I think largely we are aligned on what we are looking for in a platform. The private blog idea is interesting. I normally consider blogs as public, are there private blog platforms?

Sure. If nothing else, you could proxy it through an authenticated endpoint, requiring people to log on to view it. But I don’t know the blogging software space very well - there are probably projects with built-in support for this. I’ve started looking around; I suspect the ideal platform isn’t so much a blogging platform, but it’s designed more around a blog design.

If you come across one, please let me know! I’ll keep updating that CryptoPad document. I also started a spreadsheet, which is better suited to the data than a document table, but CryptoPad doesn’t have the ability to embed assets from other documents (other than images), so I’m just doing the table manually.

On the other hand, projects die when the maintainers lose interest.

Absolutely. Good projects attract multiple maintainers; there’s a bit of Darwinism there. When one project I used was archived, I offered to take over maintainership; the author didn’t want to hand it over to me, so I hard forked it and worked with distributions to replace the no-longer-maintained version with mine. It’s the OSS lifecycle, right? And the best thing about OSS - if the maintained loses interest, someone else can simply take over. And if no-one does, maybe it isn’t worth maintaining.

I would like a platform that I know is going to stick around.

This is so important! Especially for this purpose. Getting several people to join a platform and then put content on it introduces a lot of technical inertia. That’s why it’s important for me to reduce the odds of the project changing their terms of use; increasing costs; moving popular, free features to the “paid” column; and other shenanigans.

On the other hand, something like Zusam, if the maintainer loses interest it will likely also die.

See, I don’t believe this. It’s possible the project would die, but so often have popular projects lost their maintainers, and new people step in. They fork it, or have a peaceful transition of ownership, but the project carries on. Yes, some just disappear into obscurity, but the popular ones tend to keep going, sometimes under other names. X11 to XOrg; OpenOffice to LibreOffice; OwnCloud to NextCloud; so on and so forth. And increasingly, many projects add data migration paths from other projects, especially if they’re popular. Many ActivityPub servers can import Mastodon account data, for instance.

I do have reservations about HumHub, but it’s the first platform I’ve seen that even comes close to being a familiar feel for users.

It does look pretty close to ideal for what we’ve been discussing; I need to install it and try it out, because so far all other options have failed in some way. There’s another forest of options in the blogging style, so I’m still optimistic, but I may try HumHub anyway.

I’m considering the other idea of using Dokuwiki as well, which I guess comes in as being more similar to your blogging idea.

Yeah, that was an interesting avenue; I suspect the user client experience will be where that fails for me. It can’t require any technical expertise.

Apples and oranges.

Wireguard is a VPN technology. DuckDNS is a service that lets you create a subdomain on the duckdns TLD and point it at your server. They do completely different things.

You would use DuckDNS if you don’t want to rent your own domain (“rent” because it’s a recurring payment for something over which you have only nominal control). It provides no security, no access control, and it creates no network. It’s just a pointer in the global DNS DB.

Wireguard is a VPN technology, for creating private networks.

One is like a mailing address. The other is like a strongbox. You could give the strongbox to a friend to deliver it to someone who has the key (Wireguard). Or you could write a message on a postcard and mail it (DuckDNS). Or you could put the address on the strongbox and mail it (DuckDNS + Wireguard). The point is, they serve completely different functions.

The two could be used together.

I agree with you on how core emoji reactions are. … It’s clear I’m going to have to settle in some respect.

So, in thinking about this in more concrete terms (as opposed to vague dissatisfaction), I suspect what we really want is a blogging platform with robust authenticated reader interaction tools.

The issue with AP, and therefore most of these servers, is that (a) it’s expected to be public by default (the privacy point you mention), but almost more fundamentally (b) they’re aggregators. People either to a bunch of people and get a feed of a bunch of posts by different people (Mastodon/X); or they join a community and see a bunch of posts by different people (Lemmy/Reddit).

I think what we want is blogging software, with an endless stream of content posted by a single user, but with reactions and threaded conversations per post. I’ve been thinking how this could be achieved on various AP platforms, but while you can almost get there with groups/channels/communities, the sticking point is that they are all ultimately designed around any member being able to post top-level content. I haven’t seen any system yet that (easily) allows restricting posting by individual accounts.

