After Google Reader went down, I migrated to Feedly and had been using it for several years. I didn’t love it, not even used their mobile app, but it worked good enough. However, it’s clear that RSS reading was becoming less and less of a priority for them, and they’re also doing an AI pivot like a lot of other services.

Then I found a nice open-source RSS reader for Android called Capy Reader, and I wanted to start using it. So I decided it was time for a new setup.

I wanted to keep using a web app as well. Capy Reader supports Feedbin, FreshRSS and Miniflux as servers. I went with the minimalist and also open-source Miniflux with paid hosting for just $15/year. And it’s working great for me so far.

In the interest of the Small Web, here’s a list of links from friends that you should check out. There is also a fixed link to this page at the bottom of the site, and I’ll try and keep it up-to-date.

Blogs

• Alcides Fonseca
• António Lima
• Bruno Baptista
• Fred Oliveira
• Fred Rocha
• Gonçalo Silva
• Gonçalo Valério
• Henrique Macedo
• Luís Oliveira
• meiadeleite
• Rafaela Ferro
• Ricardo Lafuente
• Ricardo Pereira
• Tiago Noronha

Projects

• Abril, Cartazes Mil!
• Fumaça
• Garfada
• Oficina do Património
• Postcrossing

The Tor network is an invaluable tool for circumventing censorship and staying anonymous online. And that’s why it’s blocked in several countries and regions around world. The community has come up with different ways of overcoming that through bridges to access the Tor network. Snowflake is one of those technologies, disguising traffic as an audio or video call. But to work, Snowflake needs volunteers to run proxies on their own unblocked network.

There are already browser extensions, a CLI, a website embed script. And the Orbot, a Tor VPN Android app, has kindness mode that you can enable. But we decided to build a standalone Android app for running a Snowflake proxy, and called it Snowflake Volunteer. Install it on an Android device, configure it to run as you would like (only on Wifi or charging), and leave it to do its thing. Source code is available too.

I discovered that my 22 years old Ticalc.org account is still available online. And that my files are still being downloaded to this day! They had 143 downloads in the last 7 days. 🤯

This was back when I was in high school, learning how to program with my TI-83+ graphical calculator, instead of paying attention in classes. I wrote some simple games and tools to share my friends, plus a programming tutorial in Portuguese.

When the server goes dark, we go dark, too. We’ve built an entire civilisation on an unthinkably brutal and comically unreliable stack while hallucinating it as literally anything else. We condemn AI today for making shit up, but what about us? We’re building on a fantasy just as brittle, we are just as demonstrably wrong. Yet we pretend a file isn’t just a gesture that can disappear in an instant. We hallucinate that the server is somehow both fleeting and forever.

— Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark? by Cade Diehm