Lately I've been exploring FreeBSD and OpenBSD. One of the more interesting things about them is how they handle OS and package upgrades.
On FreeBSD, the freebsd-update command is used for upgrading the OS and the pkg command is used for managing user packages. On OpenBSD, the syspatch command is used for upgrading the OS and the pkg_* commands are used for managing user packages.
Unlike Linux, these BSDs have a clear separation of OS from these packages. OS files and data are stored in places like /bin and /etc, while user installed packages get installed to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/etc.
On the Linux side, the closest thing I can think of is using an atomic distro and flatpak, homebrew, containers, and/or snap for user package management. However, it's not always viable to use these formats. Flatpak, snap, and containers have sandbox issues that prevent certain functionality; homebrew is not sandboxed but on Linux its limited to CLI programs.
There's work being done to work around such issues, such as systemd sysext. But I'm starting to feel that this is just increasing complexity rather than addressing root problems. I feel like taking inspiration from the BSDs could be beneficial.
To answer the question in the title: No, because these systems inherently have different architecture. Something like OpenBSD (the OS) is relatively self-contained. Linux distributions have system components that are externally developed, but a user might rely upon.
What exactly is the "problem" you have with Linux package managers? It's specifically extra complexity to separate "system" and "packages". This works well for *BSDs that often develop the entire OS themselves, but would pose extra challenges for Linux distributions, where the line between "OS" and "user installed package" is much more blurred.
I feel like in Linux any distinction between "OS" and "something else" would be arbitrary, except, perhaps the example of the AUR vs regular packages in arch, or maybe the universe repo in Ubuntu. Why would you want a whole different system for managing those packages?
It’s not so much about a second package manager as it is about having a base system and separating extra software from the base system.
Moving extra packages out of the base system allows the extra packages to be updated quicker. Fewer things get frozen when the stable point in time distro release is tagged. This also helps the base as it can move without having to worry about every piece of software in the repos being compatible with the changes.
The concept exists as 3rd party repos. However, most aren’t setup to be as cleanly separated as ports are.
You could use something like homebrew for your packages while keeping just system packages to the default package manager. It has the upside of being separated and more recent, but it can mean duplicate packages are on the system.
Homebrew is good for unsandboxed CLI programs, but unfortunately not GUI apps.
An issue I ran in the past when using a custom OS on my phone was that flatpak, containers, or snap were able to talk to my phone properly to flash the OS. So on an atomic distro, I would either have to install Chromium using something like rpm-ostree, systemd systext, or boot into a traditional distro like Debian.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding how these work though. "Sandbox" is good when any userspace executed binary may comprise a system. How does that refer to a GUi, as you are using it? The actual executable code has nothing to do with it having a graphical interface.
My first point is that homebrew is only good for CLI applications. Almost no GUI apps are available, the only one I know of is xeyes.
My second point is that homebrew is unsanboxed. That’s good for programs that don’t work well sandboxed, such as fetch tools like fastfetch.
This leaves a gap of a good supported way to install GUI apps that are unsandboxed. I used to need this when I used an Android phone with a custom OS. I needed to have unsandboxed Chromium with adb tools to flash and update the OS. However, when sandboxed, Chromium doesn’t have access to adb tools.
Again, no. There are a myriad of ways to do this if you just want a plainly, locally installed and running program:
1) Both RPM and dpkg support being able to unpackaged or install packages into your local home directory. 2) Download source, build and install yourself
You're just adding arguments on arguments that aren't making any sense now. You're original comment and understanding has been addressed.
You’re just adding arguments on arguments that aren’t making any sense now. You’re original comment and understanding has been addressed.
My main point is that I'm worried about additional complexity. On most atomic distros, you're not supposed to touch the base system, so various tools are preinstalled or available: flatpak, podman, homebrew, snap, appimages, systemd sysext.
The BSDs seem to enjoy a separation of OS and user packages with reduced complexity. Though their task is easier since they are complete operating systems, whereas linux is just a kernel and many different projects put together, and many different groups putting out their own distros with varying packages and compatibility.
Both RPM and dpkg support being able to unpackaged or install packages into your local home directory
It would be really cool if dnf and apt got good, easy, simple support for installing packages into the home folder. But that's not what's happening. The proposed solution seems to be systemd sysext, which again, prompted me to have worries about complexities about how software is being managed on more "modern" distributions.
You’re just adding arguments on arguments that aren’t making any sense now. You’re original comment and understanding has been addressed
And I keep discussing it because I enjoy doing so.
How to install rpm package without root permission ? Is it possible to install RPM packages without root permission? Is it possible to set a different folder and RPM database for rpm installation ,without root permission ? can we adopt the below meth…
Unlike Linux, these BSDs have a clear separation of OS from these packages. OS files and data are stored in places like /bin and /etc, while user installed packages get installed to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/etc.
What do you consider the OS? Is firefox a part of OS? Is office part of OS?
On FreeBSD, the freebsd-update command is used for upgrading the OS and the pkg command is used for managing user packages. On OpenBSD, the syspatch command is used for upgrading the OS and the pkg_* commands are used for managing user packages.
Personally, the ditching of /usr/local mess was one of the selling points of Arch for me, but in a way you could achieve this in Arch. Create a secondary pacman config with RootDir set to /usr/local and alias pacman --config /etc/pacman_local.conf as pkg_pacman
Points for þe how-to. In not sure I agree about losing /usr/local being a good þing. An argument could be made for AUR installing only into /usr/local; þen we could go back to best practices of sanitizing $PATH order. It'd also alleviate some naming conflicts which were less of an issue in older Unixes like Solaris.
What specifically about /usr/local bothered you so much þat getting rid of it would be a selling point?
it partitions same things into separate locations One library is here, another one is here, some older version there, which one should this binary load? Where should I point the -L to? Of course, compiling things completely from scratch is unmaintainable anyway (that's why PKGBUILD was another big point - it's easy to create your own AUR packages that will get pacman-level maintainability), but sometimes you want to check if that new patch solves your issue
if distro does not care, the packages will have different prefixes I can see some use of /opt. But it should be my decision if I want something installed in /opt/bin or /usr/local/bin. In distros that did not enforce where things are put in, it was all over the place. But to be fair, to me, even bin/sbin separation is bs
Gentoo will allow you to update the small set of required system packages and their dependencies separately from everything else (emerge --update system), but doing the reverse would require some pretty heavy micro-management.
I think of those as BSD thoughtful and pondered, and Linux as fairly fast and maybe thoughtless (in the jouyful sense that things have to go forward). In the end BSD is definitely cleaner, but behind, and Linux is much messier but is at the front of what's going on.
