Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.
new from me: FR#153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr153-what-does-a-discord-replacement-look-like/
TL;DR on the new EU regulation on railway telematics: all information on railway transport, including fares, ticketing rules, timetables, realtime positions, etc will have to be made available under EUPL or Creative Commons terms
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32026R0253
해피 발렌타인
싸구려 초콜릿 대신 27조짜리를 가져왔어요
(시가총액, 2026년 1월 기준)
3回言わないと聞かないアレクサ。悪いのは耳の悪いアレクサか、滑舌の悪い私か
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
As a free software maintainer, this is entirely unacceptable. Now I have to spend time figuring out how to tell AI agents to *fuck off* so I don't have to deal with this.
Je vais tenter de publier quelques photos plus ou moins régulièrement, à priori, surtout des photos d'archi/urbain/paysage et participer au #Catsofmastodon !
#photography
📣 Office Hours — Friday, Feb 13, 2026 · 2:30 PM CT
Want company while you work, get quick help, or just hang out? Join my weekly office hours. Video optional, friendly folks welcome. We'll follow meeting guidelines: 🔕 mute when others
speak, 🚫 no marketing, and 🚫 no meeting/recording bots.
Check your local start time: https://time.is/0230PM_13_February_2026_in_CT?Jeff%27s_Office_Hours ⏰
DM me or check the gist for the Zoom link and full details. See you there! 🙌
FR#153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?
Discord has announced plans to age-verify all users globally next month, as age verification laws around the globe are taking root. As many people understand the open social web in a form of contrast with Big Tech platforms, seeing it as a refuge from enshittification, this led to another round of conversations on what alternatives there actually are for Discord.
The closest option as a Discord alternative is Matrix, who posted a blog ‘Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification‘. In it, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson describes plainly how Matrix is beneficial as an open standard, but that this does not fully prevent people from avoiding age verification laws: “The biggest difference between Matrix and Discord is that Matrix is an open standard, like email or the Web. There’s a wide range of both clients and servers, and anyone can run their own server on their own terms while participating in the global Matrix network. However, it’s important to note that server admins are still subject to the law in the jurisdiction where they operate. Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it.”
Another part that stands out to me is how Hodgson is open about how the client ecosystem for Matrix is limited: “Meanwhile no other organisation stepped up to focus on the “communication tool for communities” use case and provide a production ready Discord alternative, but clients like Cinny or Commet may feel much closer to Discord.”
PieFed is also trying to get a piece of the Discord user base Pie, and also wrote a blog post explicitly positioning itself as a Discord alternative. At this point, people making posts on microblogging sites complaining that Discord should not be used for documentation is practically a meme, but does get at a real frustration that all sorts of features that should not be chat-based are being used by a chat platform. PieFed makes this case explicitly, describing itself as having ‘all the advantages that traditional forums have over Discord’, and additionally having “community building features”, such as wikis, events, private groups, and StackOverflow-like questions-and-answers.
This gets at a familiar problem across the open social web: people active in the ecosystem can clearly see how these open protocols can be used to replace Big Tech platforms, but the gap between that potential and a polished, complete alternative remains wide. Matrix can handle real-time chat, PieFed can handle forums, but neither on its own offers the full bundle of features that makes Discord sticky.
Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for. Several developments this week illustrate what this composable model looks like in practice.
Germ, an E2EE messaging app for iOS that uses atproto’s identity system, has been in beta with atproto integration since August. But this week, both Blacksky and Bluesky shipped native Germ buttons directly on user profiles, meaning users can now launch into encrypted conversations straight from the apps they already use. Germ uses MLS for its encryption and atproto handles as its account system, so users can message each other without needing a separate account or phone number. The significant part is less the feature and more the product decision behind it, as rather than building end-to-end encrypted messaging into their own apps, both Bluesky and Blacksky are now using a third-party service that shares the same identity layer. Germ has also published implementation guidelines for any atproto developer to integrate the same functionality.
Standard.site is a set of atproto lexicons for long-form writing, designed collaboratively by three independent blogging platforms to ensure their posts are interoperable with each other and with any future platform that adopts the same schema. This kind of cross-project coordination on shared data formats is exactly what the composable model requires to function: not just different apps built on the same protocol, but active collaboration to make sure the building blocks actually fit together. This is also directly relevant to one of the most persistent complaints about Discord: that communities use it for documentation and knowledge that should be persistent and searchable rather than buried in chat history. With a shared lexicon for long-form writing, that content can live across multiple platforms while remaining portable and discoverable through atproto’s identity infrastructure.
