they will evaluate each piece of software on a case by case basis. Once they have a taste of Free Software, and it (hopefully) works well for them, I feel it becomes easier to sell the philosophical side of things.

@etienne agreed, this kind of thing has caused some confusion among my non-technical friends as well.

Good luck - I hope you can make it fit what you need!

@etienne hello! I'm not an expert, but one thing to check:

Does this problem happen only for existing messages, or also for new messages sent while Converse is running?

Reason I ask: when a message is encrypted with OMEMO, it is only encrypted for the devices that already exist.

This has some nice security benefits but also means when you set up a new client, it can't decrypt the old messages.

It "should work" with new messages - so if it doesn't, that suggests an incompatibility or bug 🙂

@david @newt heh, thanks for letting me know! I'll do it properly tonight when I get back tonight 🙂

@gabriel

> You're saying |matrix| isn't it? :trollface:

😁 I have my personal preferences, but I'd definitely take Matrix over the status quo today!

@ascentale A9: BlueSky is absolutely the current hotness, and I don't think we can or should fight that. BUT!

What we _can_ do and I think _should_ do is establish links across BlueSky and the Federation, so people know they _can_ come here and _not_ lose contact with their friends.

To that end, I wrote up a big post telling people in simple, basic steps how they can follow each other across the services via BridgyFed. It's here:

https://solarbird.net/blog/2025/01/09/lets-all-go-to-the-exit/

This has been well received in migration circles so far, and I've been picking up new followers both on BlueSky and Mastodon.

It also gets BlueSky people reminders that the Federation is here, which will be _very helpful to us_ if and when BlueSky goes to shit.

#BikeNite