Fediverse

New Hubzilla server

Yesterday I signed up for yet another server, this time KNThost, because they have a managed service for Hubzilla (also Streams). At this stage I really think I need to have some help with running Hubzilla instances. The one that I hosted on an unmanaged VPS has gone bad, and no longer shares posts. It’s a one way hub, with a growing queue and database problem.

So, on KNThost, for a small monthly fee, they install and offer assistance with the service. It’s a bit like Mastohost in that way, and the subscription is cheaper than my other VPS. The only thing I don’t like about it is the US server location but, these days, it’s a bit hard to decide on a good location in any case. The EU is beefing up its internet laws and privacy is threatened there. Israel, where my current servers are located, is also a questionable location. I think that if one posts to, or uses the web in 2023, one must automatically assume that there is surveillance.

I find myself scratching my head with regard to where to post my content. From my Epicyon Activity Pub server I am doubtful that the posts actually reach anywhere, since I rarely get a response. On Hubzilla, I no longer subscribe to anyone on Mastodon (or Pleroma or Akkoma, etc.). Perhaps this was a mistake? It may also have been a mistake to remove myself from Fe.disroot, from the point of view of reach. If you want to be a first class citizen of the Fediverse, it’s best to be on a large instance like mastodon.social. But, from the perspective of what’s good for the Fediverse, small instances are better; individual instances are best.

POSSE

Rather than focusing on social media to publish my posts, and favouring one place over another, I am thinking to embrace more fully the POSSE system (see below).

POSSE is a term invented by the IndieWeb people

POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.. Why. Let your friends read your posts, their way.

In my case, I will be publishing some individual items first on epicyon and my hubzilla channel, and then collating these back into a daily blog post that contains all the significant items, reflections and links from the same day. This itself can be posted and,if I like, be sent further, such as Tumblr. I’ve done this before, and found it to be a satisfying practice. It is similar to the practice adopted by Cory Doctorow in his Pluralistic blog.

Ultimately, everything is ephemeral. What matters is our current interactions, rather than trying to preserve everything for eternity. But it’s also important to be in control of the medium, to the degree possible.

Epicyon search

A friend asked in Epicyon’s Matrix room about search, since he is interested in finding his old posts and interactions. It turns out that Epicyon has quite a good search mechanism built in.

Today’s links

As a columnist I have learned that honesty is timeless and self-importance gets you nowhere

I really liked this article by a Guardian columnist. It seems to be relevant for any kind of public writing, including social network / blog posts.

Against the future

This person has various strategies to rebel against the AI onslaught

Interoperability

I am not so worried about a few big tech companies embracing fediverse, because if a couple of them do, it may draw the even bigger fish in too, meaning that for the first time we will have interoperability between major social media companies.

If we like the unique feel of Tumblr, the rapidity of Twitter, the artistic community of deviantart or the targeted boosts offered by Facebook, etc. we could choose one of those services knowing that we can still them to stay in touch with our friends on other networks.

That will still not be enough to persuade many of us to join those commercial networks, but we will finally be able to read posts sent by our friends, and they will be able to read ours. If that happens, it will be great, because it will no longer matter what service people decide to join.

Even the big companies may eventually see that interoperability is to their advantage – they will simply need to shift their attention away from all kinds of devious behaviour that aims to lock in users by force, and towards offering the best experience possible. When people are no longer held captive, they will be able to demand more.

If I already enjoy being on Facebook, but can also see there all the posts of my friends on Twitter, I will end up spending more of my time on Facebook, which is eventually better for Facebook.

The only real danger, as far as I understand it, is that as with email, it could become a playing field mainly of a few big operators. Because in order for it to work properly, there is quite a high bar to reach. It has to be done with a slew of protocols and security standards. But new email companies and services, even non-profits run by a few volunteers, do manage to break in, and even manage to be innovative in what they offer.

I think this will be the same with the fediverse. What will eventually persuade the big companies to open up and be interoperable will be government regulations or other necessities, rather than “competition” from Mastodon. But the availability of common free opensource protocols like ActivityPub is showing the way forward.

