"Will #Linux phones become a viable alternative to the #Android / iOS duopoly?"

Good review of the state of play. No tl;dr but interesting to observe that here too, China is pushing ahead with its own mobile OS, whereas Europe's entire digital economy can literally be switched off on a whim.

How much failure in digital governance do we need to live through? (And why?)

#digitalsovereignty

https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2026/10/05/linux-phones-alternative/

#NRC is among the most respected Dutch newspapers and their setting up a #mastodon server is a beacon on the path to a democratic #DigitalCommons

Short term it shows it is indeed possible for any modest organization not to be hostage to remote techbro overlords.

Longer term it means probing more seriously into how a decent new digital economy could work. Each profession (from journalists, to retailers and taxi drivers) must figure this. There is no free digital lunch.

@NRC
@MarloesdeKoning

But such a grassroots liberation of digital information tech from gatekeepers would be awkward for the financialization / speculation game (bigtech is like 30% of stock market value).

Pushing the specialized compute engine angle is a way to push back the inevitable, but its a strange one, because it only offers an advantage for specific algorithms (linear algebra etc.) So the success of this gambit is predicated on turning society into an algorithmically controlled entity.

2/2

Is it a coincidence that one hardware company building proprietary special purpose compute engines is behind both bizarre "tech" bubbles of our era (crypto and "AI")?.

Probably not. Giant wheels are in motion in digital land, but they are moving slowly. General purpose computing (CPU's) was saturated technologically, monopolized (Wintel) and at great risk of becoming totally commoditized. The truth is that extremely low cost open source general compute would cover 99% of people's needs

1/2

The PageRank algorithm changed online search, but it did not have to lead to #adtech and #surveillancecapitalism.

New algorithms are never business models themselves. What new business models they enable depends entirely on the society that adopts them.

In other words, digital algorithms fuse and express via less explicit but critical socioeconomic "algorithms": how financial systems are structured, how people organize work in "corporations" etc.

#LLM algorithms will be no different.

1/

These tools can on the one hand help ex-post empirical (statistical) work in analyzing the characteristics of current decentralized networks, on the other hand they enable ex-ante simulation and quantification of heterogeneous network properties and behavior.

3/3

https://www.openriskmanagement.com/post-media/2026/09/OpenRiskWP20_010926.pdf

We focus on the quantitative metrics and tools that can be expressed using such a framework, starting with basic building blocks and establishing the practical correspondence between adjacency tensors and supra-adjacency matrices, culminating with a discussion of the construction and use of tensor graph Laplacians.
2/

In a new white paper we develop graph representations of decentralized (heterogeneous) Social Web networks. We build primarily on the machinery of multilayer networks with their associated tensor representations.

We expand on the specialized subclass of so-called layer-disjoint networks as they offer powerful tools for modeling complex online interactions of Actors within distinct Communities.
1/

#activitypub
#atproto
#decentralization
#socialweb

https://www.openriskmanagement.com/towards_graph_calculus_for_decentralized_social_networks/

RE: https://piefed.zip/c/technology@lemmy.world/p/1773172/sovereign-tech-agency-invests-eur500k-in-flatpak

Sovereign investment in #opensource software can be the most efficient use of public funds imaginable.

Its not a panacea, its not without its own risks but it has been a blind spot for too long.

A digital society built on top of #adtech and #bigtech is a grotesque dystopia but somehow the message takes too long to reach the brain of the dinosaur.

Webpage links in #mastodon posts are rendered as... links. Which is fine as a starting point. But you need to "click" to figure out if:

1) the page actually works for a browser that is blocking ads

2) the page is not behind a paywall

We could imagine little superscripts next to the rendered link that classify what kind of page is linked to 🤔

Another thought provoking #vpro #tegenlight documentary, about black boxes in dominant political and economic worldviews.

