rsolva

I would like to see social networks that facilitates real life, face-to-face encounters to a much larger extent that the current state of affairs. The Fediverse has the pieces to this puzzle, but I do not know of one project that combines them in the right way yet. We do have Mobilizon for events, we have Mastodon and all the other similar projects for sharing and commenting, but we need something that puts the pieces together in a new configuration.

I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.

But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!

Ban personalized advertising!

Just write up your requirements in and AGENT.md, to avoid repeating yourself. It has worked really well for me on a PHP+Apache project.

I have had the same experience when building simple websites for myself and others. I did it as a test to begin with, but it worked out so well that I have kept at it for a while. The core concept for my experiment was to have no dependencies other than PHP and a web server. Longevity is the goal, I should be able to leave a project for years and it should just keep on running.

Source code is here: https://forge.dmz.skyfritt.net/ruben/folderweb.

It is kind of a mini-framework, but really more of a core that can be expanded upon. A few simple ideas that has been codified. It is mainly a router that does very specific things with some convenient features built-in, and with the option to build plugins and templates on top of this core. The customization and freedom it enables is fantastic!

I used to worry that AI would lead to a regression toward the mean, but for this specific use case I think it can have the opposite effect. It can cause a flourish of experiments and custom-tailored solutions that enables a richer online experience. It demands a certain discipline in the way you build, to avoid making a long-term mess, but having just a little bit of experience and insight into general web development goes a long way to keep things tidy and predictable.

Have anyone else had similar experiences?

EDIT: One live site where I have built on top of FolderWeb, is https://stopplidelsen.no (Norwegian)

@criomsoneer: Check out Open Science Network (Bonfire), they are also doing interesting work in this space! https://openscience.network/

From the graphs on downdetector.com, it seems like many other services are affected too, so I guess some underlying infra has trouble?

Do not expect your rights to be honored on large platforms. They are fenced gardens regularly weeded, using algorithms with very specific preferences.

The only information outlet where we can have a reasonable expectation of freedom is the web itself, a good old websites on your own domain. Could be a txt file if you want to keep it simple ;)

GNOME generally seem to have struck a nice balance over the years. Icons has a reasonable amount of skeuomorphism without too much hyperdetailed textures, most icons has distinct shapes (not just a bunch of boxes with rounded corners).

I used to rice my linux desktop, but havefound less reason to do so the last ~5 years, and have been happy using the defaults in Fedora. I spend most of my time in a terminal, the browser and a few select GTK utilities apps, like Switcheroo, Curtail, Netsleuth etc.

Maybe it is the somewhat slower, more iterative pace of GNOME, compared to macOS an Windows, that ends up with a more balanced end result?

Woah, I'm impressed! The voice cloning also worked much better than expected! Will there be separate models for other languages? I know the National Library in Norway has done a good job curating speech datasets with many different dialects [1][2].

[1] https://data.norge.no/en/datasets/220ef03e-70e1-3465-a4af-ed...

[2] https://ai.nb.no/datasets/

What is your definition of democracy?

Centralisation generally leads to efficiency, but when pushed to far it will corrode core human values.

Democratic processes will always have to contend with the messiness of humans, and we have to find a balance. Currently I feel the consolidations in many aspect of modern society has been pushed to far. If we keep pushing, we end up in an authoritarian or fascistic state with no wiggle room for the squishy humannesses that is the pesky, but unavoidable ingredient in a vibrant and free democratic society.

For basic functionality, it is possible! https://paul.kinlan.me/adding-activity-pub-to-your-static-si...

Does it work (well) under WINE / Proton?

Having used both After Effects, Apple Motion and a bit of Blender on and off for about 20 years, I really miss a good motion graphics tool that runs well on Linux. Blender could be it, but it is currently not there.

Will definitely check out TiXL when I have some spare time, if it is possible to run under WINE!

Bonus question: How does TiXL compare to Friction? (https://friction.graphics)

This is a hard problem. Offering autonomy and ownership of data to non-techy people is HARD.

Although I'm not at all convinced Umbrel is the right answer, they seem to be on the right track. Can they empower regular people to own their data without causing havoc down the road if they run out of money and go out of business? I'm sceptical, but I do respect them for trying to tackle this head on. But having skimmed their website, they could do a better job of building trust and answer the long-term question of what happens if they fail.

I do believe this is a growing market, giving people who are fed up with BigTech a way out that does not require that you are a nerd. I am only worried people can be scared it this goes wrong. Paying a premium for rather basic hardware if the setup and software is super smooth could be perfectly acceptable to non-techies that do not at all want the hassle of maintaining a custom NAS.

I built something similar recently [0] with help from Claude Code (in Zed). It is still only a rough prototype, but I have tried it out on non-techy people for a project, and it has worked better than anything I have tried prior (Wordpress, Hugo etc).

I mount the folder with the content so they always has easy access to add and modify the website directly from the file explorer. It is quite powerful because there is not friction. You hit save, and it is live. This can off course be a drawback too, it is quicker to mess up stuff, but that is a trade off I am willing to make in 95% of the use cases I deal with.

