May 2020 – Julian Foad

By using a silo we exclude children 2021-07-16

Teckids e.V. held their annual summer camp for kids between 9 and 15 years. This year, after we started introducing Matrix and Element as a chat platform … Some got really excited that they could even change or add features to Element … Unfortunately, Element is developed on GitHub, so the potential young contributors are […]

Julian Foad

Matrix — Why? 2021-05-28

A collection of articles “Dear politicians of the EU, it’s time to decentralize the internet” with a fun video 600 TOMATOES explain how to fight BIG TECH introducing federated inter-operable messaging — NoordStar, 2021 WhatsApp and the domestication of users with case studies Mozilla, Signal; followed by Keeping platforms open with case studies XMPP, Matrix […]

Julian Foad

Introducing Trax Cam 2021-05-11

I made my first Android app. Well, I didn’t write it from scratch, I took an open source camera app and just renamed and modified it a bit, and rebuilt it. I called it Trax Cam. It is a fork of Open Camera. The initial, test version of Trax Cam makes just two small improvements […]

Julian Foad

Why Friends Ask Friends to Matrix Me 2021-05-11

Matrix is a messaging eco-system that’s Open, Libre, Free as in Freedom. We can use Matrix our way, while our friends on Matrix can choose to use a different app that suits their tastes, and a different service provider with different terms and conditions that better suit their needs. Like the personal messaging silo mega-corps […]

Julian Foad

Matrix needs: Bring Your Own Domain 2021-05-11

Owning Your Identity in matrix is currently not as cheap and easy as it should be. Hopefully this will be changing in the not too distant future. The current options for using your own identity in Matrix are, roughly speaking: rent a personal matrix homeserver as a managed service “in the cloud” around £1 a […]

Julian Foad

Month: May 2020

The Purism Librem Mini – I Want One