Jacky Alciné
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Jacky Alciné

Backing Up My Life and Sending My Machine Away

I'm in the process of shipping my personal laptop to Dell for repairs. At first, I was a bit worried that I'd be out of a machine for work (I use it for client work at black.af as well) but I have a PC that I've dedicated largely for media consumption (gaming and video storage). That made me wonder how much of my actual online life do I have backed up in the event that my main laptop was out of commission. I took some steps below to move my "vital" infrastructure over to a closer location.

  • I copied my GPG keyring into my Yubikey. These keys are useful only really to me with one publicly known key and another key I keep for personal encryption that isn't shared anywhere.
  • I moved any files I wanted to keep long term into my personal install of Nextcloud. I've been using Nextcloud since 2016, ownCloud since 2015 so everything I need and want is stored in there. That server also has reproducible backups (test your backups monthly!)
  • I started uninstalling a few GUI applications that I used a lot and checking if I could back up their settings. This ended up being my terminal, IRC client, e-mail, calendar, code trees resulting in gigabytes of information having to been sent over rsync. A good time to raise a ticket with KDE about making the serialization of one's system settings an actual practice - this way, I could keep some settings in sync with others across devices. This is going to become more prevalent as Plasma Mobile is likely my mobile operating system of choice in 2020.

The most complicated part was probably copying my files over that I didn't keep synchronized under Nextcloud's watch. This was mostly the code of projects I work on which produced and all of the assets in cache as a result of it (curse you Node modules and projects that can't support the link flag).

My primary laptop for two years

I don't know why but I got slightly emotional packing up my laptop and putting it in the box, lol. I'm eager to have it up and running soon. Safe travels!

2019-12-04T16:53:07.69135-08:00 • 1 interaction
  • Tags:
  • thoughts
Jacky Alciné

Day 1: Lwa's in Pre-Pre-Alpha

First day of my IndieWeb Challenge for December and it's going to be about Lwa. I think this whole week might be! I've released a "stable" candidate that lets you know what your site needs to work with it. Be sure to try it out and let me know what you think! I've also added a page to let you preview what your site's feed would look like in Lwa for a reader. That's available for people to try out. I'm hoping that I can bring Lwa to be a friendly tool for interacting with the open social Web.

2019-12-01T22:44:14.03451-08:00 • 6 interactions
Jacky Alciné

Ambitions for 2020: A IndieWeb Look

With the new year looming around the corner, I want to help push things that encourage a more people centered Web to arise. We've returned to the land of the mainframes and it's evidently not something that we need to keep around if we're invested in people. The following list is a short one of things I'd like to have for the IndieWeb to help move the needle:

  • Contribute more to the Android client for Indigineous
  • Experiment with my own reader for Android
  • Publish the mobile client for Fortress
  • Work on pushing streaming support for Microsub
  • Re-attempt launching IWC Oakland
  • Completely deactivate all of my Facebook accounts
  • Build better interoperability between ActivityPub and IndieWeb communities
  • Explore bridging the worlds of Secure Scuttlebutt and the IndieWeb

There's definitely a host of more things I want to get done in 2020 but if/when I get these done, I'll be more than glad. Here's to a new year around people!

2019-12-01T00:22:31.49862-08:00 • 11 interactions
Jacky Alciné

My IndieWeb Challenge!

I'm going to be participating in the IndieWeb challenge in December this year. Most of my work is going to focus around building up services that I'd like to use for the IndieWeb and can help use to encourage use of it. This means I'll be doubling down on building Lwa and Fortress to bring a polished experience for browsing social feeds and authorization. If I also find time, I might look into implementing collection posts for Koype so I can finally port over my FAQ! That coupled with the ability to have custom pages in Koype would be the last additions to getting my experience to be completely IndieWeb.

I also do plan to do some Wiki gardening for older pages to help keep things relevant for those pursuing. Here's to the IndieWeb Challenge!

2019-11-30T23:56:07.67776-08:00 • 11 interactions
  • Tags:
  • indieweb
Jacky Alciné

Working for an Ethical Software Company

Ethics. A governing set of rules that help people determine conduct, according to Wikipedia. These kind of rules have become more and more important as software continues to "eat the world". Recently, Paul Jarvis asked an open(?) question about what it means to be an ethical software company. Which is always going to be subjective - some people consider some things to be "right" or "wrong". For example, imprisonment of any being is wrong. Angela Davis taught me that. But we have companies who have no problem working on a mission to accelerate and "effectively" put people into prisons or detention centers. Ethics - subjective as hell.