Summarized by that glorious Adam Smith economist, who pontificated at length about the "wealth of nations", without ever mentioning the role of women in care, even while he was taken forever care of by his own mum, Margaret Douglas 😑

Incomplete, self-serving views that know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

(In Dutch and English)

https://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/artikelen/onze-economische-blinde-vlek

After the flourishing of Web 1.0 all the action was a return to centralization (and #enshittification ). It wasn't all bad: #wikipedia and #openstreetmap are products of this era. But it doesn't help with our mental models to call this era "Web 2.0".

In fact we'll know the Web 2.0 when we see it: It will mean standard and readily usable (by *almost* everyone) software will boot and connect to the Web in seamless bidirectional ways.

#activitypub (or its evolution) might deliver this 🖖

2/2

Marketing people invented #Web3.0, web3, and even Web 4.0 and beyond, but if we take a step back and ask: has there been a distinct phase of the Web *after* the original TBL protocols and implementations (=Web 1.0) that is:

1) public standard,
2) widely used (#decentralized ),
3) offers routine and flexible bi-directional interactions

There was never such a phase.
So-called #Web2.0 was built around centralizing platforms. *Emulating* a #socialgraph, not realizing true #socialnetwork

1/2

Very happy to announce that #OpenRisk joined the #Digital4Sustainability Community, a European initiative dedicated to advancing digital and #sustainability skills required to accelerate the twin transition.

The transparency and empowerment of #OpenSource and #OpenData are levers that can be used to great effect for social and economic transformation and sustainability requires both and urgently.

More about D4S and the rationale for joining 👇

https://www.openriskmanagement.com/joining-digital-for-sustainability-community/

After an exhaustive and exhausting search to understand everything informed and objective that has been said about scaling and scalability of #activitypub and #atproto decentralized #socialnetworks the result is rather disappointing: The issue doesn't seem to be well defined to start with. There are many hidden (and varying) assumptions about what the target "global network" looks like, what functionality it must guarantee. It seems the squabbles are political, not technical in nature...

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116953033064631792

The concept of the tragedy of the commons illustrated.

"when a resource is shared and can benefit the individual at a cost to the community, it is rational for the individual to overuse the resource, even though this collectively leads to the depletion of the resource for everyone"

There is simply no way to reach #sustainability while society does not have effective mechanisms to prevent individuals and groups to to abuse the commons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

One thing I keep coming back to when comparing #ActivityPub and AT Protocol: ActivityPub is basically a convention on top of the #web stuff we already have. An actor is a JSON-LD document you GET. An inbox is an endpoint you POST to. If you already run a website, you can bolt this on without changing the site's basic shape. Ghost didn't set out to join the #fediverse, and then years later it could, just by adding an endpoint.

AT Protocol feels less like that to me. Running a PDS means a signed repo, a Merkle search tree, a firehose, a DID. It's not a layer you add to an existing site. It's closer to standing up another backend beside it.

I think that's why ActivityPub keeps making sense to me. You can join later. You don't have to have built the whole thing with federation in mind from day one.

#ATProto #ATProtocol #fedidev

Was surprised to see a rather "unusual" warning when running mkdocs build for a project.

Can anybody (who knows the circumstances more deeply) summarize the #mkdocs vs #zensical drama? (the root causes, as seen by a dispassionate third party 😅 ).

On the face of it is seems akin to the #wordpress #wpengine story, a conflict about money and control after an open source project becomes more widely adopted.

Maybe I should have stayed with sphinx 😟

This innate conservatism and resistance to change is of course well known. This is why we have expressions like "never let a crisis go to waste".

The idea is that during stress periods collective behavior is more open to extraordinary measures and changes.

But as a strategy for steering ourselves to a safer place this is a deeply problematic approach.

Leaving aside that waiting for crises to change anything is absurdly risky, it is also very undemocratic: Bypassing consensus at gun point.

People who think/wish that worsening climate fundamentals leading to #heatwave events will suddenly sensitize society to environmental #sustainability are probably counting themselves prematurely rich.

Just a few years ago we had a planetary scale biological #pandemic risk event which is now almost forgotten. As soon as stress subsides prevalent cultures and mental models reassert themselves, like an elastic band that returns to its base state

Real change does happen but is infuriatingly slow