A New Social’s most recent Bridgy Fed update is about making the bridge between atproto and ActivityPub more functional at the interaction level. Previously, if someone on Mastodon replied to your bridged Bluesky post (or vice versa), you’d get a notification but couldn’t respond without logging into the other platform. Now you can like, repost, reply, or block directly through Bridgy Fed without needing an account on the other side. This kind of interoperability plumbing is easy to overlook, but it’s essential if the multi-protocol ecosystem is going to feel like a coherent experience rather than a collection of disconnected tools.
Taken together, pieces of a composable alternative are starting to appear. BlackSky provides feeds for their community on atproto, Germ adds encrypted messaging as a modular service any atproto app can plug into, Standard.site enables long-form publishing and documentation, PieFed offers forums, wikis, and Q&A through ActivityPub federation, and Matrix handles real-time group chat. None of these apps individually replaces Discord entirely, but collectively they can cover the entire feature set and even go beyond it.
There is an obvious counterargument here: Discord succeeded precisely because having everything in one place is convenient. Asking people to use four different apps instead of one is a real user experience cost, and for many communities the friction of that setup will outweigh the benefits. But the point is less that everyone should adopt this composable model today and more that the building blocks are now being laid. As interoperability between these services improves, the multi-app experience may become seamless enough that it stops feeling like a compromise.
The reason decentralisation matters for something like age verification isn’t just “run your own server,” as Hodgson acknowledges that server admins are still subject to local law. It’s that when your social life isn’t bundled into one platform, no single company’s policy change can disrupt all of your communication, community, and content at once.
What we’re finding is that for decentralisation to really make an impact, it needs to happen on multiple axes at the same time. There is the decentralisation in the way it is usually understood by communities on ActivityPub and Matrix: from a single centralised server to many decentralised servers run by independent groups. This gives communities autonomy over their own spaces, but each server still replicates the same software and feature set.
There is the decentralisation in the way it is done on atproto: from a single software stack to separating identity, data storage and apps. This means your identity and data aren’t locked to any one application, and different apps can offer different experiences on top of the same underlying infrastructure.
And there is a third axis that is now starting to become visible: the decentralisation of features. Rather than a single app that bundles everything together, like Discord, multiple different apps each specialise in a few things and are interoperable with each other. This is the axis that the developments this week are starting to illustrate, and it may be the one that ultimately matters most for resilience against the kind of platform-wide policy changes that sparked this conversation in the first place.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr153-what-does-a-discord-replacement-look-like/
サーバーメンテも終わったし寝るか
openai.com/index/harnes...
i have been mildly obsessed with the ideas in here for the past month or so.
incredibly validating, total victory: my suspicions are correct, actually. "This functions like garbage collection" is a sentence I have said out loud. craziness
Harness engineering: leveragin...
대전 가시면 팡파레 가십셔 여태 먹은 얼그레이 케이크 중에 1등 눈물을 흘릴 깊은 맛이다 (초코색)
An amusing #BumperSticker I encountered in the wild today. Cheers besties.
疲れた
Do people actually appreciate URL shorteners?
I know mental health care talks a lot about self care but I think community care is just as important.
The Fedi is one of those space for me. Just talking to folks and meeting new people with similar interests and experiences without having to physically go to an event somewhere is so helpful for me.
And with that - thanks for being here. 💜🫶🏻💜
Saturday! February 14th @ noon eastern—i'll be streaming INVINCIBLE SWORDSWOMAN (1977) for #KungFuSat 🥷
⏰ pre-stream countdown starts at ~11:45am eastern
🎥 Invincible Swordswoman (1977) starts at 12pm eastern (Mandarin audio, hardcoded English & Mandarin subtitles)
Our team works really hard on Wagtail. I've been involved in the community for over a decade now, trying to provide an accessible CMS that's just... better.
There are no CMS Olympics. But we do have the CMS Critic Awards! And you can help Wagtail win gold. 🏆️
Please take a minute to vote for us in the Best Free CMS and Best Open Source CMS categories. It's super quick, and you don't even have to fill out the whole ballot.
Vote here: https://cmscritic.com/vote
The 12-Factor App - 15 Years later. Does it Still Hold Up in 2026? https://lobste.rs/s/t7jbfe #devops
https://lukasniessen.medium.com/the-12-factor-app-15-years-later-does-it-still-hold-up-in-2026-c8af494e8465
Over the next week: what’s next for Tailscale as we expand from secure user connectivity into a platform for modern infrastructure access (AI workloads, services, cloud, Kubernetes, privileged access).
