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The view towards the Lake District from the top of Hoad Hill.

28th December 2020

For all their disruption, the one thing Silicon Valley has not touched is the ownership and governance structure of a typical capitalist firm.

– The DisCO Elements

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26th December 2020

Currently reading:

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26th December 2020

Lovely image of the coop principles, I like the old school chalkboard look.

Came across it in DisCO Elements, originally seems to be from here: https://www.willystreet.coop/pages/seven-cooperative-principles

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26th December 2020

I’ve set up a basic automatic photo sync from my phone to NextCloud. Chuffed to get that working. I struggled in the past with syncthing for that some reason I’ve forgotten now, and it made me have to stick with Google Photos.

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19th December 2020

I’ve set up syncthing on my YunoHost box. I already had it on my desktop and my mobile. The whole point of Syncthing is kind of that it’s P2P, without a central server, but I thought this might be handy as an extra node for those two to sync between. I do occassionally get sync conflicts when I’ve edited stuff on both while they weren’t in communication with each other. It’s not a central server, just a more available node, I guess.

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19th December 2020

Weekend project was more self-hosting, mostly via setting up YunoHost. I’ve got NextCloud, Invidious, Syncthing and the anarchist library self-hosted on it so far.
In the process, a bit of research into Cloudron vs Yunohost.
Which led to a bit of reflection on self-hosting and a detour into the Free software economics.
Which links a bit to the Post-Open Source article from last week. Particularly a comment from @ntnschndr:

“I’m increasingly convinced that OSS as such is broken as a means of protecting against corporate exploitation, and it should not be celebrated as an end in itself. … Rather than fixating on licensing, it might be more relevant to all of us to discuss the possibility of an “exit to community”

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2862/why-not-make-cloudron-fully-open-source-again/35
Listened to the General Intellect Unit episodes on The People’s Republic of Walmart. About planned economies and how corporations are doing them internally, despite all the lip service paid to the power of the market.
No long walks this weekend, just a couple of shorter ones around Lancaster. I like the cemetery.
Thinking about the importance of good documentation. If knowledge is power, then Documentation is praxis. I want good tools for documentation then.

  node "knowledge is power" as knowledge
  node "documentation is praxis" as documentation

knowledge --> documentation

I watched Blade Runner 2049 again.

13th December 2020

Weeknotes 2020-50

After having taken the time to set up YunoHost, I’ve saved myself a little money and feel empowered.

However, I now have no direct imperative to financially support some orgs/projects I like (GreenNet, Wallabag, etc).

I could self-host and donate, but then it probably ends up costing more if you factor in time and money combined.

I wonder if the purity of ‘self-host everything’ goes a little too far.

I think perhaps my preferred middle ground would be ownership of data, and remunerating orgs I like to provide apps that operate on that data.

This is a little bit like Solid‘s approach.

See also Free software economics I guess.

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13th December 2020

Very handy list of VPS providers using green energy here https://office.uniteddiversity.coop/s/oZjArwQDtPEgGFd from @jdaviescoates. I found 1984 (https://1984.is) through it, who look really good.

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12th December 2020

After writing 700 Notions I see a pattern emerge w.r.t short, ‘right’ and long ones
Then last week I came across this click-baity posting by Tim Denning, advocating max 200-word posts to reach ‘virality’, while reflecting on my blogwriting pace. Checking the length of my Notions, I looked at…

11th December 2020