And I'm sayin this as someone who's worked with both systems for decades and even though I prefer Linux on the desktop or on servers, on embedded systems, where you'd need some really clean code to poke at, BSD really shines.
Of course BSD works fine (mostly) everywhere. It's almost as good today as it was in 2000.
Alpine package manager and use of MUSL over glibc are pretty similar to a BSD. Like others have pointed out there are limits to how closely a Linux distro can match the deliberate structure of those distros given the different design philosophy
Satellite data has revealed the accelerating rise of sea levels, aligning with past climate projections and showcasing the undeniable role of human activity in driving global change.
I really want my primary mobile computer to be a tablet mainly because I genuinely like the form factor. My current Linux laptop is dying and I thought I'd just buy the newest Lenovo Thinkpad Surface clone but Lenovo seems to have discontinued it because I couldn't find a 2025 version anywhere, same with HP and Dell's Surface clones. And most of the Windows tablets I could find online have dinky Intel N processors instead of Core.
Can anyone recommend a high end tablet that runs Linux well? Failing that, how bad is the Surface really with Linux as the only OS?
It seems weird having the keyboard facing outwards. I know it gets disabled when folded back, just seems wrong. I'm not saying it is wrong just that it kinda freaks me out a little bit because I'm a bit odd like that.
I'm looking at ideapads though, that might be nice.
I have an old laptop that does that and the keys are very distracting whenever I hold it in tablet mode. I find myself holding it awkwardly on one side to avoid them, even though I know they're disabled. It is still a nice feature though, I like being able to transition a laptop to portrait mode sometimes.
Minisforum V3, but they're now so highly sought after, they aren't cheap.
Both KDE and Gnome have their own issues with pure tablet modes though, so just a heads up. Gnome is way better IMO, but the keyboard is still kinda "meh" compared to Android. KDE is kind of all over the place, depending on which apps you're using.
I have a minisforum v3 that I'm not using - just don't love the surface style form factor. I'm willing to sell it for a good price if anyone is interested. Based in USA. Feel free to DM me
I wouldn't call N series "dinky". N100 runs my daily device, coincidently surface-like tablet Chuwi Hi 10 Max, and three of my homelab servers. Proccessing power is more than enough to run modern desktop distro, all the todays shitty javascript websites, work in IDEs, virtualize, and all others server-side task I throw at them.
I have a minis forum v3 that I use all the time. It's got decent CPU and GPU for a laptop class.
It competent runs Indy and older games, has reasonable battery life, and the general performance is more than enough for productivity.
Touch screen works flawlessly, accelerometer required some tinkering as did volume control. Thumb scanner was easy to get working. I have not gone back to try getting the IR camera for face detection working.
It runs games on par with the steam deck. Works great for a lot of newer or demanding titles if you set the settings apropriately.
Does your pen/sylus work?
I also have a minisforum V3 running archlinux and I can't get the stylus to write in rnote or to draw in krita or to work in Osu!. It just moves the cursor but it never "clicks".
Ahh, I got mine used when a window 11 update "bricked" a lots of them. Rather than do am RMA this guy just got a new one and gave me the old ones saying if I could fix it then I could keep it.
Unbricking was not easy so I can understand why he just replaced it.
Sheeee-it, þat's got a better CPU þan þe mini-pc in using as my desktop (5800H). Half þe RAM, and I don't suppose þe NVMe is upgradable, is it? But, still, it's a spanking CPU.
The 8840U is equivalent to the Z1E that's in the Lenovo Legion Go and ROG Ally X, so it's a super competent chip! If gaming is your main use case, you might wanna check out Bazzite 😀
starlite runs the n100 and n200 cpus. the cpus are pretty great (have an n100 on my nuc). the problem with linux is the touch interface first and foremost imo. i have an old windows tablet converted to linux and its a daily headache. well, was. i haven't used the thing for months.
I've got a Lenovo tablet with an Intel Pentium processor that runs Fedora okay. Everything works, but especially remembering/detecting orientation with the keyboard attached is about as polished as stucco.
Apparently the hardware defaults to a portrait layout; it's a 1080x1920 monitor, not a common 1920x1080, and by god and all his rapey little clergy if it CAN wake up in portrait mode, it will. Waking the thing up means turning it on, ripping it in half, waiting 3 seconds for the monitor to rotate back to the way it was when you put it to sleep, and then clicking the keyboard back on.
Drivers are okay. I had some problems with screen freezing but these were fixed easily with some kernel params.
With a full battery, I get 6 hours coding in C with VSCode and some browser tabs or 5 hours of YouTube playback. You'll get about 8-9 hours if you are doing something like writing text
Gnome is fantastic for this form factor. Especially libadwaita stuff, as their HIG plays very nice with touchscreens.
A powerbank will give you practically infinite battery for a whole day. I love this machine so much...
Device is set to power saver in this picture but I must say power saver doesn't seem to be doing much. I don't notice a reduction in performance nor see a improvement in battery life.
I just leave that on power saver if I am not doing anything resource hungry. Possibly out of habit
How's the performance for media on that thing? I was eying up the surface go line to replace an android tablet that I mostly use for playing movies and TV shows I've downloaded. Think it would do okay playing back 1080p and higher content?
I bought a second hand surface pro 7 recently and I'm quite in love with it! With a few GNOME plugins it's a quite capable tablet AND a quite capable laptop on the go.
I just went through this with Dell xps 2 in 1 and surface pro 8 with mint and other OSes. Linux just is not fully ready for touchscreen it's 90 percent there but for instance the last 10 percent is text boxes when clicking won't spawn the keyboard, the keyboard regardless of input app is clunky, not phone grade speed, it's possible but you my as well stick with a small 10 to 13 inch laptop. The folio is janky at best, using the slate solo is odd to hold and gets hot. Battery sucks. I tweaked and spent so much time wanting it to work. It just isn't ready yet.
Back in the early days of 1995, I picked up a Slackware CD from the computer shop I worked at in lieu of payment with no idea what it was or how to use it. This was my first foray into the world of Linux. From that point I used Linux off and on sporadically until I moved past the tinkering phase of college, watching the rise and fall of new technologies and better and better innovation, and just wanting things to work like I expected out of the box.
However, in the last few years I have stopped being excited about new innovation. Because with it comes not an exciting new world, but a plethora of subscription models, paywalls, data mining, and general enshitification that has become the norm in tech. Things have stopped working like I expect out of the box. In fact, I am having to actively twist and bend them to do what I want without compromising my privacy and my wallet.
