Threads for ploum

    1. 0

      I’m not too much of a fan of them ragging on her religious views… but yeah, this is pretty on-brand Gnome.

      1. 2

        I’m not a fan of the article’s author nor what they’re trying to do in the linked article.

        1. 3

          I don’t know the article author but the article makes a very good point: that person seems to have no software nor technological nor even organization managing experience.

          To add insult to injury, this person does not even seem to have core free software values as she run and advertise a business through Facebook.

          It is also concerning that the person seems to be trying to erase some of her past while not even managing to do it properly (keeping the facebook page). This seem to indicate a lack of technological awareness.

          So there’s a lot of questions here about how that person was chosen has the executive director of GNOME. The profile is very very different from previous directors and doesn’t seem to fit at all the post.

          The shamanism aspect is also quite controversial in technological/scientific communities centered on rational thinking. While everybody is free to have its own views, the problem here is that the person is presenting herself has having a business centered around superstition. So it might be interpreted less as the expression of a deep belief and more as the exploitation of credulity (which is, as every religion demonstrates, is a very thin line), something that would deeply be at odd with lot of people in the free software community.

          This latest aspect would not be enough to be a red flag alone as we could consider that a person has the perfect right of having a side-hustle making herbal tea and branding it “shamanism” while keeping it completely separate from her work at GNOME but keep in mind that the GNOME director is the public face of the project. When Elon Musk says something frivolous, its bad for Tesla and Twitter, even if unrelated. Same applies here and that’s why a director position is so hard and important.

          I find the linked article badly structured and written. It raises the good issues but is on the verge of attacking the person while the real question is “who choose her and what was the process and the rationale?”.

          It is possible that the person might become a very good GNOME director. But, yeah, the choice is at first concerning and should be supported by strong arguments.

    2. 0

      Nice one, can’t wait to give it a try. av-98 allows legacy OS’ to access Gemini as long as you have Python 3, which means you can browse Gemini on things like OS X Tiger, this would be nice to have on such systems. :)

      1. 0

        Ah, py-cryptography adds a Rust dependency which is not possible on such “mature” operating systems.

        1. 2

          py-cryptography should be optional (if it is not the case, this is a bug). In fact, most of the py dependencies should be optional (but you won’t get http and html support without py-requests and py-bs4).

          1. 0

            ok, thanks. I’ll give it a try :)

    3. 3

      This is pretty cool. I can’t help but having a knee-jerk reaction of “Small web!? They’re pushing big web platforms like Github, Youtube, and Discord!”, but then I tell myself to chill out and that not everything needs to be totally pure. The work these people are doing is still interesting and seems valuable.

      1. 0

        When something becomes trendy, everybody want to be part of it and the name lose its significance. I’ve seen people calling their website minimalist because they removed some cruft. I’ve seen JS developers saying it is absurd to even try to build a website without JS but still liking the “small web with JS”.

        Maybe we need to dig more and make the “tiny web” ;-)

        (should be noted that Kagi uses nearly no JS at all and has the objective of working fine with JS disabled browsers)

        1. 0

          Maybe every website other than the single heaviest website is eligible to be part of the “small web”. Hahahah.

          1. 0

            the biggest websites in 2011 would probably be considered “small web” today, relatively speaking. :P

    4. 0

      I think there are way too many tags and a lot of them are very specific. Maybe we can remove most of them and add a misc/other tag.

      1. 0

        I vaguely recall someone mentioned outright removal wasn’t support but no objection.

    5. 0

      It was the extensions to LDAP which were in Active Directory which stifled Samba, right?

      1. 0

        Yep, Kerberos. But there might have been others, I don’t know. (using books here because this happened before I was involved in the free software community)

        1. 0

          No, Kerberos is a different protocol related to authentication. The extensions were added to Active Directory which was their LDAP implementation (directory service).

          1. 0

            Might be. As I said, Kerberos didn’t killed Samba because Samba dev realised the problem (there was still use of Kerberos/LDAP together) but I’ve never user Kerberos myself and hated LDAP deeply so my brain won’t remember the details of those stories ;-)

            1. 0

              hated LDAP deeply so my brain won’t remember the details of those stories

              😂

    6. 0

      Nope.

      Having big monopolies adopting a protocol is not a success. It is not a source of joy. It’s the opposite. It means they could stay relevant longer (and who want that?). It also means that they will create havoc by trying to destroy the decentralization momentum.

      Easy: look at what Google did for XMPP.

