Now, that’s a deliberately cynical and subversive passage – so maybe it’s a terrible idea to be inspired to re-use the format in this way – but I’m taking the positive parts, and I’m trying something.

I’m not sure what the ultimate outcome will be yet, but I started posting some ideas this morning, and here’s what I’ve got.

[edited 10th Jan, to add the final volta that was missing from my original]

Choose Mastodon. Choose the Fediverse.

Choose curiosity over virality.

Choose connection over noise, authenticity over performance, and hope over hype.

Be niche. Be human. Be yourself.

Choose your people, your pace, your corner of the web.

Choose freedom.

—

Choose open standards and interoperability instead of being walled in and caged.

Choose the right to leave without losing yourself.

Choose clients in a range of fabulous front-ends¹.

Choose to build together.

Choose an internet that doesn’t depend on one billionaire’s mood.

Choose boundaries made by people, not incentives set by code.

Choose spaces where your words aren’t metrics and your friends aren’t a product.

—

Choose a thousand small communities instead of one loud machine.

Choose timelines that listen.
Choose #bloomscrolling over doomscrolling.²

Choose #Monsterdon, #Caturday, #SilentSunday, #BelieveInFilm, and #Mosstodon.

Boost because you care. Follow because you’re interested.

Choose creativity. Choose joy!

Choose watching The Indie Beat Television, and being inspired by art.

Choose optionality. Choose respect.
Choose a human web.
—
So why choose any of this, when it’s so much easier not to?

Because caring is the point.

Because building together beats shouting alone.
Because the best places don’t keep you: they let you choose.

Yes – I know the original ends with a “why bother, do drugs” – twisting from meaningful to meaningless to nihilism. That’s not the point of this version. I’m well aware that folks will choose to be contrary – that is, after all, a choice – but I’m saying: let’s take a moment to lift each other up, and celebrate what we’re building together in the open social web!

Thanks for the conversations in the thread on fedi!

1. https://toot.cat/@idlestate/115865339639206829 ︎
2. https://mastodon.social/@box464/115865440211515613 ︎

More on that, after some good parts.

Talks and Travels

The year kicked off with a lot of travel and speaking – this continued throughout the year, but my Talks and Travels series of posts only covered a smaller percentage of my actual trips and gigs in 2025, there were several unpublished posts that should have covered the International Journalism Festival, trips to Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands… and the third and fourth-quarter trips didn’t get written down even in draft form.

I love to have the opportunity to share my passion and excitement for the Fediverse and a better social web with others, on stage or otherwise; and to visit different places; so these trips are in the highlights section.

I’m going to ask organisers of the events that I visited during the latter part of the year to forgive my lack of an associated post here; I may get around to a belated write-up, though!

The highlights

One huge event this year was becoming full-time employed at Mastodon – a mission I believe in. This has been my real anchor in 2025.

The major personal highlights of the year all arrived in the final few months – and in one case, even the last few days.

VOLUME

In July, I was approached by María Mazzanti, the managing editor of VOLUME magazine, to take part in a collaboration with the wonderful Silvia Dal Dosso for a featured interview in VOLUME 68. As I wrote elsewhere at the time:

Incredibly honoured to have been asked to contribute to VOLUME 68 and go interdisciplinary to discuss filter bubbles, tech, social networks and the #Fediverse. Top career highlight for me, for sure.

I was interviewed for a piece in VOLUME, the biennale architecture and art journal. The latest edition is themed around “Bursting Bubbles”. Bonus illustration via @_elena

This is the physical copy, I think it may be online in the future, not sure.

https://archis.org/dossier/bursting-bubbles/

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) 2025-11-22T17:59:46.457Z

I’m very grateful to María, and the team at VOLUME for allowing me to share the article here on my blog; the entire issue is absolutely fascinating, so do pick up a copy via their website if you’re interested. I’m also very curious to get to know Silvia more if our paths cross in the future – her writings and work are extremely on-point for my interests, and I think María did a fantastic job of pairing us for this conversation.

OpenUK Awards

I was delighted to be invited to the annual OpenUK Awards as a nominee this year. I’d previously been honoured in the OpenUK 2023 New Year’s Honours List. I was not expecting anything else, but I was nominated in the Community category of this year’s Awards, and subsequently invited to the House of Commons for a lovely evening celebrating the best of the UK open source / hardware / data / standards communities.

I did not win the category (congratulations to Daniel Gale!), but came away with a very weighty recognition of my nomination.

It was also a delight to see my friend James Smith at the awards dinner, and now to discover that he is in the 2026 New Year’s Honours List for his work on Manyfold and the Fediverse – nice work, James! Also: congratulations to all those recognised!

A surprising namecheck

Last week was the annual Chaos Communications Congress. I’ve never been to Congress, but it is definitely on my bucket list of events I’d like to get to at some point (this may be more viable in future, given other life changes).

I had an unexpected message from a friend, to tell me that my name came up on stage, during the session “1965 + 60 Years of Algorithmic Art with Computers”.

“Computer: zoom and enhance, lower left quadrant“

(I cheated, that’s a still image from the recording of the session)

The gentleman on the right is none other than Frieder Nake, one of the pioneers of the computer art and drawing machine movement! I’ve spoken about him several times myself – specifically during my closing keynote at QCon London in 2024, and in a shortened version of that talk at Electromagnetic Field in 2024. You can find the related resources page for those two talks here.

This was a slightly mind-blowing moment to discover, that my own talk had been referenced at the end of this one, in a joint session involving one of my subjects, and heroes of the movement. What a highlight. Thanks for letting me know about it, Trammel!

The endings

On the downside of 2025, there were a couple of huge blows.

In the summer, we unexpectedly lost our friend Dj Walker-Morgan, aka “Codepope”.

I’d known Dj for many years, and in the past ~5 years become involved with his HackWimbledon / Makeroni pop-up maker space, which he ran as an educational and community resource.

The shock of his sudden death hit many of us very hard. Dj was a very kind, generous person who helped others to understand and build with technology; and, his line of scifi-related parody / slogan t-shirts was legendary! We miss him greatly.

We’re in the process of restarting HackWimbledon, and a small group of us will be keeping it going in his memory (there’s a meetup on January 11th, FWIW).

Yvonne Ann Piper, 1945-2025

At the end of the summer, my mother turned 80.

We’ve been extremely close for many years; we lost my father back in 2000, and my brother just 7 years ago, both at Christmas time; so, we’ve made it an annual tradition to go away at the end of the year and change our scenery (Malta has been our winter holiday spot of choice, for the past few years).

For her birthday, we took her to visit family in Ireland, but we could see that she wasn’t doing too well. On our return to the UK I had to dash off (to FediDay in Berlin, and then to EmpoderaLIVE in Málaga – two talks I’ve not covered here, as yet), and while I was away, my amazing wife ended up taking her to hospital. She was there for nearly three weeks; sadly, the doctors were not able to help in the end. The end-of-life care provided at the Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust was of the best, most patient and caring quality.

My mum was the person who made me, gave me many of my values; and, she was my best friend. The very first person I wanted to tell about the three highlights above, was her – and she wasn’t there any more. Heidi and I miss her very, very much.

Needless to say, the past few months, and especially these past weeks over Christmas and New Year, remembering all three of my immediate family members – have been very difficult.

The eulogy I gave at her service was the most challenging thing I’ve done (you’re welcome to read it); but, it was also a lovely celebration and confirmation of what a great human my mum was, to have her friends and family together.

Now, we’re in the process of finalising her affairs, and slowly moving forwards.

So long, 2025. You’re not on my list of favourites.

This year, 2026 – feels like a bit of a turning point.

I turn 50 in a few months’ time. I’m all on my own now, from an immediate family perspective – the last of my line. However: I’ve got a good network of friends, around the world as well as nearby. I know what I care about, how I want to have an impact in the world, and I know the skills I have, and those I want to develop.

Time to think deeply about the future. I’m always up for a chat about that…

It was fun to see some old favourites again, and it was nice to see some youngsters engaging with the games I used to play. Turrican, Hunchback, Mario, Puzzle Bobble, Lemmings!

The Townhouse building at Kingston University has been open for several years already and I drive, walk or bus past it regularly, but never had a reason to pop in until now! It has the university library on the upper floors, and a cafe and event space on the ground floor. For the duration of this week, the Archive of Retro Computing has taken over the event space with this display.