Diary

Shifting as I do between Markdown, BBCode, Orgmode, SPIP PHP tags and plain HTML there’s a tendency to get a bit mixed up sometimes. Bill Gates would say that the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

Lately I haven’t found the inspiration to write in my blog, but, on the other hand, I’ve written lots of little things in various other places, so I’ll collect a couple of them here.

In sickness and in health

A person who has to be laid up for several months due to a couple of unexpected spinal operations wrote that:

“I’m feeling ok now – a little mentally traumatised still from the urgency and unexpectedness of the surgery. The randomness of life really hit me.”

I wrote back that I wasn’t sure that “life is random” because I’ve been conditioned to think of it as prarabhda karma – which Jiddu Krishnamurti would have laughed at, because we create theories to explain away life’s mysteries. I also wrote that I try to relate to the “random” things that happen to us as gifts from the universe, as a bhakti would do. Baruch ha shem be tov ve ba ra as they say in Judaism.

But then she asked me to explain all these words, so follows my explanation:

‘Prarabhda karma’ is one of three types of karma according to brahmanist texts: it’s the kind that you have already been landed with, as against the karma you are now creating, or the karma that you have already perpetrated, but which has not yet resulted in anything. Actually, there’s nothing mystical about the word karma itself – it simply means action – the Indo-European root is cognate with our word “create”, but there’s a whole philosophy built around it (in both Hinduism and Buddhism): the result of “bad” actions, good “actions”, and doing action without seeking reward, etc. – the Bhagavad Gita, a poem of 700 verses, spends a lot of time on it.

‘bhakti’ means someone of a devotional bent, who might find himself in opposition to, say, a “raja yogi” or a dhyani. The analogy they usually give in India is that a bhakti is like a kitten, who his mother picks up by the scruff of his neck, and allows himself to be carried along, surrendering personal will to divine providence, whereas other kinds of yogis are more like the monkey baby, tenaciously clinging to their stated objective.

‘ blessed is God who brings goodness and ba ra’ I suppose “praise G-d whether he brings us good things or bad things” is the spirit of it. Bhakta, or devotion, is pretty much the same in all religions, I think. In one of Paul Bowles books, set in Morocco, there’s a scene where the narrator accidentally slams the taxi door on the hand of an elderly fellow passenger. Wordlessly, the old guy wraps his bloodied fingers in his shawl, mutters “alhamdulillah” (praise be to Allah!) and goes on his way.

I find I don’t have a problem reconciling between the attitudes of these different religions, while not believing in a conceptualization of God as some of them do. “God” is just a shorthand term used for convenience; a personalisation similar to the way some people assign personal names to inanimate objects. If they find it helpful, let them do so. Just don’t try to persuade me that divinity is the way that you imagine it, based on what has been drummed into you in churches and temples. Or that the god you yourself have set up on a pedestal needs to be pulled down, because either way, it is of no consequence to me. Agnosticism and atheism are nonsense terms and only imply that we haven’t understood, while “belief” will always be extremely fragile.

Progressive web applications

On my phone, using Epicyon, I noticed that there are interesting differences between Firefox (and Mull) and Chrome, in the way they handle progressive web apps. The launcher I use does not directly support pwas. But I found that if I create a Chrome pwa in Samsung’s default launcher, I can then go back and use it in my launcher. But the same is not true for Firefox pwas. They can be added to Samsung’s home screen, but do not show up among the applications, as do Chrome pwas. I don’t normally use Chrome and when it began to pester me about syncing between devices, I decided not to use it for Epicyon either. So, since I can’t use Firefox web apps under my launcher, I simply open Epicyon from a Mull tab. I might eventually put Vivaldi back on my phone, so then I’ll see what happens with the web apps that it creates, but for Epicyon I can manage like that. My launcher, by the way, is Baldphone – it’s supposed to be a simple launcher for old people. Maybe I’m getting old, because although I’ve experimented with every launcher in F-Droid, I like it best.

