Notices by Rolle Laukkarinen (rolle@mementomori.social), page 2

My book app is coming along, but the codebase getting really complicated. I might change my plans and not make it open source, at least not right away.

Still, the main idea stays the same: build it for myself first and make sure there are multiple ways to own your book data. Most likely, that means things like Nextcloud sync, an API, CSV export...

If Daft Punk released one more album, it wouldn't save the world. But it would help a little.

Over the years, I've realized how far we've drifted from the original idea of the World Wide Web. These days, it feels more like a corporate, big-tech web. I think there's real value in self-hosting as much as possible while still using major platforms, especially when you can pick more European and reasonable options.

People often forget that YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram were once independent companies, not owned by Meta or Google. Google was meant to be ad-free, and OpenAI was founded as a non-profit research organization, etc.

We'll probably never return to that vision, but I'm glad I own most my data and have about half of my tech self-hosted and open-sourced. It's only a dent, but I'm proud of that dent.

#OpenWeb #Internet #SocialMedia #BigTech

@stefan

I hope these get implemented some day:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8565
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14762

@eberfreitas @pahoittelemme

@stefan I like that things are becoming more federated. What makes me a bit sad is that we still can't all be online using the same protocol. But then again, that's nothing new, people have always been spread across different platforms anyway, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter... without being able to communicate with each other.

As a pacifist, what I love most about the Fediverse is how it feels like a shared search for peace. We have Caturday, when everyone posts cat pictures every Saturday. There's Mosstodon, which is all about sharing beautiful photos of moss and nature. And we have SilentSunday, where people post calm outdoor and nature photos. Even with all the chaos in the world, the Fediverse has a way of calming my mind.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #SocialMedia

I've been wondering about Bluesky's decentralization again. I can't think of any reason why I'd want to self-host Bluesky in its current form. I cannot 100% self host "my own Bluesky".

Their main selling points for building their own protocol were easier migration and better discoverability, but right now there's no simple way to migrate my Bluesky account to my own instance. And hosting the centralized parts yourself isn't really possible, or if it were, not affordable, they haven't made that feasible, by design, it seems.

Even if you self-host a PDS, Bluesky's Relay only indexes up to 10 accounts from it. You can run more, but they won't federate, the central infrastructure decides what gets seen. They control this (source: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation#:~:text=For%20a%20smooth%20transition%20into,for%20everyone%20in%20the%20ecosystem.). You can self-host a PDS (Personal Data Server), but you still depend on Bluesky's centralized Relay and AppView. There's no production-ready alternative infrastructure from what I gather.

It feels like I'd be renting a room in a hotel that someone else is running anyway, when I want my own hotel.

If Mastodon gGmbH vanishes tomorrow, my instance keeps running and federating with everyone else. If Bluesky PBC vanishes, the ecosystem would need to scramble to stand up replacement infrastructure that doesn't really exist yet.

ATProto keeps getting evaluated on its promises while other systems get evaluated on their merits. The "portability" selling point depends on infrastructure that isn't mature enough to actually catch you if Bluesky falls.

I trust W3C, the builders and fathers of the World Wide Web, ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

#Decentralization #SelfHosting #SelfHosted #Mastodon #Fediverse #Bluesky #Servers

It’s funny how in 2022 they claimed that Mastodon as a whole was CSAM social media because of a few nazi servers managed by two scumbags. Now they don't seem to see the irony in X and Grok, a massive platform with half a billion users.

#X #Twitter #SocialMedia

@lety Thank you for the support. My next step would have been to explore the fedi.buzz API and the possibilities of combining several public Fediverse APIs. Emelia Smith, who has worked on moderation and trust & safety tools for the Fediverse, kindly helped me improve auto-deletion and similar features, so I thought it was okay to do something like this. But I guess not. It seems that public posts cannot be used publicly in any way, according to the Fediverse Police / HOA forces. Still after this time I'm a bit sad about everything that happened.

It's exactly one year since the Mastodon HOA caused me a mental breakdown by verbally attacking me and falsely accusing me of scraping data into a database (which I didn't do, it was just a single index.html file using a public, existing mastodon.social API). That incident led to the shutdown of Fedi On Fire, a fun project I had. In their eyes I will forever be a "Techbro Asshole".

> This effort took inspiration from FireSky, a Bluesky project designed to show public statuses in an IRC-like layout happening in real-time. In Roni's own words, his effort was to showcase how beautifully diverse the Fediverse can be.

https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/fedionfire-shutdown

#FediOnFire

Nice headline.