For any company that wants to come off as an ethical one and walk the walk of it, they have to understand that their impact doesn't end on deploys. It continues into the action that they take with the money (and resources) they collect from users to continue their livelihood. This line is one that tech (for some reason) is willing to ignore in some cases and what makes the actual difference between an ethical company for show and one in the paint.

It has to start with the people in the company. An ethical company values all of the work produced by its workers (think cooperative economics). This insures that by design, the company is stabilizing for the well-being of its workers and not for vacuuming excess profits for shareholders. This focus on sustainable growth spills over into other things like:

  • collecting and communicating data from users when it's necessary, not because you can
  • listening and responding to feedback from users about how it impacts their lives due to having a more direct connection to the success of the company
  • responding to events and supporting the well-being of workers when it comes to their lives

This definitely comes off as "this company is creeping into their personal life" and yeah, that's a bit of the idea. When companies decided to become "the new social interaction layer" or "the new movie theater", they took on the responsibilities that come with these deep social vectors of people's lives. That obligation has been taken extremely lightly in the tech sector and has resulted in a lot of mistakes and harm for the sake of "innovation" and "scale".

Companies won't be perfect - nothing really is. But they can do better (we're past the saying part). And this ties into what Paul was really asking - what do they do?

They stand behind the values that they profess. If you're a company that works to connect people; don't fund or back things that actively disconnect people from their families. If you're aiming to be a transport layer of ideas, understanding that one user is not representative of all is necessary and creating tooling for such a landscape is necessary. You truly have to put yourself in the lives of others (actual empathy) and understand how supporting and working with organizations at scale can impact your users. It's doubly ironic when companies claim to want to reach into "developing worlds" and are indirectly making their lives more difficult. This is an obvious jab at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and whatever letter you can fit in the FAMG acronym. 

Donating the money away doesn't matter if it's not proportional to what you take in nor does it undo the harm initially caused. It's like a conditional apology (those aren't apologies).

For those who don't wanna read the wall of text above, just try to apply the following:

  • Give users complete say over their data on your platforms
  • Invest time into not being a member of the Attention Economy
  • Understand what you spend money and/or invest in
  • Be as transparent with your choices to your users as you would be with stakeholders (users are the validation of your product after all)
  • Pay your workers equitably, fairly and transparently.
  • Avoid surveillance capitalism (it's anti-ethical by design - unless your ethics have no problem with abuse of individual privacy).
  • Grow from the mistakes and listen to people who are negatively impacted by those mistakes.
2019-11-07T12:49:18.70415-08:00
  • Tags:
  • thoughts
Jacky Alciné

The Future of the Intersection of PoC and F/LOSS

Kat proposed a question that gave me a bit of pause (thanks Josh for highlighting it). I figured for a question with this kind of weight deserved a longer space.

The F/LOSS space gave me my stay into technology. I started on Windows ME because that's what came on the Compaq my mom bought. But when I couldn't update the system past Vista and it begun to really slow down, Ubuntu was there - a bastion project that shows what Open Source software can do when we have people and companies backing it. I have a lot of faith in the power of free and open source software. But there's a reckoning that needs to occur.

Free software is defined by the Free Software Foundation as "software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it". It's commonly described as "free as in speech". Open source software's a bit more defined as code that's licensed as freely available, permitting anti-discriminatory distribution, providing non-encumbering and non-specific application to the software being used and technology neutral. With these definitions, you'd think that organizations like these and their backers would be very open and willing to take on people who are conventionally pushed out of places that gate-keep knowledge and resources.

I rarely had problems online until people saw the face associated with it. I've gotten unlogged comments on FreeNode about people being "shocked" that I'm Black. On the flip side, I felt safer and more comfortable seeing and working with very welcoming people (hey Paul!) that kept me in the space. This does NOT excuse or dismiss Richard Stallman's explicit endorsement of misogyny, pedophilia and sexual assault. If the FSF wants to continue a notion of being a safe intersectional space, RMS has to be removed. Full stop.

I don't know much about issues and complications within the OSI but no place is perfect or devoid of things if they haven't been discussed or addressed. It'd make sense for them to employ a company culture team to weed it out in advance.

Where Does the Future of F/LOSS stand?

To shortly answer Kat's question, I think that the FSF itself does not stand to help, support or reach out to marginalized people in the ways that they claim to by endorsing and employing people who actively cannot live to those values. The concept of free software isn't a novel one either, there's facets of it that can be seen in indigenous cultures (the Taíno and Arawak immediately come to mind). But as they stand, they force a lifestyle and behavior that people of color (myself included, tbh) can find extremely difficult to uphold and be ostracized for attempting to do so. As someone who does his very best to uphold these ideals because I believe that they can put people first, I don't think that we'll have the best chance to continue the crusade against hyper-proprietary solutions or combating bigoted people if we maintain the status quo. It's not sustainable.

