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Cake day: 15. kesäkuuta 2023

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  • I’d love to see that wonderful interoperability we were all promised. It should be possible to have one identity/account that’s connected to multiple services. I should be able to log in once, post some thoughts on Mastodon, share a photo on Pixelfed, and comment on a PeerTube video. Some services have tried to combine various formats with a little success, but it has been very limited, and generally broken.


  • Not the one you’re replying to, but I’d generally agree.

    If someone wants to post on Peertube, they basically either have to have the time, funding, and know-how to self-host, or arrive with an established audience. Someone with great creative talent does not necessarily want to run an expensive and complicated software project. Someone who has an established audience has very little incentive to jump to federation.

    PeerTube is improving slowly. There are now a few instances with open registration, which could mean more fertile ground for good content. We shall see.


  • Absolutely. The organizations that have the most to gain and the most capability to manage instances are

    • local governments,
    • news publishers/journalists, and
    • Universities

    These are groups that have unique publishing and legal mandates that already have the IT departments and adequate sway to compel users. They already host email and websites, and regularly come into conflict with corporate messaging platforms.


  • OpenStreetMap is frankly about as good as a crowdsourced map can possibly be.

    And it’s always improving. Mobile apps like CoMaps let you add business information. There are also apps like Every Door, MapComplete, or SCEE, which particularly emphasize updating OSM on the go.

    There are apps for adding photos, such as Mapilary or Panoramax, which are not built into OSM, but built on top of it.

    There have been a few attempts at FOSS review projects, like lib.reviews or mangrove.reviews, although it is tricky to reach critical mass.

    Each of these are huge organizational challenges and data management challenges on their own. Without selling ads or mining data, it’s hard for me to imagine a single project that does evey part and does it well.








  • There is a conflict between confidentiality and mandatory reporting. The ideal of confidentiality is that anything you say in private that you don’t want recorded or repeated should be kept private. The ideal of mandatory reporting is that if anyone finds out about a crime a person has committed, it should be reported for the sake of justice.

    The solution is that we limit both of them in different situations. Confidentiality is generally limited to those who have a crucial and necessary role in keeping information confidential. In other words, those positions or professions that are deemed essential by society and which require confidentiality to function properly. That’s lawyers, medical professionals, and in some cases, religious professionals.

    Mandatory reporting is generally limited to those who are in a position that allows access to vulnerable individuals. That’s teachers, social workers, police officers, and sometimes also medical professionals or religious professionals.

    Because those include some of the same categories, the law gets very specific and sometimes even contradictory in different jurisdictions.



  • I’m not sure of the details about the situation in Iran, but from my understanding, it seems that it would be much safer to set up a server outside the country that’s run by you and others inside the country. It’s fairly easy to set up virtual private servers, although you may need to arrange payment outside the country.

    That would be much safer than hosting it with the physical infrastructure inside your borders. If you’re hosting the physical infrastructure, it makes it much easier to locate. If the server is not in Iran, then it may be difficult or impossible for the government to seize it and access the contents.

    There are people on this site who are far more expert than I when it comes to network security. Follow their feedback and you may even find someone willing to partner with you to help set it up.