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Epiktistes is my home in the Fediverse. It is an instance of Ktistec, a single-user ActivityPub server like Mastodon, but with fewer users and fewer commits. Here's my introduction (last updated early-2025).
I wrote a series of posts about optimizing the performance of the Ktistec server, its build time, and its executable size: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.
Some things I regularly write about, organized by hashtag:
I also wrote some #pointfreeverse.
@admin fwiw, i followed a few cities a few days ago and now my server is being bombarded by weather reports for dozens/hundreds(?) of cities i didn't follow.
sometimes i wish #activitypub and servers/clients supported both Like and Love activities, for when liking something isn't strong enough...!
I took a detour and worked on alt text editing in release v3.2.6 rather than continuing with the polls backend. I also continued to fix bugs and to add polish. Here's the full set of changes:
Added
Fixed
figcaption elements.Changed
(I'm editing this post in Markdown—the new feature in the last release!)
Would it be useful to customize the rendering and presentation of posts by actor?
I follow a lot of actors and I get a lot of posts, and I'd like the posts from some actors to stand out, and I'd like the posts from others to be more inconspicuous. Or maybe I want to use color to help visually categorize posts from actors I follow, based on subject matter.
Does this sound like a useful feature?
I've been using Firefox for two decades. Some of Mozilla's recent choices gave me a reason to look at alternative browsers. There's no way I'm using Chrome, but it turns out that there are more than a few capable Firefox forks. With no real requirements in mind, I started researching. Here are the forks I found in no particular order:
I started with LibreWolf since it kept coming up in recommendations. It strips out all the telemetry, bundles uBlock Origin, and apparently tracks Firefox stable releases within 24-72 hours. The catches I found: no auto-updates on Windows (not a problem for me), streaming services need workarounds because it disables Widevine (not a problem for me), and on macOS you have to run terminal commands to bypass Gatekeeper warnings (a negative). It also looks like it might stop working on macOS late next year altogether (definitely a problem).
Zen Browser surprised me—it's accumulated 38,000+ GitHub stars since launching in July 2024. It's inspired by the maybe defunct Arc Browser: vertical tabs, split-view, workspaces. It releases weekly. The downside is no horizontal tabs option. I'm not sold on it but I can see the appeal.
There's a whole category of forks that preserve "old" Firefox. Pale Moon uses its own rendering engine (Goanna) and keeps the classic Firefox interface. It still supports legacy XUL extensions and NPAPI plugins. It uses fewer resources than modern browsers because it's single-process. The trade-off is that modern JavaScript-heavy sites struggle and some things like CloudFlare challenges fail.
Waterfox caught my attention because of its privacy-first stance and support for older extensions. It seems to be mostly one developer, which might make others a bit nervous, but it's not an issue for me. Sometimes less is more.
One thing I learned that seems important: frequency of updates varies wildly. LibreWolf, Zen, and Floorp seem to track Firefox releases within days. Pale Moon and GNU IceCat lag weeks or months. That matters for security patches.
Honestly, while I continue to research alternatives, I'm staying on Firefox. Hardened with the right extensions and configured the right way, it still meets my needs. But it's good to know options exist, and I'm hopeful that something will show up that captures lightning in a bottle the same way Firefox did 20 years ago!
