On 14h July (though it was already the 15th here), some of my monitoring jails started throwing errors. Not all of them, though. On the same host, an Uptime Kuma instance was showing a ton of servers down, while LibreNMS wasn't displaying any issues. After investigating, I discovered why. The jail running LibreNMS was using local_unbound (integrated into FreeBSD), while the other, perhaps for speed, was using Cloudflare's DNS.

DNS is like email, the Fediverse, and other similar services: they work better and make us freer when they're decentralized.

Let's go back to decentralizing the internet. Its very existence, as we've known it, depends on it.

#BeFree#Decentralization#SysAdmin#IT#Technology#Internet#Networking

I've been following ATProto's development from the sidelines since 2022, but I somehow missed this great take by @eloquence on Bluesky interoperability with Mastodon and ActivityPub: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1716

"We currently have two emerging alternatives to X that deserve to be taken seriously: the fediverse and BlueSky. The fediverse tends to attract folks who highly value open source in principle and practice; BlueSky tends to attract folks who are looking for a drop-in Twitter replacement.

In this context, I would argue that a clear commitment from the key parties (that includes @Gargron's Mastodon gGmbH and Bluesky the company) towards an interoperable social web is essential. We should be able to follow each other no matter where we decide to make our social media home. Even Mark Zuckerberg's Threads has at least made a commitment towards interoperability."

It's a good read. Year after year, it feels like ATProto and ActivityPub, Bluesky and Mastodon, couldn't be further apart. Even Nostr and WordPress support ActivityPub. We're seeing more servers and clients in the Fediverse adopting ActivityPub. As far as I know, 99% of ATProto is still powered by Bluesky's main server, which makes it not very decentralized. I wonder why anyone would want to set up a server for ATProto when ActivityPub is so much more widely used.

I see Bluesky and ATProto's future as just another private company, like the rest. It's easy to pretend decentralization and open source just for marketing.

#Bluesky #Decentralization #Fediverse #ActivityPub #ATProto

👋 Hey #FOSS community! Need your wisdom on grant funding...

I've been developing a decentralized chat app that challenges the centralized model - think WhatsApp but with zero servers, complete privacy, and VR capabilities built right into the browser.

🔍 What makes it different:
- Runs entirely in browser (JavaScript/PWA)
- Direct P2P connections via WebRTC
- Industry-grade encryption by default
- Experimental AR/VR shared spaces
- Users own 100% of their data

The project is open-source and functional, but needs funding to:
- Improve security auditing
- Expand mobile platform support
- Develop accessibility features
- Build developer documentation

Has anyone had success with grants for privacy-focused or decentralization projects? Especially interested in orgs that value user empowerment over profit.

🔗 https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat

#Privacy#Decentralization#WebRTC#Grants#OpenSource#P2P

🇨🇭 It’s real. It’s running. In Switzerland.
💸 #GNUTaler is here.

https://c3d2.social/@t3sserakt/114550326620043758
#FOSS#FreeSoftware#DigitalCash#Privacy#Decentralization#FSF40#PaymentFreedom#Micropayments

1503 is a hotfix release that fixes two regressions: a thread leak that caused restarting of very fast nodes after a few days and a html validation error due to which some pages with invalid HTML could not be displayed.

⇒ https://github.com/hyphanet/fred/releases/tag/build01503

You can watch the update spread on
USK@IqBM871miZh5B9hoy08bWqSWVeGNEtLVPeoEbVKAFhw,~ceIdB338B08-4aC-c-wM2mJsmzT2K5U9aih4585OlY,AQACAAE/watch-1503/-1/

#p2p #decentralization

I had the honour to be invited by @ZFAVClub to participate in an online live workshop exploring the mighty and wonderful CLI tool of the @internetarchive, in collaboration with @dweb 💕

If you are interested in data preservation and digital commons, please do watch it, as we did our best to shed some light on the most powerful yet little known features of this software.

The #InternetArchive is an invaluable resource for unlimited, public, open, and free storage for the whole Universe. It seems too good to be true, but it is!

We also touched upon the value of #FreeSoftware, #Linux, #decentralization, and #publicDomain.

https://archive.org/details/youtube-8Pr05zlXdlo

#archive#commonGood #librarian #library #hacker #hacking #hackerLibrarian#DWeb#CLI #terminal #tutorial#Python #workshop

Joined the Wellington mesh tonight!

Communicated with a friend ~60km away, over the Remutaka Range, using Meshtastic (LoRa @ 915Mhz) instead of the internet.

📻 🗻 📶

#solarpunk #meshtastic #decentralization #lora #radio#wellington #mesh

"To create a European public internet, it's neither necessary nor desirable to have your digital life operated by the EU and its member states, nor by its private contractors. Instead, the EU could make Eurostack a provider of technological public goods.