Unfediverse

Someone said the other day that it isn’t entirely true to say that “the Fediverse is bigger than Mastodon” because, as it stands, Mastodon by itself has many more people on it than any of the other non-Mastodon instances. (And what happens if all of Tumblr joins the Fediverse?) Anyway, for now, the effect of Mastodon’s “market dominance” is that all the other instances need to conform to Mastodon first, and then worry about being interoperable with each other only later. As a result, although almost everything I do in Epicyon and Hubzilla will work in Mastodon, and everything I receive from Mastodon is likely to come through fine, this is not true if I try to follow someone on Hubzilla from Epicyon, and, as I just discovered, posting an image in Hubzilla will come through blank to Akkoma (a Pleroma fork). Even with Mastodon, Epicyon and maybe Hubzilla have compatibility problems. From Epicyon, I discovered that I cannot respond to surveys, for example. Images can be given alt tags in Hubzilla (through a non-intuitive and undocumented syntax), but these do not seem to work in exactly the same way as in Mastodon. It’s all a bit wild. So, for interoperability it’s best to keep posts as simple as possible.

Palestine

When political realities change for the worse, we tend to adapt to them by hardening our positions. When Russia invades Ukraine, this has an inhibiting factor on all discourse that tries to be even-handed. Suddenly we are all against Russia, siding with the warmongers of NATO. That’s too bad, because the necessary nuances are lost – with the darkness of night comes our inabilities to perceive differences in colors.

It’s the same now with what’s happening in Israel/Palestine. Israel’s new regime is so harsh, anti-Arab and Fascist, the world cannot do other than to side with Palestinians and to unite against Israel. This usually results in sending Israeli Jews into defensive mode. A people so traumatized by historical antisemitism have a strong defensive reflex. This too is dangerous.

But what can one do? What can one do when a conflict seems to require that we take sides? To sign up anyway but just not to be happy about it?

Lao Tsu has the following to say about war:

Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 31

Good weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them.
Therefore followers of the Tao never used them.
The wise man prefers the left.
The man of war prefers the right.

Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man’s tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

On happy occasions precedence is given to the left,
On sad occasions to the right.
In the army the general stands on the left,
The commander-in-chief on the right.
This means that war is conducted like a funeral.
When many people are being killed,
They should be mourned in heartfelt sorrow.
That is why a victory must be observed like a funeral.

I’m told that there’s a parallel Talmudic passage.

War and peace may be governed by firm principles, or be in the domain of realpolitik. But they are also matters of the heart. When it comes down to it, I am not going to listen to Lao Tsu, Marx, Jesus, my elders, the Prime Minister or the laws of the nation. I’m going to do what my heart tells me to do.

Links

Palestine: Unite or die | Israel-Palestine conflict | Al Jazeera This article by an al-Jazeera senior journalist suggests that it’s imperative for Palestinians to put aside their differences if they want to struggle against the new political realities in the region.

2022’s Best Investigative Stories in India – GIJN

There are amazing stories here.

Diary

There’s something about social media that it’s both a time-suck and an energy-suck. I’ve been so busy with it lately that I have not found the time or the energy for my blog. Not that I have been active on social media: that would not be true. It’s more that I have been either reading timelines, or evaluating and playing with its possibilities. Or installing, or reinstalling, and not getting very far with anything.

I’ve been busy both with Epicyon and with Hubzilla, and, as always my interest is more in the possibilities and capabilities of a system than actually using it. I’m simply not very good at being very social on social media, so I end up following smart people with interesting things to say; the ones who are least likely to follow me back, in other words, because they already have thousands of followers.

However interesting it is to play around with social media, blogging has greater importance. It’s the place where one can record one’s thoughts or place images that will have more permanence. So it’s unfortunate that people who spend / waste time on social media often end up neglecting their blog. I don’t want to become one of those people.

My blogging system lacks a way to keep the blog updated when I’m not at my computer. That’s a bit of a problem for when I contemplate traveling just with my phone. It isn’t a problem entering text on the phone. I have a nice, portable keyboard for that. Today while I was awaiting the family to emerge from a children’s play, I was able to sit in a coffee shop and type away on my keyboard, using my phone as a screen. I have Orgzly in my phone and it’s great for taking notes or writing longer texts. So it’s possible to use it also for blogging, and then sync it later to my blog when I’m on a computer. I could also use Epicyon to write blog posts, and later move them back to my blog. I suppose these methods are the best solutions.