I need to look at pump.io clients, because I think pump.io started as more of a blogging protocol. And the more I think about it, the more I believe a private blogo is a better foundational model.

Is federation or similar mandatory for you?

No. In fact, I suspect it may work against the privacy requirement. I expect that, even if one of the federated servers met all of the requirements, federation would have to be disabled to prevent leakage. Although, at least one server supports authenticated pull (one of the Misskey forks), I’m guessing it’s not likely that federation will be needed.

As in, do you want something that allows your users to interact with users that are not part of your family and not on your platform, eventually able to completely replace the mainstream social media?

For me, no. I want my SIL to be able to easily post pictures and videos of my toddler niece, and all the family members to be able to oooh and aaaah, and react with little heart and exploding brain emojis, and comment on how the fact that she climbed a jungle gym is a sign she’s sure to be an Olympic athlete. The parents absolutely do not want those videos showing up in TikTok.

Or is a completely closed platform ok, in terms of it’s only your family and friends, and people have to go elsewhere (e.g. back to facebook) to interact with others?

Ideally, it’d support ActivityPub. I’m not sure how; perhaps through the user creating channels and setting a federation flag, or marking it as public. I think the expectation that people will understand that inviting someone from another platform effectively makes all of that content public, might be bit much to assume. So I think having private and public channels, where public channels are federate-able would be fine. But I’d rather not have federation than have a system where people are prone to make privacy mistakes. Is there an option I’m missing?

I use Nextcloud, developed by a company,

Yeessss; I think that’s a little different, because NextCloud was forked off of the completely open source OwnCloud, which was well-established and license protected long before NextCloud came along. If NextCloud tried any shenanigans, they’d be eviscerated. HumHub is a bespoke solution, right? So they can’t be accused of stealing an OpenSource project’s s code.

I use Photoprism, which the base edition is FOSS but they have proprietary extras that you pay for (like HumHub).

Yeah, this is a good example. I use it, too, although I admit I’ve considered, and regularly revisit, alternatives purely because of this quasi-free nature. So much of PhotoPrism is built on free libraries; the project uses something like 120 OSS libraries. How much of their income do you think they contribute to those projects who’s work their taking advantage of?

I use Home Assistant, though I think they recently transitioned to a non-profit

I’ve been using it for two or three years myself; it’s always been OSS & free software, AFAIK.

they charge for a cloud connected component.

That’s a service. I have no issue with charging for a service, because it’s an ongoing cost to the hoster.

Actually, I don’t have any issue with anyone charging for their software, either; it’s just that I won’t use it, and I don’t trust quasi-free projects. That’s just from experience. Most end badly, either by being bought out and going totally commercial, or just slow enshittification for the non-paying customers.

I write software for myself, and give it away free because it costs me nothing to do so. And I’ve written software libraries that I know, for a fact, are being used as backbone code for a not insignificant chunk of the internet. I’ve never been paid by any commercial company taking advantage of my work, and have little sympathy for people charging for software that’s 90% other people’s freely given code. Which is most software today. You write the entire stack from scratch, including the compiler, like Excel once was? Hell yeah, you deserve to charge for it. Otherwise, you’re just profiting off other people’s work.

HumHub have been around 10 years, so they aren’t exactly new. Plus as it’s extendable, perhaps one day a gfycat or emoji reaction plugin will be added (or if you have the skills, maybe you could make one).

Huh. Never heard of them before a week or so ago. I wouldn’t completely discount them because of the semi-free model; I just am putting them down on the list.

Thirded.

They occasionally upgrade services for free, and rarely raise prices. They support a variety of base Linux images, including Arch (which, when I first switched to them, was rare). The control board is functional, and they’ve got all the features needed to implement VPN subnets, DKIM, etc. without having to use the DNS provider’s tools (assuming you are using a different provider). There’s also a command-line tool for managing your VPSes with them. Reasonably priced, the usual array of options from cheap to expensive, easy to add resources, and so on. Servers in the US and Germany (and maybe others? I haven’t added a VPS in a while).

