Back in beautiful SA after over four months in Europe. I will miss it. 🇪🇺 🇩🇪

Whenever I get a new work-issued #windows PC or some #Microsoft #outlook update, I need to figure out how to switch off Autocorrect.

It frustrates me to no end but so does finding the option to disable it, so I tolerate it for as long as I can and use little tricks to stop it from triggering.

Note-to-self attached.

MicrosoftがアメリカのICC制裁に加担したので、オランダはNixOSベースのLinuxデスクトップをテスト中。HackerNewsにも出てたけど、こっちの記事のほうが詳しく説明している。
ヨーロッパのアメリカに対する危機感は、すごいのだけど日本でなんにも伝わってないのはもどかしいし、腹立たしいな #linux

オランダは、マイクロソフトがICCとの提携を打ち切ったため、NixベースのLinuxデスクトップを構築した。: https://itsfoss.com/news/netherlands-dawo-initiative/

Marginalia: a search engine that prioritizes non-commercial content, no AI, no tracking, open-source. "The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write" https://marginalia-search.com

#UNIX #BSD #Linux but also #Windows

#3goodthings

- my son enjoying sailing
- my wife going on a well-deserved holiday
- hard 5k run to clear my mind

🚀 Das Community-Voting für den Open Source Wettbewerb 2026 ist eröffnet!

65 Projekte aus der öffentlichen Verwaltung und ihrem Umfeld stehen zur Wahl. Bis zum 30. September könnt ihr für euren Favoriten abstimmen. Das meistgewählte Projekt erhält den Community Award.

🗳️ Jetzt Projekte entdecken und abstimmen:
https://open-source-wettbewerb.de/einreichungen-2026/

#OpenSource #DigitaleSouveränität #ÖffentlicheVerwaltung #OpenSourceWettbewerb #OSBA

🌧️ Raining in Gräfelfing, thunder in the distance, the kids' first day of sailing school on the Starnberger See ⛵

@EUCommission

Super!👍

#ThreeGoodThings

- Extrawurst, die mir meine Familie aus Österreich mitgebracht hat

- Laugen Croissant Dreiecke

- Viel Energie um mit Projektdruck positiv umzugehen

Ich habe angefangen, #Elixir zu lernen.

Ueber die Jahre hatte ich immer mal wieder etwas Spass mit Erlang und kleineren Serverprojekten, wie z.B. einem EPP-Server fuer die Registrierung von suedafrikanischen .co.za Domaenen.

Ich lese "Programming Elixir" von PragProg und nutze dabei moeglichst wenig generative KI.

Das Erlernen neuer Programmiersprachen hat mir immer viel Freude bereitet, aber in den letzten Jahren hatte ich doch Zweifel, inwieweit das noch von Nutzen ist.

Turns out I used #Mastodon wrongly, or at least not in a way that promotes happiness 😄

I kept looking at the Trending feed and the Home feed with Boost, Quotes and Replies active. 😠🐈‍⬛

Time to find a few more interesting accounts, unfollow others and #behappy again. 😁

I like this. OH: The Fediverse is social media. TikTok, X, Facebook etc is algorithmic media. This catches the difference quite well. We should take the term social media back. It is about us, not their algorithms.

I will hear a leftist say "if it had not been for tikTok ..." or "if it had not been for twitter ... " these huge social movements like Black Lives Matter would have never been possible. There would have been, they say, a media black out.

And they are correct. And yet, I still detect little sense of urgency or interest from the same people in educating and promoting social media that we can control like the fediverse.

The microphone can be unplugged the cameras cut off at any moment.

The excellent PeerTube enthusiast @polykit has built a new independent search engine for PeerTube videos called PeerSeek:

➡️ https://peerseek.video

You can find out more details about PeerSeek in their blog post about it:

➡️ https://polykit.rocks/peerseek-federated-peertube-search

(By the way, Polykit also runs https://MakerTube.net which is a PeerTube server for people who make or fix things.)

#PeerTube

📣​ New post 📝​

"A newbie's guide to self-hosting: GoToSocial part 1 (installation and set-up)"

🔗​: https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-gotosocial-part-1-installation-and-set-up/

Basically a visual guide showing how to install #GoToSocial via #YunoHost and set it up with some basic security.

⏱️​ From start to finish, it should take about 25-30 minutes.

It's my act of resistance against tech bros... I love the idea of teaching people how to self-host their own social media instance, connected to the fediverse ✌️​❤️​ :GoToSocial:​

Thank you @yunohost  and @gotosocial for empowering us all!

#SelfHosting #Fediverse #newbie #MySoCalledSudoLife #blog #resist

Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are…

So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that ­– cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is).

Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social.

That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.)

The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…)

So @_elena calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹):

https://mu.social/profile/elenarossini.com/post/3mqob7shxks2t

Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger:

> “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (https://mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial.eu/post/3mqoepm7m2k2z)

Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in.

These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want.

🤡🤡🤡

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity.

> “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³

But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it.

Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control?

And if so, why can’t they even get that right?

Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead.

Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them.

So, yeah, how’s your Monday going?

¹ e.g., https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116770333053823108, etc.

² https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTECDMT2

³ https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-social-unconventional-beginnings-strategic-pitches-conflicting-signals/ (from the YouTube video that they since deleted. Nice transparency there, clowns.)

⁴ Run this script in Node 18+ to reproduce the numbers from their PDS yourself: https://codeberg.org/aral/gists/src/branch/main/wsocial-pds-stats.js Also see https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/ and https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/

#WSocial #EU #sovereignty #socialMedia #socialNetworking #mastodon #fediverse #activityPub #ATProto #startups #EUCommission

My timeline is attracting too much doom and negativity. Can you point me to some folks to follow that DO things like implementing solutions with a smile instead of those that complain and are getting lost in problems, attacking any solution? I need more #IoK — The Internet of Kindness. Thank you for sharing! (Feel free to send as DM, to avoid the nay-sayers and reply-guys jumping on another sea-lioning opportunity)

We are unveiling our plan to make Europe the world’s first electro-powered continent:

1️⃣ By 2040, electricity should account for 46% of Europe's final energy consumption
2️⃣ Reducing the price gap between electricity and fossil energy
3️⃣ Lowering network charges and taxes
4️⃣ Deploying smart meters faster

Our aim: save €200 billion in fuel imports by 2040 and halve oil consumption.

Power Smarter. Go Electric.

https://link.europa.eu/9Ngd6b