Daily Journal 📓 May 2024

⭐️ 0x2E/fusion A lightweight, self-hosted friendly RSS reader

We registered Z-Space as a BC society today:

Z-Space Arts and Technology Society provides affordable, sustainable, community oriented office and creative space dedicated to supporting creative technologists, startups and innovative small businesses. We host a series of events and meetups supporting the community. We connect with similar art, science, and technology spaces globally.

Just bought my DWeb Camp tickets. I’m excited, it’s my first time! It’s Aug 7th - 11th, and I’ll probably spend some of the next week in SF to catch up with some people, maybe do a meetup or two.

⭐️ rashadphz/farfalle 🔍 AI search engine - self-host with local or cloud LLMs

I’ve used Wave for payroll in Canada forever (both SMB and small startup teams). Giving it another look for SMB basic accounting. Anything else I should be looking at in Canada?

⭐️ christianalares/seventy-seven The open-source alternative to Zendesk

siftrss is a tool for filtering RSS feeds and outputting a new, filtered feed. I used it on my Github account feed to generate a feed of just starred items, which I’m now using EchoFeed to cross post.

@levelsio points out that many are missing Telegram as a giant platform:

Telegram has 1 billion users

It’s the #1 or #2 chat app in most countries around the world

Complete blindspot for most Americans

And NOBODY uses it for its encryption (or lack of it), we use it because it has the best UX of any chat app!

Also best API to develop bots with

I think I finally found a good label for what my approach is, by @hermittoday:

a deep generalist is someone who discovers new niches by following their curiosity with extreme faith, and once the newly found niche is understood and its complexity exhausted, in a meta-systematic fashion, it’s time for them to move on

Spending more time with Ownr. Seems like a good choice for sole proprietorship. Not sure if I can do a “test” startup setup.

Mattias Ljungman writes that seed stage investing is broken for investors and founders, and suggests a framework for redefining the pre-seed to A investment stages.

I had an amazing catch up with Ami last week. He’s the founder of Creative Pulse, a community running in Vancouver for 10 years.

The next event is about type designer Alanna Munro’s approach to Build in Public .

EchoFeed is a service to send RSS posts to Mastodon, MicroBlog, Bluesky, GitHub, Discord, or LinkAce, as well as Webmentions and Webhooks. Free to start or $25/year.

Jortage is a communal cloud whose first project uses Backblaze + Fastly to deduplicate media attachments, designed for fediverse instances.

Seen via @[email protected]

⭐️ dream-num/univer Univer is a full-stack framework for creating and editing spreadsheets / word processor / presentation on both web and server.

⭐️ ItzCrazyKns/Vane Vane is an AI-powered answering engine.

I put together a page gathering info on DAUs for the Open Social Protocols I’m interested in.

I love the Minimum Viable Demos website. If all you see is the boring vertical mobile version on your phone…turn it sideways! (and/or visit the glorious desktop version)

MLS aka Messaging Layer Security is all of: the right choice, early, and needed today.

Battle-tested common libraries that work across web, mobile, and desktop would be a great common good.

Kye Fox writes: “ActivityPub might be a transitional technology” - I mostly agree with his predictions.

But I think all the Open Social Protocols are toast unless we get multiple large orgs across multiple countries running instances.

And also move beyond micro-blogging by building Proto Apps.

I got an email from Daylight Computer today telling me I’m getting a partial refund now that they have retail pricing announced on their e-ink tablet.

Oh right! I bought into their founders round way back in 2022 and wrote a post about how they might run their developer ecosystem. Exciting!

My friends at 1RG in Toronto now have a public events calendar. Inspiring! I want to figure out what we can do at Z-Space.

I made a page here for my Budget Scenario Template — a Google Sheet for budget scenario planning and cashflow forecasting.

⭐️ siddrrsh/ambientGPT

I’ve been using (and enjoying) Missive as my main company & personal email client, but it’s overkill for one person.

Recommendations for an email client that you like on iOS? I’ll make some notes here: Email Clients

New Public are running a remote Neighborhood Steward Fellowship, must be US based, $1000 honorarium, apply by May 20th:

“An eight-week program bringing together leaders of local-oriented online spaces to experiment with fun new practices and ideas”

⭐️ philz1337x/clarity-upscaler Clarity AI | AI Image Upscaler & Enhancer - free and open-source Magnific Alternative

⭐️ darobin/lucid Lightweight Universal CIDs

Dan Romero on “partnering” with Farcaster:

How can I partner with “Farcaster”?

It’s a permissionless protocol. Build something people can use.

Feel free to send to me and if looks interesting, I’ll recast it.

That’s it.

Also: @adrienne’s talk on if Farcaster is a scenius

⭐️ nocobase/nocobase NocoBase is an open-source AI + no-code platform for building business systems fast. Instead of generating everything from scratch, AI works on top of production-proven infrastructure and a WYSIWYG no-code interface, so you get both speed and reliability.

From @vicvijayakumar on full stack:

”We’ve managed to convince new developers that JavaScript is the easiest language to build applications in, but also give them toolboxes that come almost empty.“

Hearing from multiple people that we have to teach new Canadian founders about reverse vesting again. But also “fix” startup company formation so that it’s cheaper / easier. Ownr is not the solution.

