I had no idea that the creator of Mitra is working on a nomadic identity implementation of ActivityPub that uses cryptographic identities before littleFedi did. Looking forward to wrap my head around it tomorrow... (too bad I didn't learn about this before my OmniOpenCon presentation)
@silverpill If I may ask, why is it Linux only?
https://codeberg.org/silverpill/minimitra
Epiphany is listed here as supposedly anti-AI, but it's based on WebKitGTK, and Hyperbola devs say they're going to remove support from Hyperbola GNU Linux-libre and the upcoming HyperbolaBSD because WebKitGTK now also has vibe coding...?
Web browsers are one of the categories with the least AI-free alternatives. NetSurf and a fork of Firefox ESR? Damn.
Next time someone complains that there are too many terminal emulators, point out that right here we have plenty of alternatives, and not the same can be said about lots of other software categories.
"The basic idea is for vulnerabilities rated low and medium severity, they will be treated like regular old bugs instead of a special bug that needs extra attention. I think this is a great idea and a policy we should be encouraging open source projects to adopt something similar. Open source projects are drowning in vulnerability reports, this should help remove some of the pressure."
I ended up using i3 during my presentation because niri did not work ootb with the input of my wireless keyboard, which I rely on as my mom gave me this laptop partly because its keyboard is not working properly anymore! Otherwise, it's a decent old laptop with the now luxurious amount of 8GB RAM. Surely I'd get a ThinkPad or a thickbook if I could, but I'm still on a shoestring budget.
My presentation from a week ago, at #OmniOpenCon 2026 (Bucharest), is finally online and somewhat polished... The video is raw footage and my talk could only cover mostly #ActivityPub, but the complete text also dives a bit into #ATproto, not without deserved criticism.
https://fionescu.princeps-poesis.xyz/2026/10/23/the-nuts-and-bolts-of-decentralized-social-media/
Someone over on #XMPP told me: why don't you just use #NetBSD but hardened? Well, it's 2026 by now and NetBSD have promised nothing about bringing pledge and unveil, and I would assume it's not trivial to patch Firefox with them. If I had all the free time in the world, then surely I could try, but as it stands I'm still making baby steps away from being just a FOSS freeloader...
I only just now see the "art" of #OpenBSD 8.0... After a long while in which they weren't very clear with their AI policy but still seemed to be on the skeptical side, they decided in bad taste - but somehow predictable, considering the mainstay devs having grown up in a generation where it was "cool" to be or at least pretend being neither for nor against anything - to drop ironic slop...
Now would be the right time for a fork of OpenBSD that would take at least a bit more principled stance, but who got the time for that? Some are most probably just warming up now to fork Linux, when OpenBSD is more manageably small and hackable...
My presentation at #OmniOpenCon 2026 will be published on PeerTube and on my static website in a few days, I hope! I can't praise enough their organizers for their openness and friendly assistance, no eyes rolled when I arrived with an OpenBSD laptop and only a vague understanding of xrandr! I wasn't expecting to draw a relativeky numerous public, so I'm grateful for their interest, despite how my presentation skills sucked! And last but not least, I'm grateful for how open towards me the young people from the XMPP stand were - despite the age and skill gap, we had strikingly many common interests / software affinities as *BSD and mostly non-systemd Linux users!
Chilling with George Timms and the rest of the #XMPP gang at #OmniOpenCon 2026, Bucharest
I've heard only now that #NetBSD raised organically more than $100,000 - it wasn't a headline in the news like with the Omarchy scheme... I don't even use NetBSD currently, I prefer OpenBSD for its stance on security, but I think NetBSD also have tremendous importance and deserve support. It's important to have increasingly bettet #noAI alternatives to Linux.
TIL (thanks to @nuintari) that lpd has been used not just for printer jobs, but also for queueing mp3s:
https://patrick.wagstrom.net/weblog/2003/05/23/lpdforfunandmp3playing/
The event calendar should be released any moment now, but so far I can confirm that my talk proposal for #OmniOpenCon 2026 Bucharest was accepted, so I'm going to have a presentation on #ActivityPub and #ATproto!
After rounding up my self-hosting stack which I started back in March (unfinished Bluesky and whatnot), I'll try porting onto OpenBSD - or NetBSD? - all this stuff that is running on Alpine Linux and, mostly, Docker, which might prove to be a daunting experiment because it seems so much stuff these days assumes Linux - or even just Debian or systemd-based Linux -, and usually people who run OpenBSD as a server just flex about having a puny little static site while using httpd and relayd... which are more secure tools, I know, yet incompatible with for eg. MediaWiki, in my case... I hate that this means even more time taken away from the productive stuff (such as populating the database of my MediaWiki), but I want security and stability as a baseline, and it seems more risky to me sticking to Linux. See you in... 3 months, I guess? Lol.
RE: https://fosstodon.org/@linuxmagazine/117089065940796166
"The US National Vulnerability Database, the resource much of the world’s security automation quietly relies on, spent 2024 watching its backlog of unanalyzed vulnerabilities climb past 27,000. In April 2026, the institute that runs it conceded it could not keep up and narrowed its full analysis to prioritize US federal and US-critical systems: roughly 15 to 20 percent of incoming vulnerabilities, by independent estimates. A month later, a US government watchdog reported the database could no longer be considered reliable. Europe had no vote in any of the decisions that led there."
Still can't believe that happened...
I wonder if this whole #CRA compliance or anything related will generate new junior jobs across the EU...?
Just noticed #Mastodon is now blocking from view quoted posts where the consent of the original author has not been clearly obtained yet, a great privacy feature I would've expected to see first on #Hubzilla, but it's nice when the whole fediverse evolves in the right directions. I don't usually praise Mastodon, but in this case the praise is well deserved.
RE: https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/117088939271783618
Which is also why I use #OpenBSD, which is pretty secure by default, although I'm looking forward to running #dropQbsd
With the recent release of SmolServe v1.0, a lightweight server for serving #Gemini, #Gopher, #Finger and #Spartan, and the upcoming release of a Smolnet browser for Android devices which will also support lesser-known/newer protocols such as #Nex, #Text, #Scroll, #Titan, #Guppy, #Scorpion, #Mercury, #FSP, #Molerat and #Terse, it seems like the #smolweb and interest in it is far from having peaked yet.
#OmniOpenCon is an open source conference that takes place in Bucharest each year at the Politehnica University - not a very big thing, but for eg. last year there was a talk given by one of the developers of Collabora, there were features on new stuff in the RISC-V space, so it's not just an event for students.
Last year I participated as that one weird person in the audience who didn't have a Github account and ran a QEMU of Alpine on a snail-pace notebook with no VT, this year I want to participate as a speaker, I am preparing a talk about decentralized social media, mostly about the fediverse and the ATmosphere, not just about my experiences as a power user and instance admin, but also stuff I've learned from reading and discussing with developers and lessons we can learn from the history of these networks, such as how communities deal with situations when opinionated developers try to politically abuse their coding powers (the Piefed and Tesseract debacles), and other spicy stories...
https://sessionize.com/omniopencon-2026/
Has anyone here ever used #HardenedBSD rather than vanilla #FreeBSD for their NAS?
Building #smolBSD on #Alpine is an adventure: one first needs to edit Makefile and replace --quiet with -s (Busybox's sha256sum doesn't recognize the former option), then edit mkimg.sh and remove --show from losetup options (again, a Busybox quirk). Even then, the build is only mostly successful, and my attempt of running a full live setup... makes me think I should have RTFM for #NetBSD first.