It is nicely put together, with some machines set aside for coding, some for gaming; information about each system displayed alongside; some meta-history on topics like the British computing scene (Acorn vs Sinclair), Commodore and Amstrad, and the US elements. The back section is dedicated to vintage home gaming systems, from the 1977 Binatone Pong game, through Atari / Nintendo / Sega, up to the Super Nintendo and Jaguar.

There are also some super “deep cuts” in the collection, including the Tatung Einstein, which I don’t remember ever seeing or hearing about before…

From my personal history, the Binatone Pong game on display is I think slightly older than the simple dial paddle controllers than we had hooked up to the TV at home when I was young. No sign of the metal-clad Commodore PET that I remember tinkering with at primary school, but a range of other Commodore machines are on show, including the classic Commodore 64 (I have one of these, from a former Twitter coworker!), and several other models I’m less familar with.

My first home computer, the Acorn Electron, is right there, running Arcadians, a Space Invaders clone I must have spent hours on back in the day. My own Electron ended as a hand-modded machine featuring switchable headphone or regular speaker output. I’m still quite proud of that relatively low-tech little hardware hack from back then.

Next along in my own line would have been the Amstrad CPC (with 3″ disk drive) that my uncle had, and pointed me towards on most visits to his house. I have memories of Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner on that one. The little info card here tells the story of how Alan Sugar did a deal on the disk drives such that Hitachi ended up having to keep making them, at a loss, even though the 3″ disk format was otherwise dead in the water.

My school had a very well-equipped computer room with (I think) about 30 BBC Master and Micro computers, so I was very much an Acorn boy and learned BBC BASIC as my first proper coding language (along with a tiny bit of 6502 assembler). Later on, the school computer room was upgraded with several Acorn Archimedes. My brother had an A3000 in his bedroom… I had an Acorn Risc PC with a StrongARM processor, way faster than the x86 PCs available at the time! The BBC Master and A3000 are present and correct in the exhibition (there’s a BBC Micro as well, alongside the Electron).

We also had a Super Nintendo, which is one of the last of the home gaming consoles in the exhibition (I overheard someone say that the Playstation, our next games console as a family, was where gaming all went wrong and 3D and got boring… I can sometimes understand that point of view!).

As an aside, I had a quick go on Wolfenstein 3D on the Jaguar in the corner there, and the controller for the Jaguar was bonkers! Chunky and not very friendly to use. The graphics seemed decent, with some kind of interpolation at distance? I don’t remember ever actually playing on a Jaguar when they were current…

Pretty much all of the machines had some kind of modification, both to output graphics to the LCD monitors in use, and/or to replace disk drives with some form of USB-floppy emulation, often with a Pi or something else doing the interfacing.

A fun trip down memory lane!

My colleague David (one of the core developers on the Mastodon team) was one of the original founders of FrOSCon all the way back when it started, and the event is held near his home location, so it was a doubly wonderful opportunity for me to see him in person, and also to meet his family!

The last time I was in Bonn was in 1988, back then on a school trip exploring the Rhineland, in what used to be known as West Germany.

aside: I remember two things about that visit very distinctly – firstly, being in a group of youngsters that was closely tailed by security staff around a department store in Bonn, no doubt because shenanigans were afoot by some of my contemporaries (!); secondly, I had been given a Kodak disc film camera for a recent birthday, and the film shift mechanism broke during the trip, although one of my teachers tried to help me find a shop that could get it fixed, to no avail for such a niche device!

There have been many changes as a result of German re-unification and the compensation agreement between Berlin and Bonn, Vereinbarung über die Ausgleichsmaßnahmen für die Region Bonn. The university that hosts FrOSCon – Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences – is one of the institutions to have emerged as a result. The Open Source community is very fortunate to have such a wonderful venue to convene!

My talk was the keynote on the second day of the event. Due to unexpected circumstances I was only able to travel early on the Saturday and missed the opening of the event, but I arrived in time to see the huge interest in the keynote for day one: Daniel Stenberg of curl fame, talking about AI Slop Attacks on his development process. That was a fantastic talk, and I felt like it was a tough act to follow!

I spoke about the importance of federated, decentralised systems as a way to preserve access to information and to enable digital sovereignty.

I spoke about the creativity of humans, and our remarkable ingenuity in building the world in which we live.

We find ourselves in difficult places politically, economically, socially right now: but, there is room for hope.

Of course, I also mentioned how Mastodon and the Fediverse are important parts of the digital ecosystem as we work to build an alternative, better, social web for everyone.

The excellent folks from the Chaos Computer Club video operations team did a great job at capturing all of the talks from FrOSCon – you can watch my talk on their site, I’ll embed a YouTube version below here for some level of convenience for those who use that platform.

While I’m on the subject of the Fediverse, digital sovereignty, and FrOSCon, I’ll also point out some related talks of interest: Frank Karlitschek spoke about digital sovereignty; my colleague, David, spoke about Taking a Fresh Look at the Fediverse (updates in Mastodon, and in other projects across the ecosystem); and Georg Lukas spoke about reverse-engineering Samsung wifi cameras to post photos to Mastodon, which was a fun technical talk.

I am very grateful to the organisers, volunteers, hosts, and the Open Source community for the opportunity to re-visit this part of Germany after such a long time away. I was home again by 11pm on Sunday, exhausted but happy. Thank you for making my time with you so enjoyable!

The idea is to simply write, specifically, to publish 100 posts on a personal blog in a year. It shouldn’t have been too hard, once I got going.

It started off really well, with daily posts through Blaugust (at least I achieved one challenge, and got back into a groove, for a while). Some posts were really popular, too!

To be fair to myself – I came fairly close to success here. 88 posts to date, 89 when I publish this one. Just 11 from victory.

Options!

• move the goalposts. Recalibrate! Maybe I can give myself another 10 days by moving my start date forwards, and then posting twice as much (10 days forward = -10 posts from my existing total; so 20 days to write 21 posts).
• post 11 short posts right now!
  • well, I suppose I could. I have at least that many ideas / projects in my head that I want to offload.

What have I done wrong here?

I feel like I’ve done a lot wrong.

I lost focus. I took a trip one time, got out of the daily habit, and never got it back.

I’ve got things I meant to post about, dammit.

I feel annoyed and angry at myself for not doing it.

and eventually, that loops around into me feeling even more blocked – the mountain of guilt became another barrier to progress.

I marked today’s date on the calendar, so I could see it. I checked how far away from success I was, a couple of months ago. July? That’s ages! Lots of time to finish this off. Easy.

As an aside, one week ago, I lost a friend. That was a bad day, and it has been a weird week, and I’m tired. That’s not the reason for any of this. It was a shock. It threw me off, but I was already thrown off.

…

and of course – I’ve done nothing wrong.

Right back at the start, I wrote about writing for myself, for the sake of writing, because it’s something I enjoy – not because I owe it to anyone (except for myself). I’d held myself back before. That feeling came back in, a bit, but look at me – here I am – writing today.

What next then

I’ve been doing a lot of stuff lately!

I’m going to schedule some posts with some of the panels and interviews I’ve done over the past few months, to get them out there in a different format. That can keep things ticking along, even on days when I don’t have time or energy.

I’ve been coding (a bit!) and I want to share a few of those side projects. If I don’t write about them, it does not make them less valid. [hey, brain, read/listen to/understand what you are writing right now]

There are some Big Things happening in the world and in the tech world. I want to write about my thoughts on those things, too.

And then there’s my lapsed newsletter, and the mostly-formed, just-not-executed, plan to do my own podcast.

Maybe I’ll never learn to offload all of the things from my head.

Standby for more: another day.

I’ve had the Bambu X1C for a couple of years already, and it is a really, really great 3D printer. There’s no question whatsoever that Bambu has transformed the 3D printing space for consumers, and has done so while also creating some very high-quality premium hardware.

I’ve been meaning to write about the various mods I’ve made over time, but at this point it’s a bit far down the line to go into each one in detail

• riser with LED strip, remote controlled via a Raspberry Pi Pico with a simple MicroPython HTTP-to-RF API that can dim the strip
• IKEA SKADIS mounted on the side with tools
• boxes to hold desiccant beads in the AMS, and a hygrometer
• after-market high flow nozzle (obviously)
• Garolite plate
• third party nozzle wiper
• etc etc

The printer has been very reliable, and straightforward to maintain as well.

