dontblink

OK I'm getting a flip phone

Xmpp, IRC, Matrix, all great decentralized alternatives, but good luck convincing people in contacting you on Xmpp...

This problem is a problem because it's a social tendency, not because we don't have alternatives.. Very sadly...

The AI thing is very cool, I think something like that exists, agentic browsers.

But I am scared this would be just the next abstraction, of this chains of abstractions.. Corporations are already using AI to profile you even further, the internet will definitely adapt under this pressure, and I believe that in a few years agentic browsers will just become the new norm.

Search engine at first were more objective, now people have learnt to play the game of SEO to attract views, search engines have started to show targeted results, and stuff like Searx came out, or Yaci, claiming to get back a more objective web. There always have been ways to filter out or to try being more objective, but I think the evidence have shown that as a social momentum, this stuff doesn't work.

Yeah Yaci (self hosted crawler) is a great project, but it's stagnant, and the prevalence is still a shitty google or bing searche engine, and this is true for other aspects of the web.

Social media? There were more independent social medias while centralized stuff was rampant, now there's the fediverse and decentralization. Which is super super beautiful, but most people are just unaware. The social momentum is not saying that we are going towards a world where every little server will be connected to other little servers and decide in which parts integrate one another, that would be great, and I'd love to see that, but it's simply not where we are currently going as a society.

Now it's the turn of AI, it can be a helpful tool for a while to avoid it all, stuff like agentic browsers can give us some freedom for a while when they will be actually usable and reliable, but in that time the web will have evolved again and pheraps we'll need to take into account new ways to defend ourselves or to look through the bushes.

It's a never ending hide and seek unless something really big changes. Linux, free software, open source is all great, but we are continuously pushed towarbalance mainstream in some way or another. And most people live the mainstream, not in the alternative, despite the alternative being objectively better. It is just unsupported by our culture.

It's an abstraction built on another abstraction built on another abstraction.. And the web is just the most clear example of that, I mean the very languages in which the web is built are an example itself: JS (which already is high level)>React>Next. You see? Abstraction on abstraction.

But when will we stop to play games and just stay in the present? Focusing on the core of things?

Do we strive to get to a sort of technological ecstatic point in which all will actually be clear? A sort of technological philosopher stone? And the way to do that is through collection of loads and loads of human data?

My perspective on this is quite pessimistic, because it's a form of cruel optimism to say that one can solve this problem individually. To change this would require a coordination of consumers, programmers and people revolving around all things of the internet to fix it, unless we assume that AI is somehow sentient and can be better at solving our problems than we do, which I do not exclude: faster and better at looking and processing novelty than we are.

But that will mean that us, as humans, will just be obsolete.

I always come to the conclusion that the web maybe it's not worth getting used as it is right now, and maybe to feel good we should stop trying to relate to machines and instead just living our own biological needs.. Focusing on beings which we can understand better.. Living in the present.. And stop running, whether it means running away, or towards. Rejecting culture and just staying in our own spaces, cultivating simplicity and balance.

Sorry for the philosophycal rant lmao, I guess this was just more than a technical problem for me lmao, but thanks for your answer!

Use a reverse proxy to proxy everything through https, then you can install how many services you want. Caddy is super simple, you can reverse proxy with just 1 line.

For calendar and contacts (caldav, cardav) Baikal is extremely easy to install and use. And pretty minimal.

Slowly switch to Linux devices, or dumb phone, and learning to adapt happily living without some features, but also without control and censorship :)

As far as I knew reverse proxies could only reverse proxy stuff coming in from 443 or 80, I didn't know they could listen other ports as well!

Main reason why I was using a reverse proxy at first is because I had everything behind cloudflare, and cloudflare can only proxy and give you an SSL encryption for stuff that goes through 443, so I could make Caddy listen to 443 and then forward to interested ports.

But this leaves out everything that needs to go in some other places than 443, and requires its own standalone ssl certificate, which is a bit cumbersome. Pheraps these can be proxied with other proxies than cloudflare, hopefully giving SSL to everything..

I'm not sure I understood the upstream ssh thing, what do you actually do?

Honestly, with Fdroid and many other open source projects at risk after Google's last madness, I wouldn't take anything Android anymore (nor Apple of course).

My next phone will either be a dumbphone or a Linux phone.

Self hosting IS hard, don't beat yourself too much because of it.. After all you're trying to serve services for yourself that are usually served by companies with thousands of employees.

A server requires knowledge, maintainance and time, it's okay to feel frustrated sometimes.

Can we still load custom roms? It's been a while since my last install of Lineage OS.

If that's not an option either, well, Linux phones I'm coming!

I don't know if I like what fairphone is doing, is not a lot ago the new fairphone 5 came out.. If they plan to support a phone for 10 years, what's the point in releasing another model...?

I think essentially I would like to achieve something like this

Thank you for your answer!

Yes I've considered using Hugo data sources, but handling all events in one single data file is not really a good way to manage data because Hugo can't programmatically generate content pages from a single data file sadly.. Also again, even if I make a script able to do this, I don't think you can modify content when already created without handling single posts individually.

I could generate a "list of events" but not individual pages from it and not an RSS feed for posts which I would need for newsletters etc..

The thing with CSV is that I kinda lost track of where the actual updated data is, so I'm keeping that updated too, yeah I know I'm a mess.

All the stuff cited is needed for one single job essentially: contacts, newsletter, events.. Which is gathering self published and externally published events and sending them to a list of chosen emails + some integration with social medias.

I'm not a webdev and I thought I could solve this much more easily, but I think doing this correctly would involve using at least an headless CMS + something that is able to grab data from external APIs + some JS framework for building the frontend.

Or relying on a ready full CMS like Ghost or WordPress + theme and hosting on a VPS, which honestly is what I'm leaning towards..

I want to avoid JS if possible as I had terrible coding experiences with it, I know some Rust but webdev in rust is not really a good option from what I've learned.

What do you think?

Why the fuck not using mechanical ports?

I think I'm probably slowly transitioning to "the ghost" but more as a matter of digital minimalism than for privacy lmao

I think people should really read books like digital minimalism by cal Newport, stolen focus, surveillance capitalism, your brain on porn ecc to understand how social medias (but the internet in general) IS DESIGNED to be addictive, and what are the addictive traits.

Lemmy is definitely better but still holds some concepts from addictive social medias (not because of developers fault, I think they just tried mimicking popular socials, since these are born as "alternatives"). Infinite scrolling and upvotes are just two examples.

Some frontends do a great job leaving power to the user in that, like eternity, but I think a lot more consciousness should be raised on the topic and, at least in the open source / federated community there should be some guidelines on how to design social medias just as useful tools while minimizing distractions/useless/addictive parts.

It's great to be decentralized, it's great to avoid ads, profilation and targetization, but we can do better in designing really new and useful tools starting from certain principles.

No I actually prefer GNOME, but have to use KDE because I need specific features (kiosk mode), but yes I feel like Gnome is so much better integrated with its defaults apps!

When Linux phones?

(Actually usable ones)

Crypto - wall street on steroids Bitcoin - an actual alternative to the collapsing monetary economy

That doesn't take into account privacy coins like monero, which have different purposes, but most crypto is bullshit.

Glad to know xfce has a kiosk mode, I wonder if it's easier to set up than KDE or GNOME..

UFW definitely and maybe also selinux or apparmor to give internet access only to applications that need access!