      So a huge Nope. (but it’s techdirt, those are monopolies groupies)

    7. 2

      Watching this is like watching porn. Better.

    8. 2

      using it for years through either libreddirect or farside.link (both also allows to redirect medium to scribe.rip, reddit to teddit/libreddit and many others)

    9. 0

      Just curious, did anyone read any of the essay by their friend by any chance? (it’s linked to in the opening paragraph)

      1. 0

        I did not but some comments about this article on lobste.rs attracted my attention on some reactionary tones of the post, something I didn’t caught at first read (because mostly focused on the material aspect).

        1. 0

          I gave up on the linked article early so missed some of the references highlighted. Usually going down to using latin quotes is an indirect sign, at least here in the UK (you are of a certain background and maybe privilege). Then the essay by their friend continued on that path (I didn’t get far there either) but interesting that it was the inspiration for a course in life (pun not intended).

    10. 0

      I think it would be great if there was a fediverse alternative to Github which allows you to interact with projects on other instances. I know in principle git is decentralized but there is also the issue tracker, wiki and whole user management system.

      Seems like the folks at Gitea and Forgejo are working on this: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

      1. 2

        When you think about it, we already have it. It’s called email. It’s exactly what sourcehut is trying to propose: no need for a new federation, just use the existing one.

        1. 0

          I was not aware, that’s pretty cool!

          1. 3

            https://git-send-email.io/ (to contribute/send patches)

            and, on https://sr.ht/ you can open tickets/reply to them/participate in mailing-lists without opening an account, only by sending an email.

    11. 3

      I’m interested, but that 4 hour battery life is stopping me.

      1. 1

        4 hours? Ehhhhhhhh. That’s a heavy hit against my motivation to get one.

      2. 0

        didn’t see that it was only 4h. Yeah, that’s really annoying. I guess I must hope for it to improve thanks to software optimisation.

    12. 3

      Already ordered mine… Could not resist even if there are too few keys on that keyboard for properly typing in Bépo.

    13. 2

      My BBClone statistics were already completely spammed as early as 2005/2006.

      Not a new problem.

      I solved it the hard way: removed completely every single statistic on my website. Never looked back. It worth asking the question: “why do we really want statistics?” It just like we are trying to copying the marketers/spammers themselves to boost our ego with worthless junk

      1. 0

        I remember referrer spam in maybe 2010 when a colleague explained it to me when we observed it in logfiles, we simply stopped making any statistics public on the webserver (which was good in any case), so it had no effect at all.

        1. 2

          I don’t have any web stats published, it’s only just restarted in the last year for me.

    14. 2

      This is fascinating as I was too young to know those stuff. I dream of having such a device to browse Gemini on paper which could really be done with Offpunk. This is would be a crazy experiment :-)

    15. 4

      i know there are some smol computer lovers around here 👀

      that reform looks gorgeous

      1. 5

        Thanks for posting it here <3 <3 <3 PS: I’m the author, AMA

        1. 0

          I’m exactly like you and looking for exactly the same kind of device : very good (ortho) keyboard, small screen (e-ink for better visibility in the sun and battery).

          I’ve written about my quest here : https://ploum.net/the-computer-built-to-last-50-years/

          Unfortunately, I’m really angry against Astrohaus for the Freewrite. Their software are a shame, force using a proprietary cloud and are full of bugs. My Freewrite, despite its weight, have no more battery than my laptop. The traveler has a very very bad keyboard to the point of making it unusable for me (I had to send it back because some keys were always quadrupled. Now, the space is only working if I press it really violently). See gemini://rawtext.club/~ploum/2021-10-07.gmi

          Placing all my hope on the MNT Pocket even if I would need to adapt my layout to the keyboard. Hoping to see an eink version soon to use with only a terminal. Neovim, Neomutt and Offpunk are all I need 95% of the time ;-)

    16. 0

      Would be cool if the page had a description on what was different from Amfora/Bombadillo.

    17. 2

      Now available from AUR:

      ArchLinux users can install it with e.g.:

        yay -S av-98-offline
      
      1. 0

        wow, that was quick. Maybe I should release it properly with a new name to avoid confusion.

        1. 2

          The current package conflicts with the av-98 package, so that the latter will be uninstalled if you try to install av-98-offline (but not the other way around, because av-98 is unaware that there are other av-98 providers around).

          Initially I tried to just rename the executable as av98-offline, but the python file gets installed as …/site-pakages/av98.py, which still conflicts with the original av98.