No, Seriously, What Do We Do?

We got amazing people laying out how the visible vanguards of movements are actively harming people in the space (if not directly then by endorsement and support of those who do - it's called being an accomplice). I'm thinking that it's nigh time that we actually give up on things of the GNU. Our endorsement and support is going to further give them a head count that, in this space, is implicit power. And I refuse to give them that knowing that this behavior has been going on for more than a decade.

I think it'd been more advantageous for people of color who have the resources, capability and time to begin divesting from these systems and look to build our own. Greenfield projects are difficult but they can yield more beneficial in the end than spending more energy attempting to refactor a system that's actively resisting changes to grow. This is my personal (unwavering for now) stance about this and that's the answer I'll give in response to Kat's question.

What are You Going to Do?

I have quite a few projects that I've made open and available and I'm already in the process of moving them over to the Parity Public license backed by License Zero. The reasons for this are many but it's largely because OSS as it stands does not make it easy for people without the immense privilege to write, distribute and maintain code to sustain themselves. Just ask the JavaScript community that isn't backed by Facebook, Apple, Google or Microsoft. It's gotten a lot easier due to communal efforts from Debian and corporate endeavors from GitHub. But we need to actually acknowledge the barrier and not make it into a marketing tagline.

The larger community also seems very willing to defend and support people who perpetuate these behaviors to no end. There's threads on THREADS about this on Twitter. Sarah Mei has been telling y'all for the longest. The stuff I'm spending time and energy on is not something I'd want to attribute to abuse and I'd like to optimize to reduce. And I don't have the energy to explain to people anymore why they need to go back and read what people have said in the past.

2019-09-13T19:14:50.40215-07:00
  • Tags:
  • tech
  • digital rights
  • rants
  • F/LOSS
Jacky Alciné

Clearing Out My Feeds

I'm definitely a very "connected" person. After an hour or so of being up in the, I'm checking the cached notifications that appear when my phone leaves "Do Not Disturb" mode. It's from an array of platforms (YouTube, Patreon, Twitter, Instagram and mailing lists). I've always kept my subscriptions on YouTube low because the act of watching video is a very isolating operation. Patreon was easy to because it costs money. Instagram is something I'm working to reduce. Twitter, though, has proven to be the most difficult platform to reduce my "mental traffic" to. I also use it as a pipeline for news. 

Thankfully Tokimeki Unfollow, a free app on Glitch, has helped me with reducing the number of people I follow as well as moving people into lists that align with the kind of content that they tend to post. I've gone from nearly following 2,000 people to about half of that. And I don't want to stop. I'd like to get to a place where I don't see updates if it's not a mention or a direct message. And even then, I'd like to direct those to my personal site's contact form. Once I get down to about 750, which feels like an optimal number of people to follow for me, I'll double down on adding this content into Lwa so I can just follow Twitter lists like a timeline - instead of relying on the primary timeline for the source of information. I'm excited to launch it!

2019-09-11T20:31:32.94994-07:00
  • Tags:
  • silos
  • twitter
Jacky Alciné

Koype 0.1.0 is Out!

Friday evening, after some testing of the development environment, I finally cut the first minor version of Koype. It's been nearly a year since I've started working on this project and this minor version reflects a shoddy attempt at a self-service IndieWeb site. There's a lot of implications and assumptions I've made and I'd love for those willing to try it out on their systems to help me break them. Some of those are:

  • You'll be using an object storage system to store all of the files in the system. Koype stores information about its posts, incoming Webmentions and media all to object storage. This can be amended to work with just local file storage given demand and interest for it comes into play.
  • You'd use SQLite to store information about your system. I almost went with using PostgreSQL because my familiarity with it but I decided to give SQLite another look. After noting that it's already basically everywhere and moves well, I figure it'd be something I would want to stick into Koype to test it out.
  • You have some level of familiarity with Elixir. When things break, there's a console you would want to drop into to push things back into the normal state. I'm working on a way to build interfaces for this moments instead of writing those commands over and over.

I'm super excited to see how y'all go about using this initial version. I'll be bringing more bug fixes to Koype but will be turning a bit more attention to getting things around Koype like the Hub and Theme Gallery up and running. You can install Koype today by using its Docker image on Docker Hub or building from source. There's more information coming to the docs so check for an update on that soon!

