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a bit of what i've been up to lately
2021-05-13
Well, it has been a minute since my last blog update. I've been a busy beaver, working on some new stuff!
First off, a quick update on Neighborli. Like I discussed in my last post, I was planning on forming my own social network. I am pleased to say that it officially happened, but I changed several things from what was discussed in my last post.
So, instead of basing my fediverse instance off of Mastodon, I decided to go with Pleroma. This is for several reasons:
Also, I am not the biggest fan of the Mastodon community. They are very ban-heavy, and quick to defederate any servers that don't agree with their particular views. This is fine, of course, and is a feature of the ActivityPub protocol, allowing anyone to block instances they don't want to see on their federated timelines with ease.
However, I have noticed, especially over the last several months of running Neighborli, that much of the Mastodon community is just as censor-happy and effectively against free speech as much as their Twitter and Facebook counterparts. I have no qualms with anyone running their instances the way they want (that is, after all, the appeal of joining the fediverse), but I don't want to be a part of encouraging anyone to censor others just because they aren't big fans of how someone else runs their own instance. Someone even went as far as to make a list called FediBlock, which I won't link here, because I don't want to give the big SJW list any further exposure, but you can search it up online if you really want to learn more about it. This list encourages other instance administrators to block instances based off of really pathetic things, including running "free-speech" instances, which is what Neighborli aims to be as well. I assume it won't be too long before my instance is added to the Big List of Baddies, because I refuse to censor any user of my instance as long as the things they post don't break any laws of the United States, which is where Neighborli is based.
So, I went with Pleroma. And I'm glad I did. Instead of going with the Glitch frontend, which is a fine FE, I decided to go with Soapbox-fe, another free and open-source frontend for Pleroma. I customized it easily to my liking with Neighborli's branding, and have plans for other features I would eventually like to add on top. This gives Neighborli a very nice, modern, and appealing aesthetic that rivals the big social networks.
Want to see what Neighborli is all about? I encourage you to come join us at the link below, join the fediverse, help us grow, and ditch the constraints of the big social platforms that don't respect you or your data.
Join us on neighborli and create an account to see what's going on in the fediverse!
I have also been heavily redesigning FOSSphones, my Linux phone news site. The redesign was weeks in the making in my spare time, and brings a darker aesthetic to the site that I think looks nice, especially when reading at night.
In more FOSSphones news, we are currently a few days away from announcing the winner of our PineTime giveaway, where we are giving away a FOSS-respecting smartwatch by Pine64 called the PineTime. This giveaway is ending on May 15, just two days from the time of writing this blog post.
Other than that, I have been working on my new office, where I currently have some crypto miners going. I also now stream regularly on Twitch, as well as uploading videos right here to the videos section of this site.
I think that's about enough of an update for now. Join up on Neighborli and follow me for more if you'd like, and I will be much more active in trying to keep my blog up to date now that I have everything setup the way I like it.
Until the next post - have a great and fun spring!