Public Service Internet monthly newsletter (Nov 2025)

This is wearable maximalism but subtract two smartwatches and smart glasses, and this could be you in three years.
From the Verge

We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed seeing the deliberate thoughtfulness of Tilly NorwoodDeloitte’s AI report to the Australia government and Windows 10 end of life is a e-waste disaster?

To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

You are seeing aspects of this with Sir Tim’s thought on the future of AIrenewable overtaking coal as the worlds source of electric and digital sovereignty grows bigger in Europe.


The future of cities: Humans are the problem?

Ian thinks: Recently I attended the Society 5.0 conference and attended a workshop on how the internet is changing architecture and physical public spaces. At the same time by chance McNeil and Marx talk through the same tensions.

AI slop, rage bait, whats next?

Ian thinks: This discussion between Taylor and Drew is very revealing, how prolific Ai slop really is. Its a detailed discussion and with lots of in-depth commentary on the process of how its made and why.

Lets talk about the AI bubble

Ian thinks: Everyone is talking about the AI bubble but this video breaks down what a bubble looks like and with a critical eye how money is being passed around. How this works and are we really looking at the collapse of the last decades?

Deep insight into Europe’s digital mindset

Ian thinks: During the PublicSpaces conference earlier this year, there was a great keynote talk in Dutch but a big part of the talk was around European culture and Startup culture clash. The German Digital-Mittelstand is a strong example of the long-term view of the European landscape.

Bluesky federation isn’t ready?

Ian thinks: Bluesky has been talking about federation for a long while but its clear over this high profile this conflict with Blacksky.
Futher conflict is around the corner with the Trump administration’s arrival on Bluesky.

Smart glasses, or work for Ai?

Ian thinks: The emphasis on smart glasses recently has raised a ton of red flags. It feels like there is so little learned from the past including Google glass. Gilliard and Paris break down what I have been thinking how little has been learned. On a more casual note.

Enshittification and so much more from Cory

Ian thinks: Cory has been on the circuit talking about his new book Enshittification. I have heard a few interviews but one of the best is certainly the one with Rushkoff where they talk about so much more. Second best is this one on Vox’s grey area.

The Intentional Collapse

Ian thinks: Talking of Douglas Rushkoff, he’s monologue on a potential intentional international collapse due the Ai bubble, greed, quality and so much is a sobering reminder of what’s at stake. But also the small steps we can do to make a difference.

Straight out of America a man called Mark Bray

Ian thinks: You may have come across this story about Mark Bray and his radical works casing him and his family to be put on a watch list of radicals. It’s a story in a worrisome trend of researchers joining such lists along side journalists and activists.

Amazon’s outage says more than you can imagine

Amazon goes down and so many of the services we rely on daily and there are many thoughts about that? However there is so much more to this story than first imagined. This video explains how deep this all potentially runs.


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Replacing Mixcloud with Funkwhale

Funkwhale mixes

For a long while I have been threatening to leave Mixcloud in favour of hosting my own mixes. I looked around and thought funkwhale looks great as its a federated network for music. With some help from JonT, I started to scrape the metadata I stupidly forgot to keep for myself.

I installed Funkwhale on the Yunoserver but spent too much time trying to work out how to mount my NAS on the Yunoserver. I gave Navidrome but  decided it wasn’t right as there was no way to listen without logging in, so went back to Funkwhale and got things up and running.

Seems Funkwhale might not be the best solution for the mixes, plus the developer is looking for new maintainers recently. Its really setup for single tracks not mixes. I could upload mixes but my plan to use cue files, won’t work. The only place to put playlists is in the comments. I also need to do more digging as I can’t change the year of the mixes. More importantly, the public sharing is a bit broken for me. You should be able to listen to the radio but its not working for me

Funkwhale profile

As I get my head around it all but you can subscribe via RSS and if you’re using Mastodon or other fediverse applications, you can subscribe to this account: @digitalitalicmixes@mixes.cubicgarden.info.

Enjoy, I’m one step closer to self hosting my mixes.

Using Yuno hosting for all my fediverse needs?

My raspberrypi4 yunoserver

It was in a discussion with Derek Caelin who created the video Decentralised social networks vs the trolls. Who mentioned Yuno host while I mentioned how much trouble I was having getting Funkwhale working to replace mixcloud.

I had bought a raspberry pi 4 at the start of April to replace my raspberry pi 2 and maybe add something to the kitchen audio setup. But hadn’t really done much with it. So the other day while watching a film I built the case, downloaded the yunohost image on to a 128gig microSD card and got it all running.

Got to say Yuno host is pretty nice and easy to setup. The hardest part was getting the DNS all setup with one of my own domains. Now its kinda setup, I have been looking through the app catalogue and spotted many of the apps/services I wanted to run in docker such as Funkwhale, Calibre-web, Pixelfed, Zerotier, Wallabag, Mastodon, Matrix, etc, etc…

Currently having a bit of fiddle trying to setup the DNS records to allow multiple applications hosted on one system.

I’m impressed so far… Although I am thinking it could be so much better on a more powerful machine. I could use one of my older laptops instead, however I gather the performance will actually be better on the pi. To be fair with a gigabit ethernet network adaptive, I don’t need to worry about storage so much. Although I’m looking at maybe switching my Ubuntu server to Yuno if I can get everything I currently run working.

Expect to hear more as I start installing more services.

Is federated microblogging this easy?

everything you need for decentralised Twitter?

I’m wondering if I should bite the bullet and install these alpha and beta plugins under Cubicgarden.com? In my mind it seems what you need for a federated/distributed blogging system is just a few plugins away?

OStatus for WordPress turns your blog into a federated social network. This means you can share and talk to everyone using the OStatus protocol, including users of Status.net/Identi.ca and WordPress.com

WhisperFollow turns your wordpress blog into a federated social web client.
In it’s current form it aggregates RSS feeds in a page on your blog called “following” which it creates.
The links it aggregates are the ones from your blogroll with rss feed data.

And many more…

These would be a good time to have a duplicate setup of cubicgarden.com to test these and many more plug-ins out on..

The end of open twitter?

IMG_2935

Its been a good load of years since I visited a promising startup in South Park, San Francisco called Twitter. Oh have they changed…

There has been a whole number of stories and posts about how Twitter is locking down the API calls and access to data. Not only that they are being very shirty with some of the clients and services around it.

Its ironic we use to praise Twitter for there business model formed around creating a ecosystem around its self by leveraging APIs. It was one of the web 2.0 darlings but something happened…

Twitter right from the start had people asking how were they going to make money to keep going?

Well what ever direction they decided to go in, its meant breaking what made it hugely popular.

The question is what will people move on to? Since Twitter for the longest time have sucked the air out of the microblogging ecosystem and seen off most of the alternatives including Plurk, Pownce, etc…

Jaiku Engine is a opensource project after Google bought it and open sourced it. However it lacks something which status.net and identi.ca had built in from day one. Federation… Jaiku engine has also gone quiet since Google plus launched too. I wonder, what if distributed social networking also come to the rescue and provide a nice mix of social networking like facebook/google+ and federated microblogging?

Twitter has done some great things but frankly the business model they have chosen is rubbing up against too many of my and other peoples freedom. I now wonder if I will ever be able to get a dump of all my tweets, dm’s and mentions? (Dataportability!) Google and Facebook have actually been quite good about this, Twitter much less so.