One day, perhaps, I’ll have a linux phone where I can do exactly what I want. Perhaps computers as such will be unnecessary, and the phone will present a complete solution.

This post was written in the Emacs terminal mode. It’s the first time I’ve done that (normally I use the GUI version). But the GUI version does not have a huge advantage over the terminal. Not that I’ve memorized all the emacs commands, but there’s a menu system and I have my notes.

Interesting links

Les bonnes pratiques d’écoconception pour WordPress

Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation

“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

What is the small web, by Aral Balkan “The Small Web is the Single Tenant Web Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of ‘users’. When we refer to people, we call them people.”

But he also raised a concern today that seems to be valid: that on the Fediverse, it is quite likely that, as with email, there will be a tendency by large servers to block small instances. With email, this is due to the prevalence of spam. With the Fediverse, it would be due to the challenges of moderation. It’s easy to block right-wing white supremicists, for example when they are all on a couple of large servers, which can easily be blocked. It would be much harder to accomplish if they were on single or small instances, with just a few users. So one could imagine a situation where an instance could decide to block everyone who isn’t on a few well-known, well-moderated instances.

We’re just at the beginning of popular mainstream adoption of the Fediverse. It’s an exciting time, but it’s still very unclear how its future will evolve.

Favorite books of 2022

Now’s the time when lists are being made of popular books and popular TV shows, movies etc., so it’s a good time to make wish lists. Maria Popova has a book list with many promising titles.

Hubzilla, links

On Hubzilla, I have now created a channel in order to reconnect with the people over there. Epicyon does not federate well with the Zot networks. For now, it’s on https://zotum.net/@hosh

At the same time, I have created a channel there for my community:https://zotum.net/@wasns, as why not? It’s time we had a fediverse presence, and I can manage both of these from the same place.

I am thinking today that I’m not diligent enough in my writing efforts, either for myself, my community or my interests. I should write, write, write, and photograph, and document, rather than introspect so much. Reflecting the universe, we become the universe.

Interesting Links:

The biodiversity crisis in numbers – a visual guide | Cop15 | The Guardian

Rising temperatures causing distress to foetuses, study reveals | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Shireen Abu Akleh: Al Jazeera submits new evidence to ICC | Israel | The Guardian

Dutch government may quit Facebook – Techzine Europe

The Europeans are getting serious. See also Cory Doctorow’s article, EU to Facebook: Drop Dead

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free ❧ Current Affairs

Not a new article, but very good – referenced in Cory Doctorow’s article, above.

Say No to “Fedified” in Fediverse #SNFF — #SNFF

No to centralization in a decentralized network.

Aral Balkan — The nature of the self in the digital age

Finally understood why Aral B calls himself a cyborg 🙂 – a good article.

Mastodon, Nonprofits, and the need for some kind of basic analytics to help justify spending time and resources – Disruptive Conversations

Fediverse thoughts again

I’ve been thinking that from a practical point of view, there is probably something wrong with my conception that decentralization should be as fine-grained as a universe of individual servers in communication with one-another. I’ve had this conception for the last twenty years at least, so it’s hard to shake. But recent posts I’ve seen about the Fediverse seem to demonstrate that this conception is expensive in terms of resources: at least, with regard to the way that federation of instances works: the more instances, it seems, the more expense.

There are other arguments as well for a federation that would be built on communities; professional, by interest, geographical, linguistic, whatever. Human beings are tribal by nature. And yet, if this is the basis for division and affiliation, there will always be a choice to make, because we live in more than one world. Do we choose an instance based on locality, or upon profession, for example? Outside of Mastodon, this choice is mitigated by the existence of groups that one can join, regardless of the instance. Groups have been around since at least GnuSocial and Friendica I believe, and have worked quite well.

I hope that the Fediverse will be built upon co-ops and volunteers, rather than on companies. Yesterday I discovered Chatons.org, which enables one to find small servers that are not established on a profit motive. Internet co-ops have always been popular in France. I first hosted my blog on Ouvaton, an early co-op that still exists today. And disroot.org in Holland is similarly based on voluntary effort and good will. My other Fediverse instance is with them.