So why hack it? Well… I own it, I think it can be made better, and… because.

When the X1Plus Expander launched on Crowd Supply I went ahead and backed the project, as I was interested in ways I could potentially add extra sensors and a better camera; as well as finally being able to connect over a LAN socket rather than having to be on wifi (the studio network can be a bit flaky from time to time).

The X1Plus Expander depends on third-party firmware (X1Plus), which requires the printer itself to be jailbroken / rooted.

Long story short, I’ve finally done that.

I was extremely impressed with how smooth and clear the project contributors have made the process. I went through the official process with Bambu to switch my printer into the unsupported third party program, downgraded to a rootable version of the firmware, rooted it, then ran through the remote install process (via wifi from my Framework) to install the firmware. I’d already printed the case for the X1Plus Expander. Then it was simply a case of following the exciting and dramatic installation video.

I now have VNC access to drive the controls on the printer’s touchscreen remotely; SSH access; the ability to network mount storage; etc etc. Lots of options to explore here. I was even able to upgrade the firmware of components like the AMS from within the third party X1Plus firmware.

You’ll also spot the OpenSpool sitting off to the side in the image above. That’s another third-party addon that I’ve barely started to use, but it extends the ability for the printer to recognise RFID-tagged spools from Bambu themselves, to having it recognise “any” spool that I happen to tag and configure.

All of this is background tinkering and admin… apart from the case for the X1Plus Expander, I’ve not been using the printer itself quite so much lately, due to travels.

Open source (and open source hardware!) FTW!

PublicSpaces was an event I’d been tracking for a while, but this was my first opportunity to be there in person. It was a delight to discover that my friend Ian Forrester has been to the last five iterations of the event! It also included a bit of a “Mastodon and friends” meetup, of several folks from across the ecosystem here Europe.

A "Mastodon and friends" photo from the audience at #PubConf2025 @bjoernsta @samvie @FreddieJ @laurenshof @_elena

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) 2025-06-13T08:09:18.425Z

(apologies to everyone included, for the blurry image – I thought I’d done a better job of it than I had!)

A few people have suggested that the title of the panel was “slightly clickbait-y” – No Musk, Zuckerberg or Trump can shut us down – and look, OK, I can’t deny that!

We wanted to talk about how open, decentralised social web spaces and networks, particularly the Fediverse and ActivityPub-based platforms, can help to ensure that everyone has access to spaces for free discussion. In my case, this all aligned very strongly with my previous posts and talks around civic institutions and public bodies owning their own social media, rather than being subject to the whims of commercial third parties.

It was great to be invited to take part in this; we tackled some challenging topics. Thanks in particular to Björn Wijers for including me in the panel, and for being such a great human in general!
A little over a week after that visit to Amsterdam, I was in Brussels for an event hosted by the European Citizen Action Service, and another panel conversation highlighting the value of independent social platforms. There’s a lot more discussion – and implementation – to be done. Europe may be in better political shape than some other parts of the world at the moment, but it’s a constant and ongoing effort to keep things in a position where freedom, individual dignity, democratic rights and the rule of law are understood and appreciated. We work on this mission together.

I’d also be remiss not to include Elena Rossini‘s fabulous Introducing the Fediverse short film in this post. The video was launched only a week before PublicSpaces, at Fediforum. Elena herself was on the panel immediately before mine, and I had the delight of seeing an audience respond to seeing the film for the first time, in the same room. A fantastic four minutes to share with your friends and contacts.

The time to take ownership of your social profiles and content is now. Don’t look back!

I’ve written about Glitch a few times before. It was an absolute gift of a place for me, as someone who spent a large chunk of my career in Developer Relations – a quick and easy place to prototype, build and stand up sample apps. Several of the team over there became my friends, and we’ve stayed in touch. The community was consistently friendly and supportive. It was true to the roots of the open web. tl;dr I’m genuinely sad about it winding down, but I can also understand that the whole landscape has shifted, so… I “get” it.

The state of play

So, here I am, just over a week from “G-Day” and I’m hurriedly looking around for places to move things … I’ve had a reasonable amount of notice here, so I have no-one to blame but myself for the last minute migration (and I’ve also been travelling quite a lot in recent weeks).

• I was a Glitch Pro subscriber, which meant that I could have up to 5 “boosted” projects that were always on.
• A quick survey of my account shows that I have 130 projects in total.
• A closer look shows me that exactly 10 of them are important to me to keep online and running somewhere.
  • 4 of these are basically microsites – static web pages that I wanted to have available all the time;
  • 1 is a simple API backend for a smart device;
  • 2 are Fediverse apps (Postmarks / pipesmarks, and Shuttlecraft);
  • 2 of them have full custom domain mappings;
  • 1 is my “Glitch in Bio” landing page, which I definitely want to move somewhere else.

Part way there

The static sites were pretty easy to move onto GitHub Pages. I’ve been trying to not have quite so much of my stuff there, but these were essentially just a case of exporting from Glitch to GH, enabling Pages in settings, and then tidying up a few paths. It also gave me the opportunity to check the validity of links and other contents (I was still embedding videos from an older PeerTube account of mine, which I’ve now pointed at my current one). I already have andypiper.org pointing at my main GitHub pages presence, with any other repositories with Pages enabled then ending up as URLs below that, so this was straightforward and only slightly fiddly. Glitch have enabled the option to set up redirects from my existing projects to the new homes, so I’ve now got that set up in those cases.

The journey to self-hosting

I’ve been tinkering with a homelab set up for over a year now. This is currently Proxmox, along with a collection of other containers. So far I’m using the apps I’ve got setup for myself via Tailscale connections, but I’ve got half a plan of hosting some of my sites directly on the public network. I definitely have enough “spare” domains to do so! I spent a bit of time starting to set up routing this afternoon, before hitting the wall of CG-NAT and realising that I’ll need to have a chat with Community Fibre to get into the state I want to be in.

I’m hoping to re-home my Postmarks instance before the deadline (well, export the contents into a new one), but I suspect that the Shuttlecraft will have to go.

The key one I want to do something with is my landing page / formerly Glitch in Bio. It is a Node app and I could relocate it to my homelab, but I’m tempted to just get LittleLink configured and set up on GitHub pages as a quick fix.

After I’ve done all of the code moves, there’s going to be an ongoing exercise of fixing references to sites that no longer exist, but I should have until the end of 2026 to resolve those.

I’ll be watching the countdown for a few more days…

Our brand palette is a set of purple / indigo hues, and of course, I want to represent the organisation appropriately!

I now have a couple of pairs of glasses with varieties of purple frames. Naturally, I also got a purple (sort of) watch band as well.

[side note – I am now a big fan of IOLLA, a Scottish brand, who made one of the pairs I’m now wearing regularly – they have brilliantly-designed clip-on sunglasses too]

I’ve also taken advantage of Framework’s new translucent purple laptop accessories, and have added a bezel and a couple of USB-C expansion modules in that colourway.

Working on being fully on-brand – new transparent purple bezel for my #FrameworkLaptop (and some transparent purple expansions too, not visible from this angle).

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) 2025-06-15T12:10:52.315Z

Oh, and I made a GNOME Shell user theme that uses the brand colours, with a little SVG Fediverse logo for the app menu, configured using the ArcMenu extension).

On a more technical side, I also made some small tools to create LibreOffice and macOS colour palettes out of lists of colours in text files. One hundred percent connected to the fact that I wanted to use the right colour scheme in documents and presentations

Shiny stickers

Last year, I wrote a blog post, Fediverse for Freedom – which was about the importance of a free and open Fediverse, and how and why public institutions can support it. Since then, I’ve referred to this blog post in many of my talks and in conversations, and started to use the hashtag #FediverseForFreedom.

Ahead of FOSDEM back in February, I created some stickers to share – a Fediverse logo, overlaid with the text “I Am Part Of The Rebel Alliance #FediverseForFreedom”. They were quite a hit at the time, and since then I’ve used the same image in presentations. When people have seen them, I’ve quite often been asked where they came from.

Last week, Elena Rossini – writer of the fantastic The Future is Federated blog/newsletter, talented filmmaker and photographer, and (perhaps) the Fediverse’s Number One Fan – released a great, four minute video that both explains and promotes the Fediverse and open platforms not owned by billionaires¹

One of the stickers shows up in several shots of the the video, and once again, I heard that people would like to be able to get some for themselves.

