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A personal update on Hacker Beach #7

2 min read

After finally having booked my incoming flight for Hacker Beach #7, which is going to take place on the Phillippines in January, I'm getting genuinely excited about it.

Aside from every single one of the past 6 editions having been amazing in their own way, I'm mostly looking forward to clearing my schedule of for-profit work, and yet again spending most of January on developing and contributing to free and open-source software.

The things I'll be hacking on will include many pieces of software from both the remoteStorage ecosystem as well as the wider Kosmos project. But I'm also planning to spend some time on improving my IndieWeb setup, and experimenting more with Lightning Network.

I'm also looking forward, as always, to doing these things together with old and new friends, and exchanging knowledge and experience, while escaping the cold Northern winter together. Just for one example, I think I would've never switched to Linux a few years ago, and learned so much about it since then, without the privilege of having had bkero explain to me a thousand things in the past.

So, in the spirit of p2p learning, I'm hereby offering free mentorship for anyone wanting to get involved with contributing to the projects (or wider areas of software) that I mentioned above!

For outdoor activities, while others might be more excited about the excellent diving around Coron, personally, I'm more keen on the mountain-biking. In fact, I'm planning to bring a bike this year, including bike packing bags, so I'll be able to explore not just Busuanga island, but potentially more of the Phillippines, on two wheels before and/or after Hacker Beach.

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If you're interested in joining us this coming January, and you haven't had the pleasure to catch a Hacker Beach in the past: you can get in touch with people in on Freenode IRC, and you can also follow and talk to us on the fediverse (Mastodon, GNUSocial, Pleroma, etc.), and if need be on Twitter.

 

If you'd like to see location tagging in Mastodon (e.g. I'd love to have it for my photo posts), plz give this issue a thumbs-up: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/281

 

It boggles my mind that so many blockchain/DLT advocates publish blog posts on Medium and use Twitter over Mastodon. You can always do both, but why not do decentralized Web first and sync to central silos second?

 

If you tried to switch to Mastodon in the past, but found yourself lost in the fediverse, here's a great writeup for you: https://theoutline.com/post/2689/mastodon-makes-the-internet-feel-like-home-again?zd=1&zi=uiatp7...

 

Phew, that was hard! Finally have a Huginn workflow for syndicating Mastodon favs and boosts back to my personal site, from where I post (using ).

Here's the scenario diagram: https://storage.5apps.com/basti/public/shares/180111-1545-mastodon-webmentions.png (blog post and Huginn gems coming soon).

 

"6 reasons why Mastodon won't survive" from April 2017: http://mashable.com/2017/04/05/mastodon-wont-survive/#kPr8akjqpaqV -- featuring 6 reasons that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Meanwhile, the fediverse has been growing slowly but steadily, day by day, with people deleting more and more birdsite accounts.

 

Our little Mastodon instance is now federating with more than 1000 other instances/servers. It is literally a thousand different Twitters all talking to each other. Long live the fediverse! https://kosmos.social/about/more

 

"Instead of Twitter’s one-size-fits-all approach, we can tailor social media to fit the needs of every community": https://nolanlawson.com/2017/10/23/what-is-mastodon-and-why-is-it-better-than-twitter/

 

Any other admins or users of Mastodon, GNU Social, postActiv or other Fediverse software at interested in meeting up during camp?

 

Today in Enjoying-Mastodon-more-than-Twitter news: our instance has web push notifications now: https://kosmos.social/@kosmos/324074

 

Had a great time cycling to OpenTechSummit and back with @jancborchardt@mastodon.social yesterday. Realized I should do way more social rides.

Anyone else in Berlin into cycling (fast-ish), and interested in a group ride this weekend or sometime next week?

 

Started using Mastodon/The Fediverse™ on April 6. Less than two months later, Twitter feels like a cheap, ad-ridden cable TV channel.

 

Random thought: what if Mastodon/OStatus instances would (optionally) be IPFS nodes, storing all their assets in IPFS and having other instances sync and re-distribute them? What if instance admins paying for AWS or similar could be replaced by community-financed, instance-specific pinning nodes, which retain all content that wasn't accessed recently?

 

Someone made an RSS-to-Mastodon service/program: https://toot.berlin/@blindcoder/180582

 

For people stuck on a certain corporation's ad-based service, here's the reply to my Autocrypt question: https://mastodon.xyz/users/HerraBRE/updates/114191

 

Sorry that I'm commenting on this all the time, but we're now approaching 1000 Mastodon instances. ONE THOUSAND. https://instances.mastodon.xyz/list

 

Current status: 541 active Mastodon instances online, with 181,061 accounts. Unreal. https://social.lou.lt/users/mastodonusercount/updates/19865

 

Thanks to @nxd4n@mastodon.social, this toot was posted automatically from my Known website. Or as the cool kids like to say: I'm now POSSEing my toots.

 

I wrote about how to cross-post from Twitter to Mastodon via IFTTT, but here's how to do it the other way around: https://medium.com/@pimterry/sync-your-mastodon-back-to-twitter-3c72f2bc8626

 

I tooted about how you can cross-post your tweets to a Mastodon account using nothing but IFTTT: https://kosmos.social/@raucao/3377

An IndieWeb Webring 🕸💍