Distraction

On my home server I have, till now, Hubzilla and WordPress. Hubzilla is a good all-round piece of software that does various things, though not perfectly: it is an activity-hub connected social network, a place to store photo albums and files; a content management system for blogs, and a place where you can make static websites.

There are idealistic, practical and economic considerations regarding home hosting. On a practical level, the experience has been much smoother than I anticipated. The system has stayed up most of the time, despite occasional power cuts. There haven’t been so many issues at all. I’m using an old laptop for the purpose, connected to my modem-router. There are still one or two things I have to figure out, but that’s only because I’ve been lazy.

On an idealistic level, I love the idea of being in control of my own server.

Economically, it’s probably cheaper, after the small fee I pay for a permanent IP, and the electricity used, than hosting the site on a server. There were no hardware costs since I’m using an old laptop, which would otherwise just lie in the cupboard.

There is still a question whether the effort has been worth it. Regarding blogging and social networking, it depends a lot on the usage case. Although it is occasionally nice for me to see all the product of 20 years of writing together in one place, actually I could achieve the same by writing off line, on my computer, and then uploading it somewhere – anywhere – perhaps various places – not necessarily a personal website. That’s true because there are no commercial or reputational considerations involved. That would not be true for everyone.

Regarding social media, also there, there are few advantages to be found in hosting your own network. It is easier to become known and discover others by using a commercial network or a popular federated instance. If what you are posting is mainly short posts and links to your own writing, and the service is free, then there is no real need to host it at home.

What would make sense, perhaps, would be to host your own email system. That would be great, if it were not so technically challenging to host email, and if were not so difficult to self-host email without being blacklisted by the big companies who today host email.

It does not make sense to use a home server for a file server, because the main advantage of backing up your files in the cloud is that they are not being stored at home. If the house is burgled or burns down, it’s better that the files are stored elsewhere. It still makes sense to rent a cloud server for that; it is simply better that it isn’t at home. I pay a little money to Disroot in order to store my files on their server.

It would be a good idea to use a home server for storing a photo and video collection. Photos and video take up a lot of space, which is sometimes costly, so a good case can be made for creating a photo gallery on your own server. But that too could be hosted somewhere in the cloud.

Thinking about my home server

On an idealistic level, I love the idea of being in control of my own server.

SoundCloud

I’m just starting to use it, but I think I like the interface of SoundCloud over that of Deezer, and am finding it easier to find music that I like. I am still listening free for now, but haven’t heard any ads so far. SoundCloud’s paid service isn’t available in Israel, so it will always be free for me.

I don’t feel like hearing any mainstream western songs, somehow, so most of what I’m listening to are “organic house”, “downtempo”* or electronic versions of ethnic music from around the world. And sometimes the original music, without any synthesized sounds. “Quieter than Silence” by Mehdi Aminian and Mohamad Zatari continues to satisfy – I like it more each time I listen to it.

Note: It’s with a bit of hesitation that I write “organic house”, “downtempo”, etc., because I actually have very little understanding of what the terms mean. They are just words that appear next to the titles. My interest in such kinds of music is quite recent. And anyway, I have little understanding of music in general. I only know what I like. And that’s subject to change.

Just now, I’m listening to Jose Solano.

What I’m reading

“Son Visage et le Tien”, a long essay by Jenni Alexis. Interesting, so far. The English Wikipedia article about him references an article in the Atlantic, “When does a writer become a writer“[1]. Alexis, like T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck, Margaret Duras and so many others that the article doesn’t mention, has a daytime job. Winning the Goncourt prize came as a big surprise for him. It’s the kind of attainment that so many aspiring writers dream about.

Links

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/11/when-does-a-writer-become-a-writer/248945/

Despite all the predictions that the Pegasus affair would be all forgotten after a few weeks, no, the company’s woes seem only to be accumulating. Blacklisted by the US gov’t, half a billion dollars in debt, and now being sued by Apple.

NSO was about to sell hacking tools to France. Now the Israeli spyware company is in crisis. | MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/23/1040509/france-macron-nso-in-crisis-sanctions/

Apple Sues NSO Group For Hacking Its Users https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbvyb/apple-sues-nso-group-for-hacking-its-users

“For the experts and activists who have been accusing NSO Group of enabling authoritarian abuse for years, it’s a victory that is long overdue.”

Organizing some news feeds under Vivaldi

I put some of my RSS Newsfeeds in order in Vivaldi. My idea is to use it for blogs, rather than busy news sources. For that reason I first added RMS’s political notes, and then removed it. Because if I want to use it as what Dave Winer calls “a river of news”, RMS dominates too much. But the links are good. It would be better if Vivaldi made it possible to use sub-folders for different areas (and hence sub-rivers – by being able to click on the top folder that includes each set of feeds).

It’s a little disappointing to see many of the bloggers whom I bookmarked falling silent for months on end. Many people invest a lot of time in producing a nice looking blog, and then forget to use it.

Paywalled systems

I had a look at Glenn Greenwald’s website (http://glenngreenwald.net). It’s an outdated mess, with stuff requiring Flash player. His website doesn’t mention that he is now on Substack, (greenwald.substack.com) of which I was already aware. I can’t afford to subscribe to him on Substack, any more than I can afford to pay for other news sources. For now, I support the Guardian with a monthly donation, but can’t afford to do that for every web journal I visit. Steve Winer, who is wealthier than I am, has written about this problem. If enough websites gang up on me and offer a subscription model that works more like the music streaming services, offering a monthly subscription that allows me to read, say, 50 or 100 articles a month, across different journals, maybe I would pay for it. I think that the only real solution to paywalls is a model similar to the music streaming services, with a flat monthly subscription similar to that of Medium. But Medium reminds me a little of the gig economy; there are a few top earners, but even they are not getting paid so much. For bloggers and independent writers, what would work best would be to get together and create a “writers guild” or cooperative, working as a non-profit, so that the writers themselves don’t get cheated.

I don’t mind the presence of ads, only the nasty ones and trackers.

Open Library

I was delighted, then disappointed, to find https://openlibrary.org, where one can “borrow” books for a limited time. The problem is that the presentation makes them not very readable. Might be okay for students, but not really for readers. Someone put in a considerable amount of work in making the books available, but didn’t go the full route. At minimum there should be a phone application enabling comfortable reading of the books. The project belongs to archive.org, the internet archive, and uses the same login for both.

Links

India hovers over the Pause button for Big Tech’s march onto one hundred million farms • The Register https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/22/india_agristack/