iooioio @iooioio@fosstodon.org

Enter the address of your favourite website to check which user-tracking technologies it uses and who it is sending your data to.

Cool new tool!

https://themarkup.org/blacklight

Periodic reminder that you can enjoy things that other people think aren't that great. This album that I'm listening to has two reviews under 50%, and frankly I couldn't care less.

Every time a project mentions blockchain, you can disregard everything else they say because you know it's being said with ulterior motives

It is the responsibility of the good maintainer to say "no" sometimes

To extend this metaphor a bit more

A ballpoint pen is something that literally everyone finds useful. It does its job and does it very well, and you hardly even think about it. It is universal.

The Saturn V is super cool but it is not useful for anything outside of one very specific problem and that is a nation state sending people to another world.

Basically every software designed for the daily user should take its cues from the ballpoint pen. There's a place for Saturn V software, but that place is, like, CERN, not your webshit thing.

I want to talk about algorithms on social media. Specifically about how mastodon and the Fediverse often write on their presentation page or feature list about how they "don't have algorithms" because they display posts in chronological order.

👇A thread

Nightmares

Adventures of porting postmarketOS to the Librem 5

"I’ve been longing to drop the shackles of Android ever since I made the decision to stop using my Nokia N900. Nokia had given up on Linux phones, and it was clear that there would be no further security patches for my favorite smartphone of all time. "

https://puri.sm/posts/adventures-of-porting-postmarketos-to-the-librem-5/

Guest post by @craftyguy

#privacy #freedom #security

Looking for a different way to share/post content on the web?

Why not #Gopher ?

You can join my #GopherSapce here

gopher://gopher.pizza

Contact info on that page.

To learn a little more about #Gopher

https://blog.marcg.pizza/marcg/weekly-music-review-and-a-gopherhole-100daystooffload-day-24

I just want to say that if you've never checked out gopher or Gemini they are really neat places that are worth a look. Not a high pressure fire hose of posts but a quaint steady stream of interesting, thoughtful musings on all manner of topics.

Building tech for freedom?

Is it intuitive, easy to use, focused, and consistent?

Does it have beautiful defaults?

Is it:

- Private by default?
- Secure by default?
- Usable by default?

#design

@aral Yes! Yes! Yes! This is key! So many projects ignore design and pick horrible defaults. In many cases the developer designs the interface as an external representation of their internal code (I'm looking at you iptables and tc). If you understand the code then it makes sense, otherwise *shrug*.

Good design requires empathy. You must think of how someone else would approach your software without understanding the code. If your defaults make a user shoot themselves in the foot, it's a bug.

@hund @Fairphone
I need a phone with Android compability so I bought the FP3 with /e/.
I see it as the least worst phone to get and still be able to use the needed applications.
Use F-droid for as many apps as possible and Aurora store for the apps only found in Play store.

It's not perfect, but we need to start somewhere.

@hund
Youre being pretty zealous right now. The market is already niche, and like it or not, people want gapps. If you take them away, they will send money elsewhere. FOSS doesnt pay.
AFAIK the entire idea of fairphone is ethically sourced labor without slavery, which is MUCH more important than a frakly first world problem of Google doing this and that.
@Fairphone

@hund @Fairphone You probably want to take a look at the shop of @e_mydata https://esolutions.shop/shop/e-os-fairphone-3/ which offers Android without Google. Fairphone officially cooperates with /e/, so they offer Google-free-Fairphones under the hand there.
Also note that Fairphone would have to stop selling phones with Google-Android on it, if they would only once sell a phone with an Android-fork on it. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/

@hund @Fairphone

To me it feels like you are forced to fight one battle at a time and it's a bit frustrating.

In the #fairphone case, you are taking a positive step towards hardware reuse and recycling but three negative steps away from ethical software and privacy.

I was looking at the #toogoodtogo app yesterday. It seems a nice initiative to reduce food waste. Needless to say: proprietary app, google dependant, trackers from every major company...

Just published a list of all the best marketing practices we say "no" to when growing our startup.

Turns out you can grow your project without funding Google and Facebook, and their stranglehold on the web

https://plausible.io/blog/best-marketing-practices

"The Gentoo Distribution Kernel project is excited to announce that our new Linux Kernel packages are ready for a wide audience! The project aims to create a better Linux Kernel maintenance experience by providing ebuilds that can be used to configure, compile, and install a kernel entirely through the package manager as well as prebuilt binary kernels."

https://www.gentoo.org/news/2020/09/15/distribution-kernel.html

#Gentoo #Linux

Humans exploiting and destroying nature on unprecedented scale – report | Environment | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/10/humans-exploiting-and-destroying-nature-on-unprecedented-scale-report-aoe