I didn’t read any mention of the Public Key Directory server approach/proposal (c.f. https://soatok.blog/2025/12/15/announcing-key-transparency-fediverse/) in the post nor the two pages it links to. I think overall E2EE is important for messages, full stop, but I do hope that it won’t be as user - opaque as Signal and WhatsApp nor as rough of a user experience as how matrix was when I used it back in 2019.

Learned helplessness is an insidious foe, and one that market forces have tended to side with over the past 20 years (probably for far longer than that, but as I was a mere child back then I wouldn’t claim it with as much certainty).

It’s an “easy way” for those like you and me who have more or less already built up the know-how over countless small steps, but if you’ve never known “life” outside of these corporate surveillance playgrounds I imagine it seems very scary and deserted.

That’s great to hear!

I’m disappointed there’s no threadiverse integration.

The basic grunt work of bringing together bluesky and mastodon feeds is pretty decently done, if a bit opinionated.

I like the concept and presentation of their feed “packages”, but for most of the feeds I’ve been proposed in the app I’m not interested in the entire package. It’s nice that you can still directly follow the actors packaged into a feed from that feed’s page.

It’s very annoying that Surf wants their/my Surf account to act as the intermediary for my mastodon account. From what I can see, this means I need to exit the app to take some action with my mastodon account. Maybe I just haven’t found the option, but if there isn’t one then it’s a hard blocker for me to use it as my main fediverse browser.

It’s been a while since I set up my runner, and I have it on my personal desktop (which is wayyyyyy beefier than the VPS I host my forgejo instance on), but I’m pretty sure I was able to specify that only my user account can trigger actions to be run on this runner. What I’m getting at is that there is a decent amount of granularity for forgejo action permissions; you should be able to find a balance that suits you between “no actions at all” and “anyone can run any code they desire on your server”.

Interesting read, but boy does this journalist have a … different read on things than I do.

People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we’re nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win.

IMO it’s the exact opposite; we talk about this because we want the best protocol to win, this time, while knowing full well that usually it doesn’t.

Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality.

My understanding is that search on the microblogging side of the fedi is intended to be “broken” (from the view of someone expecting a Twitter-style search); hashtags are for opting-in to global discoverability whilst without them your posts are intended to be stumbled upon and/or passed around rather than sought out.

If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”.

I doubt that trump supporters cheering on the USA throwing their weight around like the world’s bully-in-chief would be receptive to such a message.

I can’t tell if I’m just too deep in the fedi-culture weeds, or if the article really is confidently ignorant.

They aren’t fediverse-first, and they’re French-based/French-focused/French-language-only, but Blast is an online, video-first news station that hosts their own peertube instance (https://video.blast-info.fr/) where they upload everything as well as putting their videos on YouTube. They also have a mastodon account where they share everything they publish: https://mamot.fr/@blast_info.

So, it’s definitely possible to have news on the fediverse, but I don’t think we’re at a point where it can be exclusively on the fedi - even if the stations’ website is ActivityPub-enabled, the majority of the people that a news station would want to reach just aren’t browsing the fediverse, let alone have accounts here.

Flashy and pretty, but as a UI I find it places too much visual emphasis on form over function / style over substance. The biggest example I can give us that I don’t think the bright neon blue left border on posts should be so much more eye-catching than the post titles. If I were to change things, I would probably try to find a dimmer shade of blue for them, and/or add some additional decoration to post titles so that they more clearly are the first thing my eyes are drawn to when scanning the page.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8,1996

Thirty years have not been kind

Hi, not OP, but: that’s known as frontmatter, it’s somewhat widespread, and thus I suspect that it’s much more difficult to have it live at the end of your markdown files than in a separate file or db altogether - unless OP is already rolling their own markdown parser.

tinfoil hat on: discord is a company based in the USA, the USA administration saw those teenagers in Nepal supposedly organise a revolt/revolution over discord, sees the inhabitants of Minneapolis organizing against ICE on Signal, and wants to preemptively know which of their citizens are using discord with which accounts in case any of them start organizing on discord.

I suspect the Software Heritage Foundation knows about Soft 98 already and has backed up their stuff, though I haven’t personally checked.

In case you omitted the following out of ignorance and not by deliberate choice:

podman unshare can be used to (mostly) painlessly access the files created by rootless podman.

Someone is working on something related: https://soatok.blog/2025/12/15/announcing-key-transparency-fediverse/

The rest of their blog is pretty great, too!

For those curious about how this fork came to be, KnowYourMeme had a decent rundown: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/godot-engine-user-blocking-controversy-wokot

I hesitate to bring this up because you’ve clearly already done most of the hard work, but I’m planning on attending the following conference talk this weekend that might be of interest to you: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/VEQTLH-infrastructure-as-python/

I recently went from 0 to 1. Reinstalled my VPS under debian, and decided to run my forgejo instance with their rootless container. Mostly as a learning experience, but also to easily decouple the forgejo version from whichever version my distro packages.

closely followed by Omarchy (I’d argue it’s not a distro, but it presents itself as one, so it gets to be judged as one)

I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for, OP, but I do know of https://activitypods.org/.

Pretty easy to sum up in 1-2 sentences…

Then by all means, give them your 1-2 sentences per DE so that they “only” need to include them!

Frankly, I think it’s a lot harder than you’re making it out to be, especially over such a large range of DEs. Not that the suggestion is without merit, just that the assumed difficulty of making it work as intended (i.e. actually helping a new Linux user pick the “right” desktop environment for them) seems underestimated.

Maybe Cinnamon can get away with “it’s like windows 95”, but Gnome and i3 are quite different from anything the target audience has ever experienced.