A simple site

I’ve been wanting to make the stickers available for a while, but the release of the video finally pushed me into getting this done!

I’d recently bought some stickers myself, from the talented Robb Knight, and he mentioned that he used Stripe Payment Links for his site. I already had a Stripe account, so thought I’d try the same thing.

So: now you can visit fediverseforfreedom.org (.com points to .org), and click on a link to to get a handful of stickers shipped in your direction! You can also easily just tell your friends, “oh yeah, I got them from Fediverse For Freedom dot org”. Nice and straightforward.

There’s a bit more information about it all on that simple site, but I thought it might be interesting to write down a bit more about how I made it.

The site is running on Codeberg Pages. Previously I’ve put these kinds of one-off, single page sites up on GitHub Pages, or on Glitch. I’m feeling increasingly less comfortable about having all of my stuff on GitHub and hosted in the US; and, unfortunately, Glitch is going away soon (more on this in a future post). So in this case I chose Codeberg Pages, although I’m aware that they are themselves a platform that is currently in maintenance mode. I’m open to suggestions for similar sites, as I’ll need to migrate some Glitch apps somewhere very soon!

Apart from that: the whole operation is very low tech. Stripe Payment Links are convenient – Stripe itself can handle a huge variety of payment types – but, on the backend… it does not do much. No order acknowledgement emails, order management tools, or anything like that. All I get is a basic dashboard with information about the orders. I whipped up some simple Python that uses the Stripe API to grab the postal addresses of orders, and then creates SVG address labels for printing. The same code also grabs the email addresses so that I can send an email thanking the customer for the order.

In terms of shipping, that’s also a manual process – no “drop-shipping” here, I’m getting the stickers from my regular supplier (StickerApp), putting them in envelopes, and posting them out myself. That also means that delivery times will vary – although I had enough in stock to cover all of the initial orders, I’ve also been in Amsterdam for the past 3 days, so the first batch will go out on Monday.

One more thing I’m experimenting with here is GoatCounter, just to get a sense of traffic and interest. I didn’t want to put a load of invasive Google Analytics onto such a basic page, and I’ve had GoatCounter recommended to me a few times now – like Mastodon, it has also benefited from NLNet funding from the European Union in the past, and I wanted to see what was possible. It seems to do just what I wanted, whilst also being unintrusive.

What’s next?

Look… I don’t intend to become some kind of merch magnate, but I do know that some people share my own desire to display our commitment to the Fediverse and related causes, and if I can help folks to do so, then I will (did you know we already made a t-shirt? Elena has asked me for more in the same vein!).

If you want to look for other ways to show your support in public, and to give back to people or projects that work on tools that you use, take a look at the Awesome Fediverse Merch list that Jeff Sikes is curating. Plenty of options for everyone.

Finally – remember to support the creators of your favourite sites, services, and open source software directly, whenever you can!

1. Remember, as I heard in a keynote at the PublicSpaces conference this week: “the Internet is currently controlled by four or five fucked up right wing white men” – it’s time to rewild the internet, and take ownership of our data and choices. ︎

Michelle was also recently named in the first Independent Impact 50 Awards recognising her impact and professionalism, which I’m absolutely thrilled to see – I’ve come to know her as a brilliant community professional and consultant, so this this feels like a really appropriate reward for her work.

We had an interesting discussion about my career, how I got involved with communities over time, and also had a chat about how Mastodon and the Fediverse fit in.

I hope you enjoy the conversation, and hear some of the lessons I’ve learned over my time in different online and in-person communities.

At least I archived the Tweet about it, because apparently I didn’t write a blog post, and I can’t find the slides from that event. Look, historical proof!

Yesterday, the meetup celebrated 13 years since that first edition!

The plan was to bring together the original presenters and hosts as a panel to revisit the topics and talk about what had happened in the industry and in our careers in the meantime. Unfortunately, the original host (Russ) was unable to join at the last minute, but Tareq and I were the original speakers, and were both available for the panel, moderated by my friend Paula Kennedy.

I wrote a short thread on Mastodon with some thoughts – here’s a slightly longer version.

At #Accurx in London for a panel revisiting the first edition of the London Platform User Group (LOPUG) – I was a speaker at the first event, 13 years ago (in my #CloudFoundry days), and on the panel this evening! https://meetu.ps/e/NSspR/vXk8/i

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) 2025-05-14T17:42:31.745Z

The evening was a trip down memory lane, and a thought-provoking look at how much has changed – and what might be coming next. Thirteen years ago, my focus was on telling the Cloud Foundry story, advocating for private and hybrid cloud solutions based on open source to VMware (later Pivotal) customers across the UK, Europe, and beyond. Platform as a Service (PaaS) was the buzzword, and we were excited about its potential.

A couple of years after the original event, I joined Twitter. Now that I’m a few years on from that period of my life, I actually had to go back and remind myself of the internal Twitter cloud stack of Apache Mesos and Aurora etc. There’s a good piece about that (featuring my buddy Chris Anisczyk from back in the day!) if you want to take the same diversion I did ahead of the meetup last night!

Fast forward to today, and the PaaS market has been significantly reshaped, largely by the rise of Kubernetes and other technologies. The landscape is very different. Apparently, somewhere along the line we lost the ease of deployment that platforms like Heroku and Cloud Foundry were well known for … progress

During the panel, I was asked about future predictions. My attention turned towards the growing push for digital sovereignty, particularly in Europe, and the emergence of concepts like the EuroStack. It’s a clear indication of a shift in priorities, and a desire for greater control over data and digital infrastructure.

It was an interesting moment of self-reflection too. I realized how my own world view has evolved, broadening from my primary focus on enterprise software stacks in my IBM and VMware days, to encompass a wider social perspective which connects to my work with social networks, and more evolved views about politics and economics in general.

Later in the evening, there was a brief discussion about whether current global events and trends are steering us towards a more complex business and technical environment. The suggestion was that an increased need for local negotiations and agreements could potentially slow everything down. This seems very likely, to me – the consequence of tariffs, breaches of trust, and protectionist behaviours from those looking to control their own domains, as opposed to those who champion collaboration and shared respect as drivers of progress.

And you know what? I find myself thinking that slowing things down might not necessarily be a bad thing. Perhaps a more deliberate pace is exactly what’s needed right now.

It was a really engaging evening, and it’s nice to see LOPUG still going strong. Thanks to Paula and the team for inviting me to join the panel – this was a lot of fun to come back to.

(shout out to Daniel Bryant for the photo I’m in above, thanks Daniel!)

We are proud to announce the first-ever FediForum advisory board. We are very glad to have such an incredible group of committed and experienced Open Social Web pioneers and advocates come together to advise FediForum and help move the Open Social Web forward.

Check out https://fediforum.org/people

— FediForum (@fediforum) 2025-05-06T18:49:33.513Z

FediForum has been an important part of the development of the Fediverse over the past couple of years. It has provided a space for projects to share their latest releases and features, and also enabled the serendipitous sharing of needs and ideas. The Projects page on the FediForum site documents a few of the collaborations that have come out of the event already.

I particularly remember how Ben Pate came to share what he was building (Emissary), how several creators in the music space came together during the same event to discuss their hopes for new social channels to connect with their audiences, and how that evolved into both Bandwagon, and The Indie Beat FM. I’ve loved being a part of these kinds of conversations!

An unconference can be difficult to navigate to some people, but it can also enable exactly these kinds of unexpected, delightful fusions of shared interest and technical know-how. At the same time, there’s also a lot of value in more organised, formal events with agendas known in advance. My own belief is that there’s space for both formats to support the Fediverse community, and I hope to see these happen in the coming years. In the meantime, you’ll see some adjustments to the format of FediForum itself, in response to feedback heard at recent town halls.

I’ve helped to run various unconference format events in person in the past; I’m also a public speaker; and, I have been a community organiser myself. I know how complicated it can be to make events like FediForum happen! I’m grateful to have the opportunity to help keep this important shared space open, available, and valuable for the future. I’m also delighted about the wonderful group of people that are on the advisory board – we have a shared passion for the Fediverse, and more importantly, we care about the humans that are part of it.

Looking forward to seeing folks again at FediForum, June 5-7.