[0] https://forge.dmz.skyfritt.net/ruben/folderweb

They offer an extension for Zed at launch, fantastic! Did not spot that when first skimming through the page.

Think I found a bug? After an hour of light use on a small project, the TUI started to lag quite heavily and became less and less responsive over time.

Ah, finally! I was checking just a few days ago if they had a Claude Code-like tool as I would much rather give money to a European effort. I'll stop my Pro subscription at Anthropic and switch over and test it out.

It is a non-profit association based in Berlin, and its very existence is a protest towards Microsoft and the other big actors in this space. And it is built on Forgejo, an open source project with a strong community around it.

Both Codeberg and sourcehut are good options when escaping the walled gardens of Big Tech :)

After reflecting on this a bit earlier this year, I came to the same conclusion; Palantir and maybe other like minded lobbying clueless politicians. It is a considerable weakness in the way laws are formed and voted on.

I get a 404, this is the correct URL:

https://blog.zorin.com/2025/11/18/test-the-upgrade-from-zori...

I have observed this too, mostly for content that is changed in a symlinked directory, but also generally. I'm on Fedora Silverblue running Zed Preview as a Flatpak. It works great in most other ways though, snappy and beautiful, but the sandboxed environment provides some additional challenges.

Yeah, I have been fighting Zed to get agents to use podman on my host, but Flatpak is sandboxed and makes it almost impossible. The ideal solution would be that Zed could use podman or docker to spin up a container where agents could run free!

Ads that could be interpreted as targeted towards children is banned in Norway. Unfortunately we have not managed to enforce this sensible law in the digital realm, where children are routinely and brutally pillaged for their habits an behaviors and shown ads based on their insecurities and fumbling step into the wider world. It is truly sickening to observe society's naïveté, and especially how big tech (and thus data harvesting) has become a mandatory part of schools now, where every child is provided with personal device at the age of 6.

> If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not against contextually relevant ads. Ads related to gardening makes sense in a magazine about gardening. There is no need to aggregate enormous amounts of personal data in such a scenario because the topic of the magazine (or webpage) is enough to give an idea of the type of readers you get.

I was talking about the current prevailing practice of collecting massive amounts of personal data, fine grained enough to make a psychological profile more detailed than what your closest family and friends could produce. Just to show you ads!

Context can be deduced from the topic of a website, no need to collect, package and sell data so intimate that it could be used against you in horrific ways by the higest bider, be it a nation state or a company.

Banning personalised ads would solve a lot of the underlying incentives that drives the attention grabbing economy today.

Increasing the age a few years for when young people are allow to make accounts on social media is not going to make a large difference in the big picture of things, and do not address the core problem that is the collection and abuse of massive amounts of personal data.

Upping the age limit a few years is a compromise that big tech can live with. Here in Norway, we've had a 13 year limit for years, but most parents have not cared so far and help their kids register at a much earlier age anyway. This is changing though, as more people realise the downsides of addictive and manipulative apps fighting desperately for our data and attention.

It is frustrating to see how unwilling we are to address the economic incentives that causes the biggest harms.

So that's why all of our municipality's digital services are down ... utter chaos at the political meeting I attended just now.

Mistral offers their OCR commercially through their API and in their Chat services, at least.

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr

You are right, but I had the creeps that sought power in mind. Internet was for sure inhabited by countless other kinds of creeps of various flavours, but none of them had such a negative impact on human civilization as a whole as the power hungry creeps. They effectively captured and curtailed the promises of the early, distributed web.

Maybe it was destined to develop the way it did, given the permissionless nature of the web, and that the ideal of an open and distributed web would be choked out at some point anyway, as a natural consequence of collective human behaviour.

And maybe, if the web could have had a few more years without the power hungry forces we now know, we would have developed a stronger immunity against such behaviour? We will never know, I guess.

Non the less, I'll forever hold a deep grudge towards the power hungry creeps for the catastrophic effects they unleashed on the world and for ruining the potential of a truly open, diverse and vibrant web. In a generation or two, I do think we will look back at the founders of Big Tech companies as creeps that harmed the world in unthinkable ways, just as we do with brutal powerful people in earlier history.

They shaped the world in countless ways, and the negatives are just now beginning to gain space in the collective consciousness.

The early internet was created and inhabited by nerds, which praticed playful creativity on interdependent networks and open protocols. Cooperation and collaboration was at the core.

Then the creeps arrived, drunk on sudden power and the promise of quick cash, and started capturing and consolidating online activity into 'platforms', or walled gardens if you will. These where void of the creative expression of the free and open web and streamlined every interaction into a very narrow and neatly defined world.

These creeps started abusing their power early on to snoop on peoples activity, pictures and conversations — which would be viewed as totally unacceptable behavior in the offline world — and went on to build the worlds most sinister and cynical manipulation machine.

Creeps are antithetical to the spirit of the early internet and the open web and they are actively working agains the ethos of open protocols and playful creativity!