Ploum.net

The Social Smolnet

2026-03-20T00:00:00Z

The Social Smolnet

It might have been an email thread. Or a lobste.rs comment. It was a discussion about yet another attempt at a new decentralized social protocol. And we reached the conclusion that with blogs and email, we already had a decentralized social network. We only needed to use it.

This was the last push I needed to implement in Offpunk the social features I had imagined years ago. Share and Reply. Available since Offpunk 3.0.

Are you reading something interesting in Offpunk and want to share it? Well, simply write it:

share

share myfriend@example.com

A new mail containing the URL to share will be opened in your email client of choice (as determined by xdg-open). The title will be the title of the page. You only need to add some text to explain why you want to share that page.

Reply

Ever read a blog post and wanted to send feedback or a simple thank you to the author? Simply write:

reply

Reply will try to find a mailto link by exploring the page, root pages and, since 3.1, potential "contact" pages. It sometimes works really well. Often, the mail address is obscured or hidden. That’s not a problem. You only need to find it once because Offpunk allows you to save it for the page or the whole online space.

Give an email address as an argument to reply and it will be saved in Offpunk for the page or the whole online space.

If you come across an email address that may be of use in the future but don’t want to react now, use "save":

reply save author@example.com

or, if you want to use autodetection:

reply save

Yes, it is enough

It looks like nothing. It looks like trivial. But for me, this really transformed Gemini/Gopher and the Small Web into a social network. As I use neomutt+neovim as my mail client, I don’t leave my terminal. I simply write "reply", neovim opens, I write "Thank you for this nice post", :wq, ,and voilà. The mail will be sent during my next synchronization.

My disconnected email workflow (ploum.net)

Almost as easy as clicking a "like" button but way more personal. Even easier if, like me, you dislike touching a mouse or opening a browser!

Replying to my own post in Neovim

This is the Social SmolNet

In less than two months, I already used this feature to react to 40 different online spaces, not counting that I’ve used it multiple times with some people.

40 saved reply addresses (41 but the first line is wrongly counted)

I even started using Offpunk as an address book for my blogger friends. Instead of laboriously autocompleting their email addresses, I go to their blog/gemini capsule/gopher hole and write "reply".

The biggest lesson I take is that "social networks" are not about protocols but about how we use the existing infrastructure. Microsoft and Google are working hard to make sure you hate email and hate building a website. But we don’t have to obey. We can enjoy writing lightweight HTML and sending quick emails to each other. We have the right to read, write, and have social fun without Javascript and centralized platforms. We have the duty to keep this torch lit.

In the meantime, if you receive from me very short emails reacting to some of your posts, now you know why.

But, of course, feel free not to reply!

Do not apologize for replying late to my email (ploum.net)

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!

How I fought my smartphone addiction

2026-03-13T00:00:00Z

How I fought my smartphone addiction

In a poignant Gemini post, Kevin Boone wrote about his anxiety to go out of his house without his phone. (This is the Gemini protocol, totally unrelated to the Google chatbot.)

Around 2018, I had the same epiphany: I was unable to get out of my house without my phone. In fact, I was so addicted that it was hard not to take the phone with me even inside the house or, God forbid, into the bathroom!

I had this discussion with Matt Baer, Write.as creator, and he told me that he had started to consciously go for short walks without his smartphone. I thought it was a good idea. I started to leave my phone at home for short walks. I disabled notifications. I even invested in an e-ink smartphone and, later, in a Mudita Kompakt.

At first, not having a phone was a real source of anxiety. For me, the anxiety was not about being able to call someone or being called. It was really about missing notifications, about not knowing if I had a new email. It was about not being able to "feel like I was doing something" if I had to wait a couple of minutes somewhere.

What is even more scary about this particular addiction is that the anxiety of being without a phone is not only internal: it is also highly socially inflicted. My mother asked me: "What if there is an urgency for me or your father?" To which I replied: "I’m not a medic and I live 30 minutes away from you. If there’s an urgency for you, telling me about it is not urgent and will not help."

But, quickly, the feeling to be without a smartphone changed from anxiety to liberating. I felt really happy not to have a phone on me while outside. I was rediscovering my old way of getting lost in my thought, of sometimes talking to myself to clarify an idea. Which is less weird these days because everybody assumes you have an ear bud and are on the phone with someone else. In fact, when walking alone, I’m often on a call with myself.

It may seem weird, but instead of scrambling for my phone to find a direction or the name of that actor that was in that movie, I made peace with the fact that "I didn’t know something." I look around for clues about a bus schedule, I ask strangers for directions. I let my subconscious work in the background to surface the forgotten name half an hour later. And I appreciate that. Sure, there are times when things would have been easier with a smartphone. But nothing insurmountable.

I became more and more allergic to any kind of notifications, even from other phones. I feel them as constant aggression. In part because I was addicted, in part because those are, by definition, designed to disrupt your thought. That’s the whole purpose of a notification.

And we are only starting to understand the damage those are doing to our cognitive abilities.

How Much Cognitive Damage Does A Phone Notification Actually Do? (carlhendrick.substack.com)

These days, I use a Mudita phone which has a side switch to put it completely offline (a kind of hardware enabled airplane mode). Every night, I pull that switch. Some days, I realise I totally forgot to put my phone online in the morning.

When I go outside, I ask my wife: "Is there any reason for me to take my phone?" If there’s none, which is the usual case, I don’t take it. This ritual has two purposes: it allows me to consciously choose whether to take my phone or not and to remind my wife that I don’t have my phone with me.

My only exception is when I go cycling. I remember how my friend Thierry Crouzet broke his hip in the middle of the woods. So I take my phone, just in case. This is not problematic because you cannot mindlessly start checking your phone while pedalling. It’s just a little weight in my jersey pocket.

I would like to say that I’m cured of my smartphone addiction, but this is not true. Put a smartphone with a shiny coloured screen in my pocket and it would probably not take more than a few days for me to return to what is the new social norm. I’m an addict and will stay an addict my whole life. But at least I have put in place enough guardrails to be free of smartphones and feel a lot happier about it.

Of course, this only applies to my smartphone. We will talk about my laptop another time…

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

Do not apologize for replying late to my email

2026-02-11T00:00:00Z

Do not apologize for replying late to my email

You don’t need to apologize for taking hours, days, or years to reply to one of my emails.

If we are not close collaborators, and if I didn’t explicitly tell you I was waiting for your answer within a specific timeframe, then please stop apologizing for replying late!

This is a trend I’m witnessing, probably caused by the addiction to instant messaging. Most of the emails I receive these days contain some sort of apology. I received an apology from someone who took five hours to reply to what was a cold and unimportant email. I received apologies in what was a reply to a reply I had sent only a couple of days earlier.

Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable.

It also puts a lot of pressure on me: what if I take more time than you to reply? Isn’t the whole point of asynchronous communication to be… asynchronous? Each on its own rhythm?

I was not waiting for your email in the first place.

As soon as my email was sent, I probably forgot about it. I may have thought a lot before writing it. I may have drafted it multiple times. Or not. But as soon as it was in my outbox, it was also out of my mind.

That’s the very point of asynchronous communication. That’s why I use email. I’m not making any assumptions about your availability.

Most of the emails I send are replies to emails I received. So, no, I was not waiting for a reply to my reply.

My email might also be an idea I wanted to share with you, a suggestion, a random thought, a way to connect. In all cases, I’m not sitting there, waiting impatiently for your answer.

Even if my email was about requesting some help or collaborating with you, I’ve been trying to move forward anyway. Your reply, whenever it comes, will only be a bonus. But, except if we are in close collaboration and I explicitly said so in the email, I’m not waiting for you!

I don’t want to know all the details of your life.

Yes, you took several days to reply to my email. That’s OK. I don’t need to know that it’s because your mother was dying of cancer or that you were expelled from your house. I’m not making those up! I really receive that kind of apology from people who took several days to reply to emails that look trivial in comparison.

Life happens. If you have things more important to do than replying to my email, then, for god’s sake, don’t reply to it. I get it! I’m human too. If I sometimes reply to all the emails I receive for several days, I may also archive them quickly for weeks because I don’t have the mental space.

If you want to reply but don’t have time, put the burden on me

If I’m asking you something and you really would like to take the time to reply to my email, it is OK to simply send one line like

Hey Ploum, I don’t have the time and mental space right now. Could you contact me again in 6 months to discuss this idea?

Then archive or delete my email. That’s fine. If I really want your input, I will manage to remind you in 6 months. You don’t need to justify. You don’t need to explain. Being short saves time for both of us.

You don’t need to reply at all!

Except if explicitly stated, don’t feel any pressure to reply to one of my emails. Feel free to read and discard the email. Feel free to think about it. Feel free to reply to it, even years later, if it makes sense for you. But, most importantly, feel free not to care!

We all receive too many messages in a day. We all have to make choices. We cannot follow all the paths that look interesting because we are all constrained by having, at most, a couple billion seconds left to live.

Consider whether replying adds any value to the discussion. Is a trivial answer really needed? Is there really something to add? Can’t we both save time by you not replying?

If my email is already a reply to yours, is there something you really want to add? At some point, it is better to stop the conversation. And, as I said, it is not rude: I’m not waiting for your reply!

Don’t tell me you will reply later!

Some people specialize in answering email by explaining why they have no time and that they will reply later.

If I’m not explicitly waiting for you, then that’s the very definition of a useless email. That also adds a lot of cognitive load on you: you promised to answer! The fact that you wrote it makes your brain believe that replying to my email is a daunting task. How will you settle for a quick reply after that? What am I supposed to do with such a non-reply email?

In case an acknowledgement is needed, a simple reply with "thanks" or "received" is enough to inform me that you’ve got the message. Or "ack" if you are a geek.

If you do reply, remind me of the context

If you choose to reply, consider that I have switched to completely different tasks and may have forgotten the context of my own message. When online, my attention span is measured in seconds, so it doesn’t matter if you take 30 minutes or 30 days to answer my email: I guarantee you that I forgot about it.

Consequently, please keep the original text of the whole discussion!

Use bottom-posting style to reply to each question or remark in the body of the original mail itself. Don’t hesitate to cut out parts of the original email that are not needed anymore. Feel free to ignore large parts of the email. It is fine to give a one-line answer to a very long question.

I’m trying to make my emails structured. If there are questions I want you to answer, each question will be on its own line and will end with a question mark. If you do not see such lines, then there’s probably no question to answer.

If you do top posting, please remind me briefly of the context we are in.

Dear Ploum,

I contacted you 6 months ago about my "fooing the bar" project after we met at FOSDEM. You replied to my email with a suggestion of "baring the foo." You also asked a lot of questions. I will answer those below in your own email:

In short, that’s basic mailing-list etiquette.

Mailing list etiquette (www.mediawiki.org)

No, seriously, I don’t expect you to reply!

If there’s one thing to remember, it’s that I don’t expect you to reply. I’m not waiting for it. I have a life, a family, and plenty of projects. The chance I’m thinking about the email I sent you is close to zero. No, it is literally zero.

So don’t feel pressured to reply. Should you really reply in the first place? In case of doubt, drop the email. Life will continue.

If you do reply, I will be honored, whatever time it took for you to send it.

In any case, whatever you choose, do not apologize for replying late!

And use plaintext email!

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

Offpunk 3.0 "A Community is Born" Release

2026-02-09T00:00:00Z

Offpunk 3.0 "A Community is Born" Release

For the last four years, I’ve been developing Offpunk, a command-line Web, Gemini, and Gopher browser that allows you to work offline. And I’ve just released version 3.0. It is probably not for everyone, but I use it every single day. I like it, and it seems I’m not alone!

Offpunk, the offline-first command-line browser

Something wonderful happened on the road leading to 3.0: Offpunk became a true cooperative effort. Offpunk 3.0 is probably the first release that contains code I didn’t review line-by-line. Unmerdify (by Vincent Jousse), all the translation infrastructure (by the always-present JMCS), and the community packaging effort are areas for which I barely touched the code.

So, before anything else, I want to thank all the people involved for sharing their energy and motivation. I’m very grateful for every contribution the project received. I’m also really happy to see "old names" replying from time to time on the mailing list. It makes me feel like there’s an emerging Offpunk community where everybody can contribute at their own pace.

There were a lot of changes between 2.8 and 3.0, which probably means some new bugs and some regressions. We count on you, yes, you!, to report them and make 3.1 a lot more stable. It’s as easy at typing "bugreport" in offpunk!

From the deepest of my terminal, thank you!

But enough with the cheering, let’s jump to…

The 11 most important changes in Offpunk 3.0

0. Use Offpunk in your language.

Offpunk is now translatable and has been translated into Spanish, Galician, and Dutch. Step-in to translate Offpunk into your language! (awesome work by JMCS with the help of Bert Livens)

How to help translating Offpunk (offpunk.net)

1. Openk as a standalone tool

"opnk" standalone tool has been renamed to "openk" to make it more obvious. Openk is a command-line tool that tries to open any file in the terminal and, if not possible, opens it in your preferred software, falling back to xdg-open as a last resort.