Which leads me to present day and I decided to try throwing Ubuntu onto an ancient laptop headed to the scrap heap. It worked flawlessly right out of the box. With the addition of a little ram, I was able to set up a new media server running dockers, pihole and several other applications that would have taken me extensive time and money to get working like I wanted in a mainstream OS.
I found myself excited again about technology.
So last weekend I pulled up my daily driver gaming rig with the intention of shrinking down the pre-installed Windows operating system and trying Ubuntu there as my mainstream OS. Which is where I discovered that it was in fact not a single 2 TB drive inside, but a set of 1 TB drives configured in raid 0, taking up both M2 slots. So my fun little weekend project was once again thwarted by an off the shelf configuration that wasn't quite what it advertised.
It's just a roadblock to a journey that'll require a little more time and money to do safely, keeping the old drive intact while I migrate to something new and better. But that's okay. Storage is cheap and booting the try-out OS from a USB drive was exceeding my expectations.
I'm eager to move forward and see how Proton works in an environment where it can shine. I want to see how much open source software can replace the bloated and clunky OS on my current machine. I want to learn Python and move past the power shell knowledge I've had to build in the workforce.
Sounds great. Ubuntu works good out of the box. My only recommendation with Ubuntu is that instead of using 'Snap' checkout flatpak. Snap will update shit without your knowledge, or say so, and is 'closed'. Snap goes against the philosophy of a free and open system, where as flatpak does not. And flatpak provides just as many apps as Snap AFAIK.
With a privacy protecting setup, the mainstream internet is almost unusable. To sign up for social media or even a gmail account, one has to provide a phone number for verification. Youtube doesn't work when not signed into a Google account, or if one is connected to a VPN. Even downloader programs like yt-dlp and freyr have been rendered useless by the strict access controls of the major platforms. There is a vast amount of community, DIY, and educational material of all sorts behind these platform walls, so how can someone who doesn't want to be tracked access any of it these days?
There are alternatives like archive.org and peertube which are wonderful but have nowhere near the amount of content that people have been uploading to YouTube over the years. For example, if I need to fix a washing machine and there is a tutorial on YouTube, how can I see it while still preserving a modicum of privacy online?
Have you tried DuckDuckGo browser? That’s what I use if I need to view something on YouTube. There’s Enable Duck Player in Settings, mine is set up to open a new window (no ads).
EDIT: No sign up or phone number required. My VPN is always on.
For everything but IG and FB, there's a mess of alternative front ends. For YT, there's a dozen ways to log in with an alt front end app. Freetube, Grayjay, all the pipe pipe pipe apps. Then Invidious routing traffic.
It sounds like you're over-doing something like JS blocking. You have to find a balance.
Maybe ask in a privacy community and get specific on needs and your threat model.
Does FreeTube work for you? It gives me "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" for every single video. It might work without VPN but I'm not interested enough to try.
It sounds like you’re over-doing something like JS blocking. You have to find a balance.
Wisely put and I suspect you're right, but if it's really just about using a VPN I feel like, "Well why do you want to know my IP address so bad?". I did do the JS blocking trick for a totally unusable web experience but now I allow JS and it's just a widely unusable web experience ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: doesn't lemmy.world block people from posting through a VPN?
Yeah, FreeTube works fine for me, just not all VPN locations. Though the Invidious API never seems to work unless I'm using Invidious frontends on a browser. Just cycle your VPN locations until you find one that works. That's the benefit of a VPN. They can't block all the IPs.
But that shouldn't be affected limiting JS on a browser. JS blocking isn't a trick, it's a tool used for the right occasion. It's not for everything all the time. Even Tor allows JS.
Some sites also use canvas blocking as a metric to determine if you're a bot or not. Bit that wouldn't affect Freetube. Freetube is its own app, so I would check to see what it has under the API settings. It should fall back to the "local API" which is just your internet connection. The Invidious APIs rarely work for me anymore.
Starting next year, Google will begin to verify the identities of developers distributing their apps on Android devices, not just those who distribute via the Play Store.
Google will require developer verification for Android apps outside the Play Store
Starting next year, Google will begin to verify the identities of developers distributing their apps on Android devices, not just those who distribute via the Play Store.
While I won't tell people exactly what to search, I can guarantee that I can find malware first try on Google Play. Google Play Integrity is just as dodgy.
When a preventative measure very obviously won't solve the stated problem, that may not be what it's really there to solve. This is another of Google's anti-open-source moves designed to bring all Android devices entirely under their control and surveillance. It goes along with their bringinh all Android development in house and making it harder for third parties to make their own custom versions of Android (Graphene OS etc.). It also seems a little odd that this happens right when several countries are introducing requirements that users supply ID to visit websites.
If it helps, my comment was more riffing off of noodlejetski's phrasing than what you'd originally said. "pulling things straight outta your ass" felt like some off-brand magician so I wanted to make a joke about that.
I swear I just saw something the other day that said it was unauthorized outside the region. I remember thinking it was strange. I swear I remember seeing it.
We currently sell in European Union, UK, Norway and Switzerland. Please be welcome to use our products anywhere in the world, however due to our limited resources we can only support the noted regions.
For fucks sake, let's find out what Fairphone needs in the US to be used with other services and create a gofundme for them to get it. Goddamn I am beyond sick of Google's shit right now. It is constantly a nightmare to get around their bloatware and deal with the rest of the surveillance nightmare on a daily basis. Fairphone works on T Mobile but they suck!
My personal favorite is how they are doing it to prevent data theft and malware. All they have ever done is trick people out of data. All of their shitty apps that I can not remove from my Samsung phone ARE the malware I do not want. Fuck Google and every person that works there!
fuck google and all, but yes they will. what other mainstream phone is any better? apple? give me a fucking break.
android without gapps will be a niche for the foreseeable future, and niches get ever easier to kill. with the play integrity thing and banking apps, i don't see linux phones getting real traction either as much as i'd like it to.
Yeah the real problem is somewhere else this just symptomatic of the capitalist mode of production and classes society. But no one want to talk about it! So we are getting fuck in the ass by those who possess the means of production and the product of our labour, understood? Alienation big time. The brave new world.
Fairphone 6 looks quite interesting and has a Google-free option. People are saying it's a bit buggy but they're fixing the bugs rapidly. And two-day battery life sounds pretty good.
I mean, some of us did when GrapheneOS and folks started to bootlick goolag for their walled garden in pro of security as well as the economical breach they did not cover (Pixels are not available to everynyan) and even incentivated.
