It’s time to replace Patreon, YouTube, Twitter/Facebook & all the other centralized platforms of the web. But can open source answer the call? This week we look at a few projects that could replace today’s information silos if Linux users just step up.

Plus community news, some big updates & a lot more!

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Show Notes:

Pre-Show

Follow Up / Catch Up

Does Systemd Makes Linux Complex, Error-Prone, and Unstable?

We are a small team at _ungleich_and we simply don’t have the time to fix problems caused by systemd on a daily basis. This is even without calculating the security risks that come with systemd. Our objective is to create a great, easy-to-use platform for VM hosting, not to walk a tightrope.

Context on Conservancy’s Filing for Summary Judgment with the TTAB

Therefore we’ve proceeded today with the most expedient defense available to us:
a summary judgment motion which can be read on the USPTO’s website. As a
non-lawyer, I explain in this blog post some details of that motion and its
supporting documents in more mundane, non-legal terms.

TING

Snaps & automatic updates prove popular with email client, Mailspring

In the latest interview with a snap developer, we spoke to Ben Gotow who is the lead maintainer of Mailspring, a free, modern email client for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Originally started and open-sourced by Nylas in California, Ben took on the project earlier this year after Nylas changed course and stopped development. Mailspring has more than 10k active users on Linux, and will offer the snap as the preferred install method beginning from this week.

“The vision for Canonical is to provide the platform that you see everywhere other than the personal domain. We won’t make a dent in phone or PCs. But pretty much your entire data center runs Linux and every other thing in the room is running Linux,” Shuttleworth said. “Can we help deliver that innovation and do it in a format that is secure, reliable and very, very cheap? That’s an interesting set of challenges.”

Spaceman Shuttleworth Finds Earthly Riches With Ubuntu Software

Steam now lets developers know how many users want their game on Mac and Linux

Valve has made a change to the developer side of Steam that gives developers a breakdown of the different platforms people choose when adding a game to their wishlist.

This is helpful because it also shows platforms that the game does not currently support, letting the developer know how much interest there is for ports on platforms other than Windows. This is obviously only limited to PC operating systems, so Mac, Linux, and SteamOS.

LinuxFest Northwest 2018

LinuxFest Northwest, an annual Open Source event in Bellingham, WA USA, features presentations and exhibits on free and open source topics, as well as Linux distributions & applications, InfoSec, and privacy; something for everyone from the novice to the professional!

DigitalOcean

Open Source Replacements for Centralized Services and Platforms

It’s all about the platform, building the biggest platform, with the most engaged users, with the most control.

YouTube is a platform, Patreon is also a platform. It feels like the walls are closing in tighter and tighter than ever. 

Early Linux users watched this as Microsoft used the position of their platform to keep Linux off the desktop. 

But now these platform wars happen at an exponential rate across every tech category. Recently Google started blocking YouTube on Echo Show's because Amazon doesn't sell Nest cams and Chromecasts (amongst others). 

It's always the users that lose these platform wars, and the large corporations don't care about the collateral damage.

But are we starting to see the cracks in these platform's grip?

Open Source YouTube Replacement

PeerTube

Federated (ActivityPub) video streaming platform using P2P (BitTorrent) directly in the web browser with WebTorrent and Angular.

We can’t build a FOSS video streaming alternatives to YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo… with a centralized software. One organization alone cannot have enough money to pay bandwidth and video storage of its server.

So we need to have a decentralized network (as Diaspora for example).

But it’s not enough because one video could become famous and overload the server.
It’s the reason why we need to use a P2P protocol to limit the server load.
Thanks to WebTorrent, we can make P2P (thus bittorrent) inside the web browser right now.

Open Source Patreon Replacement

Liberapay

Liberapay is a recurrent donations platform.

Dash Crypto Currency — Dash

At Dash’s core is a unique fully-incentivized peer-to-peer network. Miners are rewarded for securing the blockchain and masternodes are rewarded for validating, storing and serving the blockchain to users.

Masternodes represent a new layer of network servers that work in highly secure clusters called quorums to provide a variety of decentralized services, like instant transactions, privacy and governance, while eliminating the threat of low-cost network attacks.

Open Source Twitter Replacement

Mastodon

The world’s largest free, open-source, decentralized microblogging network

Matrix

An open network for secure, decentralized communication.

Linux Academy

Gentoo Challenge Check-In

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