People using opnk directly should change it everywhere. Users not using "opnk" in their terminal are not affected.

2. See XKCD comics in your terminal

"xkcdpunk" is a new standalone tool that allows displaying XKCD comics directly in your terminal.

XKCDpunk in action

3. Get only the good part and remove cruft for thousands of websites

Offpunk now integrates "unmerdify," a library written by Vincent Jousse that extracts the content of HTML articles using the "ftr-site-config" set of rules maintained by the FiveFilters community.

Unmerdify on Codeberg

You can contribute by creating or improving rules for your frequently visited websites.

If no ftr rule is found, Offpunk falls back to "readability," as has been the case since 0.1. "info" will tell you if unmerdify or readability was used to display the content of a page.

To use umerdify, users should manually clone the ftr-site-config repository:
git clone https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config.git
Then, in their offpunkrc:

set ftr_site_config /path/to/ftr-site-config

Automating this step is an objective for 3.1

4. Offpunk goes social with "share" and "reply"

New social functions: "share" to send the URL of a page by email and "reply" to reply to the author if an email is found. "Reply" will remember the email used for each site/capsule/hole.

5. Browse websites while logged in

Offpunk doesn’t support login into websites. But the new "cookies" command allows you to import a cookie txt file to be used with a given http domain.

From your traditional browser (Firefox, Librewolf, Chromium, … ), log into the website. Then export the cookie with the "cookie-txt" extension. Once you have this "mycookie.txt" text file, launch Offpunk and run:

cookies import mycookie.txt https://domain-of-the-cookie.net/

This allows you, for example, to read LWN.NET if you have a subscription. (contributed by Urja)

6. Bigger, better images, even in Gemini

Images are now displayed by default in gemini and their display size has been increased.

Gemini capsule of Thierry Crouzet displayed in Offpunk

This can be reverted with the following lines in offpunkrc:

set images_size 40
set gemini_images false

Remember that images are displayed as "blocks" when reading a page but if you access the image URL directly (by following the yellow link beneath), the image will be displayed perfectly if you are using a sixels-compatible terminal.

7. Display hidden RSS/Atom links

If available, links to hidden RSS/Atom feeds are now displayed at the bottom of HTML pages.

This makes the "feed" command a lot less useful and allows you to quickly discover interesting new feeds.

8. Display blocked links

Links to blocked domains are now displayed in red by default.

A blocked link to X on standblog.org

This can be reverted with the following lines in offpunkrc:

theme blocked_link none

9. Preset themes

Support for multiple themes with "theme preset." Existing themes are "offpunk1" (default), "cyan," "yellow" and "bw." Don’t hesitate to contribute yours!

10. Better redirects and true blocks

"redirects" now operate on the netcache level. This means that no requests to blocked URLs should ever be made (which was still happening before)

And many changes, improvements and bugfixes

- "root" is now smarter and goes to the root of a website, not the domain.
Old behaviour can still be achieved with "root /"
- "ls" command is deprecated and has been replaced by "links"
- new "websearch" command configured to use wiby.me by default
- "set default_cmd" allows you to configure what Offpunk will do when pressing enter on an empty command line. By default, it is "links 10."
- "view switch" allows you to switch between normal and full view (contributed by Andrew Fowlie)
- "help help" will allow you to send an email to the offpunk-users mailing list
- "bugreport" will send a bug report to the offpunk-devel mailing list
- And, of course, multiple bugfixes…

Come and join the Offpunk community!

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

The Disconnected Git Workflow

2026-01-31T00:00:00Z

The Disconnected Git Workflow

Using git-send-email while being offline and with multiple email accounts

WARNING: the following is a technical reminder for my future self. If you don’t use the "git" software, you can safely ignore this post.

The more I work with git-send-email, the less I find the GitHub interface sufferable.

Want to send a small patch to a GitHub project? You need to clone the repository, push your changes to your own branch, then ask for a pull request using the cumbersome web interface, replying to comments online while trying to avoid smileys.

With git send-email, I simply work offline, do my local commit, then:

git send-email HEAD^

And I’m done. I reply to comments by email, with Vim/Mutt. When the patch is accepted, getting a clean tree usually boils down to:

git pull
git rebase

Yeah for git-send-email!

Guide to setup git send-email (git-send-email.io)

And, yes, I do that while offline and with multiple email accounts. That’s one more reason to hate GitHub.

One mail account for each git repository

The secret is not to configure email accounts in git but to use "msmtp" to send email. Msmtp is a really cool sendmail replacement.

In .msmtprc, you can configure multiple accounts with multiple options, including calling a command to get your password.

# account 1 - pro
account work
host smtp.company.com
port 465
user login@company.com
from ploum@company.com
password SuPeRstr0ngP4ssw0rd
tls_starttls off

# personal account for FLOSS
account floss
host mail.provider.net
port 465
user ploum@mydomain.net
from ploum@mydomain.net
from ploum*@mydomain.net
passwordeval "cat ~/incredibly_encrypted_password.txt | rot13"
tls_starttls off

The important bit here is that you can set multiple "from" addresses for a given account, including a regexp to catch multiple aliases!

Now, we will ask git to automatically use the right msmtp account. In your global .gitconfig, set the following:

[sendemail]
   sendmailCmd = /usr/bin/msmtp --set-from-header=on
   envelopeSender = auto

The "envelopesender" option will ensure that the sendemail.from will be used and given to msmtp as a "from address." This might be redundant with "--set-from-header=on" in msmtp but, in my tests, having both was required. And, cherry on the cake, it automatically works for all accounts configured in msmtprc.

Older git versions (< 2.33) don’t have sendmailCmd and should do:

[sendemail]
   smtpserver = /usr/bin/msmtp
   smtpserveroption = --set-from-header=on
   envelopesender = auto

I usually stick to a "ploum-PROJECT@mydomain.net" for each project I contribute to. This allows me to easily cut spam when needed. So far, the worst has been with a bug reported on the FreeBSD Bugzilla. The address used there (and nowhere else) has since been spammed to death.

In each git project, you need to do the following:

1. Set the email address used in your commit that will appear in "git log" (if different from the global one)

git config user.email "Ploum <ploum-PROJECT@mydomain.net>"

2. Set the email address that will be used to actually send the patch (could be different from the first one)

git config sendemail.from "Ploum <ploum-PROJECT@mydomain.net>"

3. Set the email address of the developer or the mailing list to which you want to contribute

git config sendemail.to project-devel@mailing-list.com

Damn, I did a commit with the wrong user.email!

Yep, I always forget to change it when working on a new project or from a fresh git clone. Not a problem. Just use "git config" like above, then:

git commit --amend --reset-author

And that’s it.