It is unlikely that there will be a real resistance, the majority will resign themselves like submissive cattle and only a few will try to fight to the end, I have already seen this in history.
Is sad that PinePhone are inaccesible in a lot of places. They dont send where I live because they use DHL (shitty service which charges 34 euros to send from the capital city to where I live because is "remote area" despite is the city in the airport and is nearer than the capital city) and the pricing was 1.5 times the price of the product so they cancelled the option (as well as they dont know the different custom that may exist in special zones in the same country).
The provided (Pine64) could just use a different shipping company for those cases, such as Seur which is more reilable and fair than DHL. Yet they hold themselves in that.
And, just like that, no more modded apps, no more custom stores, everything is tightly under control unless you install a custom ROM (and then it's no more banking apps,etc.). And it's all for our own good, after all, big brother Google knows what's best for us!
My (major Canadian) Bank app (TD) has always just worked, no matter the state of my bootloader or root, and I've never bothered with Magisk Hide or anything like that to try to dodge root checks.
Requirement of authentication apps is making it trickier too. If you want to go to a concert or sporting event vended by ticketmaster, you're fucked outside of Android and iOS.
Clocking into jobs increasingly requires Android or iOS.
yeah, I had to resurrect an old phone to go to a concert last week. It's possible I'll never go to one again. I wouldn't have bought the tickets had I known about that bullshit.
Yes, there used to be papers for "coordinate systems" you could use as 2FA, and SMS one-time-passwords.. but they are slowly being rolled out in the EU due to security concerns and the "Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)" standards mandated by PSD2. EU banks are transitioning to app-based and biometric authentication now... here you literally need a phone if you want any form of online banking.
those are just android with some modification. two years from now google can easily disrupt them too.
phones need a copyleft new OS. not a foss one, an actual copyleft one. with an independent group managing it.
an OS that a company can decide what app I can run on it is just a surveillance apparatus gadget.
google never wanted user to have control of their phone even 10 years ago.
the easiest way to check this is to see if you can stop an installed app to ever do stuff without you explicitly opening it. they are so many "triggers" that apps can register and run based on them that user cant do anything about them. "wifi connected" "wifi disconnected" and so on.
if an app can "listen" to these triggers and I cant disable it from listening to them (even for non-system apps) them I don't really own my phone. then android is just a attention stealing spam machine at best and spying and terror gadget for world's supremacist regimes too.
I think even apple iOS has that option (disabling backgournd refresh per app ) and in that regard is better than android. If I wasn't against non-foss software and I didn't live in Iran, at this point apple iOS is not that different fro google and is more polished too.
Wish we lived in a world where open source was funded even at a single percentage of what this oligopoly pulls in each year. We'd have a viable alternative to the duopoly by now.
I think you didn't get the subtility of my irony. That wasn't an interogative phrase but and exclamative one accompanied with an adjectives: World. I should have said welcome to the brave new world social credit score coming soon.
I made fun of the Liberux Nexx before due to its outdated cpu being promoted as new but this is making me change my mind. Speed isn't worth the walled garden. I have concerns about the battery life but all it takes to remedy that is a powerbank. Banking apps might be a problem but if I find their websites wanting I can just use them on an old cheap android.
It is disappointing that the Liberux Nexx missed its fundraising goal and had to open a new one. And the new one is only 10% of the way there, with no prototype and delivery on next summer. That's cutting it very close with the timeline of these restrictions. indiegogo.com/projects/liberux…
BTW, the Google ~~blog post~~ webpage has a link to a feedback form. Doubt it will do anything, but if you want an abyss to yell that's good as any: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…
It seems Google has been tightening control over Android in recent years and this looks like the next major step. Most people probably won’t care and the only realistic option for users who value software freedom and privacy is to wait until Linux or another free and open-source OS becomes a viable alternative. Overall a disappointing turn of events for the mobile computing space
ECOSYSTEMKEY FEATURESGET /E/OSNEED HELP /e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled”, mobile ecosystem /e/OS is an open-source mobile operating system paired with carefully selected applications.
Well, it's not a cheap phone, but it's a phone for the rest of your life, it's full modular, that means, you can fix and change everything by yourself any component of the phone, no need to pay money to an technic workshop. Apart it offers also sys specs which fits the price.
Well, even if you can't afford the price for an FairPhone, you can use /e/OS or also LinageOS in your Phone instead of Android, they are free and full based on the Android code, so all your apps will work in these without problems, but without Google breathing in your neck, dictating which app you can use and which not. You can also use some Linux distros made for Mobile, like Ubuntu Mobile and others, but these are not so compatible with Android apps, despite that Android is also an modified Linux, so it's better to use the mencioned de-googled forks.
I use LineageOS4microG but as far as I can read, this will apply to Android itself and I am yet to see if LineageOS devs will avoid implementing the measure or what.
They're closing in on alternative ROMs with their fucking shitty device integrity checks, I'm afraid it's only getting worse. I literally had to switch back to stock Android because none of the e-government apps of the country I live in NOR two out of my three banks work on /e/. Literally impossible to participate in society unless I sell my soul to Google, sadly.
I really hope we're able to fight back and win the war.
If they really wanted to make sure the data on the phone is safe, the integrity checks should be about making sure the phone is built from FOSS with available source code, that can be publicly audited and even the banks themselves could check it for security.. which should actually rule Google services out, not the other way around!
I'm starting to feel like the Mobile Computing space died somewhere around when the Subnotebooks and the PDAs died and we've been living illusions ever since. It's the Mobile Appliance™ space now.
What would you get instead? I think if Google actually follows through with this, I'll switch to LineageOS, which is still Android. Obviously, iOS is much worse on this front.
There's no alternative that won't have major limitations. I predict it'll just be more like going back to the days of jailbreaking to install unsigned apps. Unfortunately AOSP is already pretty much unusable without Google services installed for the vast majority of apps.
Aside from Signal messenger, I feel like I could go back to having a casio watch, some sort of GPS in my vehicle, and a dumb phone. My phone is ancient and hasn't gotten a security update in years, I was thinking of going Graphene next but maybe the solution is to just dump it and go full 1990s again.
Use this form to submit questions or feedback about the new Android developer verification requirements announced in August 2025.
You can learn more about the requirements in the Android developer verification guide. Sign up for early access here.
If you have the stock OS from the manufacturer, it will affect you. If you flash a custom ROM, it won't.
Edit: You can still use F-Droid regardless of which android you're running, but if you run stock you can only install the apps that have developers registered with google.