Who's who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter
https://www.ft.com/content/ad94db4c-95a0-4c65-bd8d-3b43e1251091?accessToken=zwAGR7kzep9gkdOtlNtMlaBMZdO9jTtD4SUQkQ.MEYCIQCdZajuC9uga-d9b5Z1t0HI2BIcnkVoq98loextLRpCTgIhAPL3rW72aTHBNL_lS7s1ONpM2vBgNlBNHDBeGbHkPkZj&sharetype=gift&token=a7473827-0799-4064-9008-bf22b3c99711

#X #SocialMedia #Twitter

For a moment, I thought it would be nice to see something like this for the Fediverse, and it wouldn't even be that hard to build. But then I remembered... why would we want this? What are we trying to prove here? This kind of app is made for "influencers."

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/threads-growth-bobbin/id6756035789

#Threads #SocialMedia

@cadusilva Feliz Ano Novo para você, para toda a galera da Bolha e para todos os meus amigos portugueses! Ping @pedrosanta, para você e sua família também! 🎉

I don't know portuguese one bit, but I studied Spain for a couple of years. It's been fun being here with you guys ✌️

@BeAware I use Threads quite a lot, but it's starting to feel as toxic as X. But at least they still have some moderation. Compatibility with the Fediverse is practically non-existent, it doesn't work at all in Finland. It seems like they've given up on it. @rozeboosje

Many people recommend Brave as a browser these days. I just tried it again after a while.

The good: it has a built-in ad blocker and blocks YouTube ads completely.
The bad: it's noticeably slow at loading regular web pages, even with a 1 Gbps connection. And that crypto shit nowbody needs. Still too bloated as a web browser, like the most of them.

I've gotten so used to the ultra-slim ungoogled-chromium setup, with a working YouTube ad blocker and full anti-tracking features, that browsing feels as fast as opening local files. No other browser matches that.

It's sad that you have to be a nerd to get a truly fast, ad- and tracking-free browsing experience these days. Most browsers only give you one or the other.

#Browsers #Brave #Chromium

The best thing about ungoogled-chromium:

- No sync
- No profiles
- No force-feeding Google
- No fingerprinting
- No pointless gradients, stats, or widgets cluttering the new tab page that you can't disable
- No useless toolbar icons
- No "calling home" features that slow down browsing

Yet it still delivers top web standards and blazing-fast speeds.

It takes a bit of tweaking to get things like Netflix working, but it’s totally worth it.

I’ve tried over 20 browsers, and this is the one.

#Browsers #Chromium

It's a bit sad that completely free and open browsers aren't very user-friendly to install.

Here are the verified installation instructions:

Arch Linux (AUR)
yay -S ungoogled-chromium-bin

Flatpak (any Linux)
flatpak install flathub com.github.Eloston.UngoogledChromium
https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.ungoogled_software.ungoogled_chromium

Linux (AppImage/Portable)
Download from: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/

Windows (winget)
winget install -e eloston.ungoogled-chromium

Windows (Chocolatey)
choco install ungoogled-chromium
https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/ungoogled-chromium

Windows (manual)
Download from: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/

macOS (Homebrew)
brew install --cask ungoogled-chromium
https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/ungoogled-chromium

Official links:
GitHub: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Binaries: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/

#Browsers #Chromium #OpenSource

The US firm behind the Roomba smart vacuum cleaner, iRobot, has filed for bankruptcy protection after facing competition from Chinese rivals and being hit by tariffs.

Under the so-called pre-packaged Chapter 11 process, the main manufacturer of its devices, Shenzhen-based Picea Robotics, will take ownership of the firm.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1lr75lp239o

Mastodon Bird UI support for Mastodon v4.6.0 with CSS properties is coming soon. The theme will also be modularized using SCSS partials to match Mastodon's new style infrastructure.

The build process will include npm scripts and Parcel, making the theme ultra-portable for any Mastodon instance, whether added through the Custom CSS textarea or directly by a Mastodon admin.

I'll also create a simple bash script for Mastodon admins to enable the theme as a selectable option more easily than the current fork-and-cut method.

This is no easy feat, but definitely worth it.

GitHub: https://github.com/ronilaukkarinen/mastodon-bird-ui

Progress in the nightly branch.

#MastodonBirdUI #CSS #OpenSource #MastoAdmin #Theming #BirdUI #Mastodon #BuildInPublic

I dislike the overconfidence and dishonesty of AI, but even more so the overconfidence and dishonesty of the people who hype it.

#AI #GenerativeAI #Tekoäly