One of the things I've been advocating for years - and where I want to raise my voice even louder - is the importance of owning your data. #OwnYourData

Over the past few days, I’ve come across two examples of how misinformation is causing immense damage, leading people to believe that there's no alternative but to hand over their data to big corporations, putting themselves entirely in their hands.

- A well-known lawyer, just before a meeting, warned about using Teams and its new "virtual assistant," which joins conferences before anyone else and transcribes everything. When I pointed out that it would be wise to use alternative tools (like Jitsi, for example, but there are others), he abruptly ended the conversation, saying, "We've lost this war. There's no alternative anymore."
That wasn’t the right moment for a detailed discussion, so I just noted that alternatives do exist - but if no one starts using them, and if we passively accept certain behaviors from certain companies, things will never improve for us.

- Just now, I received another one of those emails that hurt more in the heart than in the wallet: "Our e-commerce is taking off, so we’re moving it to Shopify to better manage our growth."
I replied, trying to explain that handing over a growing e-commerce business to a third-party company (right now, they have full access to their own server - meaning all their databases, data, etc., are under their control) means losing ownership of it. Prices could change at any moment, contract terms could shift negatively, and, worst case scenario, if Shopify itself faced issues (which seems impossible today, but think of giants like Kodak), they could lose everything. Of course, they’ll do what they think is best, but I feel obligated to warn them.

Luckily, others are making the opposite choice. But I keep wondering: since these big platforms aren’t exactly cheap, rather than "selling themselves" to them just for (potentially) fewer headaches, wouldn’t it be worth paying someone (not me, of course, but someone working exclusively for them) to handle these things - ensuring they retain full ownership of their business and their data?

Importando 129527 mensajes de #gmail a @Tutanota son muuuuchos años de mi vida y la mayoria no servirá pra nada, pero por que perderlo.

Should be a law: if you run a web app that stores user data behind a login, you are required either to allow users to scrape their data (no anti-scraping tech blocking authenticated users) or to provide an API they can use to access it at no additional charge.
It should literally be illegal to lock users data into your site and prevent them from implementing their own automation to access it.
#tech #web #dataOwnership #dataRights

Friends of the #BSDCafe and of the #Fediverse,
initially, for just over a year, BSD Cafe's media was stored in a FreeBSD physical server jail with an outgoing bandwidth of 250 Mbit/sec. To address bandwidth congestion, I had integrated Cloudflare with a tunnel, serving media (and only media) through Cloudflare.

In line with the principles of self-hosting and data ownership, I’ve decided to remove Cloudflare. This has led to some bandwidth congestion when media was posted and slower download speeds for users, particularly during peak times. This is because as soon as content is published and federated servers are notified, they will rush (depending on how full their queues are) to download the newly published content - media included.

I’ve now revised the setup (currently in beta) by moving DNS management to two personal nameservers run with PowerDNS. The media server remains the same, but I’ve added two reverse proxies, one in the USA and one in Germany (the media server is in Poland). They're connected to the Media server via WireGuard.
I’ve installed the excellent Varnish and created a custom VCL. Media requests will be directed by the PowerDNS LUA scripts to the caller's closest reverse proxy. Nginx will pass requests to Varnish, which will serve data from the cache if available. If not, it will fetch from the original server, but request volume has decreased significantly.

I’m analyzing the results, and they look very promising. I may expand this home-made CDN by adding more VPSs, potentially closer to Asia and Oceania.

A detailed blog post will follow.

Stay tuned!

"In this unit, you will create a new project that is stored online in GitHub and connected to Netlify."

Why? You're a Static Site Generator - by the end of the tutorial, I know you'll give me a directory of files to put on my web server. Why do we always have to rely on external services? To be clear, in this context, I have nothing against GitHub or Netlify, but why do we always have to "promote" the idea of putting our data on other people's services?

As the years go by, I remain convinced that the world needs to refocus on the importance of keeping control of our own data.

And I am psychologically preparing for the call I will have in a few minutes, where interns will explain to me that the future is putting everything in the big tech cloud.

Even a static site generated by an SSG.

The #Fediverse brings me so much joy! I'm grateful this network exists, otherwise I'd be stuck battling with #Twitter, #Facebook, etc. No more algorithm drama, just genuine connections.

For this #ThankYouTuesday, I want to thank everyone who still wants to own their data. Those who aren't swayed by seemingly valid and effective technical solutions designed solely to entrap. To those who don't believe in the flashy pages created by web giants that promise better results than others and sometimes sabotage competitors to create this illusion. Or embrace and extinguish the competition.

When all our data and activities are chained to the servers and infrastructures of a few entities, what will we truly own?