That was nearly 20 years ago now – and in all of that time, I never had the opportunity to go to SXSW for the tech part¹ of the festival…

This year, our friends at Flipboard created a side event they called Fediverse House, as a eye-catching label for a series of talks and sessions around the open social web

[yes, it was broader than the Fediverse; some other platforms and topics were represented, too. It was great to be able to talk about the Fediverse]

I was excited to be able to join the event², and even more so, I was honoured to be asked to join a panel moderated by the wonderful Mia Quagliarello all about building communities on the new social web. I briefly mentioned this trip on the most recent Mastodon blog post update for our updates during March, but I’m now able to include more about the content here.

Here’s the video of our panel discussion, available on Flipboard’s PeerTube – or, on YouTube for those of you that are not yet Fediverse-enabled, or who want to watch on your TV or something I hope I did an OK job, representing the good people of the different communities on the Fediverse. I know that my own experience and perspective is not a universal one and I do my best to reflect that when I talk about our spaces.

As well as this panel, the event included some fantastic talks from folks such as Molly White and Cory Doctorow (clips are on PeerTube); it gave me an opportunity to learn more about the ATProto ecosystem from chatting with the nice folks from Bluesky; I was able to meet writers from one of the best publications on the web today, 404 Media; and, it also provided a chance to spend time IRL with friends from the Fediverse – including the excellent Jeff Sikes, and also people I greatly respect and appreciate from WeDistribute, Sean and Damon.

Anyway… I still haven’t actually been to SXSW

This year, I did something better than that. Thank you to the Flipboard team for all your work in putting Fediverse House together!

1. I was in Austin one year during the music festival, and managed to get to a couple of sessions, but I wasn’t in town specifically for the event, that was a surprise bonus. ︎
2. Thank you to the Social Web Foundation for making my trip to Austin possible. ︎

Throughout the past year, we’ve been experimenting with the use of paint as an element of our pen plotter work. This is not to the same extent as some of our friends in the community, who have built complete systems to pick and apply colours individually² – instead, we’re using 3D printed styli to draw through poured paints. We’ve found this to be an interesting combination, juxtaposing the organic and unpredictable movement of the paints with the precision of the drawn lines.

Our previous mini-masterpiece, New Horizons, was in the show sale last November; a behind-the-scenes image crept into my previous post about plotter work.

The new piece, Heliocode, is something that Heidi spent a lot of time on, largely while I was travelling in my new role! The line art design was my principal contribution – that may reappear in different form, in a future project; experimentation with paint, and creation of the final artwork, were all thanks to her efforts. The design was was not intended to be reminiscent of the previous work, at all (in fact, it was never created with the intent to be plotted) – although, viewed one after the other, I can see that there’s a coincidental similarity.

Heliocode

The artwork was created with a Bantam Tools NextDraw 1117, and again combines poured paint techniques with the more strict stylus dynamics of a coded SVG design. We chose a vibrant yellow medium, and a dark violet for the line art. A slight imperfection still found its way into the pattern, which is part of the charm of working with a mixture of digital and analog tools.

Feel free to take a look at the new work, on the Wimbledon Art Fair sale site – it is one of a kind, at an affordable price.

You can also come to visit us at the event itself – find us in Red Studios 273, between May 8th – May 11th 2025.

1. The mini-masterpieces are made and donated by each of the artists taking part in the fair, as part of fundraising for the future of the show. ︎
2. See Licia He’s Painting with Plotters course, as one example. ︎

This evening, I went to start up my VPN (I use NordVPN, FWIW). No luck. Just no connection.

The VPN connection has failed. Please check your internet connection and try connecting to the VPN again. If the issue persists, contact our customer support.

Well, thanks.

In case it was a package issue, I uninstalled and reinstalled the third party nordvpn RPM. No luck, same error.

Digging into the system log, I found this:

19:40:46 [Error] failed to connect to uk2646.nordvpn.com : resseting forward firewall: reseting allowlist rules: removing allowlisted subnets: listing iptables rules: exec: "iptables": executable file not found in $PATH

A “smoking gun”!

OK, so let’s dig a bit more.

$ journalctl -g iptables -b --no-pager
Apr 28 19:47:20 neshatan tailscaled[1649]: linuxfw: clear iptables: exec: "iptables": executable file not found in $PATH
Apr 28 19:47:20 neshatan tailscaled[1649]: router: iptables not found: firewall mode "iptables" not supported: iptables command run fail: multiple errors:
Apr 28 19:47:20 neshatan tailscaled[1649]:         exec: "iptables": executable file not found in $PATH
Apr 28 19:48:56 neshatan nordvpnd[1518]: 2025/04/28 19:48:56 [Error] failed to connect to uk2582.nordvpn.com : resseting forward firewall: reseting allowlist rules: removing allowlisted subnets: listing iptables rules: exec: "iptables": executable file not found in $PATH
Apr 28 19:49:22 neshatan nordvpnd[1518]: 2025/04/28 19:49:22 [Error] failed to connect to uk1910.nordvpn.com : unsetting allowlist: disabling allowlist routing: clearing allowlisting: iptables listing rules: exec: "iptables": executable file not found in $PATH:
Apr 28 19:50:28 neshatan nordvpnd[1518]: 2025/04/28 19:50:28 [Error] failed to connect to uk2281.nordvpn.com : unsetting allowlist: disabling allowlist routing: clearing allowlisting: iptables listing rules: exec: "iptables": executable file not found in $PATH:
Apr 28 19:53:36 neshatan nordvpnd[16192]: 2025/04/28 19:53:36 [Error] failed to connect to uk2570.nordvpn.com : resseting forward firewall: reseting allowlist rules: removing allowlisted subnets: listing iptables rules: exec: "iptables": executable file not found in $PATH
Apr 28 19:57:28 neshatan nordvpnd[16192]: 2025/04/28 19:57:28 [Error] failed to connect to uk2123.nordvpn.com : unsetting allowlist: disabling allowlist routing: clearing allowlisting: iptables listing rules: exec: "iptables": executable file not found in $PATH:

OK, so we definitely don’t have an iptables executable.

It turns out that there is an iptables-nft package installed (for netfilter), and this is supposed to install /usr/bin/iptables – but that file doesn’t exist.

A quick symlink of iptables-nft as iptables was a basic patch for this, and I was able to bring the VPN connection up again.

Two related reports from the interwebs, one from as recent as today (which may explain why I only just encountered it) – I found these just as I started to write this post.

• Latest update of iptables-nft breaks NordVPN
• Connection problem on Fedora 42

I’ll take the opportunity of this blog post to point out that nordvpnd has two typos in log messages. I’m not entirely certain where else to report this issue. Consider resetting these.

In the meantime, I also accidentally discovered that tailscaled had also been reporting issues with a missing iptables executable. I hadn’t noticed too many issues with it over the past couple of weeks, but hopefully this is an improvement for both daemons!

Update 2024/04/30 – as pointed out by some folks in Fediverse comments, this appears to have been an issue with an update to the iptables-nft package on Fedora interacting poorly with alternatives and the merger of /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, and has been resolved for the moment by reverting the change

I’ve been an avid follower of The Bootloader since it began. In my opinion, it is a perfect 30 minute format: each participant gets to bring some “picks” to talk about (mostly in the tech / software / hardware / maker space), for no more than 5 minutes – so you get to hear about six things of interest, that you may not have come across before, and learn something cool about the thing and the host or guest. You either get a Paul/Tod double-header with three picks each, or they bring on a guest, and each person picks two things. I always discover something new through listening to this show! I was surprised and delighted that Paul and Tod asked me to join them for this episode – compared to them, I am a mere amateur when it comes to making cool electronics and such.

You can listen to the show via multiple channels – like our own Games at Work.biz podcast, there’s a YouTube version, but it is audio-only (nice work YouTube for forcing everyone into that weird system). The show notes are also extensive, as they more-or-less cover a linkified transcript of what we talked about.

The YouTube edition may be a bit strange for an audio show… but gives me an opportunity to embed it here, so if you feel like it, click away!

So, what did I pick?

Oh, you don’t want to watch listen? Well, that’s a bit sad. OK, here are my picks:

1. Glance
   I recently came across Glance, an easy-to-configure self-hosted dashboard that lets me arrange information, feeds and data into a useful start page for my life and interests. It is nice and straightforward, pretty easy to extend, and has a friendly community. Worth taking a look!
2. MNT Pocket Reform / MNT Research
   I’ve written a few times about my MNT Pocket Reform, and after a recent spell where I had to get something looked at under warranty and didn’t have it with me, it came back just before we recorded the podcast episode. Again, I really wanted to share something that has a fantastic community, and in this case also a company (and people) with great principles behind it. So, I took the opportunity to give them a shout-out!