I still think that for websites, decentralization can exist at the level of the individual household, but there too, it is more practical to gang together and host a few websites on a single server; preferably one that uses renewable energy and has a low carbon footprint. If I didn’t have a personal interest in doing things myself, I would probably go with something like that. I still might, if I find a good offer.

Epicyon, meanwhile, has as its underlying philosophy the concept of small groups of no more than 10 people. Except for families and maybe small housing cooperatives, that’s probably too few. A hundred or two would probably make more sense – maybe larger, if one wants to establish a community server. For example, if we would create a Mastodon server for every member of our smallish community, we would need a few hundred accounts.

Zot versus Mastodon

I have no doubt that despite all the interest around Mastodon, the communities built upon the Zot networks are more friendly and durable. The tools are somehow more conducive to community-building: the mentioned groups; the cloning of channels upon each other’s servers, etc. make for a more connected group of people, though it is small. I would stay there, but seem to have jettisoned myself from the community by stops and starts, fickle changes of mind, as well as server troubles.

So for now I will stay with Epicyon. Its technological simplicity is attractive. Today I was experimenting with the Lynx terminal browser. Epicyon works very well with it. What websites, let alone other fediverse sites, work well with a terminal browser these days? Only the ones that do not depend upon Javascript and a lot of CSS styling. Bob Mottram is building something very nice here. I wonder how well it will be appreciated by those who he sees as its primary usership: small groups of community activists, neighbours and volunteers?

I’m not a very social person, but I have always believed in the value of community, indeed have lived all of my adult life in communities. Perhaps I should do more to help the community in which I live use free open source software; in that I have not succeeded. Everyone around me wants to use the conventional commercial products of the big companies.

Trends I’m seeing

Rightwing pushback

Israeli TV news reported that homophobic hate speech and attacks are up 75% since the last elections, which were a victory for religious rightwing extremists, who want to reinstate “Jewish values”.

Elsewhere: Indonesia is about to make sex outside marriage an offence punishable by jail

Growing disfavor with centralized services / parallel flowering of decentralized services

Telegram: In India, Telegram just lost an important court case:After Delhi High Court Ruling, Telegram Discloses Names, Phone Numbers & IP Addresses Of Users Accused Of Sharing Infringing Material

Because their platform is inherently unsafe, and the information is available on their system, they could be forced to comply.This is why we should not be using services like Telegram for sensitive communications.

Meanwhile, Russians were able to get what they needed without bothering with a court ruling: Russia is spying on Telegram chats in occupied Ukrainian regions. Here’s how

Everyone’s Over Instagram – The Atlantic

F-Droid: Why curation and decentralization is better than millions of apps

Most Chinese people have more than one app store on their phone, so there is no monolith there, whereas “outside of China, Apple and Google control more than 95 percent of the app store market share.

Many people seem to be talking about starting new services that take advantage ActivityPub protocol. Among these is Ben Werdmuller, who says in his blog post The Fediverse and the Indieweb

So I’m newly-invested in implementing ActivityPub and building end-user tools that join the network. I’m excited to build things that people can use to, in turn, build something new. There are a ton of opportunities here: we’re in a particular moment where the fediverse looks like it could be the future, and the more tools and onramps we build, the more likely that becomes. That fits directly into those indieweb principles of owning your own content, and my additive principles of devolving wealth and ownership.

Werdmuller also says that he is turning away from an old concept of the Indieweb, POSSE (“Publish on your ownsite, syndicate everywhere”):

I want my site to connect to the indieweb; to the fediverse; to people who are connecting via RSS; to people who are connecting via email. No more syndication to third parties. My own website sits in the center of my online identity, using open standards to communicate with outside communities.

I reached the same conclusion a long while back, and have been trying to keep my posts out of search engines too.

WikiLeaks’ Website is Slowly Falling Apart

That too sounds like a problem of centralization. Didn’t they release their documents over file-sharing networks?

Push to free Julian Assange; sanctuary for Snowden

I’ve read of three separate efforts. Major world newspapers have published together an appeal for his freedom and against extradition to the US. The Australian government has been appealing to the US government against it too. And his lawyers are making an approach to the European Court of Justice. Let’s hope these efforts succeed.