Working offline

I told you I mostly work offline. And, as you might expect, msmtp requires a working Internet connection to send an email.

But msmtp comes with three wonderful little scripts: msmtp-enqueue.sh, msmtp-listqueue.sh and msmtp-runqueue.sh.

The first one saves your email to be sent in ~/.msmtpqueue, with the sending options in a separate file. The second one lists the unsent emails, and the third one actually sends all the emails in the queue.

All you need to do is change the msmtp line in your global .gitconfig to call the msmtpqueue.sh script:

[sendemail]
    sendmailcmd = /usr/libexec/msmtp/msmtpqueue/msmtp-enqueue.sh --set-from-header=on
    envelopeSender = auto

In Debian, the scripts are available with the msmtp package. But the three are simple bash scripts that can be run from any path if your msmtp package doesn’t provide them.

You can test sending a mail, then check the ~/.msmtpqueue folder for the email itself (.email file) and the related msmtp command line (.msmtp file). It happens nearly every day that I visit this folder to quickly add missing information to an email or simply remove it completely from the queue.

Of course, once connected, you need to remember to run:

/usr/libexec/msmtp/msmtpqueue/msmtp-runqueue.sh

If not connected, mails will not be sent and will be kept in the queue. This line is obviously part of my do_the_internet.sh script, along with "offpunk --sync".

How I use Offpunk (by Ploum) (offpunk.net)

It is not only git!

If it works for git, it works for any mail client. I use neomutt with the following configuration to use msmtp-enqueue and reply to email using the address it was sent to.

set sendmail="/usr/libexec/msmtp/msmtpqueue/msmtp-enqueue.sh --set-from-header=on"
unset envelope_from_address
set use_envelope_from
set reverse_name
set from="ploum@mydomain.net"
alternates ploum[A-Za-z0-9]*@mydomain.net

Of course, the whole config is a little more complex to handle multiple accounts that are all stored locally in Maildir format through offlineimap and indexed with notmuch. But this is a bit out of the scope of this post.

At least, you get the idea, and you could probably adapt it to your own mail client.

Conclusion

Sure, it’s a whole blog post just to get the config right. But there’s nothing really out of this world. And once the setup is done, it is done for good. No need to adapt to every change in a clumsy web interface, no need to use your mouse. Simple command lines and simple git flow!

Sometimes, I work late at night. When finished, I close the lid of my laptop and call it a day without reconnecting my laptop. This allows me not to see anything new before going to bed. When this happens, queued mails are sent the next morning, when I run the first do_the_internet.sh of the day.

And it always brings a smile to my face to see those bits being sent while I’ve completely forgotten about them…

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

Why there’s no European Google?

2026-01-22T00:00:00Z

Why there’s no European Google?

And why it is a good thing!

With some adjustments, this post is mostly a translation of a post I published in French three years ago. In light of the European Commission’s "call for evidence on Open Source," and as a professor of "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain, I thought it was a good idea to translate it into English as a public answer to that call.

Google (sorry, Alphabet), Facebook (sorry, Meta), Twitter (sorry, X), Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft. All those giants are part of our daily personal and professional lives. We may even not interact with anything else but them. All are 100% American companies.

China is not totally forgotten, with Alibaba, TikTok, and some services less popular in Europe yet used by billions worldwide.

What about European tech champions? Nearly nothing, to the great sadness of politicians who believe that the success of a society is measured by the number of billionaires it creates.

Despite having few tech-billionaires, Europe is far from ridiculous. In fact, it’s the opposite: Europe is the central place that allowed most of our tech to flourish.

The Internet, the interconnection of most of the computers in the world, has existed since the late sixties. But no protocol existed to actually exploit that network, to explore and search for information. At the time, you needed to know exactly what you wanted and where to find it. That’s why the USA tried to develop a protocol called "Gopher."

At the same time, the "World Wide Web," composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.

It’s hard to be more European than the Web! It looks like the Official European Joke! (And, yes, I consider Brits Europeans. They will join us back, we miss them, I promise.)

The Official European Joke (ploum.net)

Gopher is still used by a few hobbyists (like yours trully), but it never truly became popular, except for a very short time in some parts of America. One of the reasons might have been that Gopher’s creators wanted to keep their rights to it and license any related software, unlike the European Web, which conquered the world because it was offered as a common good instead of seeking short-term profits.

While Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee were busy inventing the World Wide Web in their CERN office, a Swedish-speaking Finnish student started to code an operating system and make it available to everyone under the name "Linux." Today, Linux is probably the most popular operating system in the world. It runs on any Android smartphone, is used in most data centers, in most of your appliances, in satellites, in watches and is the operating system of choice for many of the programmers who write the code you use to run your business. Its creator, the European Linus Torvalds, is not a billionaire. And he’s very happy about it: he never wanted to become one. He continued coding and wrote the "git" software, which is probably used by 100% of the software developers around the world. Like Linux, Git is part of the common good: you can use it freely, you can modify it, you can redistribute it, you can sell it. The only thing you cannot do? Privatize it. This is called "copyleft."

In 2017, a decentralized and ethical alternative to Twitter appeared: Mastodon. Its creator? A German student, born in Russia, who had the goal of allowing social network users to leave monopolies to have humane conversations without being spied on and bombarded with advertising or pushed-by-algorithm fake news. Like Linux, like git, Mastodon is copyleft and now part of the common goods.

Allowing human-scale discussion with privacy and without advertising was also the main motivation behind the Gemini protocol (whose name has since been hijacked by Google AI). Gemini is a stripped-down version of the Web which, by design, is considered definitive. Everybody can write Gemini-related software without having to update it in the future. The goal is not to attract billions of users but to be there for those who need it, even in the distant future. The creator of the Gemini protocol wishes to remain anonymous, but we know that the project started while he was living in Finland.

I could continue with the famous VLC media player, probably the most popular media player in the world. Its creator, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Kempf, refused many offers that would have made him a very rich man. But he wanted to keep VLC a copyleft tool part of the common goods.

Don’t forget LibreOffice, the copyleft office suite maintained by hundreds of contributors around the world under the umbrella of the Document Foundation, a German institution.

We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the "success culture." Those examples, and there are many more, prove the opposite. Europeans like success. But they often don’t consider "winning against the whole society" as one. Instead, they tend to consider success a collective endeavour. Success is when your work is recognized long after you are gone, when it benefits every citizen. Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!

We don’t want a European Google Maps! We want our institutions at all levels to contribute to OpenStreetMap (which was created by a British citizen, by the way).

