pleroma.debian.social

@anjan @heavenly_general @morenonatural
I too like prosody for chat, and host my own server, where I am john@chat.paladyn.org, and also use xmpp:jlines@debian.org

My sample Small Organisation Server, the Ambrige Garden Club, is now registered on the DNS. The process is described at https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2020/11/13/ambridge-garden-club-registering-the-domain/

I distrust things, particularly big things, which exist without any obvious means of financial support, so wrote 'Who pays for WhatsApp' at https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2020/11/10/who-pays-for-whatsapp/

For a computer game, or other software used for entertainment, and End User Licence which says 'Any attempt to disassemble .... is illegal' is fine, but if lives are going to depend on it then the people responsible for purchase should use this as a danger flag to walk away (unless it is accompanied by something like 'We (software vendor), will guarantee that this works exactly as specified and will be responsible for any consequential damage, injury or death)

Software, or hardware that we depend on should Open Source, i.e. we should be able to, if needed find out exactly how it works, or interchangeable, so that we (the big we - national institutions, governments, education, health, the military), can swap out a component with one from another, independent vendor and the overall system should still work.

Many people think of George Orwell's 1984 mainly in terms of 'Big Brother', but Newspeak is as important and here today. When most people's only word for a concept is a product then the dangerous bit of 1984 is here. Almost everyone uses - and thinks - Excel instead of spreadsheet, Zoom instead of Video Conference, PowerPoint for Presentation Software. People might use the word Hoover for Vacuum Cleaner, but here their concept is broader.

Some thoughts about Federating social networks, mostly XMPP as that is the most mature, but it applies to ActivityPub too, at https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2020/10/26/if-you-cant-be-first-federate/

No sooner do I write about Excel being misused when Public Health England provides the perfect example - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988

Something I have been thinking about and finally got round to posting

https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2020/10/05/the-social-power-of-market-dominance/

By combining their the standard peertube build instructions with the apache configuration snippet at https://gist.github.com/rigelk/07a0b8963fa4fc1ad756374c28479bc7 I can see there is a quite a lot to do in order to turn it into a proper package, though I think making deployment on shared systems would benefit everyone. My instance at https://peertube.paladyn.org

Had to break off from trying to set up a Peertube server to help my wife get some people set up with Zoom and Facebook - federated social media wont take off until it can be set up by your local knitting group, allotment society,in this case Phab Club, etc. https://oxford-phab.wp.paladyn.org/

When I was younger I read a lot of Science Fiction (I still do, just maybe not so much), and it seemed unlikely to me that the default social model in the far future was feudal. Now, seeing how hard it is to persuade 'real' (non techie) people to use, for example Jitsi over zoom, XMPP over WhatsApp etc, I can see the power of the Feudal model (http://en.collaboratory.de/w/Power_in_the_Age_of_the_Feudal_Internet) Can Social Network Federation win ? I hope so