My Fediverse April 2024

As previous months, I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. This month, I am particularly excited about the ongoing work of combining OpenBadges with ActivityPub. I saw it on this Mastodon-post, which mentioned ActivityBadges. Fingers crossed something useful comes out of this.

Also, like last month, I continued to update online profiles when I found some still referring to Twitter. I did a sweeping update on all Stack Overflow sites.

Motions to Wikimedia Sverige

I mentioned last month about two motions I submitted for the Annual General Assembly of Wikimedia Sverige. Unfortunately, they were both rejected. However, some of the discussion was about it not being appropriate for the assembly to make this small-scale decision. Perhaps it can still be a strong enough signal to the staff to take action. Time will tell.

This is the first half of my fourth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

We Should All Be Vegans

This essay was an assignment I wrote last year at the course English: Writing Texts about Facts and Opinions.

Veganism is the philosophy of not exploiting animals in any way. It entails excluding all animal products and by-products from the consumption and all parts of the production. Or, put another way, a product is vegan if no animals were exploited during its production. By only using vegan products, many advantages can be achieved. You might ask yourself: Since veganism is still a fringe lifestyle, can these advantages really make a difference? If you value good public health, justice and equality and want to do something about global warming, yes they can. In fact, these advantages are so beneficial for society, we should all be vegans.

Eating vegan has a number of positive effects on health, which, of course, is good on a personal level, but it also has positive effects on the public health. Heart diseases, type-2 diabetes and cancer are common and a strain on the healthcare system. As a vegan diet has been shown to decrease all these diseases through various studies, there is an opportunity to free up resources. Those resources could instead be used to improve the situation for healthcare workers in general, resulting in better care for patients, or to treat diseases that today are somewhat neglected. Of course, increasing the quality of life for many people by allowing them to live longer and healthier lives should not be neglected either.

Another aspect that cannot be neglected is the ethical argument. Exploiting animals and causing them severe suffering for our gain is hard to justify. It is a kind of slavery and represents an idea that we, since long should have abandoned in our modern society. Especially recent progress in consciousness in animals, their capacity for suffering and having emotional lives, makes it easy to draw parallels to how society previously treated different human races. This speciesism is a remnant of an ungrounded belief in human moral superiority, which is not fitting for a civilized and enlightened society. In essence, keeping this practice preserves the thinking of some races and species being worth more than others and is fertile ground for similar thinking being applied to humans, i.e. that some people are worth less. Discarding this practice would therefore not only be morally just to the animals, but also make it easier to fully transition into a humane and kind civilization where all humans are equal.

Furthermore, if we want to keep our civilization as habitable as we have become used to, we quickly need to solve many environmental issues, and in particular address the rising levels of greenhouse gases causing climate change. Production of meat causes enormous emissions, mostly of methane from animals. While cattle are the largest emitters, pigs and poultry also compare unfavorably to vegetable protein sources. The way land is treated, both for keeping the animals, and also for the production of animal feed, is having a devastating effect on biodiversity. Declining biodiversity is a factor that causes ecosystems to perish, which in turn can speed up climate change through loss of carbon in the biomass. By using the land directly for human food, less area would be needed to produce the same amount of nutritional value and more could be saved in nature preserves.

The lack of nutritional value is a common counterargument to veganism, meaning that it would be hard to obtain enough minerals and vitamins through a strictly vegan diet. This is mostly an old myth, augmented through stories in popular culture of vegans being pale and weak. In reality, with a varied and planned diet, it is straightforward to keep a fully adequate diet and obtain all the nutrients needed for healthy bodily functions. Even without a properly planned diet, supplements can make up for the lack of the nutrients that are hard to include in a vegan diet, such as vitamin B12.

To summarize, there is much to be won for society if everyone switched to a vegan diet. Public health would greatly benefit, as well as the health level of many individuals. We would live morally sound lives while also removing fertile ground for racism and other injustices. Finally, we would make huge steps towards mitigating the worst effects of climate change. These advantages have such a potential that, anyone should agree that we all should be vegans.

New CV page

I used to have a page on this blog with my curriculum vitae. It was a plugin that extracted certain data from my LinkedIn page. Unfortunately, it stopped working, and I removed the page a few years ago.

Recently, I had reason to update my CV/LinkedIn page and I felt inspired to create a new page. As a small coincidence, I also had just come across a one-page theme that I thought looked good. So I got started and working on a new page, obviously incorporating what was on LinkedIn, but also with greater control, added a few custom sections and embedded media and linked generously.

For a bit more than a week, the site is up on aina.li/cv, and it is also linked from the menu here. Feedback is appreciated, either here or on GitHub.

My sustainability March 2024

This month was a slow month. While we had planned a user group meeting, the shift to daylight savings time caused confusion, and we didn’t manage to get together.

On a positive note, I managed to get a proposal for Wikimania submitted. Now, let’s hope that the program committee finds it worthy.