Google, Microsoft, Facebook may disappear tomorrow. It is even very probable that they will not exist in fourty or fifty years. It would even be a good thing. But could you imagine the world without the Web? Without HTML? Without Linux?

Those European endeavours are now a fundamental infrastructure of all humanity. Those technologies are definitely part of our long-term history.

In the media, success is often reduced to the size of a company or the bank account of its founder. Can we just stop equating success with short-term economic growth? What if we used usefulness and longevity? What if we gave more value to the fundamental technological infrastructure instead of the shiny new marketing gimmick used to empty naive wallets? Well, I guess that if we changed how we measure success, Europe would be incredibly successful.

And, as Europeans, we could even be proud of it. Proud of our inventions. Proud of how we contribute to the common good instead of considering ourselves American vassals.

Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?

The choice is ours. We simply need to choose whom we admire. Whom we want to recognize as successful. Whom we aspire to be when we grow up. We need to sing the praises of our true heroes: those who contribute to our commons.

Picture by Frans Snik of a LEGO version of the European Extremely Large Telescope. Yes, LEGO is a European invention too.

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

2026-01-19T00:00:00Z

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

What I like most about teaching "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain is how much I learn from my students, especially during the exam.

I dislike exams. I still have nightmares about exams. That’s why I try to subvert this stressful moment and make it a learning opportunity. I know that adrenaline increases memorization dramatically. I make sure to explain to each student what I was expecting and to be helpful.

Here are the rules:

1. You can have all the resources you want (including a laptop connected to the Internet)
2. There’s no formal time limit (but if you stay too long, it’s a symptom of a deeper problem)
3. I allow students to discuss among themselves if it is on topic. (in reality, they never do it spontanously until I force two students with a similar problem to discuss together)
4. You can prepare and bring your own exam question if you want (something done by fewer than 10% of the students)
5. Come dressed for the exam you dream of taking!

This last rule is awesome. Over the years, I have had a lot of fun with traditional folkloric clothing from different countries, students in pajamas, a banana and this year’s champion, my Studentausorus Rex!

An inflatable Tyranosaurus Rex taking my exam in 2026

My all-time favourite is still a fully clothed Minnie Mouse, who did an awesome exam with full face make-up, big ears, big shoes, and huge gloves. I still regret not taking a picture, but she was the very first student to take my words for what was a joke and started a tradition over the years.

Giving Chatbots Choice to the Students

Rule N°1 implies having all the resources you want. But what about chatbots? I didn’t want to test how ChatGPT was answering my questions, I wanted to help my students better understand what Open Source means.

Before the exam, I copy/pasted my questions into some LLMs and, yes, the results were interesting enough. So I came up with the following solution: I would let the students choose whether they wanted to use an LLM or not. This was an experiment.

The questionnaire contained the following:

# Use of Chatbots

Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor.

Option A: I will not use any chatbot, only traditional web searches. Any use of them will be considered cheating.

Option B: I may use a chatbot as it’s part of my toolbox. I will then respect the following rules:
1) I will inform the professor each time information come from a chatbot
2) When explaining my answers, I will share the prompts I’ve used so the professor understands how I use the tool
3) I will identify mistakes in answers from the chatbot and explain why those are mistakes

Not following those rules will be considered cheating. Mistakes made by chatbots will be considered more important than honest human mistakes, resulting in the loss of more points. If you use chatbots, you should be held accountable for the output.

I thought this was fair. You can use chatbots, but you will be held accountable for it.

Most Students Don’t Want to Use Chatbots

This January, I saw 60 students. I interacted with each of them for a mean time of 26 minutes. This is a tiring but really rewarding process.

Of 60 students, 57 decided not to use any chatbots. For 30 of them, I managed to ask them to explain their choices. For the others, I unfortunately did not have the time. After the exam, I grouped those justifications into four different clusters. I did it without looking at their grades.

The first group is the "personal preference" group. They prefer not to use chatbots. They use them only as a last resort, in very special cases or for very specific subjects. Some even made it a matter of personal pride. Two students told me explicitly "For this course, I want to be proud of myself." Another also explained: "If I need to verify what an LLM said, it will take more time!"

The second group was the "never use" one. They don’t use LLMs at all. Some are even very angry at them, not for philosophical reasons, but mainly because they hate the interactions. One student told me: "Can I summarize this for you? No, shut up! I can read it by myself you stupid bot."

The third group was the "pragmatic" group. They reasoned that this was the kind of exam where it would not be needed.

The last and fourth group was the "heavy user" group. They told me they heavily use chatbots but, in this case, were afraid of the constraints. They were afraid of having to justify a chatbot’s output or of missing a mistake.

After doing that clustering, I wrote the grade of each student in its own cluster and I was shocked by how coherent it was. Note: grades are between 0 and 20, with 10 being the minimum grade to pass the class.

The "personal preference" students were all between 15 and 19, which makes them very good students, without exception! The "proud" students were all above 17!

The "never use" was composed of middle-ground students around 13 with one outlier below 10.

The pragmatics were in the same vein but a bit better: they were all between 12 and 16 without exceptions.

The heavy users were, by far, the worst. All students were between 8 and 11, with only one exception at 16.

This is, of course, not an unbiased scientific experiment. I didn’t expect anything. I will not make any conclusion. I only share the observation.

But Some Do

Of 60 students, only 3 decided to use chatbots. This is not very representative, but I still learned a lot because part of the constraints was to show me how they used chatbots. I hoped to learn more about their process.

The first chatbot student forgot to use it. He did the whole exam and then, at the end, told me he hadn’t thought about using chatbots. I guess this put him in the "pragmatic" group.

The second chatbot student asked only a couple of short questions to make sure he clearly understood some concepts. This was a smart and minimal use of LLMs. The resulting exam was good. I’m sure he could have done it without a chatbot. The questions he asked were mostly a matter of improving his confidence in his own reasoning.

This reminded me of a previous-year student who told me he used chatbots to study. When I asked how, he told me he would tell the chatbot to act as the professor and ask exam questions. As a student, this allowed him to know whether he understood enough. I found the idea smart but not groundbreaking (my generation simply used previous years’ questions).

The third chatbot-using student had a very complex setup where he would use one LLM, then ask another unrelated LLM for confirmation. He had walls of text that were barely readable. When glancing at his screen, I immediately spotted a mistake (a chatbot explaining that "Sepia Search is a compass for the whole Fediverse"). I asked if he understood the problem with that specific sentence. He did not. Then I asked him questions for which I had seen the solution printed in his LLM output. He could not answer even though he had the answer on his screen.