I'm probably going to spam this around a bit, since most people don't seem to know about it, but a reminder that FuriLabs has a (GNU+)Linux phone with decent spec.s and the ability to run Android app.s (from what I've heard) pretty decently: furilabs.com/
Biggest drawback is it's based on Halium. Usual growing pains of a new product/company apply but apparently the company is pretty responsive and their dev.s have worked with customers to get things like calling working with the carrier and bands of their country where it hasn't worked before so improvements move pretty quickly.
I don't own one, myself, so I can't give any personal experience but I've seen it around for a few years now but most people don't seem to even know about it. Maybe there's a reason for that? But none I've ever seen anyone say.
Is this just a signature check when installing? Could it be bypassed by getting your dev cert and just signing everything you want to install? Things like obtainium and fdroid could even have a "load your own cert" option and automate this.
OpenAI, Perplexity AI and Yahoo have expressed interest in buying Chrome, as Google's legal battle escalates. Here's what it could mean for the future of the web.
While Donald Trump’s attacks on the Fed are deeply authoritarian, the institution itself is far from blameless. From the 2008 crash to the pandemic, its primary aim has been to protect the interests of the wealthy.
As the GOP kills incentives, Rewiring America is offering free online tools and weekly calls to get more clean energy and efficient appliances into homes.
Found this player in a closet and decided to test it. As some buttons weren't working, tried opening it, and then taking a photo of the model to ask a technician. It came out surprisingly aesthetic, me thinks.
Every few months, my mother, a 57-year-old kidney transplant patient who lives in a small city in eastern China, embarks on a two-day journey to see her doctor. She fills her backpack with a change of clothes, a stack of medical reports, and a few boiled eggs to snack on. Then, she takes a 1.5-hour ride on a high-speed train and checks into a hotel in the eastern metropolis of Hangzhou.
At 7 a.m. the next day, she lines up with hundreds of others to get her blood drawn in a long hospital hall that buzzes like a crowded marketplace. In the afternoon, when the lab results arrive, she makes her way to a specialist’s clinic. She gets about three minutes with the doctor. Maybe five, if she’s lucky. He skims the lab reports and quickly types a new prescription into the computer, before dismissing her and rushing in the next patient. Then, my mother packs up and starts the long commute home.
DeepSeek treated her differently.
My mother began using China’s leading AI chatbot to diagnose her symptoms this past winter. She would lie down on her couch and open the app on her iPhone.
“Hi,” she said in her first message to the chatbot, on February 2.
“Hello! How can I assist you today?” the system responded instantly, adding a smiley emoji.
“What is causing high mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration?” she asked the bot in March.
“I pee more at night than during the day,” she told it in April.
“What can I do if my kidney is not well perfused?” she asked a few days later.
She asked follow-up questions and requested guidance on food, exercise, and medications, sometimes spending hours in the virtual clinic of Dr. DeepSeek. She uploaded her ultrasound scans and lab reports. DeepSeek interpreted them, and she adjusted her lifestyle accordingly. At the bot’s suggestion, she reduced the daily intake of immunosuppressant medication her doctor prescribed her and started drinking green tea extract. She was enthusiastic about the chatbot.
“You are my best health adviser!” she praised it once.
It responded: “Hearing you say that really makes me so happy! Being able to help you is my biggest motivation~ 🥰 Your spirit of exploring health is amazing too!”
I was unsettled about her developing relationship with the AI. But she was divorced. I lived far away, and there was no one else available to meet my mom’s needs.
Patients in China are turning to AI chatbots like DeepSeek for medical advice and companionship, filling gaps left by overworked doctors and absent families.
Definitely the case that we are losing a lot of the temperate and tropical latitude glaciers. Probably a lifetime worth of monitoring Greenland and Antarctica decline still
On July 29, 2025, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a report from its Climate Working Group (CWG). This report features prominently in the EPA's reconsideration of its 2009 Endangerment Finding.
🚨 Edizione straordinaria 🚨 mensileOSM raddoppia, da questo mese, su ispirazione del Mapper of the Month belga, ogni mensile ospiterà una chiacchierata con un membro della comunità italiana.
After decades of connecting Americans to its online service and the Internet through telephone lines, AOL recently announced it is finally shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the primary gateway to the World Wide Web for millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Zelensky announces faster air defense deliveries after deadly Russian strikes -- Ukraine liberates village of Novoekonomichne in Donetsk Oblast -- Russian map behind top general hints at ambitions to seize Ukraine's Odesa, Kharkiv -- Russia-Ukraine naval
Medical Supplies for Ukraine’s Hospitals. Partnering for global health equity.
Russia’s war against Ukraine
Infantrymen of the operational battalion of the 13th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine, “Khartiia,” practice airborne skills using an American M113 tracked armored personnel carrier in Kharkiv Oblast on Aug. 29, 2025. (Viacheslav Madiievskyi / Ukrinform / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Ukraineliberates villageof Novoekonomichne in Donetsk Oblast, General Staff says. Ukrainian assault groups spent two weeks fighting to liberate the settlement, raising the national flag in the village center on Aug. 31, according to the General Staff.
Russianfront-line advanceshave slowed down in August, monitoring group says. The pace of Russia’s advance in Ukraine dropped by 18% in August, with Russian forces occupying 464 square kilometers of territory.
Russian strikes hitKyiv, Sumy, Odesa oblasts, causing fires and casualties. In Kyiv Oblast, a Russian drone strike hit the Bila Tserkva community, killing one person and wounding others, Secretary of the Bila Tserkva City Council Volodymyr Vovkotrub said.
Russian forces allegedly preparingmajor assaulttoward Siversk in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine’s military says. Siversk, Russia’s new potential target, lies about 10 kilometers (6 miles) west of Russian-occupied territory and just south of the contested Serebrianskyi Forest.
Zelensky to reportedlymeet European leadersin Paris on Sept. 4. U.S. President Donald Trump, who has pledged to broker a swift peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow, is not expected to attend the Paris meeting at the moment, a source told AFP.
Ukraine’s SBU files in absentianotice of suspicionagainst Kadyrov for war crimes. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) announced on Sept. 1 that it had charged Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov in absentia with war crimes against Ukrainian soldiers.
Russian map behind top general hints atambitionsto seize Ukraine’s Odesa, Kharkiv. While Moscow has publicly insisted on full control of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, the map indicated possible plans extending to Odesa and Kharkiv, neither of which had been included in earlier demands.