2019-08-30T21:27:56.59918-07:00
  • Tags:
  • releases
  • koype
Jacky Alciné

The Silent Majority is Going to Watch the World Burn. It's Not Okay.

It is very easy to mute words. To block people. To deflect and say that the problems of the world have little or no impact to you. That you can eat, pray and love away all of the issues. That it's best to optimize for "positivity" and "blessings" instead of opening one's eyes to events around them.

It's self-centered and self-serving to do so. Especially in a world where the actions of the many can override the actions of a few. Instead of deeper introspection into why one might "react" or be "outraged", people opt to just say that the people speaking up are just making noise. It's moderately tolerable to see this from strangers - my stance on humans is that we're capable of great good, we just have evolved to focus only ourselves - but it gets borderline depressing to see this from people I want to call friends and family. It's a bit isolating to think that the concept of optimizing for general safety for people you can't even see is something people are willing to chuck out of the window for momentary comfort. It's even more saddening to see the same people claim to be proponents of "progress" and general social well-being be so hypocritical.

To put things into context, I'm a Black vegan democratic socialist. A bunch of words to say that I want to optimize for the less fortunate, provide resources to all (since we have more than enough) and against any form of harm to life that causes immediate harm to the environment. This also means that I exist in a minority in a lot of spaces I enter. Granted, I am also a young cisgender heterosexual (cishet) male, so I have all of the affordances and privileges that come with that (not having my authority challenged by other people that adhere to patriarchal ideals, etc). However, once I'm among peers, I can notice how alone I am in my stances.

  • There's a strong belief in the general African diaspora residing in the United States that capitalism can be somehow made ethical despite decades of years of evidence showing the contrary.
  • Even with more research coming about the impact of animal abuse and consumption, Black people are unwavering to the idea that meat and dairy are vital for life. There's (weak) arguments made around it being vital for child birth and growth.
  • There's less want of a unity to allow for group mobility and more of a demand of abusive systems that have historically put Black people in the States into lower positions of mobility and class. 

I want to chuck a lot of this to Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome but there's a few holes in that theory that wouldn't fit neatly with immigrant children from the continent or the Caribbean for example. This exists outside of the Black (and Latinx!) communities but I'm not qualified to speak on it, though. It's difficult to want change when everyone is comfortable with either contributing to the dismissal of their participation in oppression or the willingness to enter deeper into it despite them causing self-harm. Why are either of these okay?

I don't think I'm really saying anything. I'm just frustated that I have to justify me being here in my whole self almost daily. I'm tired of having to explain why Europe and the US should be wholly accountable for the damages they've caused and work from there (China, Russia, etc). Who's going to hold them accountable though? We can't see ourselves without some sort of national anchors and if these countries are the ones dictating 'order', we were screwed since the first Indigenous Taíno person fell to Columbus's raids of the West.

Maybe I should just be like y'all and say fuck it.

2019-08-28T10:04:07.92989-07:00
  • Tags:
  • testing
Jacky Alciné

The Need for a Solid Mobile IndieWeb Experience

As much as the Web community would love to tell us that the Web is completely ready for the mobile landscape, it doesn't come close to the speed of native code running on a consumer device. Not a vanilla emulator but a two-year (or older!) device with a bit of wear. I tried for a month to use applications on the Web solely through Chrome and Firefox on mobile and it didn't work out too well for me. I got too used to the snappy nature of these native applications and I wanted that in the Web browser on my phone. Even this site isn't fully optimized for mobile.

The Need to Opt for More

I decided to look at the client landscape for micro.blog, the most mature social platform that's built around IndieWeb principles. I defined maturity as a platform that allowed immediate on-boarding into the community, provided a very simple (no-explainer) interface on how to get started and made it easy to go beyond it. That level of support is something I want my suite of tools to have - and I'm still working on it.

The client application in question that caught my attention was Dialog for Android. I didn't bother look into the iOS landscape since the founder is an Apple developer - there's insured support for that platform. It has probably the best interface for a social tool outside of Tusky for Android. If I had the money and time, I'd hire this person to build a open version of this application that provided first class support for Koype (via Micropub and Microsub). Something like this combined with the ability to just 'make' a IndieWeb site on the fly - registering a domain, getting a sample site going - can help adoption a lot too since more people are online. I can see a platform like Glitch with the ability to remix a site being a driver for this. A lot of the pieces are there.

I mentioned in my keynote at IndieWeb Summit 2019 how things won't get better until we attempt to reach out and pull people in. Soft advocacy only works for so long.


 

2019-08-27T23:34:54.92149-07:00
  • Tags:
  • koype
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