When I first started self-hosting, not all of this was standard. I can’t say I’ve looked at the market in a few years, so perhaps their offerings are standard now, but when I moved from another hosting provider, Contabo stood out. I have been quite happy; perhaps the best thing I can say about them is that I haven’t had to contact their technical support in the past couple of years.

P.S. the only cautionary thing I’ll say it’s that they’re a German company. While you can never trust any VPS provider from a data security POV, Germany is a 5-eyes country, and so sits in my “least trustworthy” list; as in, they’re least likely to put up any resistance if one of the surveillance states asks for access to your data, or to tell you about it before they do. For me, this doesn’t matter, and frankly I don’t have enough knowledge to choose a better option if I needed it. Since I don’t, and since I’m not using my servers for anything that’s currently considered subversive, it isn’t yet a worry for me. But FYI.

Thanks!

Agreed: some items are basic functionality that should reliably and easily work. Image & video uploading are among them. I’ll add some verbiage on the CryptoPad page about options which have been rejected simply because they don’t support the most basic features.

It’s funny: I’ve been similarly searching for a good chat platform, and there are two things which I personally don’t care much about, but which a couple of my family members are insistent about: typing notifications; and gifs - as in, a widget where you can search for short gifs from e.g. Gfycat and have them inserted. My wife absolutely requires the latter.

That being said, my position on emoji responses are almost a core feature for a social media platform IMO. They’re fast, easy, non-cluttering feedback, eliminating the need to type out some inane, two-word response. It’s infuriating (to me) that Lemmy doesn’t support them; it leads to such illuminating responses as “So much this!”, “Yes!”, but worst of all the lack subverts up/downvotes, which should be a tool for designating interest, not agreement. Not having emoji reactions muddies and dilutes any value voting has.

Pixelfed is an interesting suggestion. It always feels like it’s intended to be public. Were you thinking each user would have to configure default privacy settings?

You may be right. I think I read that post visibility was configurable; if I can narrow the field sufficiently I’ll start installing them and checking how they work. I do think federation would have to be disabled on any AP server.

I can see how to restrict to followers but haven’t yet found how to stop anyone being able to follow you.

Yeah, that would be a blocker.

I think for me, if a new user has to set up the privacy settings to stop them posting everything public, that’s probably not the right platform.

Agreed. The service must be at least configurable to be private-by-default.

BTW there is PixelDroid as a dedicated Pixelfed app, but it’s only on Fdroid.

I think I found an iOS app, too… but I looked at so many servers last night I may be misremembering.

The table isn’t rendering on my mobility client, so I’m going to delete it from the post; I’ll keep the CryptoPad document going as long as I can, but it’s open edit, and I’m hoping others will contribute to it.

Argh! I’ve posted a similar question; basically, I want a private alternative to Facebook, with wall-like functionality. The second minimum requirement is that there be an iOS app that makes posting easy – including initiating a picture or video capture. So:

• #1: private, b/c it’s family sharing toddler pictures
• Also #1: super user friendly, because (100% - 1 person) involved are non-technical
• Also #1: has to have a better user tool than an SPA. No web interface can ever be anywhere as good as a native app can be, and I will die on that hill.
• #2: emoji reactions, and threaded comments

I’m not interested in installing and evaluating a dozen different servers, so like you I’ve been hoping that people with similar goals would narrow down the field a bit. There’s no way I’d convince enough of the family to go along with evaluating all of the options anyway, and IME what works fine for me can often fall apart when other people come onboard.

I’d convinced myself that Friendica – venerable, proven, reasonably popular – would fit the bill, especially because the design doesn’t assume public-by-default, like Mastodon or Lemmy, and the potential damage of exposed content, either through my misconfiguring the server, or some upgrade assuming users want everything public by default, is high. I’d prefer a project where the developers assume private-by-default, and invite-first. Lemmy isn’t really right, because we’re following people, not communities; Mastodon has a better model, following users, but then its conversation threading is kind of shit for this purpose, and its reaction feature set is anemic. Circles was perfect, and beloved by the key parent involved, until it first made half of her posts invisible to her (and only to her and her husband), and then locked her out. This doesn’t surprise me much, as Circles is based on Matrix, which frankly has the worst cryptography management I’ve even encountered. But if you’re saying Friendica is that painful to post media on, then it won’t work.

