µ-Posts (What is this?)

There's a growing case being made with each passing year that if there's hope for the social web, it's in small communities. It's built on protocols like ActivityPub, rather than on one-stop “gated” (i.e. proprietary) platforms. Whereas our social giants are built from the start for unaccountable inequity, a web of small, connected communities has the ability to give us true “town squares” run by humans and organizations that are closer to their users, and answer directly to them.

Big news: My friend William DeMeo has announced that he's formalised Birkhoff HSP Theorem in Martin-Löf type theory using Agda. Details on ualib.gitlab.io.

A lot of people are switching from #WhatsApp to #Signal these days. I don't like where it's going. Messaging should be as decentralised as e-mail is, otherwise we're heading to the same problem as we had with WhatsApp. Who guarantees that Signal won't be acquired by somebody we dislike in the future? For example, Matrix is a better alternative as its decentralised protocol guarantees that it can't be fully owned by anyone. (And there are possibly more options.)

Just received a YubiKey from CZ.NIC (in exchange for writing about it with #overenomojeid). After setting up the two-factor authentication in mojeid.cz I can easily manage my citizen profile. It's great to see some progress in Czech "e-governance".

While being stuck in England because my flights were cancelled, I watched a Moshe Vardi's talk that aptly argues against Cyber Libertarianism, why we can't reach (economic) equilibria and more. His OWLS talk is here youtu.be/BipEbkdbVNc.

IT'S OFFICIAL: @gitchat@twitter.com now natively speaks Matrix!! Read all about what it takes to add native Matrix support to a large existing chat app, and bask in the glow of a world where FOSS chat is increasingly FOSS, open & interoperable once more :D 🎉🥳🍾🌉🚀 https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/07/gitter-now-speaks-matrix​

I'm just incredibly tired of having to deal with the cookie pop-ups everywhere. Is there any legitimate use-case for third-party #cookies, apart from advertising? If not, we should just finally ban them (legislatively). Those that want to track us will use browser fingerprints anyway...

"Parliament wants to boost #sustainability by promoting #reuse and #repairs and by tackling practices that shorten the lifespan of products."

A huge win for the #RighttoRepair 🙌 🛠️ : https://bit.ly/3misaVW​

Okay so Google killed their Buzz, Wave, Talk, Picasa, URL Shortener, Google+, Hangouts and now essentially even Photos. I'm leaving Google unwillingly more and more every year. I wonder which of the last products of Google which I still use (Google Scholar, Translate, Drive, Maps, Youtube, and Android) is going down next...

Mobilizon has been released! Check out the official announcement:

Mobilizon. Your events. Your groups. Your data.

Go behind the scenes of the design of #Mobilizon, our new tool to free your groups and events from Facebook.

https://framablog.org/2020/10/27/mobilizon-your-events-your-groups-your-data

From next year on, all software developed by the city of Munich will be Free Software. This year they will already select five projects to start with. https://www.golem.de/news/nach-limux-aus-muenchen-will-schnell-open-source-auf-den-weg-bringen-2010-151702.html (de)

Mental note for myself: restarters.net have a great wiki https://wiki.restarters.net/, full of tutorials and other material for people that prefer to repair laptops, phones and other electronics rather than throwing it away.

Last Sunday the UK/US/CA/AU/NZ/IN/JP govts issued a statement asking tech companies to add backdoors into E2E encryption. This is a big deal: unfortunately backdoors do not work. Read about our alternative: combating abuse via decentralised reputation.🔒 https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix-without-backdoors

Who reads privacy policies and terms of use these days? Turns out that some people do and, moreover, they then make a short summary of the most important parts. Check out https://tosdr.org/ and https://privacyspy.org/ 😉 (and also tosback.org).

I love Michael Lewis' idea to create a dedicated search engine for personal websites (read his explanation here and here). I've added myself to the database so now you can find me (and much more) on https://searchmysite.net.