I hope you take a listen to The Bootloader, and maybe even get interested enough to check out their back catalogue of episodes and add it to your podcast app for new ones!

I wasn’t immediately able to share the main talk (the closing keynote from QCon London 2024), but I posted about the shorter edition that I delivered at Electromagnetic Field, and I’ve also written about the distinction between computer art generated using algorithms, and generative AI creations.

It took some time for the video to become available to share, but you can now take a look at the closing keynote that began it all, on the InfoQ website: Where is the Art? a History in Technology. I really enjoyed researching the subject.

This year, I plan to tinker with building more of my own plotters, in different formats.

Next up, we have our fifth (!) Wimbledon Art Fair – next month, May 8-11. We’re still working with the plotter and pouring paints, and have upgraded from the AxiDraw A4 SE to a larger NextDraw 1117 for some of our more recent work. If you’re in the neighbourhood, do come and take a look!

You can watch the show recordings live on Owncast, or watch later on PeerTube, or listen to the episodes as audio podcasts on Castopod (in any of your preferred podcast apps)

Thanks again Ozoned for inviting me to hang out, it was great chatting! Also, thank you for creating Fireside Fedi – this is exactly the kind of thing I hadn’t realised I wanted, to learn about the rich and diverse community we’re all taking part in.

I’m very happy and excited to share that as of early March, I’m working with Mastodon full-time, as Head of Communications.

Pivot…

A full-time role in communications is a slight pivot for me, but I can draw a through-line across all of my experience with community, public speaking, and in developer relations – Dev Rel often contains an element of acting as a translator between parties; demystifying new technologies and APIs and explaining them in layman’s terms; connecting customer feedback to the right places inside an organisation. In the case of Mastodon, I get to draw on multiple threads of experience: working adjacent to the news and Curation product teams, and also the Policy and the Trust & Safety teams, in my previous full-time role; 20+ years of Open Source (and Open Source foundation) community experience; public speaking, and writing about tech. The best part of it all is that Mastodon, the Fediverse, and Open Source, are all things that I am deeply personally invested in, and passionate about.

I’m extremely grateful to the rest of the team at Mastodon (particularly Eugen and the leadership for trusting me with the role, and also the board of our US 501(c)(3) entity who were instrumental in the decision making processes that enabled me to become involved on a full-time basis).

Looking ahead

In terms of communications strategy, I’m working on making things less reactive, more proactive. As a small, technically-focused team we have not always been able to quickly respond to media and other inquiries. My goal is that with more bandwidth to dedicate on talking to press, organisations, etc (and by decoupling these replies from being distractions or burdens on the engineering folks) we can do more to tell the story of the Fediverse, and Mastodon, more broadly. We’ll continue to work with the community as we do so – in fact, I’m hoping to hear how we can better support community efforts to share the message about ethical, more privacy-focused social web platforms, and also looking to learn about local and cultural nuances that can help us to share our story in a strong way.

You’ll see us getting more involved at conferences, community events, and in some more formal environments as well. Feel free to get in touch, if I can help – contact information is listed on the website.

image credit: Unsplash / CC BY-ND Elena Rossini

I have a Framework 13 with a 12th Gen Intel board running Fedora.

Since I first got the machine, I’ve upgraded the battery capacity (to the 61Wh version), and also the screen (to the nicer high definition 2.8K display panel).

I’ve got an order in to switch the motherboard³ for one of the newer AMD Ryzen models, and I’m on the waiting list to receive that. I’m excited to see how the performance boost is in practice. I also plan to add a nice purple bezel, since I want to be on-brand!

I’m mostly using the machine docked at a desk either in the studio or at home, which generally means plugging in to a single USB-C connection to attach displays, input devices and a good webcam and mic. I am also travelling a lot more at the moment, though, so my eye fell on the gen 2 webcam module upgrade for better picture quality and performance in different lighting conditions.

Hardware – top module is the original module that came in the laptop, below is gen 2.

Framework’s documentation and hardware design is really exceptional. The upgrade instructions suggested that this would be a 5-10 minute upgrade, and I think that it could probably have been done in 2 minutes if the ribbon cable connection wasn’t quite as fiddly as I seemed to find it. Open the laptop fully (it folds out flat); lift the screen bezel (connected magnetically); unscrew the two magnetised anchors at either end; remove, replace with new (here lies some cable fiddling with small clips); screw back and reseat bezel. Done.

Technical comparison via cyme – although the full listing does not format terribly well in a wrapped context.

$ cyme -d 0x0bda:0x5634 -vvvm --headings
Bus  # TPos PPath I  VID     PID     Dev V  CVal   BaseC           SubC UidSc Pcol UidPc Name                            Manufacturer     Serial         Driver Speed
 3    3   7  3-7   0x0bda 0x5634  0.21  2.01  0xef Miscellaneous 0x02 ?  0x01 Interface Association Laptop Camera Generic  200901010001     usb     480.0 Mb/s
 # I  Attributes I# PMax Name
 1             9  300 mA USB Camera
 PPath I Alt# CVal BaseC SubC UidSc Pcol UidPc Name             Driver   E#
 3-7:1.0 0x00 0x0e Video 0x01 Video Control  0x00  -  Laptop Camera uvcvideo 1
   # Dir   TranT   SyncT       UsqeT Iv MaxPkb
   3 In  Interrupt None  Data  6 1x 32
 3-7:1.1 0x00 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming 0x00  -             uvcvideo 0
 3-7:1.1 0x01 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming 0x00  -             uvcvideo 1
   # Dir   TranT           SyncT       UsqeT Iv MaxPkb
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 1x 128
 3-7:1.1 0x02 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming 0x00  -             uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 1x 512
 3-7:1.1 0x03 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming 0x00  -             uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 1x 1024
 3-7:1.1 0x04 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming 0x00  -             uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 2x 768
 3-7:1.1 0x05 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming 0x00  -             uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 2x 1024
 3-7:1.1 0x06 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming 0x00  -             uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 3x 896
 3-7:1.1 0x07 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming 0x00  -             uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 3x 1020

$ cyme -d 0x32ac:0x001c -vvvm --headings
Bus  # TPos PPath I  VID     PID     Dev V  CVal   BaseC           SubC UidSc Pcol UidPc Name                            Manufacturer   Serial               Driver Speed
 3    3   7  3-7   0x32ac 0x001c  1.11  2.01  0xef Miscellaneous 0x02 ?  0x01 Interface Association Laptop Webcam Module (2nd Gen) Framework FRANJBCHA1430207PD usb   480.0 Mb/s
 # I  Attributes I# PMax Name
 1             10 500 mA Laptop Webcam Module (2nd Gen)
 PPath I Alt# CVal BaseC SubC UidSc Pcol UidPc Name                            Driver   E#
 3-7:1.0 0x00 0x0e Video 0x01 Video Control    0x01  -   Laptop Webcam Module (2nd Gen) uvcvideo 1
   # Dir   TranT   SyncT       UsqeT Iv MaxPkb
   3 In  Interrupt None  Data  6 1x 32
 3-7:1.1 0x00 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming  0x01  -                          uvcvideo 0
 3-7:1.1 0x01 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming  0x01  -                          uvcvideo 1
   # Dir   TranT           SyncT       UsqeT Iv MaxPkb
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 1x 128
 3-7:1.1 0x02 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming  0x01  -                          uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 1x 512
 3-7:1.1 0x03 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming  0x01  -                          uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 1x 1020
 3-7:1.1 0x04 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming  0x01  -                          uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 2x 768
 3-7:1.1 0x05 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming  0x01  -                          uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 2x 1020
 3-7:1.1 0x06 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming  0x01  -                          uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 3x 896
 3-7:1.1 0x07 0x0e Video 0x02 Video Streaming  0x01  -                          uvcvideo 1
   1 In  Isochronous Asynchronous Data 3x 1020
 3-7:1.2 0x00 0xfe ApplicationSpecificInterface 0x01 Device Firmware Update     -        0
                                               Camera DFU Device

Noting that the 2nd gen module (second listing) has a DFU option, and draws slightly more power

Before and after shots, similar position in the same room within about 20 minutes of each other. The newer module has a wider field of view and more light for sure. Either way, I need to improve my setup there slightly, but ordinarily when I’m sitting at that desk, I would be using a Logitech StreamCam connected via a hub.

1. Exception tends to be video editing and, sometimes, podcasting (but that is mostly due to the setup we chose for Games at Work dot Biz, rather than a deficiency on the Linux side). ︎
2. What of the MNT Pocket Reform? Well… it’s currently with UPS, after needing what was supposed to be a brief return to Germany for a strange issue that was resolved under warranty. I’m extremely annoyed about the time it has taken to get back to me – not the fault of the MNT team, absolutely the fault of the ridiculous import/export situation the UK finds it in with Europe these days… meh. ︎
3. Once I get this, I’ll repurpose the original motherboard and display into a simple desk device, I think. ︎

This week I’m attending RightsCon 2025, along with my friend Felix from the Mastodon core team. It is a critical time for digital human rights (and for all human rights, privacy, and the future of online communities – and so, so many other things) and I’m keen to learn what I can from the different groups of advocates at this event, as well as to talk about what we’re working on. I’m here to discuss the importance of choosing authentic, user-centric platforms that are not driven by for-profit corporations, or “juiced” by algorithmic engagement.

Flying to Taipei this evening for #RightsCon next week, where I’ll be on a panel “How we build a new social web” at 9am on Tuesday. I’ll also be speaking at the #RubyJam meetup on Tuesday evening, about Ruby and the #Fediverse. My first visit to Taiwan – any tips?

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) 2025-02-21T11:12:33.362Z

Thank you, friends, for the great suggestions and tips ahead of the trip! I’m already using some of the useful knowledge you shared on the socials

I will be taking part in a panel on Tuesday morning entitled How we build a new social web, where we will be discussing user empowerment and the decentralised, open social web platforms. It is an honour to be invited to be a participant in the conversation here, and I’m looking forward to explaining the importance of independent social networks in the form of the Fediverse.

Separate from the main RightsCon conference tracks, I’m also going to be speaking at the monthly RubyJam meetup on Tuesday night, covering The Fediverse and Ruby. I’m planning to take a deeper and slightly historical dive into the role of Ruby in the past, present and future of the Fediverse – a different angle to the keynote I delivered in Japan in December, to avoid direct repetition.

This evening ahead of the conference proper, we attended an excellent keynote by Roger Dingledine, co-founder of Tor, and met with various people from across the Tor community.

As always, I’m reminded of how much I have to learn from the different perspectives shared around me.

aside: I still need to write about FOSDEM, and also my upcoming trip(s), and also, also… agh, must be better at writing!

At the end of the first round, as he always does, the quiz master came around to collect the team name – the bar staff then got to vote on the best / most amusing one, and that team got a packet of crisps (!) and an extra point.

So, we gave him the name – and he said he did not get the reference. We then attempted to explain the concept. That’s in spite of “enshittification” being a Word of the Year somewhere in the world in both 2023 and in 2024.

Being in tech, and an avid reader of Cory Doctorow’s work (mostly on the non-fiction side, but I’ve dipped into some of the fiction stuff too), of course, it’s a term I’m very familiar with. Last night’s experience was another reminder of the remarkably tiny interest and social bubbles in which we exist.

… our team name was not even listed as one of those that got any kind of attention from the bar staff, and we lost out on that much sought-after (!!) packet of crisps.

… we did, however, come second overall when the scores were totalled up, which was pretty impressive considering there were only two of us, and at least 14 out of 60 questions were sports-related (although we did nail 17/20 of the movie round, so there’s that). Hurrah!

Shout-out to the man Ash that runs that weekly quiz, he’s nice guy, and doesn’t get a ton of support from the venue, we appreciate him when we’re there!

In semi-related news, the fancy Nokē smart padlock¹ that I was gifted as a birthday present ~10 years ago is the latest victim of capitalism and tech eating themselves.

Arrived home on Friday night to discover that the rarely-used gadget had been used to lock up a delivery, but that since I hadn’t used the app for months, Apple had kindly uninstalled it from my phone. The only problem was that I then could not log back in to my account in the app. A Reddit search later, and also a grep through the depths of my email – the company was sold to another one last year, the servers taken down, and the promised “transfer of function” to the new company’s app was never actually communicated to customers. Fortunately, a day later I was able to use the failsafe mechanism to unlock it (having already sourced a potential loan of an angle grinder).

My appeal to a support email address to resolve the issue has been ignored, but “rewarded” (!!!) by apparently immediately being added to the marketing email list for the new company, as yesterday I received a junk message.

Needless to say: the enshittification does, in fact, continue; and I am very annoyed about it.

1. I know… technology may not always be an ideal solution to every problem. It was a very nice gift, though, and it was good while it lasted. ︎

Background

Independent musicians, creatives, artists, makers – these are all folk who often struggle to connect with audiences, and where retail and tech platforms tend towards squeezing their ability to make money from their work (see the excellent Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow – essential reading for today’s world and understanding how it systematically squeezes creatives). Over the Christmas period, I finally deleted my Spotify account, after reading about yet more awful ways that company is destroying authentic creativity for their own profit.

Cancelled Spotify. One of those things I'd allowed to roll far too long for no good reason (not paying attention), and the "ghost artists" stuff has made me feel particularly unfriendly towards the platform. https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) 2024-12-23T12:31:01.894Z

I’ve been a huge fan of independent artists for a very long time. Back in the MySpace / MP3 / Napster days I came across folks who I now count as friends, amazing musicians such as Cindy Alexander, and Alex Cornish.

Up until recently there was a wonderful streaming station, RadioFreeFedi, that offered music from artists who had a presence in the Fediverse. Sadly, that has now gone away.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been attending Fediforum, an online conference where people building in the Fediverse gather to share projects and ideas. During the events in 2024, I came across two fantastic people with an interest in making things better for artists and musicians: Ben Pate, builder of the Emissary platform, which has a music-centric edition called Bandwagon; and Kirsten Lambertsen, a multi-talented web creative who runs Patron Hunt, and who spun up an alternative streaming station, The Indie Beat.

Happy New Year fedifriends!

I'm excited to officially announce the launch of TheIndieBeat.fm, a streaming radio station showcasing indie #music from the Fediverse.

The Indie Beat Radio is made possible through a collaboration with Bandwagon.fm / @benpate

Music artists who upload their work to Bandwagon.fm have the option to make tracks available for streaming on TheIndieBeat.fm

Our goal is to use federation to make less work for artists — upload once; distribute infinitely.

— MizKirsten (@mizkirsten) 2025-01-02T20:30:17.360Z

The Indie Beat builds on Bandwagon, so artists who share their music in the Fediverse via Bandwagon, can also choose to add them to rotation on The Indie Beat.

Some inspirations

I was nerd-sniped, I mean, inspired, to make something with The Indie Beat, in part through a nice blog post shared by Neil Brown (which was apparently prompted by me, so that’s nice and circular!) about how to add the streams from The Indie Beat into Linux music apps such as mpd.

I don’t use mpd, and to be honest I most often live on Apple platforms (but I do keep a Plex server, which I intend to move to Jellyfin this year as I work on improving my self-hosting and homelab situations). I was pretty sure that I’d seen a taskbar music player for GNOME, though. I usually run GNOME on my Linux systems – the exception being my MNT Pocket Reform, which is Sway with a minimal set of other desktop apps.

The player I was thinking of is the SomaFM internet radio extension, which is a menubar app that lists the SomaFM station streams, and allows the user to choose between them.

The process

The first iteration was a straightforward copy/edit hack of the SomaFM extension, replacing the list of channel streams with the equivalent ones from The Indie Beat. Easy!

I excitedly sent a screenshot to Kirsten to show off!

There were quite a few things that I felt I could do better, though. First of all, the artwork was missing. Also, I knew that the whole point of The Indie Beat was to be a showcase for the artists on Bandwagon, and that there was supposed to be metadata in the stream header that contained their link information.

After a lot of poking at the MP3 stream, I realised that The Indie Beat is built on a streaming server called Azura Cast, which has an API – and The Indie Beat API had that data, and a whole lot more that I could use. In order to use it all though, I had to fully re-think how the extension would work.

So, I started over, from scratch.

