"We’re a collective of individuals upset with the way social media has been traditionally governed. A severe lack of moderation has led to major platforms like Facebook to turn into political machinery focused on disinformation campaigns as a way to make profit off of users. Websites with ineffective moderation allow hate speech to proliferate and contribute to the erosion of minority rights and safe spaces. Our goal with Beehaw is to demonstrate and promote a healthier environment."

There is always room for friendlier, well-moderated social networks. I stopped posting after a few months at the Lemmy site that I had originally joined, mainly because there was too much trolling and baiting starting to happen. So it looks like Beehaw is worth giving a try if you're looking for a federated alternative to Reddit.

See https://beehaw.org/

#technology #alternatives #socialnetworks #reddit #lemmy

WoAD brings the functionality of the Winlink Global Radio E-mail® system to your Android device. Using WoAD you can send and receive e-mail messages through a Winlink Common Message Server (CMS), using either a VHF/UHF packet or internet connection. WoAD also supports peer-to-peer (P2P) connections to other Winlink P2P-capable clients, again through a packet or internet connection.

WoAD can be configured for packet connections from your Android device to use:

• AFSK - using the device’s sound card and simple electronic circuitry to interface to the audio connections of a radio
• USB - using the device’s USB host capability to connect to a packet modem or radio with built-in packet modem
• TCP/IP - using an internet connection to connect to an internet capable packet modem which is in turn interfaced to a radio
• Bluetooth - using the device’s bluetooth capability to connect directly to a bluetooth-enabled radio or via a bluetooth capable packet modem

The use of WoAD requires a valid amateur radio license.

See https://woad.sumusltd.com/

#technology #hamradio #amateurradio #winlink #WoAD

Non dependent on operating systems, Penpot is web based and works with open standards (SVG). Penpot invites designers all over the world to fall in love with open source while getting developers excited about the design process in return.

Create beautiful user interfaces in collaboration with all team members. Maintain consistency at scale with components, libraries and design systems. Create rich interactions to mimic the product behaviour. Share to stakeholders, present proposals to your team and start user testing with your designs, all in one place.

Your work and your knowledge can help someone else even if you think it wouldn't. There's a place to share your libraries and templates or download the one you like.

See https://penpot.app/

#technology #opensource #design #SVG #prototyping

Should you wish to try high-quality voice recognition without buying something, good luck. Sure, you can borrow the speech recognition on your phone or coerce some virtual assistants on a Raspberry Pi to handle the processing for you, but those aren’t good for major work that you don’t want to be tied to some closed-source solution. OpenAI has introduced Whisper, which they claim is an open source neural net that “approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.” It appears to work on at least some other languages, too.

If you try the demonstrations, you’ll see that talking fast or with a lovely accent doesn’t seem to affect the results. The post mentions it was trained on 680,000 hours of supervised data. If you were to talk that much to an AI, it would take you 77 years without sleep!

See https://hackaday.com/2022/09/22/openai-hears-you-whisper/

#technology #opensource #AI #speechrecognition

You know best what you want to see on your home feed. No algorithms or ads to waste your time. Follow anyone across any Mastodon server from a single account and receive their posts in chronological order, and make your corner of the internet a little more like you.

Now, their onboarding website has an easy-to-use guide to finding a server home instance that suites you. You can still connect to anyone anywhere else across the Mastodon network, or even the Fediverse, but your home instance server can show a local feed relating to its main topic of interest.

It is especially interesting to see so many now dedicated to particular cities or regions around the world, but also for artists, ham radio, activism, technology including specifically open source, and more as part of the 2,800 known servers.

Just judging from the way more interaction, I get on Mastodon (I post the same on Twitter and Mastodon), it seems Mastodon users are far more easily able to see posts of interest to them as they don't have adverts and other odd manipulations of their feed algorithm. It's just a cleaner experience.

