There are forks of the #GameOfTrees version control system popping up merely because of worries that the project might eventually succumb to accepting LLM-generated contributions, then ending up on other people's lists of #noAI LLM-free alternatives.

Fork the code as much as you want, but please don't let your potential users hanging when important issues get fixed upstream, and keep in mind that I don't work with LLMs, have never even once asked an LLM for anything, and I don't intend to start. I don't believe the other developers involved are all as pristine as myself, but I've met most of them in person, do trust them, and have never seen anyone commit code which looked like they didn't write it.

As a community we are losing trust in established projects within the FOSS ecosystem very fast right now. I understand and share many of the concerns about LLMs, but the trend to quickly fork projects out of spite and fear without communication is also worrying. If you maintain a list of recommendations, please ask upstream projects which do not already have an obvious pro-LLM stance before recommending forks with little to no track record, especially when the software in question might handle sensitive data.

I have added the following to the project's README file. Not sure if this counts as a policy. To me it feels more like I'm writing down what should be common sense.

"""
Game of Trees is entirely handwritten and contributions generated by LLMs
will not be accepted. The main author (Stefan Sperling) has successfully
been avoiding LLMs and would prefer to keep it that way, even if/when legal
uncertainties around the copyright status of LLM-generated output settle.

Should you feel a need to ask an LLM questions in order to help you understand
something, try asking us first. If you are truly trying to wrap your head
around something then you will learn from us, and we will learn from you.
We may have some expertise you are lacking, but because we cannot ignore what
we already know, we can be blind to problems you are seeing. Our code and
documentation can likely be improved as a result of communication, even before
you send a first patch.
"""

EDIT: I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am a committed antifascist, because of my personal history, my family history, and my country's history. Nazis and fascists are not welcome here, and they never have been.

Being accused of fascism or Nazism, or of defending either of them, hurts me personally. Part of the point of this post was precisely this: if we disagree, let's not immediately start shouting "fascism". Let's talk, look at what was actually said and done, and try to understand the situation. Sometimes there is more to it than it first appears.

After 30 years of commitment to open source, openness and collaboration, I honestly don't know how else to make my position clearer. I am deeply saddened by how this whole situation has unfolded.

Periodic official communication, just to clarify a few things.

The BSD Cafe is an open, inclusive and friendly community. A community of people who try to be *“pro, not against”* and *“supporters, not haters”*: enthusiasts, friends, people who come here to share, to learn, to discuss. Not to hate each other.

This does not mean that we all have to think in the same way. Quite the opposite: it means that we can have different opinions, discuss them, defend them strongly, and question each other’s ideas.

What it does not mean is that it is acceptable to insult, threaten, attack people, or pretend that there can only be one morally acceptable position on every possible subject.

Calling the BSD Cafe a "Nazi Bar" from the outside simply because we do not automatically censor people who have an opinion different from yours is offensive towards the hundreds of people who are part of this community. Unless you're a Nazi or a fascist. In that case, you're not welcome here.

People are, of course, free to criticise what happens here. But expecting us to attack, ban or silence someone because you believe they deserve it, and then accusing the whole Cafe because we do not, is something different.

And I have seen something even worse lately: actual calls for hate. The equivalent of *“hey, everyone, go and attack this person”*, simply because that person does not share your position.

No. This is not acceptable.

And, dear friends, declaring yourself anti-Nazi while organising a crowd against somebody, intimidating them and treating them as an enemy who deserves to be attacked means using exactly the kind of methods you claim to oppose.

I do not say this lightly. I come from a family, and from a country, with a very real history of fascism and of the antifascism that immediately followed it. These are not just abstract words to me.

Hate is not tolerated, at any level, inside or outside the Cafe. The same is true for threats, intimidation and aggression. Believing that our cause is right does not make those behaviours more acceptable.

You disagree with someone? Say it. Explain why. Argue against their ideas. Support yours with all the conviction you want. But do not aggressively attack. This is not tolerated.

And expecting everyone else to attack that person too, or considering them somehow complicit because they do not, is something different. And it is not what I want for this community.

On any subject.

Even pineapple on pizza (!!!).

The Fediverse is a non-place, but it is made of real people. Wonderful people, very often. Let’s not turn it into version 2.0 of traditional social media, where every discussion becomes a war and anyone who does not think exactly like us automatically becomes the enemy.

In the last few weeks I have seen people stepping away exactly because of this. On different subjects, people accused of the worst things not because of something they had done, but because they had not said what someone expected them to say. Some of them, for their own wellbeing, simply decided to take a step back.