For example, the EU could work to improve federated social media systems, like Mastodon and Bluesky. EU coders could contribute to the server and client software for both. They could participate in future versions of the standard. They could provide maintenance code in response to bug reports, and administer bug bounties. They could create tooling for server administrators, including moderation tools, both for Mastodon and for Bluesky, whose "composable moderation" system allows users to have the final say over their moderation choices. The EU could perform and/or fund labelling work to help with moderation.

The EU could also provide tooling to help server administrators stand up their own independent Mastodon and Bluesky servers.
(...)
In addition to improving federated social media, the EU and its member states can and should host their own servers, both for their own official accounts and for public use. Giving the public a digital home is great, especially if anyone who chafes at the public system's rules can hop onto a server run by a co-op, a friend group, a small business or a giant corporation with just a couple clicks, without losing any of their data or connections.

This is essential facilities sharing for services. Combine it with public data centers and tooling for migrating servers from and to the public server to a private, or nonprofit, or co-op data-center, and you've got the equivalent of publicly available conduit, data-centers, and fiber.

In addition to providing code, services and hardware, the EU can continue to provide regulation to facilitate the public internet."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

#EU#PublicInternet#DigitalSovereignty#Decentralization#SocialMedia

Just a thought, from a knuckle-dragging biology scientist. TL;DR: I believe there is scope to make the hosting of a peertube instance even more lightweight in the future.

I read some time ago of people using #webAssembly to transcode video in a user's web-browser. https://blog.scottlogic.com/2020/11/23/ffmpeg-webassembly.html

Since then, I believe #WebGPU has done/is doing some clever things to improve the browser's access to the device's GPU.

I have not seen any #peertube capability that offloads video transcoding to the user in this way.

I imagine, though, that this would align well with peertube's agenda of lowering the bar to entry into web-video hosting, so I cannot help but think that this will come in time.

My own interest is seeing a #Piefed (activitypub) instance whose web-pages could #autotranslate posts into the user's own language using the user's own processing power... One day, maybe!

Thank you again for all your hard work; it is an inspiration.

#mastodon#webVideo #HLS #transcoding #video #decentralization#edgeComputing#webGL#W3C #activitypub#AI #ffmpeg #selfhosted #degoogle #mathstodon

Hey Fediverse! 👋

We just wrapped up an amazing FediForum June 2025 a week ago, and BadgeFed was right in the thick of it! Here’s a recap of what we did, what we learned, and what’s next for decentralized badges.

BadgeFed at FediForum: Unconferences & Speed Demos

BadgeFed had the honor of presenting and hosting two unconference sessions and showing off our work in one speed demo slots (watch the demo). The energy was fantastic; lots of curiosity, sharp questions, and a real hunger for open standards in the credentialing space.

Community Feedback: Standards, Docs, and Openness

A big theme at FediForum was specs and open standards. We’re right there with you! That’s why we’ve enhanced our technical documentation to explain exactly how BadgeFed uses ActivityPub and OpenBadges together:

• Issuers are ActivityPub actors, each instance can federate and follow others.
• Badges are ActivityPub Notes with OpenBadge 2.1 attachments for maximum compatibility and verifiability.
• Strict linking between issuer and badge, and between badge and recipient, to prevent spoofing.
• Signature validation for both ActivityPub and OpenBadge data.
• Federation: badges propagate via follows, and a special announcer actor helps with discoverability.
• Comments and interactions: badges can be discussed and shared across the Fediverse.

Read more in our DETAILS.md.

Making BadgeFed Easier to Try

We heard you: people want to try BadgeFed! Right now, it’s a solo setup (one admin, one Docker container), but we’re working hard to make it easier for others to deploy, configure, and even federate their own instances. Stay tuned for updates on multi-admin support and streamlined onboarding.

Feedback: Discoverability vs. Spam

One of the most important pieces of feedback we received was about badge discoverability vs. timeline spam (see the issue). We want badges to be easy to find and share, but we also don’t want to flood the Fediverse with unwanted posts. This is now our top priority, we’re rethinking how verbose BadgeFed should be, and exploring opt-in/opt-out models for badge visibility and hashtag use.

What’s Next: Embedding & Profile Badges

We’re also working on ways to let you embed badges in your blog or add them to your Mastodon profile. More news on that soon!

FediForum was a fantastic experience, huge thanks to everyone who attended, gave feedback, and showed interest in decentralized credentials. Let’s keep building a more open, verifiable, and user-empowered Fediverse!

Badge up, and see you in the timeline! 🏅

You can read the article "BadgeFed @ FediForum June 2025: Unconferences, Demos, and Community Feedback" by @mapachehere as well.

It worries me that the SillyCon Valley tech press is still publishing articles about decentralised social media by people who don't have the first clue what the word "decentralised" means.

What BlueSky going down shows is that BlueSky is not decentralised. Even if the ATmosphere as a whole is getting there. But one TechCrunch writer's takeaway was;

"It turns out that decentralized social networks can go down, too."

#SarahPerez, 2025

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/wait-how-did-a-decentralized-service-like-bluesky-go-down/

🤦‍♂️

#SocialWeb #decentralization