Intro from VP Product Ross Kukulinski ▶️https://tailscale.com/blog/winter-update-week-26/?utm_source=Mastodon&utm_medium=owned-social&utm_campaign=tailscale-winter-update-2026
Can I play with her ?
#cats #猫 #chats #caturday #FediCats #MastoCats #CatsOfMastodon
아무말
A Moist Owlette is freshly showered at Owl Park San Vigilio, a zoological park in northern Italy 🇮🇹 via https://fb.com/816647270688824 #owlsintowels 💛🦉
됐당
Mark Zuckerberg and his minions at Meta see our slide into fascism -- which Zuckerberg actively funds, and Facebook actively profits from -- as a good product launch opportunity for facial recognition stalkerware goggles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-recognition-smart-glasses.html
I keep thinking about how you can't really claim refugee status as a disabled person in other countries due to fatally inadequate disability supports (i.e. eugenics) in your home country.
Failing to support disabled people is still violence and oppression but, evidently, most liberals hate disabled people and, therefore, letting disabled people die of starvation, exposure, and/or lack of care is acceptable to them.
With me, staying at home for Saturday and Sunday, there has to be some alternative plan created so that I will use the time as useful as possible.
I think we'll make some progress in the italian textbook, I will most likely end my Gentoo adventure and reinstall the laptop for something else and setup it for 24/7 access over ssh.
I was also checking if and how I could setup some virtual hosted server and learn new things on the real machine with some nice domain 🙂 Ideas?
해피 발렌타인
"For me, speculative fiction possesses a delicious and breathtaking capacity for making political theory come to life. When I started my undergraduate degree as a political science major, I'd been an avoid science fiction and fantasy reader for years. The intellectual challenges these genres thrust me into made political theory electrifying and liberatory. I never had to struggle to imagine the new worlds that theorists like Karl Marx, Edward Said, and Franz Fanon implored readers to envision; I'd already been doing that."
— Mimi Mondal, Bama, Kumar, Sumit (Artist), Gogu Shyamala, Gautamiputra Kamble, P. A. Uthaman, Neerav Patel, Tamilmagan, Archita Mittra, Goutam Mandal, V. Chandrashekar Rao, Sahej Rahal, Rahee Punyashloka, Kunal Lokhande, Subash Thebe Limbu, Nabi Haider Ali, Esther Larisa David, Snehashish Das, Hameedha Khan, Aswathy K. Raj, Gouri, Gitanjali Joshua, Prachi Singh, Shivani Kshirsagar, Yukti Narang, Sudarshan Devadoss, M.K. Abhilash, Yeswanth Mocharla: The Blalf Book of Anti-Caste SF, p. xv
My issue with LLM PRs is that I don't know who I'm talking to. How can I tell how much the author understands the code, if the code looks always superficially perfect? What I'd like to see is people introducing themselves. A second year EE student and a fifteen year professional systems engineer could be submitting code that looks the same.
It used to be "talk is cheap, show me the code". But code is cheap now. Let's talk
MyMiniFactory has Acquired Thingiverse Bringing Anti-AI Focus
https://hackaday.com/2026/02/13/myminifactory-has-acquired-thingiverse-bringing-anti-ai-focus/
Look it can we all just decide if software is supposed to work? Feel like a lot of heartache and hand wringing can be saved with a simple yes or no.
TL;DR on the new EU regulation on railway telematics: all information on railway transport, including fares, ticketing rules, timetables, realtime positions, etc will have to be made available under EUPL or Creative Commons terms
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32026R0253
근데 저도 평소에 많이 봐서 이 분 블친인줄 알았네 해야 찾아가드림 성인만 찾아가요
Add `ContentPoliciesHelper#policy_list` to wrap string building in views (#37856) by mjankowski has been merged! https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/commit/56ecdde1523cec87c55d3d0e7e9b6757dcfe2491
And the first "stable" release of #neocaml mode is officially out https://github.com/bbatsov/neocaml/releases/tag/v0.1.0
Friday 13th is a great date to go live, right? :D
I really have to wonder what blocklist I somehow ended up on in BlueSky. I've been blocked by a surprising number of people despite not having posted a grand total of 22 times, nothing particularly controversial, and not since 6/2024.
근데... 참 이제 ai 거품도 슬슬 꺼져가고, 이 ai 업계도 너무 ... 발전이라곤 찾아볼 수 없게 되어버려서...... 이걸 진짜 왜 신청해두었지 하는 회의감부터 들긴 하지만요..ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
nicole mikołajczyk
🕊️ 
Sven Peter
Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) 
DIGIWB/화이트베어 
tooearly
jnkrtech
The Rt. Rev. Fumire, Ph.D. 
✧✦Catherine✦✧