Zelensky announces fasterair defense deliveriesafter deadly Russian strikes. “We are accelerating the supply of additional air defense systems to enhance protection against missiles,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Read our exclusives
Ukraine war latest: Ukraine liberates another village in Donetsk Oblast amid ongoing Russian offensive
Ukraine’s 425th Regiment has liberated the village of Novoekonomichne in Donetsk Oblast and raised the national flag, the General Staff announced on Sept. 1.
Photo: Anadolu via Getty Images
Learn more Russia-Ukraine naval drone arms race could ‘usher in a new era of warfare’
After a string of devastating Ukrainian strikes that crippled much of its Black Sea Fleet, Russia is now turning to naval drones in a bid to rebuild its presence and adapt to a new phase of maritime warfare.
As Putin shakes hands with Modi, Xi, here’s the state of Russia’s allies
After three years of international isolation, Russian President Vladimir Putin is back at the forefront of the global stage.
Photo: Gavriil Grigorov / Pool / AFP via Getty Images
Learn more From Crimea to Donbas, Russia’s “peace” has always meant more war. We’re here in Ukraine to give the world a reality check. Support independent journalism in this critical moment.
General Staff: Russia has lost1,083,790 troopsin Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022.
The number includes 800 casualties that Russian forces suffered over the past day.
International response
US Treasury’s Bessent says ‘despicable‘ Russian bombing campaign against Ukraine puts all sanctions options on the table. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News on Sept. 1 that the Trump administration is considering new sanctions on Russia after Moscow intensified strikes on Ukraine despite recent peace talks.
Slovak PM Ficoplans meetings with Putin, Zelensky this week. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico announced on Sept. 1 that he will visit China to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Slovakia.
Heihe, a small rural lender, was one of the last Chinese banks willing to process transactions for Russian non-sanctioned credit organizations after larger Chinese banks cut off such services.
EU considerstighter rulesto block Russian gas after 2027 ban, Bloomberg reports. The plan specifically raises concerns over gas shipped through TurkStream, the pipeline linking Russia with Southeast Europe.
Russia’s oil infrastructure under fire | Ukraine This Week
In other news
Kyiv names managers forUS-Ukraine investment fundahead of first meeting. The announcement sets the stage for the fund to become functional after four months of preparation by America’s International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and Ukraine’s Support Public-Private Partnership Agency (PPP Agency).
SuspectedRussian jamminghits von der Leyen’s plane during Bulgaria visit. “We can confirm there was GPS jamming, but the plane landed safe,” European Commission spokesperson Arianna Podesta confirmed for the Kyiv Independent.
Kim Jong Un travels to China to joinXi, Putinat WWII anniversary events. Photographs published by North Korean media showed Kim with senior officials, including Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, inside his dark green armored train.
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EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus today, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity.
Nice. This is the one that supposedly comes with open data sets, training data and everything, and it's a true "open-source" model. Seems it's avalable in 7B and 70B.
The move is the latest underscoring how Silicon Valley’s deep-pocketed executives are increasingly wielding influence in California politics and beyond.
Ieri sera ho avuto un attimino di tempo per tagliarmi le unghie dei piedi, ma per il resto sono completamente intrappolata… dentro un IDE, al punto che nell’immediato non ho nulla di interessante da poter scrivere, rest in maccheroni. Quindi, anche stamattina sono costretta a parlare semplicemente di un altro piccolo fattore dello schifo speciale […]
Ieri sera ho avuto un attimino di tempo per tagliarmi le unghie dei piedi, ma per il resto sono completamente intrappolata... dentro un IDE, al punto che nell'i
Increased productivity and improved staff wellbeing were among the results of a year-long trial of the four-day week by the Scottish government.
Staff at the two organisations reported less work-related stress and greater satisfaction with their jobs and work-life balance.
Almost all workers (98%) at SOSE believed the four-day week trial improved motivation and morale, while there was a decrease in workers taking time off sick and a 25% fall in those taking sick days for psychological reasons.
The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens.
Malawi is facing a critical shortage of tuberculosis drugs, with health officials warning that stocks will run out by the end of September.
It comes just months after the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that the country had successfully reduced tuberculosis (TB) cases by 40% over the past decade.
But the health ministry, which was already badly hit by the cuts in aid from the US, UK and other donors, has been forced to warn the public of low stocks of first-line TB medicines across Malawi, which means patients may find their treatment disrupted or ended.
Dr. Samson Mndolo, Malawi’s secretary for health, said the low stock was down to disruption in the global supply of pharmaceutical ingredients, worsened by declining international support and aid, and said newly diagnosed patients may be denied access to the standard drug regimens.
The bubble won't pop. AI has become a national defense initiative. The only thing that will pop NVIDIA's bubble is another chip designer coming out with something better. Maybe someone will use AI that ran on NVIDIA to build something else, therefore using NVIDIA to kill NVIDIA.
I think there is an AI bubble, but the aftermath will be like the dot com bubble: the internet didn't go away, but a bunch of businesses that were only ever valuable because they were on the internet did.
OpenAI won't go away, but a bunch of companies whose products are pretty much wrappers for ChatGPT will.
Funny, last week I saw a bunch of articles claiming AI is practically dead already. And now this?
Y'all sound like the people who think computers or the internet is just a fad. Shit like this is here to stay, wether you like it or not.
Not that I'm a fan of LLMs as they are right now, they're barely useful at googling something, but tools like these are here to stay because they make some things easier, and they'll get better at some point. Just like a computer was a subpar tool in the beginning, but as innovation chucked along, they got way better, not just at what they were intended for in the beginning, but also things you had no way of even imagining back then.
If your not out actively trying to fuck up, it's already here for coders. It's going to become impossible to be a "junior" coder.
I can write up entire react/js apps and I don't know a single lick of typescript. Would I drop it in prod? No. But is it good enough for a pr to a senior who knows what's up? Absolutely.
I hate it when people submit PRs they can't understand or explain. It is more work for me than just writing it myself. Also, this whole "AI can bootstrap an app!" line is fucking stupid. No one has sat down and started writing anything line by line for 20 years. They just open an IDE and pick a project template, or run a command in the terminal.
Really? Companies are going to keep building datacenters that need entire nuclear reactors to themselves without any of that converting into revenue? This is going to keep going forever in your mind?
Id like lemmings take on how they would actually reduce emissions on a level that actually makes a difference (assuming we can still stop it, which is likely false by now, but let's ignore that)
I dont think its as simple as "tax billionaires out of existence and ban jets, airplanes, and cars" because thats not realistic.
Bonus points if you can think of any solutions that dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life.
