u/Digital_Nerve_8765

As it's mental health awareness month, I wanted to point out the stigma specifically regarding inclusive spaces, which imo hurts the most. I made a meme about that a few days ago.

In terms of online spaces, I especially find a lot of mastodon instances concerning. They advocate for inclusion, awareness and the protection of minorities / vulnerable groups. But still, I haven't found any more hostile and aggressive posts against pwNPD on any other likewise platform (e.g. twitter/x, threads or bluesky).

We are all well aware of the stigma, but it's infuriating when this happens in self-proclaimed inclusive safe spaces. Like, ableism is then suddenly okay? wtf!

I felt the duty to point that out, hence I even mentioned that in my blog post about a recent release of a new version of one of my software projects.

If it's okay, I share it here. You can find it under the section Mental health awareness and mastodon.

I don't want to hide behind the curtains anymore. We are valid. We deserve inclusion, too!

Keep your heads high, y'all. ❤️👑

HortusFox v5.8 released

I'm proud to announce the new version 5.8 of HortusFox. Along with this release, there have been some other changes made that I want to address here as well.

What is HortusFox?

HortusFox is a self-hosted collaborative management, tracking and journaling app for plant parents and gardening enthusiasts. It's FOSS under the MIT license. In addition to extensive plant management, it also offers inventory, tasks, search feature, calendar, collaborative chat, plant recognition, QR code printing, API, backups and many, many more features!

Code changes

In terms of code commits, I resolved 12 issues from the current milestone. These have mostly been improvements and fixes. I want to have a bit more time for the planned plugin feature, so I decided to implement it in a different version. As you know, I don't want to have too large milestones, hence I went with 12 issues in the current one.

Here is the changelog:

- Added tech stack section in README to give credits to used packages (#455)
- Added markdown for plant details notes (#497)
- Fixed that custom plant attributes weren't taken into account when cloning plants (#503)
- Fixed that an initially generated cronjob password contained invalid characters (#510)
- Fixed that exporting a backup failed in case any of the locations weren't assigned a preview image (#513)
- Added a list of console commands to project README (#517)
- Changed allowed request methods for cronjobs (#518)
- Removed associations with any big tech corporations (#519)
- Ecosia image search for returned plant names using the plant recognition feature (#520)
- Improve generating hyperlinks for Ecosia image search (#523)
- Prevent execution of arbitrary script files in the /public directory (#524)
- Increment version number across various files (#525)

Forum launched

HortusFox is a FOSS project that yearns for digital sovereignty. Hence I decided to deprecate the discord community server. Originally I got inspired by Dan Brown, the creator of BookStack, who actually did the same and I followed them along here, as I agree with his reasoning here. I personally decided to replace the discord server with a self-hosted forum. Remember how it used to be? A software project used to have - along with the code hosting - a website, documentation and a forum. This just worked. It gave people the opportunity to engage with each other. A forum is searchable, even from the outside, using a search engine. This just doesn't work with discord as it's closed by nature. Also, I don't want the community depend on big tech corporate decisions (and discord made some controverse ones recently), so switching to a forum gives the community more control and autonomy. The forum is now officially live, and links to discord have been removed from the project scope. Additionally, I removed any bluesky link, as I don't see a purpose in using such kind of platform anymore. If I want to post news, I can just do this on my blog and/or the forum. I also felt that I don't have a "real community" on bluesky, so naturally my posts are mostly liked/reposted by bots. Recent new followers were also bots. I feel like spending time there is kinda useless. This is not a fault of Bluesky, as it's way better than other services (twitter/x, threads, mastodon, etc). But still, I think these platforms have outlived themselves.

View release:

https://github.com/danielbrendel/hortusfox-web/releases/tag/v5.8

I have also a blog post published on the release and other things. Feel free if you want to additionally read about some funny/conerning trivia around the project regarding AI or "drive-by" feedback. Furthermore, as the month of may is Mental Health Awareness Month, I outlined my concerns on mastodon instances and their rules regarding ableism.

https://www.danielbrendel.com/blog/62-hortusfox-v58-published-digital-sovereignty-release

Hey, here's the HortusFox dev again.

I got inspired by Dan Brown's decision to abandon discord for a hosted zulip instance. And then it hit me...

Back in the day, software projects had a website, documentation and forum. Some had, in addition, an IRC channel somewhere. This just worked. It was an amazing way to foster community and keep control over your data.

So, today I was very unhappy regarding enshittification again. I mean, we used to have soooo many platforms and sites back in the day. Now everything takes place on a handful of platforms. Internet monopolization by corporations. I know, this is no recent news. We all know that.

I believe forums may be a key aspect to regain digital sovereignty again. That's why I've decided to setup a forum infrastructure for HortusFox. When tinkering around, I eventually decided to go with Flarum. Simply because it's easy to install, uses the well-established Laravel framework and I like it's style from the ground without any additional extensions installed.

The selfhosted community is one of the most aware communities when it comes to data protection and digital sovereignty. I love that! That's why I once again decided to post here. ❤️

As for me, I am now going into the process of migrating from discord to flarum. I mean, discord feels great, it offers many features, but it's eventually centralized, it only has closed communities in terms of SEO and recent decisions in terms of age verification are concerning. The latter one is also a reason why I finally abandoned publishing play store apps three years ago, and went fully PWA. Microsoft Store does the same now (removed sign-up fee in favor of ID verification).

Maybe I'm a bit carried away, but imagine, if even the reddit communities such as r/opensource or r/selfhosted would abandon reddit in favor of a forum-based communities run by volunteers? Reddit is not our friend. And various decisions to wipe out third-party apps and pushing echo chambers aren't really something I consider "the heart of the internet". By the way, did you notice Reddit now tests forcing people to use the mobile app when they browse reddit via a mobile browser? Pretty sure, they will eventually rollout this "feature".

What do you think? Both developers and selfhosters, would you like the idea that we turn back to forums again?

PS: HortusFox now also officially backs the open-source petition to have the german government acknowledge opensource work as volunteering by law. A big thanks to Boris Hinzer for launching the campaign.