--/ 22-Sep-2026 \--
My talk proposal, "The Nuts and Bolts of Decentralized Social Media", was 
accepted by the organizers of OmniOpenCon 2026! This is a conference that takes 
place each year in Bucharest at the Politechnics University and it's dedicated 
to everything open-source - and boy, did they mean it!

I don't have a background in computer science, and besides a brief flirt with 
software development, IT was not really my thing until last year, when I 
switched to Linux. Last autumn, I attended OmniOpenCon and learned quite a few 
things there, but I was only in the public; I wasn't even self-hosting anything 
at the time!

I'll probably start my presentation with a finger command - great opportunity to
show plan.cat! - rather than the hackneyed 'whoami' and from there jump straight
into showing the ActivityPub and ATproto instances I run, before diving into the
specifications of the protocols, and then compare implementations, all while 
trying to give some clear explanations, not just non-stop infodumping to the 
nerdiest degree - though, to be fair, the subject is a ripe rabbit hole, so to 
say...


--/ 09-Sep-2026 \--
Immich is so bloated, so I've been looking for alternatives... Lychee is 
freemium AND vibe coded at this point... GNU MediaGoblin gets really close to 
what I wamt, but it lacks a basic thing such as custom privacy settings... and 
it doesn't seem to have active development nowadays... on the other hand, I 
don't even have the time to try adding features by way of even vibe coding, let 
alone (re)learning software development just for this... oh well, I'll keep this
as a pipe dream and stick to "just put the files somewhere on the server"...

--/ 31-Aug-2026 \--
For some reason, the different browsers on my mobile phone cough up the
"ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH" error, sometimes as soon as I load the main
page, sometimes only when I get to the $EDITOR or login page, sometimes only
after attempting to log in. Firefox on desktop, on the other hand, seems
perfectly fine with plan.cat... This is the only site where something like this
happened to me, to the point I'm considering self-hosting my own finger
server...

What a tour de force last night: on the bus I've managed to finally get my XMPP/
Snikket server up and running, and after I've got home I've managed to crank an
application for OmniOpenCon 2026 Bucharest - really curious to see if they will
accept my talk about decentralized social media, considering I'm a literal
nobody - and write down on my static site a brief introduction to this topic and
how it turned into a special interest for me, much like how I approached Linux
(and *BSD): with much curiosity and even affection, as something that's more
than a mere tool. I hope at least some people in my possibly slim audience will
be able to relate with this enthusiasm and get beyond voicing out "but there's
no network effect to these niche networks!!"...


--/ 24-Aug-2026 \--
My BSSG-generated static site is up in a working state, need to customize it a 
bit more, but looks good either way. I previously used WriteFreely and it turned
out to be a drag updating it to the newest and most secure version...

ATproto: finally wrapped my head around did:web thanks to @mai.lapyst.dec, but I
still need to somehow generate a bunch of tokens for the account creation 
prpcess without using those Ruby or Go scripts, as recent versions of both Ruby 
and Go throw up compiling errors on more than one of my systems when confronted 
with the dependencies of those slightly older scripts for Bluesky... ActivityPub
folks, you were right to diss ATproto. In before "skill issue"...


--/ 23-Aug-2026 \--
After Gopher and Gemini, time for introducing myself to another smolweb (or 
however less cringe you want to call it) protocol: finger...

I'm from Romania and I use OpenBSD and Alpine Linux...
Not much to say, except I'm still only less than two years in this FOSS 
"business".
Not exactly subscribing to offpunk or frugal computing, but I'm close enough.

---
Wishful to-do:
- finish my ATproto stack
- renewed attempt at building smolBSD on Alpine
- return on Usenet
Pending:
- dropQbsd
- littleFedi