But once we began a chatbot-less discussion, I discovered that his understanding of the whole matter was okay-ish. So, in this case, chatbots disserved him heavily. He was totally lost in his own setup. He had LLMs generate walls of text he could not read. Instead of trying to think for himself, he tried to have chatbots pass the exam for him, which was doomed to fail because I was asking him, not the chatbots. He passed but would probably have fared better without chatbots.

Can chatbots help? Yes, if you know how to use them. But if you do, chances are you don’t need chatbots.

A Generational Fear of Cheating

One clear conclusion is that the vast majority of students do not trust chatbots. If they are explicitly made accountable for what a chatbot says, they immediately choose not to use it at all.

One obvious bias is that students want to please the teacher, and I guess they know where I am on this spectrum. One even told me: "I think you do not like chatbots very much so I will pass the exam without them" (very pragmatic of him).

But I also minimized one important generational bias: the fear of cheating. When I was a student, being caught cheating was a clear zero for the exam. You could, in theory, be expelled from university for aggravated cheating, whatever "aggravated" could mean.

During the exam, a good number of students called me panicked because Google was forcing autogenerated answers and they could not disable it. They were very worried I would consider this cheating.

First, I realized that, like GitHub, Google has a 100% market share, to the point students don’t even consider using something else a possibility. I should work on that next year.

Second, I learned that cheating, however lightly, is now considered a major crime. It might result in the student being banned from any university in the country for three years. Discussing exam with someone who has yet to pass it might be considered cheating. Students have very strict rules on their Discord.

I was completely flabbergasted because, to me, discussing "What questions did you have?" was always part of the collaboration between students. I remember one specific exam where we gathered in an empty room and we helped each other before passing it. When one would finish her exam, she would come back to the room and tell all the remaining students what questions she had and how she solved them. We never considered that "cheating" and, as a professor, I always design my exams hoping that the good one (who usually choose to pass the exam early) will help the remaining crowd. Every learning opportunity is good to take!

I realized that my students are so afraid of cheating that they mostly don’t collaborate before their exams! At least not as much as what we were doing.

In retrospect, my instructions were probably too harsh and discouraged some students from using chatbots.

Stream of Consciousness

My 2025 banana student!

Another innovation I introduced in the 2026 exam was the stream of consciousness. I asked them to open an empty text file and keep a stream of consciousness during the exam. The rules were the following:

In this file, please write all your questions and all your answers as a "stream of consciousness." This means the following rules:

1. Don’t delete anything.
2. Don’t correct anything.
3. Never go backward to retouch anything.
4. Write as thoughts come.
5. No copy/pasting allowed (only exception: URLs)
6. Rule 5. implies no chatbot for this exercice. This is your own stream of consciousness.

Don’t worry, you won’t be judged on that file. This is a tool to help you during the exam. You can swear, you can write wrong things. Just keep writing without deleting. If you are lost, write why you are lost. Be honest with yourself.

This file will only be used to try to get you more points, but only if it is clear that the rules have been followed.

I asked them to send me the file within 24h after the exam. Out of 60 students, I received 55 files (the remaining 5 were not penalized). There was also a bonus point if you sent it to the exam git repository using git-send-email, something 24 managed to do correctly.

The results were incredible. I did not read them all but this tool allowed me to have a glimpse inside the minds of the students. One said: "I should have used AI, this is the kind of question perfect for AI" (he did very well without it). For others, I realized how much stress they had but were hiding. I was touched by one stream of consciousness starting with "I’m stressed, this doesn’t make any sense. Why can’t we correct what we write in this file" then, 15 lines later "this is funny how writing the questions with my own words made the problem much clearer and how the stress start to fade away".

And yes, I read all the failed students and managed to save a bunch of them when it was clear that they, in fact, understood the matter but could not articulate it well in front of me because of the stress. Unfortunately, not everybody could be saved.

Conclusion

My main takeaway is that I will keep this method next year. I believe that students are confronted with their own use of chatbots. I also learn how they use them. I’m delighted to read their thought processes through the stream of consciousness.

Like every generation of students, there are good students, bad students and very brilliant students. It will always be the case, people evolve (I was, myself, not a very good student). Chatbots don’t change anything regarding that. Like every new technology, smart young people are very critical and, by defintion, smart about how they use it.

The problem is not the young generation. The problem is the older generation destroying critical infrastructure out of fear of missing out on the new shiny thing from big corp’s marketing department.

Most of my students don’t like email. An awful lot of them learned only with me that Git is not the GitHub command-line tool. It turns out that by imposing Outlook with mandatory subscription to useless academic emails, we make sure that students hate email (Microsoft is on a mission to destroy email with the worst possible user experience).

I will never forgive the people who decided to migrate university mail servers to Outlook. This was both incompetence and malice on a terrifying level because there were enough warnings and opposition from very competent people at the time. Yet they decided to destroy one of the university’s core infrastructures and historical foundations (UCLouvain is listed by Peter Salus as the very first European university to have a mail server, there were famous pioneers in the department).

By using Outlook, they continue to destroy the email experience. Out of 55 streams of consciousness, 15 ended in my spam folder. All had their links destroyed by Outlook. And university keep sending so many useless emails to everyone. One of my students told me that they refer to their university email as "La boîte à spams du recteur" (Chancellor’s spam inbox). And I dare to ask why they use Discord?

Another student asked me why it took four years of computer engineering studies to get a teacher explaining to them that Git was not GitHub and that GitHub was part of Microsoft. He had a distressed look: "How could I have known? We were imposed GitHub for so many exercises!"

How GitHub monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem (ploum.net)

Each year, I tell my students the following:

It took me 20 years after university to learn what I know today about computers. And I’ve only one reason to be there in front of you: be sure you are faster than me. Be sure that you do it better and deeper than I did. If you don’t manage to outsmart me, I will have failed.

Because that’s what progress is about. Progress is each generation going further than the previous one while learning from the mistakes of your elders. I’m there to tell you about my own mistakes and the mistakes of my generation.

I know that most of you are only there to get a diploma while doing the minimal required effort. Fair enough, that’s part of the game. Challenge accepted. I will try to make you think even if you don’t intend to do it.

In earnest, I have a lot of fun teaching, even during the exam. For my students, the mileage may vary. But for the second time in my life, a student gave me the best possible compliment:

— You know, you are the only course for which I wake up at 8AM.

To which I responded:

– The feeling is mutual. I hate waking up early, except to teach in front of you.

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem

2026-01-05T00:00:00Z

How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem

I teach a course called "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain, part of the University of Louvain.

As part of my course, students are required to find an open source project of their choice and make a small contribution to it. They send me a report through our university Gitlab. To grade their work, I read the report and explore their public interactions with the project: tickets, comments, pull requests, emails.