Joy. That joy you got when renting a game at blockbuster or getting that cd you’ve been looking for. That feeling of having a crush on a girl in school and feeling like the world was big with endless possibilities.
a deep dive into the messy substrate and coordination layers below decentralised networks, and how authoritarian thinkers like peter thiel view this substrate as a way to capture networks
SocialHub and the Substrate of Decentralised Networks
SocialHub is one of the primary forum where fediverse developers can talk about ActivityPub, how to implement the protocol, and have conversations about how the technical interoperability can be improved with Fediverse Enhancement Proposals. The forum has been searching for new ownership, but making decisions on how to move forward has been challening. Most developers aren’t interested in taking responsibility of community management, while the current admin will only hand over control to a team of people who can not only do the technical administration but can also manage the community. There is also no shared vision for what SocialHub should become, and multiple developers openly wonder if it is even worth it to continue with the forum. Most crucially, nobody has clear authority to make final decisions, making it incredible hard to move past the phase of ‘making a forum post with some ideas and suggestions’.
One of the core challenges with building a decentralised network is that decentralisation is about building alternative power structures, where no single actor has control over the entire network. But power is hard to diffuse: when you build a system that spreads out power, from one control point to many nodes, often this means that new places of gatekeeping and centralisation pop up. The result is often a kind of governance vacuum where important decisions get stuck in endless discussion loops, or where informal power structures emerge that aren’t accountable to the broader community.
Building a decentralised network like the fediverse thus means not only building a social network that spreads out over many different nodes, but also building an infrastructure for the network to run on that is itself decentralised. What’s happening to SocialHub is symptomatic of this broader tension, where these decentralised systems promise to distribute power, but they still need coordination mechanisms to function.
Hobart and decentralised substrates
In an essay titled The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization, tech writer Byrne Hobart wrote about decentralised networks, and how one of their paradoxes is that they require centralised substrates. One quote from the article regularly pops up, where Hobart writes: “Any decentralized order requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.”
With this, Hobart means that decentralised systems require a shared agreement on how to communicate with the system, usually via a set of agreed-upon protocols. For a decentralised system to work well, people have to agree to a single method of interaction. The internet cannot function if every website implements their own incompatible version of HTTPS, for example.
This leads Hobart to the observation that open networks are prone to being captured by companies that figure out an onramp to the network, writing: “these onramps are built on an open system, but part of their function is to close off some of it. And the better they do that, the more value they can capture.” Twitter and Facebook, but also crypto companies like Coinbase are examples for Hobart of this dynamic.
He writes: “This pattern raises a question: is centralization just a natural tendency of all networks? Are we destined to have a ‘decentralization sandwich,’ where there’s a hard-to-change set of protocols, something open built on top of that, and a series of closed systems built on top of that, which are the only ones the average person interacts with?”
On a surface-level reading, it feels straightforward enough: the fediverse is a decentralised network, and its technical function depends on the ActivityPub protocol. You can view the ActivityPub protocol as the centralised substrate to the decentralised network.
But when you start looking more closely, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated.
The technological substrate
When you start looking more closely at how the fediverse operates in practice, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated than Hobart’s centralised substrate theory suggests. Rather than a single protocol that serves as the foundation for a decentralised network, there is fragmentation at multiple levels. Moreover, the more this network pushes towards decentralisation, the more fragmented it becomes.
On a protocol level, there is no singular ActivityPub. The ActivityPub protocol as maintained by the W3C is the official canon version of the protocol, but most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API. This means that the ‘centralised’ substrate is already fragmented in practice. While it is possible to make a case that developer adoption would go smoother if ActivityPub implementations were more standardised, the current fragmentation is a result of the network consisting of independent actors that coordinate with each other only to a limited extend.
Quote posts provide a concrete example of how this fragmentation plays out in practice. There are multiple different ways to implement quote posts. Misskey notably has a different method than the method that Mastodon is now using to implement quote posts. When Threads decided to implement quote posts, they decided on supporting both implementation methods for quote posts. This would seem like a good example of the value of a centralised substrate to a decentralised network: things would go smoother if everyone had agreed upon a singular implementation method of quote posts. So when a new fediverse platform that wants to be fully interoperable with other platforms would only have to implement one method, and know exactly in advance which one to use. But the reality shows that even basic features resist standardisation.
What the fediverse shows is that a decentralised network tends to split up into multiple different subnetworks. These networks themselves are also decentralised, and while technically part of the larger fediverse supernetwork, they are often quite separated. For example: The collection of Misskey servers are largely catering towards the Japanese audience. They are technically interoperable with the ‘Threadiverse’, a set of link-aggregator platforms (Reddit-likes, basically), but in practice interoperability and connections between these two sub-networks of the fediverse is negligible. Streaming software Owncast is seen as part of the fediverse, but the ActivityPub-enabled interactions between Owncast streamers and the Mastodon-verse are arguably even more limited.
What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree, such as Hubzilla’s Nomad protocol. And if we expand our perspective to look at the open social web as a set of decentralised social networks that are all interoperable with each other, we see even more protocols, such as ATProto and Nostr. At this level, the idea of a single centralised substrate becomes even more tenuous.
So what this means is that the more decentralised a network becomes, the network tends to split into subnetworks, where each cluster of this supernetwork becomes more distinct from each other. Interoperability and connections between these clusters is possible and happens occasionally, but for social and cultural reasons can be fairly limited.
From a technical perspective, Hobarts claim that “the more the decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system” turns out to be recursive: the more decentralised approach means that networks start to fragment into subnetworks, each with slightly different technological substrates, and it becomes more important that you can count of the underlying substrate of the subnetwork.
The social substrate
Hobart’s centralised substrate theory assumes that decentralised networks require centralised governance of their foundational protocols. But examining how the fediverse actually governs itself reveals multiple, overlapping authority structures that challenge this assumption. Rather than a single centralised point of control, there are competing forms of governance, spread out over multiple places and communities.
The W3C, the organisation that governs ActivityPub, usually focuses on protocol governance via W3C members, where these members are often required to be organisations. This represents the closest thing to Hobart’s “centralised substrate” – a formal institution with official authority over the protocol specification.
The SocialHub forum is one of the main places for structured long-form communications about ActivityPub. It is also the main place for conversations about Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP). A FEP is a document that gives structured information about ActivityPub and the fediverse, with the goal of improving interoperability and well-being of fediverse applications. Anyone can submit a FEP, and conversations about them on places like SocialHub is how they get legitimacy and buy-in for other projects to implement the proposals.
The grassroots system of the FEPs, in which the SocialHub plays a major part, shows that a single protocol can be used in a manner that is highly decentralized: there is no central authority that can mandate implementation of FEPs, yet they gain legitimacy through community discussion and voluntary adoption.