See https://joinmastodon.org/

#technology #socialnetworks #Mastodon #decentralised #opensource

These apps are known as ‘Off-the-grid’ chat messenger app that works even without internet connection or 2G, 3G, or 4G network coverage, somewhat like the Walkie-Talkie app for iOS and Android. These apps allow you to communicate with each other within a range of up to 100 – 200 meters, it works by broadcasting your encrypted data via the WiFi or Bluetooth.

If there is no direct connection between A and C, the app will bounce the message from A to B to C. In short, it is a P2P (peer to peer) software without a central server like WhatsApp, Line, WeChat and Facebook Message. Three good reasons for using ‘Off the grid’ aka Mesh Network chat. These chat apps can also be used as a walkie talkie. Works great on Android 8.0 Oreo / Android 9.0 [ Popsicle, Pancakes or Pie ] smartphones such as Samsung Galaxy, Huawei Mate, Oppo, Vivo, XiaoMi, Nokia, and also Apple’s iOS iPhone.

Which is all good, but there are three main challenges here:

1. Others in the community need to be using the same app, which implies some discussion and agreement beforehand on which app.
2. They (and you) need to already have it installed before it is needed.
3. Generally, most of the apps are either Android or iOS only. iOS's apps are particularly crippled by Apple's OS policies.

See https://www.geckoandfly.com/22562/chat-without-internet-connection-mesh-network/

#technology #meshnetworks #P2P #disasters

Newt is a battery-powered, always-on, wall-mountable display that can go online to retrieve weather, calendars, sports scores, to-do lists, quotes…really anything on the Internet! It is powered by an ESP32-S2 microcontroller that you can program with Arduino, CircuitPython, MicroPython, or ESP-IDF.

The different pieces of functionality that take in outside data are brokered through MQTT API services coded into the device. Everything is open source software and open source hardware, including certification, so the enterprising hacker could point the services to anything desired or extend the Newt with their own communication protocol and functionality.

Certainly looks interesting for the purpose of distributed displays around the home for Home Assistant dashboard information. Seems like the Newt hardware device is a crowd funded device costing about $92.

See https://hackaday.com/2022/09/19/a-peppy-low-power-wall-mounted-display/

#technology #opensource #newt #display

Yes, one could manually map all the connections yourself to a Pi, but this board is actually quite a nice complete kit with everything needed. It's interesting that the PCIe slot is really only used for mounting, so no connectivity or power runs through it.

The device allows you to remotely operate the keyboard and mouse, and "see" the screen, of a computer without any physical presence requited. This is really only useful though if you need to remotely turn a computer on and off, or access its BIOS.

See https://hackaday.com/2022/09/20/raspberry-pi-grants-remote-access-via-pcie-sort-of/

#technology #raspberrypi #KVM #remoteaccess #PiKVM

"Centralized platforms like Facebook and Twitter currently have full power to control their users' information and can sell their data, including location and other personal information to the highest bidder. Decentralization technology allows the control of digital data to be transferred from companies to their users, thereby increasing privacy and control. By utilizing decentralized technology, MeWe can provide their users with greater control over their content and privacy. Users will get to make decisions on how the platform works. Each person would have their own social graph, allowing them to keep their online network regardless of the platform they use. Users could even monetarily benefit from the value of their personal data. There are no plans for cryptocurrency exchange on MeWe."

So no details yet of how it will work technically, and whether it will actually use an existing open protocol such as XMPP that also has groups. MeWe is currently privacy-centric, but centralised and a closed network. Because it's closed no-one sees your posts outside of the network, even if they are made "public", and this means no wider sharing for bloggers, or going viral outside of MeWe. It looks like they will actually be using the DSNP protocol which is Distributed Social Networking Protocol, which is an open technology that supports private communications. However, the project has been discontinued...

That said, my biggest number of followers for any single network I use, is actually on MeWe numbering well over 40,000. Still, it would be great to tap into the broader Fediverse and XMPP.

See https://mewe.com/web3

#technology #socialnetworks #decentralisation #MeWe