This year, during my review of the projects of the semester, Github decided to block my IP for one hour. During that hour, I simply could not access Github.

Github telling me I made too many requests

It should be noted that, even if I want to get rid of it, I still have a Github account and I was logged in.

We need to talk about your Github addiction (ploum.net)

The block happened again the day after.

This gave me pause.

I wondered how many of my students’ projects were related to projects hosted on Github. I simply went into the repository and counted 238 students reports in the last seven years:

ls -l projects_*/*.md | wc -l
238

Some reports might be missing. Also, I don’t have the reports before 2019 in that repository. But this is a good approximation.

Now, let’s count how many reports don’t contain "github.com".

grep -L github.com projects_*/*.md | wc -l
7

Wow, that’s not a lot. I then wondered what those projects were. It turns out that, out of those 7, 6 students simply forgot to add the repository URL in their report. They used the project webpage or no URL at all. In those 6 cases, the repository happened to be hosted on Github.

In my course, I explain at great length the problem of centralisation. I present alternatives: Gitlab, Codeberg, Forgejo, Sourcehut but also Fossil, Mercurial, even Radicle.

I literally explain to my students to look outside of Github. Despite this, out of 238 students tasked with contributing to the open source project of their choice, only one managed to avoid Github.

The immediate peril of centralisation

As it was demonstrated to me for one hour, the immediate peril of centralisation is that you can suddenly lose access to everything. For one hour, I was unable to review any of my students’ projects. Not a great deal, but it serves as a warning. While writing this post, I was hit a second time by this block.

A few years ago, one of my friends was locked out of his Google account while travelling for work at the other end of the world. Suddenly, his email stopped working, most of the apps on his phone stopped working, and he lost access to all his data "in the clouds". Fortunately, he still had a working email address (not on Google) and important documents for his trip were on his laptop hard drive. Through personal connections at Google, he managed to recover his account a few weeks later. He never had any explanations.

Et si vos comptes disparaissaient demain ? (ploum.net)

More recently, Paris Buttfield-Addison experienced the same thing with his Apple account. His whole online life disappeared, and all his hardware was suddenly bricked. Being heavily invested in Apple doesn’t protect you.

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple (hey.paris)

I’m sure the situation will be resolved because, once again, we are talking about a well-connected person.

But this happens. All the time. Institutions are blindly trusting monopolies that could lock you out randomly or for political reasons as experienced by the French magistrate Nicolas Guillou.

The Judge at the End of Europe (www.project-syndicate.org)

Worst: as long as we are not locked out, we offer all our secrets to a country that could arbitrarily decide to attack yours and kidnap your president. I wonder how much Venezuelan sensitive information was in fact stored on Google/Microsoft services and accessed by the US military to prepare their recent strike.

Big institutions like my Alma Mater or entire countries have no excuse to still use American monopolies. This is either total incompetence or corruption, probably a bit of both.

The subtle peril of centralisation

As demonstrated by my Github anecdote, individuals have little choice. Even if I don’t want a Github account, I’m mostly forced to have one if I want to contribute or report bugs to projects I care about. I’m forced to interact with Github to grade my students’ projects.

237 out of 238 is not "a lot." It’s everyone. There’s something more than "most projects use Github."

According to most of my students, the hardest part of contributing to an open source project is finding one. I tell them to look for the software they use every day, to investigate. But the vast majority ends up finding "something that looks easy."

That’s where I realised all this time my students had been searching for open source projects to contribute to on Github only. It’s not that everything is on Github, it is that none of my students can imagine looking outside of Github!

The outlier? The one student who contributed to a project not on Github? We discussed his needs and I pointed him to the project he ended up choosing.

Github’s centralisation invisibilised a huge part of the open source world. Because of that, lots of projects tend to stay on Github or, like Python, to migrate to Github.

The solution

Each year, students come up with very creative ways not to do what I expect while still passing. Last year, half of the class was suddenly committing reports with broken encoding in the file path. I had never seen that before and I asked how they managed to do it. It turns out that half the class was using VS Code on Windows to do something as simple as "git commit" and they couldn’t use the git command line.

This year, I forced them to use the command line on an open source OS, which solved the previous year’s issue. But a fair number of the reports are clearly ChatGPT-generated, which was less obvious last year. This is sad because it probably took them more effort to write the prompt and, well, those reports are mostly empty of substance. I would have preferred the prompt alone. I’m also sad they thought I would not notice.

But my main mistake was a decade-long one. For all those years, I asked my students to find a project to contribute to. So they blindly did. They didn’t try to think about it. They went to Github and started browsing projects.

For all those years, I involuntarily managed to teach my students that Open Source was a corner of the web, a Microsoft-managed repository of small software one can play with. Nothing serious.

This is all my fault.

I know the solution. Starting this year, students will be forced to contribute to a project they use, care about or, at the very least, truly want to use in the long term. Not one they found randomly on Github.

If they think they don’t use open source software, they should take a better look at their own stack.

And if they truly don’t use any open source software at all and don’t want to use any, why do they want to follow a course about the subject in the first place?

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

Prepare for That Stupid World

2025-12-19T00:00:00Z

Prepare for That Stupid World

You probably heard about the Wall Street Journal story where they had a snack-vending machine run by a chatbot created by Anthropic.

At first glance, it is funny and it looks like journalists doing their job criticising the AI industry. If you are curious, the video is there (requires JS).

We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.(www.wsj.com)

But what appears to be journalism is, in fact, pure advertising. For both WSJ and Anthropic. Look at how WSJ journalists are presented as "world class", how no-subtle the Anthropic guy is when telling them they are the best and how the journalist blush at it. If you are taking the story at face value, you are failing for the trap which is simple: "AI is not really good but funny, we must improve it."

The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.

Automated snack vending machine is a solved problem since nearly a century. Why do you want to make your vending machine more expensive, more error-prone, more fragile and less efficient for your customers?

What this video is really doing is normalising the fact that "even if it is completely stupid, AI will be everywhere, get used to it!"

The Anthropic guy himself doesn’t seem to believe his own lies, to the point of making me uncomfortable. Toward the ends, he even tries to warn us: "Claude AI could run your business but you don’t want to come one day and see you have been locked out." At which the journalist adds, "Or has ordered 100 PlayStations."

And then he gives up:

"Well, the best you can do is probably prepare for that world."

Still from the video where Anthropic’s employee says "probably prepare for that world"

None of the world class journalists seemed to care. They are probably too badly paid for that. I was astonished to see how proud they were, having spent literally hours chatting with a bot just to get a free coke, even queuing for the privilege of having a free coke. A coke that cost a few minutes of minimum-wage work.

