Ehm sorry but no. Sovereignty means you own the stack not that you just choose other suppliers. Build on EU infra means owning a machine room with some servers, having fiber optic good enough for your traffic and that's is.
What the author describe is just a supplier switch still owning next to nothing.
Perhaps the term is overloaded, and a better one would suffice, but the bigger point is to ensure that none of their infrastructure is under the purview of any US entity, public or private.
EU tech alternative is FLOSS, not copy the model someone else did earlier and better. As an EU Citizen I reject the initiatives of the Commission, which moreover, is not elected but appointed through a mechanism where the will of the people never plays a part, whose goals are the sinicization of the EU and its destruction for partisan interests against ours.
To have a sovereign IT sector, we must ENFORCE FLOSS and open hardware in no uncertain terms, rather than copying Big Tech.
I use Emacs/org-mode to do the same and much more, without tying myself to specific third parties, but the point remains valid and largely ignored by most until recently: the heart of our information is plain text with potential binary attachments, and managing it as freely as possible, with search&narrow access and the ability to turn it into hypertext, to compute inside text etc is essential to "unlocking" or truly harnessing the power of the desktop computing. This model of personal computing has been denied for ages due to commercial interests in selling countless walled gardens that do only one thing, "UNIX-style", but without the IPC of the Unix CLI.
I agree but... I've tried self hosting Matrix, messy. I manage to get it running on my NixOS homeserver, it works, but Livekit is very limited, Coturn seems not that stable to traverse NAT occasionally for reasons I still don't know, video quality is a joke. XMPP? Well, it's even harder to self-host. Mumble is much easier (at least, for me) but lack the ability to call, and that's what I'm looking for.
I've also tried the plain old Asterisk with deskphones and softphone, a nice journey, but not something that could possibly succeed.
I line Nostr, but... So far it lack way to much clients to be used on scale, meaning the reasoning that a scrap of text is the center of our information/communication needs is very nice. But... Most clients are or buggy and limited or monsters not much less buggy. Long-form notes to makes personal blogs seems to be neglected, emails equivalent seems to be just an unfinished and abandoned experiment. The media part is still to be seen in realist usage terms.
So well... The problem of protocols is that lacking a decently feature complete simple app, easy to deploy from go install/pip install/cargo build without a gazillion of deps and different services, easy to package for distro the result is a messy ecosystem only some devs explore to explore, not really to use "in production" and there is so no option to really grow big.
As an EU Citizen I do not want to switch from a proprietary fintech to another, I want FREEDOM. So, I have nothing against FLOSS cryptos, but I see exactly no reason to choose a company instead of another, especially given the record of EU illegal size of funds for anyone the EU Commission dislike, not differently than USA or Canada.
I've very recently try on my NixOS homeserver both Matrix and XMPP, with the target of having family/few friends own video-calls with chats aside mostly meant as shared scrap of text more than real chats to waste time on them. Something like "remember the milk" than else.
The experience was unpleasant in both cases; in the end, I have a working setup for both, relatively working at least, but what's really missing is a single application, something you can 'go install', 'pip install', or 'cargo build', also easy for distro packagers, that features:
- a text-based configuration
- an admin WebUI (for eventual storage cleanup, moderation etc)
- a client WebUI for users
including:
- text chat with optional file uploads
- audio/video chat
- other bits on the side like long-form notes Nostr-style for a blog with comments under articles etc (yes, it's connected, it's just plain textual communication).
The core of it is just a simple snippet of text, we can transmit to some privately, or to anyone openly, and in that sense, Nostr has got it spot on: you can do chats, emails, blog posts, because everything is just a bit of text rendered with any attached media. Unfortunately, as it stands, Nostr feels like an ecosystem that lacks a clear direction; XMPP seems to be largely abandoned, with enough complexity to put most people off; Matrix looks to be heading towards a commercial future riddled with issues that keep most people away, and in the end, we don't have much. Hosting BBB or Jitsi is even worse. Hosting Asterisk or Yate to use with softphones or classic VoIP desk phones is also problematic.
There's a lot going on under the bonnet now, but why an app hasn't emerged yet that brings together features we've more or less had for decades is a bit of a mystery to me. It almost feels intentional, as if it's designed to deny free communication to the masses by making life difficult on purpose.
The Sinicization of the West continues, yet people still aren't pushing back; there are no indefinite general strikes, nor is there anyone foaming at the mouth demanding the arrest of the coup plotters in power...
- notes left there for work, family organization, etc basically things for which an email is "too much" but a small scrap of text seen by some serve the purpose well
- calls, whether audio-only or audio + video
For social use, I see Lemmy or Nostr/Habla more than Matrix. But for all of this, there's a major lack of a single app that is easy go install-able, pip install-able, or cargo build-able without a gazillion dependencies and a thousand setup problems, to the point that most people just choose Docker, using stuff made by others that they know almost nothing about because setting up and maintaining these solutions is just too complex.