Meanwhile, Edward Snowden has got his Russian citizenship after swearing an oath of allegiance. It was the US itself that pushed him towards this step by revoking his passport while he was in transit in Moscow. But since it is the only country in which he is safe and can remain united with his family, I can’t say that I blame him.

If Russia seems currently like the epitomy of an evil state, the US has perpetrated, and continues to perpetrate deeds that are no less evil.

World governance somehow needs to develop independent mechanisms that single out crimes against humanity whereever they occur, at all times. Right now, we seem to have the opposite. People like Assange can be prosecuted for revealing crimes, even if they are not citizens of the nation that is guilty of those crimes and live somewhere else in the world. Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court is unable to prosecute war criminals in countries like the US.

A film, thoughts about Epicyon and federation, links

Cinema Sabaya

Went with Y and D to see Cinema Sabaya, which is amazing. I didn’t feel like making the effort to see it and D almost had to drag me along – it would have been insulting as Y had already bought us the tickets. But I was immediately caught up in the film, because it’s simply so well done. A mixed group of Arab and Jewish women take part in a video-photography course. From class to class and exercise to exercise they learn about each other and themselves; where they can relate to one another as sisters and where they cannot agree; where they can support one another and where they shouldn’t press too hard. There are layers on layers of complexity. The film is utterly engaging and unfailingly authentic.

Epicyon

I decided to support Epicyon with a modest monthly donation on Patreon, because I like how this software is developing – and developers, especially those who do not have a big support base, deserve to be supported.

I still find lots of problems there, which will need to be ironed out; however, it’s working for me, and I do enjoy its simplicity. The UI looks better on the phone than on the computer.

That said, there seems to be a worse problem with federation itself. I don’t think this is unique to Epicyon, but may be more prevalent the further you move outside the Mastodon scene. I noticed also with Hubzilla that some posts do not seem to federate well, and I’m seeing it now with Epicyon, because I have duplicated my follow lists from fe.disroot to my epicyon instance. When I examine the timeline I see that my posts on Epicyon rarely reach my account on fe.disroot. I also see that not all of the posts from the people I follow on fe.disroot reach my instance on Epicyon. In other words, I cannot depend upon Epicyon (and probably not on fe.disroot) to see everything that someone has posted.

That’s a problem that does not exist in RSS, for example, which works mostly flawlessly.

My interim conclusion is that (a.) If I really want to know what someone is saying, I need either to subscribe to their RSS feed, or to look directly at their instance. (b.) My instance on Epicyon is still a valuable source – I find many interesting posts there. It’s just that I cannot depend upon it as a single news source.

I have yet to try using RSS feeds on Epicyon itself (which seems to be one of its features). That will be my next experiment.

Israelis in Qatar

It’s funny that Israeli journalists are shocked by the way they are being shunned by the people they try to interview during the World Cup in Doha. And it’s good to see that Palestine still finds lots of support in the Arab world. If not from the leaders, then from the man in the street.

I don’t think that these journalists should be shunned: it would be better to use the opportunity to speak directly to Israelis. A message like “Please tell the people in your country that I will be happy to speak to you once Palestinians can enjoy freedom and dignity in their own country. We Arabs are waiting for you to stop the oppression, the apartheid and the occupation of Palestinian lands. When Israelis learn to treat Palestinians as equals, we will welcome you in our countries as brothers.” Something like that. You can’t just boycott people – you have to adopt a carrot and a stick approach and state the conditions under which the boycott can one day be lifted.

Links

‘Extinction is on the table’: Jaron Lanier warns of tech’s existential threat to humanity | Technology | The Guardian

“If you make a dismal prediction and it comes true, it means you’ve failed to have utility. I don’t claim to have all the answers but I do believe that our survival depends on modifying the internet – to create a structure that is friendlier to human cognition and to the ways people really are.”

‘Publishing is not a crime’: media groups urge US to drop Julian Assange charges | Julian Assange | The Guardian

Israeli Filmmaker’s Critique of ‘The Kashmir Files’ Draws Fierce Backlash – The New York Times

This is marvelous. One guy had the courage to tell the truth*, unlike all the fawning diplomats who were left trying to clean up the mess.

