Top all-time · #21658
Raphael Lullis
Personal blog · raphael.lullis.netwebculture
Raphael Lullis's personal blog at raphael.lullis.net covers web and culture. Since 2020, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Thinking heads are not in the clouds”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for posts on open source funding (e.g. "Can FOSS eat the world?") and on thinking. One commenter says they really liked the blog and that article, and noted overlap with their own work.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Redecentralizing the web, one server at a time.
Most-linked posts?
- Thinking heads are not in the clouds2 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-11-08
What Hacker News says?
How much would you be willing to pay for it? I provide Matrix hosting (as well as XMPP and ActivityPub Mastodon) on Communick [0]. At the moment I'm more focused on taking these services to offer custom domain hosting, and personally I've been staying away from servers and using DecSync [1] + syncthing to get my calendars and contacts on my devices [2], so I haven't thought about adding a DAV server to the mix on Co…
Comment linking /thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds/
on “Mozilla Thunderbird Beta now supports Matrix chat”Submitted Funkwhale might be the most overlooked Fediverse project as a story · 29 points
HN discussion1) I know that HackerNews has a strong anti-crypto bias, but let me pitch Hub20 ( https://hub20.io ), the self-hosted payment gateway for ethereum (and EVM-compatible) blockchains I'm working on is usable - if you are willing to invest some time/energy to overcome the rough edges - but I am having more ideas than capacity to build all I have in mind. Integration with more layer-2 projects (it started with a focus on…
Comment linking /thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds/
on “Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?”Submitted Social Media is in decline. I'm still betting on ActivityPub as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNo idea, because honestly part of the reason our project failed was that we he had zero in-house knowledge of browser internals. Mind you, our idea was to build a "browser-based OS", which meant at the time that our initial design was customize Ubuntu to the point that it could boot straight into a single-user windowless Firefox and to build all the "shell" as extensions. (I wrote a bit about on https://raphael.lull…
Comment linking /thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds/
on “Mozilla 2023 annual report: CEO pay skyrockets, Firefox market share nosedives”Submitted Mozilla.social failure explains the issues of a server-centered social web as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI wrote a bit about it at a blog post [0]. My idea is to substitute the "cloud" (i.e, your data and applications running on someone else's computers) for a "lake" of your own devices where you can replicate and synchronize the data , and use native free applications for each of the devices that you have. So, for hardware - Workstations: Linux - Mobile: /e/OS [1] For software: - GDrive -> Syncthing for the documents,…
Comment linking /thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds/
on “Ask HN: How to move away from Google”Submitted Can we fix job sites? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFrom something I wrote in 2021 [0] and based on my experience working on a "browser-based OS" in 2013: What we need is to have a device-transparent way to see our *data*. We got so used to the idea that web applications let us work from "dumb terminals" that we failed to realize that *there is no such thing as a dumb terminal anymore*. With multi-core smartphones, many of them with 4, 8, 12, 16GB of RAM; it's not to…
Comment linking /thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds/
on “I wrote a static web page and accidentally started a community (2023)”Submitted Thinking heads are not in the clouds as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSeems relevant to the blog post I just read yesterday! https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...
Comment linking /thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds/
on “Self hosted FLOSS fitness/workout tracker”Submitted Community is not enough. The Fediverse will need commercial service providers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWe vastly underestimate what could be done with a powerful browser. Ad blockers are just the tip of the iceberg. A powerful browser could work, e.g, as the basis for any type of local-first application and we would solve 98% of the issues of social media networks by letting the browser in control of the functionality. [0] We have web browsers that can let you browse through Tor and we would get rid of data tracking.…
Comment linking /a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi-more-webby/
on “Six Years of Gemini”Submitted Please help me validate an idea to fund FOSS development as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNo, this is how a subset of its users treat it, and there is a significant amount of people (myself included) who think topic-based instances are a poorly conceived idea for federated systems [0]. [0] https://raphael.lullis.net/federations-and-identity/
Comment linking /federations-and-identity/
on “Fediverse”Submitted Federations and Identity as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThreads is not fully open. If they looked at Threads and thought "that's a lot of people", then it would be *one more* reason to have their own instance. But anyway, I do agree that having their own instance is kind of pointless. We need to get rid of "servers" and get back to an Open Social Web . I wrote in May what I thought would be a smarter approach for them ( https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-…
Comment linking /a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi-more-webby/
on “Mozilla exits the Fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December”hum, allow me to toot my own horn here. I've written something to that effect in 2021. https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...
Comment linking /thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds/
on “CouchDB 3.4.1 Released”> Or better yet not tightly binding it in the first place Yeah, I agree. As I repeated elsewhere on this thread: having your own domain is the most straightforward way to guarantee that you can port your identity . But this is a separate problem from this idea of multiple "accounts". This is mostly from Mastodon's weird culture where people make this association between themselves and the in-groups from the instance…
Comment linking /federations-and-identity/
on “A self-authenticating social protocol”If you really, absolutely want to continue using Mastodon, support this: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/28554 . If you just want to run a single-user instance on the cheap: forget Mastodon! Takahe [0] does not require one whole server for each user and it has substantial lower TCO. A "small instance" for Mastodon can not be realistically be found for less than $10/month today , while I can offer Takahe…
Comment linking /a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi-more-webby/
on “Call to Action: Fediverse Media Server”I do believe that anything that helps people get away from Discord/Slack/Zoom/$CLOSED_PLATFORM_DU_JOUR is a good thing. With that said, I wonder if you realize that what you are doing here is not creating a new community but a new community center . These are very distinct things. Due to the nature of federated systems, a lot of people confuse one with the other [0]. The people who are aware of matrix and interested…
Comment linking /federations-and-identity/
on “Show HN: Fossnode – Free Matrix server for free and open source projects”My main goal with my digital hygiene is less about privacy and more about trying to avoid surveillance capitalism. I try to avoid using any systems where someone will try to collect data as a way to get some economic advantage. With that said: OS/Applications: - Linux on the desktop since 2007. - I was using Firefox with uBlock, switched to Brave because I like the model: it lets users "vote with their wallets" (by…
Comment linking /thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds/
on “Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?”Really liked the blog and this article too https://raphael.lullis.net/can-foss-eat-the-world/ Lot of overlap :-) Would be great to connect. Just hired for the open role we had, but we’ll grow more. You can reach me at birk[at]polar.sh
Comment linking /can-foss-eat-the-world/
on “Polar v1.0: Let’s Fix Open Source Funding”Now that the company is funded, are you hiring? I'd love to work for a company that has the sole goal of making FOSS sustainable, I even wrote a bit about it here: https://raphael.lullis.net/open-source-funding/
Comment linking /open-source-funding/
on “Polar v1.0: Let’s Fix Open Source Funding”I am trying, really! [0] [0]: https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/
Comment linking /community-is-not-enough/
on “Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?”> Regarding the commercial instance option. I don't really see the point? Because of "I have been wondering if that is too much but I can afford it and I know this can be expensive to run." Yes, $8/month is not a lot in the grand scheme of things. But I'm yet to see any more efficient and fair method for price discovery than having different commercial instances trying to acquire users through a straightforward busi…
Comment linking /community-is-not-enough/
on “Now Available: Ivory for Mastodon by Tapbots”Yeap, pretty much. I wrote about it how unsustainable this is on https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/ Another data point, newsie.social, an instance with 20k active users and at risk of closing: https://honeytree.social/@jeff/110821899439006428 .
Comment linking /community-is-not-enough/
on “Stepping Back from the Tusky Project”