So the whole thing is advertising a world where chatbots will be everywhere and where world-class workers will do long queue just to get a free soda.

And the best advice about it is that you should probably prepare for that world.

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.

How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

2025-12-15T00:00:00Z

How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected.

A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post about Pixelfed hurting the Fediverse. I defended the theory that, in a communication network, you hurt the trust in the whole network if you create clients that arbitrarily drop messages, something that Pixelfed is doing deliberately. It gathered a lot of reactions.

Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on? (ploum.net)

When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago, I thought that either I was missing something or Dansup, Pixelfed’s creator, was missing it. We could not both be right. But as the reactions piled in on the Fediverse, I realised that such irreconcilable opinions do not arise only from ignorance or oversight. It usually means that both parties have vastly different assumptions about the world. They don’t live in the same world.

Two incompatible universes

I started to see a pattern in the two kinds of reactions to my blog post.

There were people like me, often above 40, who like sending emails and browsing old-fashioned websites. We think of ActivityPub as a "communication protocol" between humans. As such, anything that implies losing messages without feedback is the worst thing that could happen. Not losing messages is the top priority of a communication protocol.

And then there are people like Dansup, who believe that ActivityPub is a content consumption protocol. It’s there for entertainment. You create as many accounts as the kinds of media you want to consume. Dansup himself is communicating through a Mastodon account, not a Pixelfed one. Many Pixelfed users also have a Mastodon account, and they never questioned that. They actually want multiple accounts for different use cases.

On the Fediverse threads, nearly all the people defending the Pixelfed philosophy posted from Mastodon accounts. They usually boasted about having both a Mastodon and a Pixelfed account.

A multiplicity of accounts

To me, the very goal of interoperability is not to force you into creating multiple accounts. Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive.

That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform. That also explains why most politicians want to "regulate" Facebook or X. They think it is impossible not to be on those platforms. They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly."

People flock to the Fediverse with this philosophy of "one platform, one account", which makes no sense if you truly want to create a federated communication protocol like email or XMPP.

But Manuel Moreale cracked it for me: the Fediverse is not a communication network. ActivityPub is not a communication protocol. The spec says it: ActivityPub is a protocol to build a "social platform" whose goal is "to deliver content."

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralised social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content. (official W3C definition of ActivityPub)

On open protocols (manuelmoreale.com)

No more communication

But aren’t social networks also communication networks? That’s what I thought. That’s how they historically were marketed. That’s what we all believed during the "Arab Spring."

But that was a lie. Communication networks are not profitable. Social networks are entertainment platforms, media consumption protocols. Historically, they disguised themselves as communication platforms to attract users and keep them captive.

The point was never to avoid missing a message sent from a fellow human being. The point was always to fill your time with "content."

We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0."

They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.

But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social!

The lost messages

My own interpretation is that social media users don’t mind losing messages because they were raised on algorithmic platforms that did that all the time. They don’t see the point in trusting a platform because they never experienced a trusted means of communication.

Facebook m’a rendu injoignable (ploum.net)

Now that I write it, it may also explain why instant messaging became the dominant communication medium: because if you don’t receive an immediate answer, you don’t even trust the recipient to have received your messages. In fact, even if the message was received, you don’t even trust the recipient's attention span to remember the message.

Multiple studies have confirmed that we don’t remember the vast majority of what we see while doomscrolling. While the "view" was registered to increase statistics, we don’t have the slightest memory of most of that content, even after only a few seconds. It thus makes sense not to consider social media as a means of communication at all.

There’s no need for a reliable communication protocol if we assume that human brains are not reliable enough to handle asynchronous messages.

A Society That Lost Focus (ploum.net)

It’s not Dansup who is missing something. It is me who is unadapted to the current society. I understand now that Pixelfed was only following some design decisions and protocol abuses fathered by Mastodon. Pixelfed was my own "gotcha" moment because I never understood Instagram in the first place, and, in my eyes, Pixelfed was no better. But if you take that route, Mastodon is no better than Twitter.

Many reactions pointed, justly, that other Fediverse tools such as PeerTube, WriteFreely, or Mobilizon were just not displaying messages at all.

I didn’t consider it a big problem because they never pretended to do it in the first place. Nobody uses those tools to follow others. There’s no expectation. Those platforms are "publish only." But this is still a big flaw in the Fediverse! Someone could, using autocompletion, send a message pinging your PeerTube address and you will never see it. Try autocomplete "@ploum" from your Mastodon account and guess which suggestion is the only one that will send me a valid notification!

On a more positive note, I should give credit to Dansup for announcing that Pixelfed will soon allow people to optionally "not drop" text messages.

How we lost email

I cling to asynchronous reliable communications, but those are disappearing. I use email a lot because I see it as a true means of communication: reliable, asynchronous, decentralised, standardised, manageable offline with my own tools. But many people, even barely younger than me, tell me that email is "too formal" or "for old people" or "even worse than social network feeds."

And they are probably right. I like it because I’ve learned to use it. I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology. If I don’t reply or act on your email, it is because I decided not to. I’m actively keeping my inbox clean by sharing only disposable email addresses that I disable once they start to be spammed.

Why you are probably not at inbox 0 (but should be) (ploum.net)

But for most people, their email inbox is simply one more feed full of bad advertising. They have 4 or 5 digit unread count. They scroll through their inbox like they do through their social media feeds.

Boringness of communications

The main problem with reliable communication protocols? It is a mostly solved problem. Build simple websites, read RSS feeds, write emails. Use IRC and XMPP if you truly want real-time communication. Those are working and working great.

And because of that, they are boring.

Communications protocols are boring. They don’t give you that well-studied random hit of dopamine. They don’t make you addicted.

They don’t make you addicted which means they are not hugely profitable and thus are not advertised. They are not new. They are not as shiny as a new app or a new random chatbot.

The problem with communication protocols was never the protocol part. It’s the communication part. A few sad humans never wanted to communicate in the first place and managed to become billionaires by convincing the rest of mankind that being entertained is better than communicating with other humans.

As long as I’m not alone

We believe that a communication network must reach a critical mass to be really useful. People stay on Facebook to "stay in touch with the majority." I don’t believe that lie anymore. I’m falling back to good old mailing lists. I’m reading the Web and Gemini while offline through Offpunk. I also handle my emails asynchronously while offline.

I may be part of an endangered species.

It doesn’t matter. I made peace with the fact that I will never get in touch with everyone. As long as there are people posting on their gemlogs or blogs with RSS feeds, as long as there are people willing to read my emails without automatically summarising them, there will be a place for those who want to simply communicate. A protected reserve.

You are welcome to join!

About the author

I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress.