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Discover self-hostable software you can run on your own server — a curated, open-source directory with setup guides, alternatives, licenses and live version track…

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

@… & I (along with a few others) are running #InstallFest #2 for folks in/near Ōtautahi/Christchurch who're feeling uncomfortable in their digital existences and want to free themselves from a dependence on US Big Tech &/or become more self-sufficient. …

Have just started using Ente for secure, privacy focused photo back up and organisation.
So far I am actually pretty impressed. It's lightning fast and very easy to navigate - and I have tens of thousands of photos that it's definitely helping me to organise and search through easily. And share with non-Ente users too.
It's miles better than Flickr as a UI experience.
This is a test period before I decide if I migrate rest of family too.
However, I was under the impression the company was German/Dutch but it unfortunately appears to be US incorporated - even though the servers are supposed to be in NL, F and DE. It just makes me very suspicious that at some point the company will be sold off and the creeping enshittification will start again.
It is very frustrating. I could but am not very keen to self host. I have far too many other things going on in my life for that. But it does look like immich or memories for nextcloud is the only other good option. And this probably epitomises why most people just stick with (mostly US) big tech. It is so much easier and less effort than working out what the alternatives are.

I remember receiving the email to apply for the All Bodies on Bikes gravel team,
the way my heart jumped up and said yes.
This was a contradiction to the facts my logical mind knew.
I had never ridden on gravel.
I didn’t have a lot of free time to train.
This desire to be on the gravel team had come out of nowhere.
I’d never planned to do a gravel race.
If I were going to apply to be on a team, shouldn’t it be for something I had thought of doing…

I Rode My First Gravel Race at 53 and Became a Cyclist on the Way
For Summer Russo, a self-described big-bodied rider who had never touched gravel, the path to riding 54 miles of Oklahoma red dirt at the 2026 Mid South gravel race began not with a plan, but with a heart that said yes before her mind could talk her out of it. At 53, with a 34-mile personal record to her name, Summer joined the All Bodies on Bikes gravel team – a program built on the radical premise that cycling belongs to every body – and discovered something she hadn't been looking for: h…

This is such a sweet story…
#bikeTooter #cycling

I Rode My First Gravel Race at 53 and Became a Cyclist on the Way
For Summer Russo, a self-described big-bodied rider who had never touched gravel, the path to riding 54 miles of Oklahoma red dirt at the 2026 Mid South gravel race began not with a plan, but with a heart that said yes before her mind could talk her out of it. At 53, with a 34-mile personal record to her name, Summer joined the All Bodies on Bikes gravel team – a program built on the radical premise that cycling belongs to every body – and discovered something she hadn't been looking for: h…

I don't know how many other people here delighted in Jill Bearup's #JustStabMeNow YouTube series, or went on to buy the self-published book that spun out of it (yes, that's my hand in the photograph, holding my copy of the aforementioned novel), but she's now touting the idea of a spin-off big screen movie, and I comfess I'm bubbling with delight at the sheer metaness of …

Twitter reacts to Cowboys watching Myles Garrett get traded to Rams https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2026/06/01/twitter-reactions-cowboys-myles-garrett-trade-browns-rams/90358349007…

On the subject of de-shitification, while #Nextcloud covers a lot but with glitches and gotchas in the 0.x version apps, the big hurdle is self-hosting email with spam filters.
I haven't configured email in a long time, and then it was Sendmail, and dimly recall validation hoops to jump that made "let gmail handle that" seem like a good idea…
Someone posted a docker pre-config for Postfix, so my question is if it would feasibly run on an rpi5 that also runs nc jellyfin and wp, and does this cover outbound emails being accepted as not-spam? #selfhosting