I had three inspiring Causal Islands calls today. Marking the date here that I’m very inspired and energized by the people who want to get involved with Causal Islands Berlin …and beyond.

Grist is an open source cloud spreadsheet. Not quite an Airtable clone, but similar capabilities. Some of the layout and linking makes it feel like Filemaker. The Grist Labs team behind it is also very inspiring.

The Subconscious team is announcing that they’re shutting down. The very short version from Gordon Brander “Today, if you want to amplify intelligence, you probably wouldn’t build a decentralized notes graph, you would go to work on personal AI.”

Having just gone through this with Fission, I feel for Gordon and cdata and the whole team. Thank you for striving, for your writings, and for the wonderful community you built in your Discord.

⭐️ alyssaxuu/screenity The free and privacy-friendly screen recorder with no limits 🎥

WebTransitions is a new non profit created by Dietrich Ayala:

“to enable experimentation and innovation on the web platform. It is a connector between those who want to see change on the web, and those who can help make it happen”

⭐️ BasedHardware/OpenGlass Turn any glasses into AI-powered smart glasses

OK, so I got AFFiNE running self hosted by pasting the compose file on Github into my test Portainer install. The team haven’t figured out yet what they’re going to charge or restrict for self hosting.

⭐️ nashsu/FreeAskInternet FreeAskInternet is a completely free, PRIVATE and LOCALLY running search aggregator & answer generate using MULTI LLMs, without GPU needed. The user can ask a question and the system will make a multi engine search and combine the search result to LLM and generate the answer based on search results. It’s all FREE to use.

Self-hosting Guide to Alternatives: Notion covers AFFiNE, Outline, SiYuan, and AnyType.

I don’t think any of those listed are credible Notion alternatives.

We Need A Policy Agenda for Rural AI by Jasmine McNealy, Mozilla Foundation. Feels US-centric to me, covers broadband access, agtech. Related to some of my thoughts on Local AI.

Just spent a little bit of time with AFFiNE, a local first, open source all-in-one workspace with docs, canvas, and database aka “Notion replacement”.

I’m looking for something like this to adopt and recommend.

⭐️ PeARSearch/PeARS-federated This is the version of PeARS for use in a federated context: admins create PeARS instances that users can join to contribute to the index. Federated can also be used as a private, single-user search engine when installed locally.

PeARS is “People’s Agent for Reciprocated Search”, an open source search system written in Python. Federated server plus local version to run from your desktop.

⭐️ open-webui/open-webui User-friendly AI Interface (Supports Ollama, OpenAI API, …)

Turns out Teenage Engineering makes a mini-ITX computer case called the computer-1.

Any other suggestions for cool or customizable mini cases?

Jason Cohen @asmartbear

Pick advice that matches your goals.

Lots of people recommend Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. That’s wonderful if you’re aiming to build the next Facebook.

But if your focus is on creating a self-funded company prioritizing happiness and profits, that advice is incorrect.

Plus co-ops, collectives, and other emergent forms. We can build and own together.

I just recommended someone check out TinySeed. It’s a startup accelerator for B2B SaaS companies that are bootstrapping.

Yes, this is me starting to rebuild Startup info here.

⭐️ Dokploy/dokploy Open Source Alternative to Vercel, Netlify and Heroku.

Dokploy is another Docker + Traefik PaaS, most similar to Coolify. Written in TypeScript, Apache OSS, supports Nixpacks, Buildpacks, or plain Dockerfiles.

I tinkered with a Portainer install yesterday. I’m working my way through various Bring Your Own Server stacks. This one’s a little to low level / enterprise for my single server management needs.

Cap.so is an open source alternative to Loom — desktop screen recording and sharing. It uses Tauri for a desktop client.

⭐️ CapSoftware/Cap Open source Loom alternative. Beautiful, shareable screen recordings.

@walkah tells me that deSEC is a very good no-charge DNS hosting service run out of Germany supported by NLnet. I still use Namecheap as my registrar, going to explore setting up a domain reseller somewhere.

Simon Wardley on why Wardley Maps use evolution rather than maturity in Map evolution not maturity: “(maturity is) almost always championed by salespeople who are trying to sell outdated technology that may not be in your best interest”

Hackathons are mostly bad. Hack days and gathering around demos are mostly good.

My Rabbit Tech R1 arrived today. Haven’t even turned it on yet. Love the neon orange.

@mathewchaim on how we get to keep building the Internet. This really resonated with me:

we’ve been given the opportunity to keep building the internet

it’s not so much about building a new internet

it’s more that we get to keep on building the internet

because the internet essentially stopped being built

we arrived at a specific junction, put down our tools, and turned ads on to monetize what had been built

here we find ourselves in green pastures

where we can pick the tools back up

and keep on building this thing out

I got an email from LinkedIn telling me my account is 21 years old. Regardless of what you think of the platform, an Internet service sticking around that long is amazing in our current era of software building. I was user #1746 and waves of “social networks” were being launched in 2003, and I tried them all.

Had an awesome call with Yuni from MIWA Events this morning. I worked with her on lots of IPFS events over the past several years, and MIWA is her new independent event production company.

Met @neilsonks dropping by Z-Space today (he’s an OG member here). He’s now part of Open Souls, which you can find out more about in founder Kevin Fischer’s video at Betaworks.