          I guess at some point it will be practical with a separate namespace — or to have the functionality merged with av-98 proper.

          1. 2

            That’s on my todo-list, I need to do some proper cleanup.

    18. 4

      I’d totally welcome the help to clean up the tags.

      We allowed all users to create tags at one point since the userbase was so small here. I’m not 100% what the settings are for that at this point as I’ve rebased our codebase onto upstream lobste.rs recently.

      1. 4

        on second thought, i’m not even sure it’s possible to delete tags

        1. 0

          The fact that the tags were user generated explains a lot and it might worth thinking about starting from scratch with a fresh list of tag that make sense on the tilde.news project.

          If tags can’t be deleted, then the whole point is probably useless.

          Thanks for your time and for administration :-)

    19. 3

      I don’t know, I very much like that ~.news is not as tightly wound as lobste.rs. I think tilde people have a lot of eclectic interests, and I like seeing some of the non-technical articles that get posted here.

      There may be room for pruning some redundant tags, and perhaps splitting some tags into more specific tags, but that’s not really for me to say.

      As a final thought: Tighter moderation should really only be a response to abuse, not as a way to attract readers.

      1. 2

        Your position makes sense. That’s exactly why I’m asking.

    20. 2

      What tags would you want to change/remove?

      If anything, we should consider getting rid of foss and replace it with “free-software” for the things that are truly free, and move the “permissive” software to the “open-source” tag, and possibly move “open-source” to the capitalism category due to the ability for permissive software to become proprietary. (See “What is Free Software?”)

      We should also consider getting rid of things like cloud-computing, since there is a difference between renting a server with the condition that you control the computing and it can run free software, and giving your data to proprietary services/platforms/software. (See “Who does that server really serve? by Richard Stallman)

      Perhaps if someone would be able to go through the list of tags and deal with the terms mentioned in “Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing”, we’ll be off to a good start!

      1. 2

        I believe there are way too many tags, with many overlaps and many off-topic and some quite unclear. They act more like “fuzzy” tags and are not really useful to “filter out” stories.

        If it’s considered useful, I can go through all of them and make suggestions but I’m a simple user, I don’t know how it would be received.

        Just to take the first 10:

        • Twitch : should be removed (it’s a proprietary service after all)
        • data-analysis : quite unclear. Everything is about data-analysis.
        • health-insurance : looks completely off-topic
        • social-data : unclear
        • data-brokers :  does it worth having a full tag for that ? I’m sure it overlap with lot of other things like surveillance capitalism
        • extreme capitalism : while the name is fun, I believe it mixes the effect with the subject (and, as such, many stories might be tagged that way. Rendering the tag quite useless)
        • government
        • propaganda
        • censorship

        Those 3 are also quite large, quite overlaping and mixing subject and cause. Who would like to filter out based on those criterias ? How are those tag useful ?

        • U.S.A -> same as USA…

        etc…

        you see my point? One strenght of lobste.rs is that every tag is really useful and that you rarely doubt which tag to apply.

        My question is : do we want that for tilde.news or not? It’s quite a change in philosophy.

        1. 1

          Twitch : should be removed (it’s a proprietary service after all)

          Considering there is only one post from 3 years ago, we could probably do without it.

          data-analysis : quite unclear. Everything is about data-analysis.

          The posts mentioned here make it seem like it’s more about things that explicitly do data analysis though.

          health-insurance : looks completely off-topic

          I’ve never paid attention to the fact that there is a health insurance topic before…

          social-data : unclear

          Same, but it looks like, from @cmccabe’s posts that it has to do with data collection. Perhaps it could use a better name?

          data-brokers :  does it worth having a full tag for that ? I’m sure it overlap with lot of other things like surveillance capitalism

          I’m not entirely sure what this is talking about. Is it people who sell data? Could it use a better name?

          extreme capitalism : while the name is fun, I believe it mixes the effect with the subject (and, as such, many stories might be tagged that way. Rendering the tag quite useless)

          I’ve always thought of this as a place for the more extreme cases of capitalists exploiting people. I’m not exactly sure what the original meaning was.

          government
          propaganda
          censorship
          

          Those 3 are also quite large, quite overlaping and mixing subject and cause. Who would like to filter out based on those criterias ? How are those tag useful ?

          Maybe staff should take a look at these. These topics could use being broken up if it won’t leave a bunch of small (as in nearly-unused) topics.

          U.S.A -> same as USA…
          

          etc…

          I think it would be good to get rid of the duplicates if possible.