Diary

For Christmas, one of my sons gave me a new set of in-ear noise cancelling bluetooth earphones, which are very nice; great in fact – they remain comfortable after hours of use and I’m not bothered by things like the TV.

I also bought myself another set of headphones, though fortunately with a different purpose – they come as part of a sleep mask and are comfortable for nights when I want to fall asleep to music or hear it through the night. Lately I’ve been doing ok without them – I always sleep better in winter: the womby effect of thick blankets, probably.

Most of my music continues to be long mixes that SoundCloud chooses for me: right now it’s “May Peace be Everywhere in the World” – an almost 3 hour track by Andi Rietchel. No need for mainstream first-tier musicians with me. My mainstray is Cafe de Anatolia, especially the stuff mixed by Billy Esteban.

It may be a sign of the times that we spend a lot of time piping music to our ears. I have at least 7 functioning sets of headphones by now. Perhaps it’s to drown out all the negativity around us. The toxic politicians and cruel, divisive politics. There are no doubt stronger drugs that people are resorting to.

I have three social media streams now; having set up Hubzilla and Epicyon on my VPS while continuing to use Akkoma on Disroot’s server. I’m making sure to follow different people on each. However, I’m not so much enjoying the experience; maybe I’ve just fallen in with the wrong crowd. As for my own contribution, I haven’t felt much like sharing anything of late, so I don’t. I think I’m more interested in social media from a technical point of view; when it comes to actually using it, I find that I don’t have a great deal to do there.

I have a greater interest in creating my own corner on the web, “a digital garden”, so I keep thinking about that.

VPN service and internet connections

I made a trial subscription to njalla’s VPN service. This came after I followed a link to a world library site recommended, which asked if I’m in “Neve Shalom”. Usually, the sites that I encounter have suggested that I’m somewhere in the general region – where my ISP server is located, for example. I didn’t understand how it came to know I’m in this tiny village. I don’t have location services enabled in my browser and Google Maps always has to ask whether I wish to enable them. Anyway, I thought that’s just a step too far. It’s not that it’s hard to know where I live, for anyone who makes a bit of effort: I mention it in my blog and my fediverse accounts, but how does some random site knows where my computer is? That I didn’t get. Anyway now the library site believes I’m in Finland, which is fine with me. Njalla’s service seems OK, but was a bit hard to set up, and I still didn’t manage to incorporate the VPN into my computer startup sequence.

The whole business of connecting to the internet never seems to settle down. New protocols and standards to learn, and deliberate obfuscation on the part of telecoms and companies that don’t want us to know. I just bought a new mesh router but apparently it’s the wrong one for the proprietary fiber modem-router of my carrier. There’s some other mesh router that’s supposed to go with that. Bummer.

And I hate all this proprietary stuff. This new mesh component does not come with the traditional website interface but a stupid simplified phone app that claims to be super-easy but is much less configurable. The approach of telecoms and companies is “Don’t bother trying to understand: we’ll take care of everything for you.” And instead of explaining how everything’s supposed to work, they try to keep us in the dark, which limits our freedom.

We need to counter such attempts through hacker-groups and websites that tirelessly explain whatever information is being kept from us. Locally I’m at a disadvantage, because I am less aware of Hebrew-speaking groups that specifically address the obfuscation and fud of the local telecom and its competitors. For sure there are people out there that understand the field much better than I do.

Israel’s new government

It’s all dark stuff. There’s still a disconnect in my brain; I didn’t completely internalize what it means, though rationally I know how bad it is, and how much worse it can become. I don’t know what to do with this information. Of course, we should leave this country and go to some other, slightly better, place. But, as an individual: should one do that, when the rest of one’s family remains behind? This must have been the same question that Jews and left-wing intellectuals would ask themselves during the 1930s in Germany and central Europe. With the difference that they were directly endangered themselves. So maybe it’s more like the circumstances in which ordinary white Christian Germans without overt political affiliation found themselves during the same era. They would not be hunted down by the SS or the Gestapo, but they might suffer the effects of the war. And they might feel sympathy for the direct victims of the Nazi regime.

The situation may yet arise that we will all simply need to flee; I would not be too surprised, but I can’t be sure, and I’m old after all, with family responsibilities of my own.

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.

Our truth and our persona

Are we just who we think we are, or do we always represent something – some group; some nation; some identity? There are things we would like to say, but then we remember that as a “privileged white male” or as a citizen of a former colonial power, or something else, it is probably better to keep our mouths shut. That’s what I’m reflecting on now, with regard to that Israeli film director who raised a furor at the Goa film festival (see my previous post). What he said, regarding the “vulgarity” of the film (“The Kashmir Files”) may (or may not) be true. On the other hand, if one is a foreigner and, on top of that, speaking about a highly sensitive issue – well, maybe there are places you might not want to go.

But besides even those aspects, there is a question of one’s own identity. The director, I assume, sees his podium to be that of a filmmaker, given the honor to chair a prestigious panel of judges. His professional credentials are the source of his courage in speaking out. However, those who hear him are no doubt aware of other aspects of his identity – perhaps more aware than he?

Being an Israeli Jew carries a certain excess baggage in the world, that is added to the baggage of just being a foreigner. Among its sources are, on the one hand, the history of persecution against the Jewish people, including the Holocaust of the last century; modern-day antisemitism, and, on the other hand, the perpetration of terrible injustice towards Palestinians today. These heavy bags cannot easily be left behind.

No matter which group we belong to, even when we are eager to rid ourselves of this group identity, we can’t, because this does not depend on us. We will always represent more than ourselves to the other. If we disavow, say, imperialism, or chauvinism or Zionism or whatever identity we want to disassociate with, we cannot shake off the attibution. So we had better be aware of it in our speech and our behaviour, and do our best to compensate.

Our sense of identity has to include both what we see in ourselves and what other people are likely to see too. This is only fitting. We are speaking about persona, whose original meaning was “mask” (the mask that was worn by actors), yet we cannot function in this world without one. It’s a Greek tragedy, but still just a play. The error, and the source of our confusion, is in taking the play, or our role in it, too seriously.

The Kashmir Files: Israeli director sparks outrage in India over ‘vulgar movie’ remarks | Kashmir | The Guardian

Israel condemns Netflix film showing murder of Palestinian family in 1948 war | Israel | The Guardian

Israel strips Palestinian-French rights lawyer of Jerusalem residency | Palestinian territories | The Guardian