I’m leery of Humhub because of the quasi-commercial nature, and its youth. I’ve had too many experiences with initially semi-commercial platforms shifting, either suddenly or slowly, to increasingly commercial positions – moving features from the “free” to the “paid” column. Vendor lock-in is a real issue with a dozen users.

So if Friendica is out, maybe Pixelfed? It seemed to me to be mostly indistinguishable from Mastodon, but if they have better comment threading, reactions, and I need to re-evaluate the AP clients to see if any would be user-friendly enough for the parents. I’ve used mostly Fedilab, and I’m not sure it’s ideal. For one thing, it doesn’t have support more than basic reactions: you can boost or favorite, but I am – and I think you are probably – looking for something with more variety, like emoji responses, right?

I’m watching the other reactions here, and my post on this topic is here. I may post a summary – there are comparison charts, but they all tend to focus on feature set and fall short on the overall use case. On my thread,

• Misskey was recommended as Facebook-like, and in particular, some of its forks have features the core project is missing. I always got the impression Misskey was a Mastodon-analog, which would make it not a good fit, so I’ve skipped over it. With Friendica out, I’m going to put Misskey back on the “possible” list.
• Diaspora has also been recommended and is near the top of my list.
• Smithereen was recommended, but the sparsity of the documentation – not even a list of features – put it down low on my list.
• Hubzilla has a lot of documentation; it focuses a lot on content management – assets, calendars, document sharing, etc. – which will be fine if “easily post content to a feed” and “follow a user and view a stream of their posts” is a first-class interaction model.
• Pixelfed is still an option. I just need to confirm/refute my “Mastodon, with pictures” perception. If my perception has been skewed by the fact that I’m interacting with Pixelfed through a (mainly) Mastodon app, then maybe it’ll work. However, there isn’t AFAICT a Pixelfed app, so if the only way to get to a more wall-like view is through a web interface, it’s not going to work.

@acockworkorange@mander.xyz is also looking for this feature set / use case. I kind of feel as if it’s more useful to think about this as a use case, because almost all of these projects can claim some or all of the requested features, and yet not satisfy what we’re looking for in terms of user experience. This would be a great opportunity for another tool: a wiki with a list of applications & features, but with a discussion section and focused on winnowing projects by consensus about suitability. Again, lots of software that have the necessary functionality and which could be wrangled to do this, but still fail to be a good tool for the objective.

Edit

Probably not the best place to do this, because I’m the only one who can edit this, but:

I deleted the table, as it wasn’t rendering on some mobile clients. The table was re-created in CryptoPad.

I’ll go find a collaborative, wiki-like document thing with discussions that isn’t G**gle.

Edit 2

The table is now here, as a CryptPad document. In an exercise of trust, it’s open to edits. If vandals wreak too much damage, I’ll restrict access, but that’ll require creating accounts and requesting access, and all that shiz.

Interesting choice for a title, then.

I’ve gone months between updates. On servers, that’s a little more risky because it CVEs, which can also apply to the kernel, but LTS is probably safe enough there: if there’s a kernel CVE, LTS will be updated.

I’ve had trouble with pinning the kernel before, though. Last time I did it, I went several months and forgotten I’d done it, and my system got itself wedged because some package was expecting a newer kernel; it took me a while to figure out.

LTS might be a better option, since that will be caught be dependency management. Pinning can cause version dependency mismatch issues.

I wish, I wish… I wish I was a fish.

I wish there was an instrument other than the stock market whereby private individuals could combine their funds to perform hostile take-overs, and then manage them by pre-agreed conditions.