(I haven’t seen the film so I should say his truth.)

Diary

Epicyon

I made a new fedi personal instance using epicyon. It took hours, and wasn’t even my first choice. I rented the new server under the assumption I’d be using Streams. See the post I wrote on epicyon itself here. It’s actually a temptation to continue using epicyon’s blogging feature. But org-static-blog gives me better possibilities for presentation.

I love this system, though I do not know yet how well it works. I’ve used a couple of former instances I made in the fediverse, to follow the new instance, and see how well it managing to send and receive posts, and it seems to be performing all right, though with mixed results. From one connection, I was unable to send a connection request; another said that a connection had yet to be confirmed. But these particular instances exist on the periphery of the fediverse.

There are differences between the presentation of the the different fediverse flavors. Mastodon most closely resembles Twitter and is similarly suitable for fast-paced ongoing conversations. Those become annoying on software with a more spacious presentation, like Epicyon, and tend to result in slightly disjointed conversations: it’s easier to follow those by following their link back to Mastodon. I’ve unfollowed some of the chattiest people, even though they have something interesting to say. I’ll catch up with them elsewhere. And, as with Twitter, I often find an easier way to follow people is to browser-bookmark them and go directly to their personal profiles, checking in just occasionally.

In my timeline I like to see more substantive posts – either directly or through links – and that is what I try to post too. After unfollowing, my timeline is closer to what I want to see.

Shantaram

I rewatched the first episode with D, and since then we managed another couple of episodes. It captures well the spirit of the book – I think Roberts will be very happy with it. One thing that comes across very much is the writer’s emotional warmth and humanism. The characters are all 3-dimensional; even the minor parts.

Delivery heroes

I ordered 2 new computers last week for Einat at the spiritual center and all this week the delivery company has been calling to say they will be arriving. On Thursday they called to say that they would deliver by 8 PM. But nada. Today, I was skeptical that anything would come because Fridays here are a bit like Saturdays elsewhere; it’s a day when fewer people are at work and you don’t expect much to happen: out here in the boondocks, even the post doesn’t come.

But at around 6 PM I got a call to say the delivery man was on his way. I met him outside and all my annoyance with the company dissipated. As often happens in Israel, the delivery van was his ordinary car – with packages crammed into the back seats, the front passenger seat and the trunk. It took him several minutes to locate the package in the dark, with the flashlight of his phone.

He told me the story of why he happened to be arriving at dinner time on a Friday: the previous guy in charge of deliveries to our area had quit earlier in the week, and he was the new guy – just 2 days on the job and struggling to deal with a backlog that was especially big due to Black Friday sales. Looking at the number of remaining packages in his car, he obviously had another couple of hours work, and had been at it since the morning.

How can you give a delivery company a poor rating when the guys themselves are working so hard? – being sent out in their own cars, missing dinner with their families in order to bring well-to-do scumbags their new toys. It’s the same as with other forms of exploitation.

I unloaded the computers at the spiritual center and met Einat there. She was super-happy with the new laptop, a feather-weight Asus Zen Book with a reversible oled touch-screen. She too was pretty busy: a group coming to rent the halls at 8 PM, and tomorrow a special program for the UN’s day for the elimination of violence against women.

TROM

I really like the TROM people.

TROM is a project that aims to showcase in detail the root cause of most of today’s problems and proposes realistic solutions to solve those problems. But it is also about challenging people’s values, explaining in simple language how the world works, and providing free and good quality educational materials/tools for everyone.

I haven’t got into TROM as such yet, but I think there’s lots of potential there. They have a really cool peertube channel. And the people involved are really interesting – Tio, Sasha and Aaron are the ones I’ve encountered. Sasha has a great website of her own, “Big World Small Sasha”.

Potato nose

My cold has lasted over a week, and it’s run through 3 packs of tissues + hankies. The span of time is in excess of my usual winter colds and I think this is partly due to a potato. I was spooning a vegetable soup a few days ago when the onset of a sneeze caused me somehow to inhale. I immediately had a burning sensation at the top of the nose and a slightly painful feeling there for the rest of the evening, but then it passed. Two or three days later I started to develop a bad smell in my nose – a smell similar to that of a potato that is rotting at the bottom of a basket of vegies.