We all lost something because of that. Nobody gained anything.

So let’s keep supporting what we believe in. Let’s do it with conviction, and with firmness when needed. But let’s discuss ideas without turning people into targets.

From experience, I have learnt that real change also requires discussion, organisation, patience and concrete actions. We can disagree deeply without stopping considering each other as people.

This is the kind of place I want the BSD Cafe to continue to be.

https://journal.bsd.cafe/2026/03/31/im-just-the-barista/

#BSDCafe #Fediverse #SupportersNotHaters

Funnily enough, I was never really into #Debian ... I appreciate the quality of the distro, but... I don't know, too many moving parts, I guess.

I will continue supporting #Slackware I'll look into #Guix and, of course, #OpenBSD and #NetBSD as well as #HardenedBSD .

The line is drawn. It is time to choose your side.

#Ækeynox now supports most keyboard layouts used in Europe and Latin America, making it straight-forward to use any 3×6 or 3×5 keyboard with these layouts. Feedback would be welcome!
https://github.com/OneDeadKey/zmk-config-aekeynox

#ZMK #Ferris #Corne #Totem #Quacken

This is the first genuinely operational littleFedi instance.

It has been online since 1st July, is single-user (just me), and runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W powered by NetBSD, directly on its SD card.

It consumes just under 1W.

Its database is this size:

-rw------- 1 little wheel 109289472 Aug 26 15:14 littlefedi.db

That is, just a little over 100 MB. Yes, MB.

Its average CPU load is extremely low.

It is perfectly usable both from the web interface and from Mastodon API apps.

I have 401 followers and 169 followings, and it doesn't bat an eye.

I promise myself to use it more, and I will.

You don't need Big Tech to communicate with others.

You don't need an expensive data center to exist online.

Because we are people, and the bits are just extensions of our voice.

EDIT: littleFedi allows to transform posts into blog posts, having its own SSG (Static Site Generator). The one generated by this post is reachable by clicking here.

#littleFedi #Fediverse #OwnYourData

Strangers

I keep a terminal window open most evenings, more out of habit than need, tailing the access log of one of the littleFedi test instances while I think about something else entirely. That's how I noticed it the first time: a fetch from a Threads host, correct in every way ActivityPub asks it to be, asking for someone's outbox.

Nothing wrong with it, technically. And yet I sat there for a while, thinking about the person behind that account, and whether they'd have wanted a company that size reading what they wrote, simply because the protocol says anyone can ask.

So we built a way to say no, but only to strangers, not to friends.

An instance still federates in the open by default, the way ActivityPub expects, because that's what almost everyone wants and I wasn't going to take it away from them. What changed is that an admin can now flip to an exact-host allowlist, from the console or from the command line, and it happens immediately, the switch is simply true the moment you set it. Once it's true, reads on posts, on the followers list, on the outbox, all start asking for a signature, and only the hosts you've named get an answer back. Discovery stays open regardless, because a peer that doesn't know you exist yet still needs a way to find out, before it can even be told no.

I went back and forth for a long time on what should happen to a peer once you remove them, or once you switch the whole instance back to open. In the end nothing gets deleted, not the account, not the relationship, not a single post or piece of media or anything cached from them. Traffic stops, that's all. I've never liked the idea that moderation means destroying what someone wrote, as if the words themselves were the problem and not who gets to see them.

There's a list, if you want it, of the big commercial names, the ones like Threads that started this whole conversation. It updates once a day over HTTPS, quietly, and if the update fails it just keeps yesterday's copy instead of leaving your instance with nothing. But whatever an admin decided on purpose always wins. Allow someone by hand and the list can't undo it. Suspend someone by hand and even an allow can't undo that either.

If you're bringing a block list with you from somewhere else, plain text works, CSV works, and so does the Mastodon export with all its fields, severity and everything. Ten thousand rows at most, checked before a single one is written, and you get to look at what's about to happen before it happens.

One thing I'll admit, since it will trip someone up eventually: matching is on the exact host. A peer that splits its actors and its inboxes across different addresses needs every one of them on the list, not just the one that looks like the main domain. It's the kind of mistake that fails closed instead of open, which is the direction I'd rather be wrong in, but it's still a mistake waiting to happen, so it's the first thing in the documentation.

I still think about that line in the log sometimes. A small server should get to say no to a stranger.

Now it can.

#littleFedi #littleOne #Fediverse