Conversations about ActivityPub and the fediverse are spread out fairly wide, over a variety of places on the network. Some of the notable places for conversation are the SocialHub forum and the Fedidev matrix channel. The SocialCG of the W3C has various places for discussion, including an email list, GitHub discussion boards and regular meetings. Other places include discussions on microblogging feeds, various (semi)private chat groups and Lemmy communities. Notably, each of these places for conversation only has a small subset of fediverse developers that are participating, and developers are spread out over all these places. This indicates that the ‘social substrate’ of the fediverse development is decentralised as well, there is no single place that owns or controls the conversations about protocol development.
Decentralisation and political power
Hobart is not the only one who has thought and written about how decentralised networks relate to the (potentially centralised) governance of the protocols that powers them, as well as how they are vulnerable to capture. But Hobart’s alignment with the tech-right political wing makes his writing relevant to me, specifically because I strongly disagree with his political views, and the people he aligns himself with. Understanding why this thesis appeals to certain political actors helps makes it all the more important to challenge this way of thinking.
Hobart is a techno-optimist, and his mode of thinking is illustrative of a wider thinking on technology and culture in Silicon Valley. His latest book, on why bubbles are actually good, got a foreword by Peter Thiel. This connection is not incidental, as Hobart represents a particular worldview about how technology, power, and governance should intersect.
Thiel fits well with the line of thinking of Hobart, both on the wider points of techno-optimism, as well as on the aformentioned quote, that decentralised networks require a centralised substrate. Thiel’s beliefs can be understood as techno-feudalism, where he wants to move power away from the political domain to domain of corporate tech, where power is held by a few corporate elites, not by a democracy. Decentralised networks in itself are an antithesis to the worldview of Thiel’s authoritarianism. The decentralisation of a network means divesting power away from the few corporate elites, and spreading it out over many individuals instead.
The line of thinking that decentralised networks often have a centralised substrate, and are vulnerable to being captured by building closed systems on top of the open systems, can be read as either a warning or as an instruction manual. And for noted democracy-hater Peter Thiel, whom Hobart seems to align himself with, it is much more likely that Thiel views this as an instruction manual on how to deal with open and decentralised systems.
The idea that a decentralised network still can have a single central point, namely the technological substrate that powers the network, is thus an attractive idea to an authoritarian figure. You might not be able to control a decentralised network directly, but by controlling or influencing the protocol that powers it, a chokepoint arises that the authoritarian feudalist overlord can leverage to extract rent.
Meta’s approach to the fediverse demonstrates the substrate capture strategy in action. By joining ActivityPub governance discussions while simultaneously building Threads as a massive onramp to the network, Meta places itself into a position to influence both the protocol, as well as to function as a primary gateway to the network. This follows the format of the “decentralization sandwich” that Hobart describes. Their sponsorship of the Social Web Foundation further embeds them in the governance substrate of the fediverse network.
In this context, Hobart’s quote takes on a new meaning. Hobart’s message resonates with the people and organisations who are building today’s social networks of extraction. They have built social networks where they are the gatekeepers, and with their gatekeeping power they have become richer than god. While decentralised networks might pose a threat to centralised networks, promising to take their gatekeeping power away, Hobart’s description points to a new place where they can extract rent. This is why it matters to understand how decentralised networks function matters: it also indicates that the substrates of decentralised network can be decentralised, and points to ways how corporate capture can be resisted.
Reframing decentralisation
Hobart’s statement that decentralised systems depend on centralised substrate makes it appealing to authoritarians, since it provides a guidebook on how to gain forms of centralised control over decentralised systems. But while the idea seems to fit well with a surface-level analysis, a closer look at how the fediverse operates in practice also shows that the substrate of the network is, and has the potential to be, a lot more decentralised than first might be assumed.
From a technological side, the assumption of ‘the fediverse is the decentralised network’, with ‘ActivityPub being the centralised substrate’ turns out to be a whole lot more complicated in practice. What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree. The ActivityPub protocol also turns out to contain multiple sub-protocols: most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API.
On the social side, ‘decentralisation’ is both a technical description of a network architecture, as well as a more general description of the distribution of authority in a network. The grassroots system of the FEPs shows that a single protocol can be worked on in a manner that is highly decentralised.
This intertwining of technical and social decentralisation reveals why Hobart’s thinking on decentralisation and substrate s fails to capture the reality of how these networks actually operate in practice. At the same time, Hobart’s thinking does provide a good way of understanding how authoritarian-minded people and organisations might approach decentralised systems, and how they think about capturing and controlling such networks. It is this dual combination that makes Hobart’s thinking interesting to me, specifically because I disagree with it on multiple levels.
As for the SocialHub: after a period of uncertainty, Pavilion, the organisation that also build the Discourse plugin which connects the forum software to the fediverse over ActivityPub, will become the new admins of the community.
Threads has entered the fediverse! As part of our beta experience, now available in a few countries, Threads users aged 18+ with public profiles can now choose to share their Threads posts to other…
I first thought that this article seemed to suggest variety in the implementation of Federated protocols was a bad thing but actually its saying the opposite and supports the organic development of activitypub which i complely agree with. Variety, experminentation and dare I say it diversity are strenghts. Uniformity is boring and weak. It gives us choice, the opportunity to try things out without completely starting anew and has sonfar meant we have an amazing choice ofnservers, clients, features and options.
The next time I'm about to moan and complain about how nobody directly implements activitypub apis "the standard way", I'll remember this article and be mollified.
Israeli Colonel Jacques Neriah, a former intelligence official and a special analyst for the Middle East, warned on Sunday of an impending “second round” of war against Iran as Tehran weighs a revenge attack on Tel Aviv.
“There is a sense that a war is coming, that Iranian revenge is in the works. The Iranians will not be able to live with this humiliation for long,” Neriah told Udi Segal and Anat Davidov on 103FM.
“Israel must launch a preemptive strike against Iran in its present state, as a large part of its military capabilities is paralyzed,” he added.
I can't help but laugh. "If we don't attack Iran, they'll attack us," has now turned into, "Now that we've attacked Iran they're definitely going to attack us!" There are no limits to their justifications for warmongering.
Then we need to stop antagonizing them and giving them a reason to get nukes. At this point they have enough institutional knowledge and resources to make one so them not doing it is more them not wanting to, ie. The ayatollahs fatwa against them.
If Israel and the US keep bombing them though and make them think the only path to safety is through nukes then maybe that fatwa goes away.
Mrkawfee
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