Like: we’re going to buy Twitter, build an AP interface on it, federate it, and operate it like a non-profit. We’re going to have a set of these S core values, with yearly votes on changes proportional to investment. No single investor can own more than T percent of shares Investors can sell their shares, or buy shares. Stock will never spilt. Management salaries, combined, can never exceed more than M% of non-management combined salaries, and run it as a Holocracy. Or, maybe, shares can only be sold to employees, who have to sell to other employees when they leave.

You know; try to design a good operating model that avoids the pitfalls of other companies, and can adapt when the model demonstrates perverse incentives. Put more thought into it than my ramblings above.

But ten billion dollars is a lot of money to put together, and the rules I’d like to see necessarily exclude the sort of profit-only driven capitalists who’d be able to contribute heavy loads, and would limit the amount that could contribute.

I may as well wish I were a fish.

It has worth. It doesn’t have value.

I hate videos that could have been articles (talking heads), and I did not watch this.

However, I have an opinion: in probably countless ways.

1. 3D-ification, which is already a thing
2. AI-powered user interaction with the film, a-la camera control
3. Upscaling to 128k resolution, whenever that becomes common
4. Immersion. Be one of the characters (although, this might just be a variation on #2)

As deep learning hardware and software improves and gets cheaper, I expect doing any or all of these to become increasingly common, and far cheaper than buying the IP and reshooting it, and studios will turn to these as cheap ways to milk the cash cow. Someone will inevitably film another re-imagining, whether with real people or (eventually) entirely deep learning from script to direction to actors; but that won’t stop copyright holders of a given film from trying ways to get people to rebuy new versions of old films.

I can’t speak for other Americans (USA, in particular, which is who I assume you meant), but for me it’s the nature of the oligarchical regime and their views on individualism. I’ve read the Chinese CSL, and spent a couple of days in a session presented by international lawyers and security professionals explaining what it meant for our business, how we needed to navigate it, and how it was being implemented. It’s scary.

Information is power; specific information about you is power over you. It’s control.

As for the government, I think it’s more a matter of the fact that China is far more well positioned and equipped to surveil US assets. Russia is bumbling, pre-occupied, and doesn’t make any computer components we use. Chinese chips, on the other hand, are in everything. The US is worried that, in a conflict, we could discover that China is able to simply… turn off all of the F35s. Or shut down or coopt firing systems on our war ships. Or disable coms or NV gear of ground troops. All of our modern equipment is computerized to more or lesser degree, and the failure of even seemingly simple resisters, sourced from China, could result in misoperation of gear, at best. If the espionage is more sophisticated, with more important components, it’s conceivable China could locate and monitor assets; missiles which ignore counter measures and always hit because the target is broadcasting a homing signal.

Most off these hypotheticals are probably not within the realm of current technology, and that what access China is able to embed in computer components is far more limited. But we don’t really know, and it’s far more dangerous to underestimate than to overestimate capabilities.

This thing is exactly my exit strategy. My living will gives my wife absolute authority to decide to terminate my life if she sees fit; whether or not the state would allow it is another matter, but at least my wishes are known. These include conditions of cognitive decline; my step-father recently passed after a protracted decade of horrific decline, and no fucking way all I going through that.

While you’ve got a more pragmatic solution, to be frank, if I’m going I’d like to do so with some guarantees and comfort. I’m not comfortable with the risk of accidentally half-assing the attempt with something I jury-rigged and end up with brain damage and the inability to complete the job. I’m hoping that some state will have the balls to jump into suicide tourism and open clinics full of these specific devices, so if things get bad and I’m still able to travel, I can go in some comfort.

I’m fucked if I’m comatose, because most options are simply removing support and letting the patient starve to death, and I fear being conscious (enough) through that protracted process.

We have such shit laws in this country (USA) about giving people autonomy over their end-of-life process.

It took me a few weeks to really get to muscle memory, but after that I disliked full-size keyboards enough that I started using kmonad on my laptop with the traditional keyboard. I eventually ended up with kanata (which has a superior chord handling) everywhere, until I got a piantor 50%, when I switched to QMK.

