I did in a shot. It doesn’t taste like egg.

Hermeticism is a gnostic esoteric system and like all gnostic forms, it implies that there’s an “unknown” reality that can be disveiled through revelation. You have a perceived reality that is fake and a “real” reality that is hidden from you. This already sets the ground for conspiratorial thinking.

The second element is that hermeticists in the 18th century were relatively rich and powerful men who met in secret societies, which was something everybody did, but they also had the money to build monuments and hide their symbols in plain sight. This created the trope of a secret congregation of powerful men into esoteric shit who plot to take over society.

the logic that sending messages alters political reality is part of the overall problem. Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict of ideas or opinions. A license is as powerful as the will of the state power behind it to enforce it. Otherwise, it is powerless.

If you want to make sense of the political world, I invite to move beyond the idea of “taking stances” or expressing positions as a political act, and reason instead of what incentives and powers you’re altering with your political actions.

What you describe just does not play out in real life: neither on a micro scale nor on a macro scale.

Baserow and n8n are good enough for me to use in a professional production setting. Nocodb could be good, but it has some very basic bugs and shortcomings that make it hard to use.

Appflowy is getting there, but I would give it some more time.

Appsmith is good, but complex. Worth investing some time into, but it cannot be picked up casually to play around.

On the long-term, none. In the short-term, FOSS no-code tools are finally allowing grassroot organizations to have self-hosted, customizable internal tooling without having to rely on devs or sysadmins. This has a lot of potential to overcome the failures of the last decades of hackerist unadoptable software.

social media site specifically I don’t know, but raids for managing infrastructure for completely legal but politically inconvenient activities, yes, plenty. I remember going to a talk from a guy managing the servers of Extinction Rebellion and he got all his stuff seized, never got accused of anything, had to wait months to get his stuff back and never got back a few things.

Germany is doing plenty of extra-judicial repression of pro-Palestine activism. Jurisdiction doesn’t matter.

I live in Germany, and it’s a totally realistic scenario, especially in Bavaria. They seize computers to intimidate digital activists all the time for way less serious topics.

Cooking is not a standardized or reproducible process at home, because the variables outside of anybody’s control. Modern mass recipes give only the illusion of being reproducible algorithms, but they will never achieve that.

Grappling with the complexity of different tooling, supply chains, seasonality and so on, all within a recipe, is a futile effort. That complexity must be handled outside the recipe.

The first line of the documentation is pretty clear: “Bonfire is an open-source framework for building federated digital spaces where people can gather, interact, and form communities online.”

You’re making this comment in a community named after a specific software ideology.

Positioning the project. Putting the project’s value before the tool it produces or the problem it solves is a specific stylistic choice. Just not in the software projects you’re usually involved in.

It’s an elixir skeleton that runs a system of modules you can combine (just with configs) or that you can extend by adding new modules.

The skeleton does the bare minimum and the modules contain all the logic. It’s not a no-code tool (that would be astounding, but doesn’t exist yet), you still need to write some config files (flavours) or write some elixir.

In open source circles, a technical description of what a tool does might be the norm, but in many other spaces, signaling your values and ideology is more important than the technicalities. For you it’s buzzwords, for other people it means a very specific positioning.

This is a good starting point: https://trent.mirror.xyz/GDDRqetgglGR5IYK1uTXxLalwIH6pBF9nulmY9zarUw

Licenses don’t stop bombs. In general, informational freedoms always benefits the stronger actor, because they already have the means to exploit the information better than other actors. Legal restrictions are just a bump in the road if what you produced is really really valuable for a corporation or a state entity: they can reimplement it, exploiting the design and “trial-and-error” work embedded in whatever you produced, or they can simply ignore licenses because nobody is going to ask the Israeli’s military to respect a license when they are slaughtering civilians.

Social problems never have technical solutions.

If you want to make software that is not captured by state or corporate power, you must create software that is incompatible with whatever they need to do. Embed a social logic that is worthless to their system but useful to our system. Anything else is eventually going to be captured. There’s a lot of literature on anti-capture design, and some of it manages to rise above the purely techno-optimist logic and provide something useful.

It’s a toolkit to build federated apps, with a social media+blogging+collaboration platform built on top of it.

I know it’s a tough ask. In the meanwhile I’m exploring the possibility of embedding excalidraw into something else but I don’t know.

I already contribute to wikis on this topic, like Activist Handbook, but they are not the right format for what I need. Linked documents have limited expressivity and visual people are currently underserved, hence the diagram approach.

Another similar thing would be to use stuff like obsidian canvas which is something in between

It would just be much easier to use UTC as the standard for all cross-timezone activities. The small portion of the population who needs to think about timezones would just have to add another timezone to their digital tools and the others won’t have to do anything.

DEI is definitely used in corporate environments. I understand this use of the term as “rightswashing”, where the corporate performs inclusivity without actually doing anything about it.