• I hand-traced the “catellite” artwork and made a minified icon for the GNOME top bar – the full design was not great at a tiny size.
• I kept a similar look-and-feel to the SomaFM extension – an icon, a player, a list of channels – but, I removed the settings and favourites options from my scope, to keep things simple. I also have the menu expand to fit the channel names, which I don’t love as it means it changes size, but it works.
  • a little thing that I’m fond of is that the extension uses the configured accent colour – recently added in GNOME 47 – for some of the text.
• I did a lot of reading and poking around at GNOME Shell and gjs, the JavaScript API that enables extensions to be built. I also learned a lot about GStreamer, the engine that GNOME apps use for access to audio and video media. This was all a long, long way from my past work coding for GNOME, ~20 years ago, back in early Anjuta days! I’m not naturally a JavaScript person at all, so I made a lot of mistakes here.
  • huge shout-out to the author of the JustPerfection extension, who carefully and helpfully reviewed my submissions to the GNOME Extensions site. This thing would be a lot more crashy and messy without that oversight!
• the extension contains a small cached implementation of the Azura Cast API, which enables the extension to query the available channels, rather than needing to have a static internal list of streams updated if a channel came along or went away (a concept of “mixtapes” is on the roadmap for The Indie Beat in the future).
  • I needed to add a way to access an artist’s page, which comes from a property that’s stored in the now playing data, so building an API layer that sits parallel to the radio stream player seemed to work nicely.

The Indie Beat is evolving – within a few days of starting work on this side project, Kirsten switched the branding from pink to green, so I updated the artwork. She also added a Bonk Wave channel – and the extension seamlessly picked it up! That was a nice win.

Not What I Call Radio Bonk Wave is a new radio station from The Indie Beat Radio, curated by bonkwave.org and playing music which may be #BonkWave. Or may be #NotBonkWave.

Listen here:

https://not.what.i.call.radio.bonkwave.org/

or here:

https://theindiebeat.fm/not-what-i-call-radio-bonk-wave/

—

Bonk Wave contributors – did you know you can submit any of your tracks to the station?

https://bonkwave.org/board/index.php?topic=134.0

(Bonk Wave Contributors only – if you're not signed up to the board, create an account and we'll add you to the group)

— keef (@keefmarshall) 2025-01-24T20:01:15.978Z

OK… so what does it do?

I’ve posted a short video which covers the basic features: choose between channels, play/stop, open the Bandwagon page of the currently playing artist in a web browser, or directly jump to Bandwagon’s Explore page or The Indie Beat main page. I’ve aimed for simple and clean, as befits the GNOME philosophy.

Where to get it

The extension is available to install here.

You can watch the demo video on my MakerTube.

You can follow development on GitHub.

If you like it, a comment / review on the GNOME Extensions page would be very welcome. If you have issues or ideas, do leave those on the GitHub project.

There is a donation button in the GNOME Extensions page, the use of which is entirely optional.

Don’t forget to click over to Bandwagon, and check out the artists you hear that you like.

What’s the future?

The world and the internet are kind of bleak right now, but actually – we’ve got the power to make it better.

Watch Molly White’s talk from XOXO and get inspired.

Also, this:

There’s a lot of opportunity for creatives in the Fediverse!

Castopod is a great way to self-host a podcast with native ActivityPub federation. Bandwagon exists, where you can create a Fediverse profile for yourself and your music. You can share it through The Indie Beat. I’ve personally got my eye on Libre.FM (like Last.FM, but free, and with a renewed / reinvigorated interest in building new features like ActivityPub and IndieWeb support – here’s my profile). Beyond those, there is also Faircamp, a static site generator that helps musicians self-host their content and avoid enshittification through other channels and platforms. I’m excited! We can work together to make our spaces better for musicians and other artists!

More features for the extension?

This has been a fun side project!

I’ve got a few barely-formed ideas for things I can do with this in the future, as both Bandwagon and The Indie Beat evolve. Stay tuned.

Oh, and through making this extension, I found and purchased an album I’m obsessed with, which has inspired me to do some other new things… so watch this space.

Update 26/02 – since posting this, folks have made me aware of some other fantastic options in this space. Hopefully, we can see more collaborations between these platforms / sites / curators, to grow the opportunity for everyone.

• NHAM shares monthly online mixtapes of music from Fediverse musicians
• Audio Interface, a set of radio shows for independent artists
• the Faircamp Webring collects together many of the artists using Faircamp for their sites
• Mirlo (there’s an open issue proposing that they add ActivityPub / Fediverse support)
• Ampwall

Update 26/02 – I wanted a simple app to play The Indie Beat on my MNT Pocket Reform, too, so I made a more basic system tray app, that should work on most Linux desktops (written in Python)

Where do I get those stickers?

Come find me at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels next weekend, I’ll have Bandwagon+The Indie Beat stickers to share

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, et al

Like a lot of folks, I’m re-evaluating and revising my use of Meta-owned platforms (just as I did with Twitter). I’m sure some people might jump into the comments and say “told you so”, “I haven’t used those for years”, etc.. Fair; I don’t have a rejoinder to that.

I’m not deleting Facebook at the moment, but I will heavily scale back my use of FB and Instagram. I prefer Signal over WhatsApp and Messenger… unfortunately, I have a Quest headset and the Ray Ban glasses, so I’m fairly stuck for now, but don’t have to “be” on their platforms very much. Frustratingly, the art world is very embedded in Instagram, and we only started our Forge & Craft presence there a few months ago, after holding out for the longest time. Again, I’ll be minimising use, rather than fully deleting, at least for for now.

Where am I?

I continue to have presences in lots of places for awareness and self-education, but this is the main state of affairs:

• My primary social platform is Mastodon. My account there is @andypiper@macaw.social, which you can follow from any compatible Fediverse¹ platform. You’ll find several other slices of me in the Fediverse, with the same username but different domains and content (I’m on Pixelfed, Bookwyrm, Lemmy, PeerTube and more) – but that’s the main place I spend time.
  • I’m also on the Mastodon core team, so this may not be completely surprising…

• I’m on Bluesky where I have an account @andypiper.me BUT I use that one infrequently… if you use Bluesky, you’re better following my other “bridged” account @andypiper.macaw.social.ap.brid.gy, that means you will be following my posts on Mastodon directly.

• I prefer Signal for messaging (or iMessage, if you’re on an Apple platform like me). Signal is encrypted, private, and (I believe) trustworthy – they have consistently pushed back against government efforts to weaken private data protection.

More self-hosting

I’m working to self-host more of my own content. Right now my website/blog andypiper.co.uk, and my projects page andypiper.org are not self-hosted, but I’m looking at moving that way in future. I’ve started to learn Proxmox, and want to get things together on my own servers. Now, I started out that way, a long long time ago… I had my own site that I managed, but gave up in favour of the convenience of paying for an organisation (in this case Automattic/WordPress.com) to do the heavy lifting for me. I’ve always been thoughtful and concerned about these issues; but, I’m very, very worried about data sovereignty in the current era. There are a lot of good EU-based alternatives, in case you’re looking to explore.

I’m also, fundamentally, a realist. I’m not about to stop using all of these platforms – or others that I know are also problematic, including the one I’m posting this on, right here, for now – but I can minimise how I use them, plan for change and migration, and be aware of the cages and risks that exist as I do so. To some folks, particularly in software freedom circles, that will make my choices insufficient, and I understand that.

It’s a slow process, but it is an issue I take seriously (and that I’ll be happy to advise you on, if you like).

The need for change is more urgent than ever

We need to build a better, more resilient and decentralised, web (and society). I spoke about this in Japan last month. Along with the most recent changes in the US, that’s a key driver behind me making these changes.

In case you missed it: the Mastodon project (which I am involved with, as mentioned above) announced changes in governance recently, to enshrine the independent nature of the platform into a new EU-based entity, eschewing individual ownership. I think this is an excellent direction, and I’m excited to be part of making that announcement a reality.

The People Should Own The Town Square

Coda

We live in a heterogenous world of many cultures, we always have and always will.

It takes effort to embrace that idea, but life is richer for it.

That goes for technology platforms just as much as our real-life social circles. I use a variety of platforms (Apple, Linux, Microsoft, Google, retro).

I know a lot of people in a lot of places, and I’m grateful for it.

Life is a story of constant change and evolution, and that’s a good thing.

Let’s stay in touch – only, not so much on Facebook.

Stay safe, my friends.

1. The Fediverse is a group of interoperable platforms that all use the same protocol / language (technically, that’s ActivityPub), to talk to one another. See also Fediverse for Freedom. ︎