I switched by degrees, though; I’d used a more limited set of layers for a couple of years before going full gonzo, so I was used to the modality; adding more layers was less a new paradigm and more just adding complexity to what I was, by then, familiar with. So I can’t say I’m a fair measure.

QMK has been a struggle to get all of the settings working such that there isn’t some behavior that is annoying, and I’m still not there, but having the programming in the keyboard has made some situations easier (consoles, etc).

I’m 9 mos into the piantor, and I still struggle with remembering where I bound some infrequently used layers, like the layer I put all the F-keys. And rarely I’ll think about how to get a key - rather than relying on muscle memory - and simply fail to remember the magic combo. However, I won’t voluntarily go back. Having numbers and special characters accessible without having to change my hand positions is simply invaluable, and I still use kanata on my laptop to get the same behavior, despite it meaning I have a whole row of keys I’m not using anymore.

The biggest hassle in going back to a full size is the reduced number of thumb keys. And I admit, I learned to touch type being able to hit the space bar with either thumb, and simply do not have the luxury of enough keys to dedicated to duplicate functions to allow this. This would be probably my biggest complaint, and only regret about switching.

I… had not. The permissive hold option looks like it might address my second issue, that of the fact that the fixed timing is incongruent with my far less consistent human timing.

Someone else mentioned the timeless homerow mods, wherein positional hold-tap is used to address rolling issues, which is what I think I’m seeing with the shift-down/char-down/shift-up/char-up sequence not outputting the expected shifted character.

Thanks for pointing me back at the documentation. TBH, I’m a bit overwhelmed by the number of configurable options in QMK, and suffer information overload: pointers like that help me figure out where to start fiddling. Working with QMK, even through the incredibly convenient Vial application, makes me feel like sitting in front of a Moog synthesizer.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Auto Shift is a neat idea; I suspect adding yet another delay factor would be counter-productive, for me, though. The whole shift/press/release-shift/release-shift issue is more about typing faster than my brain actually works, such that I’m not always consistent in which order I release keys. Adding a lag to get caps would be, I think, infuriating.

However, the timeless homerow mod looks fantastic. Need to think a little more about their solution, but it’s encouraging in that (a) they sound like they have exactly my problem, and (b) they found a solution for it. It’s a great resource, thank you!

Exactly. Mastodon-ish would be unsuitable as a server for a number of reasons: the loose, but still expected, character limitation; the lack of emoji responses; generally poor threading support; and the overall subscription feed-like model. OTOH, it’s based on a follow-the-user model, which is nice. I’m less familiar with Friendica, but AFAIK that’s also a follow-the-user model.

The issue with Federation is the general expectation that these are public places. You can lock them down, but that’s not what they’re designed for, and in my case, the risk of misconfiguration exposing a bunch of toddler pictures that the parents want to keep private is too high. I think of the server is federated-by-nature, then it must also be paranoid-by-default; I don’t trust share-public-by-default projects to not introduced something in an upgrade that exposes data. At least if the base presumption of the developers is that all information is private by default, the risk is limited to true accidents rather than false assumptions.

ActivityPub is enticing. It’s an exciting spec, and offers many client options. I’m worried only about those base assumptions.

Photoprism’s app space is pretty bad, but there is an completely hacky yet reliable solution for Android:

1. PhotoBackup
2. The PhotoBackup server on your Photoprism server
3. A cron job that runs the photoprism import command every few minutes.

Since I’ve had this set up, it’s worked as well as Google Photos ever did for keeping my phone snaps synced to the server. It’s been more reliable than SyncThing for my data, reacting and syncing faster, and it doesn’t mysteriously periodically just stop running like SyncThing.

I don’t know if PhotoBackup is available for iOS, but if it is, it works a treat.

This is the right answer. I specifically don’t use beets because it does this, and (1) I have things organized how I like, and (2) I’ve changed music servers a half dozen times in the past decade and am leery of an app that has to “own” the library.

But the reasons I don’t use it are exactly the reasons you’re looking for, and it sounds like a perfect fit for you.

So, do I extrapolate to the rest of the world?

Yes. Also assume that anyone who disagrees with you is either insane or stupid. It’s the modern human condition!