An altered sense of smell sometimes result from nasal infections. But I discovered today that this one was for real, when a sneeze suddenly ejected a large piece of potato skin. It had probably been irritating my nose all the while, and keeping my cold alive in the process.

Reactions to political realities

When G was here a week ago, back from Mumbai, I was asking him how he found the worsening political reality there – which seems almost as bad in India as here, and in quite a similar way. He said that one thing he found is that it changes the way people behave. I asked him if he could give an example. He said that there is a Muslim tailor who has a shop in the apartment building of his wife’s family’s Mumbai home. A Muslim tailor in a building with no other Muslims, in a political climate that is worsening for Muslims. Nowadays, whenever he is there he makes a point of consciously going to sit and spend time with him, because he knows that nobody else will. So what might be a normal human response becomes a political act. That’s how bad it’s getting there.

Here in our village the connections between the different identities are much more normal. The conscious act is to keep alive connections with Palestinians in the West Bank.

Links

Netanyahu to Agree to ‘Soft Annexation’ of West Bank, In Breach of ‘Abraham Accords’ – Palestine Chronicle

It ain’t lookin’ good around here. A “soft” annexation. Also Yuval Noah Harari is saying that Israelis are replacing the vision of the “two state solution” with the vision of a land with three classes of people: Jews with all the rights; Palestinian citizens of Israel with some rights; and other Palestinians with very few rights. Full-on apartheid, in other words. My wife thinks maybe that’s not a bad thing, as eventually it will force change. Unlike the current stasis, which leads nowhere, a civil rights struggle. But 21st century realities are unlike those that preceded them. States are much savvier about quelling or subverting phenomena like nonviolent activism, and Israel is extremely sophisticated about managing reactions in the international press.

Germany Forces a Microsoft 365 Ban Due to Privacy Concerns – Best of Privacy

Europe may yet keep the world sane, at least they have a healthier understanding of the dangers of tech imperialism. They are pushing back in a similar way to which Americans push back against China.

Pleroma and Streams

Maybe my last post was a little harsh. I modified it slightly afterwards. Anyway, I felt an urge not to be directly on the social network that everyone’s currently talking about. Disroot’s instance runs on Pleroma. (Update: or rather “Soapbox”. Is Soapbox still a front-end for Pleroma or a fork of it? – it isn’t so clear). Anyway, for now, I’m squatting there. Yesterday I also read about Mike McGirvin’s new effort, Streams, about which he says

From day one the question was how to build a federated/decentralised communication stack that provides more control over your privacy, and respects all people and cultures – including those which have a different political bias; while allowing them to all co-exist in the same space (and without killing each other).

and:

The current name of this repository [Streams] implies fluidity. As a brand or product it technically does not exist. This is also intentional.

This implies openness; the openness of the open web, and I like that. Human beings are clannish. That’s always going to be the case. I dislike this quality when we gather around meeting points such as nationhood, religion, party politics, gender… and also social network brands.

The way it plays out is exemplified in the current gathering around Mastodon. Mastodon did not invent the idea of federated social networks. There existed StatusNet and GnuSocial (based on the StatusNet protocol), Friendica and Red Matrix. Then came the ActivityPub protocol and Mastodon (which initially also supported GnuSocial). Since Mastodon had the flavour and the brand identity that people were looking for, it proved to be a greater success. The above narrative leaves out developments such as Diaspora, SSB and other networks that do not easily federate with each other.

Social networking should be something as generic and white-label as email and XMPP. It should be possible to read and participate through various means, such as commercial networks, community websites and phone and desktop applications.

Links

The 1.5C climate target is dead – to prevent total catastrophe, Cop27 must admit it | Bill McGuire | The Guardian

Israel will not cooperate with FBI inquiry into killing of Palestinian American journalist | Israel | The Guardian

Israel is therefore kindly saving the FBI the trouble of conducting an inquiry and confirming what has been obvious from the start. The only question is whether this was an act of an individual soldier or whether he was obeying orders.