I wonder when contemporary developers will (re)invent Emacs/Gnus: the unified inbox for email, feeds, and news, because what really matters are text messages + eventual multimedia content, personal and private scoring to manage them, and a consistent local UI that allows for personal archiving and resharing.
I've looked at the Fediverse, objectively with little hope and many design issues, I'm watching Nostr with interest even though it seems more like a rough sketch lacking the ideas to move forward, but that concept of Gnus and Usenet, so simple in itself, still hasn't managed to resurface.
- offpunk is an offline content browser/reader. Main component is fetching/caching/displaying ressources
- offpunk is developed as a set of components that can be used separately (openk, ansicat, netcache)
- offpunk delegates as much as possible to other UNIX tools (less for browsing/reading, chafa for images, grep to find in a page, $EDITOR for editing needs )
- offpunk is pure CLI tool. You type commands, results is displayed in your terminal or in less. There’s no "keyboard shortcuts" or "environment". It is a prompt on which you type commands
- There’s no "configuration" in offpunk. The only (but powerful) way on configuring is having offpunk launch commands at starts (commands listed in offpunkrc). So no "configuration language" or syntax or plugins or whatever.
- last but not least: basic use of Offpunk is simple. You are not required to learn much and you use only what you want. Lot of Offpunks users don’t use the Web/HTTP part and use it as a straight Gemini browser (for the record, Offpunk is a fork of AV-98, the very first Gemini browser)
My intention wasn't to compare software but rather paradigms; Gnus is only relevant here because it unifies email, feeds and news into a single UI. In other words, the human user sees everything as generic "posts" an approach not unlike many Nostr clients, to name something modern. It's the paradigm of saying "in the end, what matters is the message". As long as there's a readable amount of them, you don't need anything else; when they reach a certain volume, well, you need to be able to "filter" them somehow so that some are never seen/read, for others you only see the title at a glance, and some are actually read. This is the principle of scoring, which is even older, I think it was part of the first PARC Altos.
What I meant is that I wonder how long it will take nowadays to go back to creating a decentralized model or, since overhead allows for it today, a distributed one, that serves modern forms of human communication:
- blogs (e.g. Nostr's long-form notes in Habla, or WireFreely for the Fediverse)
- non-synchronous short messages (e.g. Twitter/X style)
- synchronous short messages, i.e. chat
With a decentralized/distributed network for distribution where everyone keeps what they want on their own hardware.
On the sidelines, it would be nice today to also see synchronous audio and audio+video, meaning calls and conferences, all in a single UI and with at most two or three protocols on the network side (one for asynchronous messages and media, one for chat if the asynchronous one doesn't cut it, and one for calls).
Without the end user having to make personal collages if they don't want to, using an app that is go-installable, pip-able, cargo-build-able, basically something that both those who want to try it and distro packagers can add quickly. This would help spread something among techies/nerds/geeks and also works for the end user, who would be introduced to this solution by the techies/nerds/geeks. To me, this is what's missing to see the big platforms currently in fashion get toppled.
Seeing projects like Offpunk inspired the thoughts above; that was the point :)
well, indeed. If you use mutt and use the "reply" feature in Offpunk, you will see how well emails and blog/gemini posts merge well ;-) (this will be the subject of another post later)
Gnus it's dog slow, be with email or with usenet. I say this as an ex-Emacs user where I even plugged slrn's cache in order to speed up things, but over 100k messages that was unusable in my netbook, even under 64 bit machines and native compilation. Slrn did it better. On RSS, I use sfeed which is more Unix like and I just plumb lynx/links or whatever I like as a reader. And fast, much fast than GNUs, Elfeed or the core RSS reader in Emacs.
OTOH, Emacs it's the only libre Usenet reader for Android. Go figure, and that being a dead simple protocol. Despite of that, lots of Thunderbird forks in FDroid didn't adapt the Usenet part yet.
Offpunk it's slow but adding multiprocessing with flock (for python3 maybe) would be a piece of cake in order to allow parallel downloads while syncinc.
I don't think Gnus is that bad once you spend some time setting it up. For groups with a ton of content where I mostly want to search, I found it was better to just download the whole group and index into notmuch. I could query 20 years of the Smalltalk USENET group or the Supercollider mailing list instantly.
Read again, I used slrnpull's cache. Mail was fast with Mu4e and Mairix. GNUS with slrn, not much. I have tons of articles from comp.* and some alt.* related groups. People loves to talk at comp.misc and comp.arch.
Also GNUS' caching it's really slow compared to slrn. Yes, I know, Elisp vs C, but even with native compilation it was excruciatingly slow. I've seen bytecoded TCL back in the day running really fast for these tasks.
As a long time Emacs user, I never even tried Gnus, or used it as a calendar (except for some time tracking in org-mode). How would calendar invites work there? How well does it support shared calendars to determine busy/free information of others?
What the author describe is just a supplier switch still owning next to nothing.
reply