This is the second half of my third monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

My Fediverse March 2024

This month too, I continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks. It is encouraging to see that there is a lot going on in this field and that it does not seem to slow down.

For myself, I have gone through my online profiles and where I previously linked to my profile on X, i have now changed them to link to Mastodon. I could make this change on GitHub, YouTube, Twitch and Facebook.

Motions to Wikimedia Sverige

I also wrote two motions for the annual gathering of Wikimedia Sverige, one to leave X, and one to join the Fediverse. We’ll see at the end of April if the other members agree.

This is the first half of my third monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

My sustainability February 2024

This is the second half of my second monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

User group meeting about roles and responsibilities

I organized a user group meeting and got some great help from Alex Stinson to facilitate it. We wanted to explore what further roles could be created in the user group to get more people to feel there was space for them to be more deeply involved. We go some ideas, but there is more work to be done. Minutes from the meeting.

My Fediverse February 2024

This is the first half of my second monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

This month was slower than January, but I did continue with similar positive reinforcements, namely boosting information about Fediverse. That activity was mainly on Mastodon, but I am aiming to widen that scope in the future.

I had planned to watch Fediverse related sessions on FOSDEM and State of Open Con, but could to my surprise not find anything else than very technical talks about integration on specific platforms. If you watched something good, please let me know!

Migrating Let’s talk about public code

In bigger news, I was influential in one substantial task, moving the podcast Let’s talk about public code to a Funkwhale instance: open.audio. The move itself was manual, but fairly easy due to the low number of episodes. Mostly, it was simple copy-and-paste work, and nothing really tricky at all.

One deciding factor for choosing this instance was that rather than open registration, all accounts are manually screened and all content need to have a Creative Commons license. Hopefully, this will be enough to keep the platform full of only properly licensed and sharable material.

My Fediverse January 2024

This is the second half of my first monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

In contrast to the other resolution, this has seen less progress, and it is still brewing a lot in my mind. What has come to change in my behavior on Mastodon, though, is that I this month has been actively boosting toots related to different Fediverse news, tools and platforms.

Learning

I watched this excellent conversation with Evan Prodromou and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue:

I was also experimenting with getting the MP3 into the toot on Wikipediapodden, a WordPress site with the ActivityPub plugin enabled, but to no success yet. It would be nice if it could be playable from inside Mastodon, just like an attached MP3 is.

Contributions

I started translating PeerTube to Swedish. Not in bulk, but at least I found where to do it and got my account going.

Planning for the year

I started a larger document with ideas of things to do during this year. Many small ideas that I need to think more about.

In particular, though, I am planning to transfer some of the Wikipedia bot accounts I set up on Twitter to Mastodon, but haven’t found frameworks that are simple enough yet. Any tips, especially guides rather than empty git repositories, for how to run that would be appreciated.

My sustainability January 2024

This is the first half of my monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions. I am not sure exactly how I want these monthly reports to be like yet, so I am just going to make a simple one to start with, and I’ll see how it evolves in the coming reflections.

Annual report 2023

I created the base for the annual report, basically by copying the format from last year and then adding what had been listed in the activities section over the year. With a bit of nudging in the Telegram channel, a few others added some more detail too, which was appreciated. Together with Daniel Mietchen, we added some images from the events and that was basically it.

It is thin, but it is also a fair description of our activities over the year, and I can only hope that it could also light a fire for us to do better.

Plan a user group meeting

As a result of my nudging, there was also a request to figure out more things people could help with. I was delighted by that and encouraged it. This led to Alex Stinson offering to help coordinate a workshop to find some activities for the user group and roles that people could take on for that. We have scheduled the workshop for February 9.

January newsletter

With those two points in the works, I felt inspired to start a newsletter to get this out. Luckily, there are some other activities happening too, that fit in there. Even if it is one of the shortest newsletters, I still feel good about it, as the news it carries might be one of the most important so far.

The newsletter has evolved through a couple of phases over the years, and I still don’t think it has found its final form. All ideas are welcome.

2024 podcast listening update

In 2022, I wrote a blog post about my podcast listening. Since I recently switched podcast player, and with that did a big cleanse, I thought it was time for an update.

I used to use the Podcast addict app for listening to podcasts. And it was actually quite good and had all the features I wanted. But it was one thing itching, it wasn’t open source. So last year I finally did some research and installed AntennaPod, an open source solution that I saw was getting good reviews.

The migration was as easy as one could hope for, and one neat feature was that it asked which of my subscriptions I wanted to keep. This made me contemplate the ones I were enjoying, and now I have updated my listening page (archiving my previous feed). Most of the changes, though, are for podcasts that stopped producing new episodes and where I gave up hope of them returning.

One small thing that I have not figured out yet, is how to add episodes without subscribing to the podcast. But I guess I will figure that out, or make a feature request. Their contributing page looks inviting, and I have requested access to help translate the app.

On the positive note, I am already glad to not be bothered by the animated ads that pestered me in the Podcast addict app.