For the last few years, I’ve written a blog post at the start of the year and a summary post at the end of the year.  I’ve found it a very satisfying process and I think that doing so has actually encouraged me to achieve some of the stated goals.  That’s not to say everything I’ve planned has worked out, we all know how the global events of the past few years have caused many disruptions.  However, it seems to be a new tradition for me and one that I am happy to continue with, as such, the following are my initial thoughts for what I would like to achieve in 2022.

Prep house for sale, sell it and offload stuff

Several years ago we decided to have a double-garage renovated into a large livable space.. the contractors we engaged for this work did a half-assed job (at best) then vanished into the ether before completion.  Shortly afterwards we became parents and the renovation work was parked for a while.  I tried on numerous occasions to engage tradesmen to complete the job and almost all were devoid of any interest in finishing someone else’s job.. but we did find someone and finally in the second half of last year progress towards completion started.. the handymen involved have done some great work but the lead chap’s baby boy had emergency brain surgery a few months ago and (very understandably) this caused delays to the completion of the work.  We had hoped to be in a position to put our house on the market this month but realistically it will likely be closer to the end of February, if we are lucky! If we don’t acquire a completion certificate from the council then this project is likely to end up costing us chunk when we sell the house.

After receiving a quote from a Japanese removal company for shifting the little amount of our possessions we wanted to take to Japan, we have realised that we really need to cut back even further!  Already I was only really taking clothes, a few computers, books and brewing equipment so there isn’t a huge amount of scope for cutting back further.  Either way, we’ll have a large house full of stuff to either sell (big ticket stuff only), donate or recycle.  In an ideal world we’d donate everything but realistically finances are going to be tight for a few years in Japan so we need to try and make some pennies by selling some of our possessions.  Particularly, as the UK pound is likely to be comically weak against the yen.

Our current house is the first we bought so we have no experience of selling a house and as such haven’t the slightest clue about timescales etc.  I know that this is a highly desirable area and houses sell quickly but I am not sure about the administrative and legal timescales so I’ll need to look into that tout de suite!

Practice driving

Despite my reticence, I acquired a driving license towards the end of last year and have hence satisfied the contract prerequisite.  Whilst I still lack enthusiasm in this sphere, it is a practical reality that since we’ll be living in rural Japan, I will have to drive.  It is our strong desire not to add to the global fossil fuel consumption levels and hugely favour electric vehicles over internal combustion engine options, however we need to do a reality assessment when we move over to see how likely this is given our location.  It is also our preference to use public transport wherever possible and plausible and to walk or cycle for very local stuff. 

Regardless of what type of vehicle we end up with and how we use it, I need to get some practice in before we leave Scotland as I’ve only driven a manual car thus far.  To this end, we’ll sign up to enterprise car club which is the only real option for a new driver, and hopefully hire electric or at least manual cars somewhat infrequently so as to gain some basic level of competence.

Deepen my growing brewing knowledge

This aim is two-fold, on the one hand, I will continue with my postgraduate programe in Brewing and Distilling and complete the final (of four) courses in December this year.  However, up until now I have been studying whilst working full-time and satisfying many requirements for moving to Japan so I have mainly been studying only to pass assignments, and whilst I have learned a great deal from the courses, I intend to properly study and research many aspects of brewing once I have a lot more time on my hands.

On the other hand, I hope to gain industry experience during the few years that it will take to establish our own brewery.  As I’ve written about on this site a number of times, I have been in contact with a brewer in our future prefecture and he is happy for me to spend some time with him at his brewery!  The details are still to be discussed (in person over some of his delicious sounding beers!) but this is very positive and my hope is that I can similarly spend some time assisting other brewers in the same vein.

Move to Japan

This is obviously an easy one to achieve but there are still some prerequisites to be satisfied and stresses to overcome before we take flight and then we need to get services hooked up (superfast broadband) and furniture purchased for our new rental house, only after which will I consider the move complete.  Hopefully further down the road we’ll be in a position where we can build our own house but that will almost certainly not start in 2022.

Continue sustainability drive

For the past few years we’ve been trying to do our bit to lessen our impact on the global climate emergency, moving to rural Japan gives us a renewed opportunity to go even further.  I plan to write a dedicated blog post on our current and future efforts, we’re not experts but are doing our best and will continue to make improvements as we go forward.

Find brewery location and start the ball rolling

Once we get to Japan, we need to find a suitable location to build a brewery and lease or buy the plot.  Whilst it is possible that there may be a building in the area that might be suitable for our purposes, it is our preference to build our own place from the ground up so that sustainability is a guiding principle in the design and resource provisioning.  In addition to finding a suitable location and starting to build the brewery, we need to build a business case and do a considerable amount of paperwork to acquire licenses to brew and sell beer.  How much of this is viable in our first year especially given it’ll probably be in year three that our brewery opens is unclear, but efforts will certainly be made to make progress in this regard.

Collaborate with others for the benefit of the community

When I refer to community I really mean communities as there are distinct groups of people that I want to help, there is the local village community, the prefectural brewing community, the island-wide brewing community, sustainability-related communities and under-represented communities (women, LGBTQIA+, minorities, charities etc.).  In each case, I want to volunteer my skills (or lack thereof) to help these communities with their particular challenges however I can.

Spend more time with family

Work-life balance is key for this next year and all subsequent years!  We have another baby on the way and I want to be as much a part of raising her as I have been already (and will of course continue to do) with our first daughter.  Despite the work required to achieve all that we wish to achieve, this will be done via a framework that guarantees dedicated family time.  Our future life is going to be a simpler one, built around three very basic needs - family, food and drink.

In some regards this aim equates to normality and perhaps not something that necessarily requires specifying in plans for the year, I don’t think it is exceptional for a father to want to spend time with and share the responsibility of raising his family, but for me, I feel like it is of paramount importance that I reaffirm my commitment to family time at the start of each year as it will be a guide in the many decisions I will have to make in the coming year.

Spend more time cooking

Throughout the past year, whilst I have still been cooking a fair amount, I haven’t spent as much time planning and making delicious food, rather I’ve been cooking in order to share the load in the provision of household meals.  This is because I have spent so much of the time that I previously spent cooking, brewing instead.  This had to happen and I have no regrets but I love cooking and when we move to Japan, I’ll have a whole new selection of ingredients to learn about, which excites me. 

As our daughter Islay has developed she has, perhaps unsurprisingly, gained an interest in growing food and cooking and some of my favourite times in the kitchen of the past year have been spent teaching her how to cook and enjoying eating these dishes together.  I look forward to spending much more time in the kitchen with my wife and kids this year!

Become a forager

Since becoming vegan almost 4 years ago my love for mushrooms has exploded, to the extent that my daughter’s nickname for me is now mushroom.. Over the past year or so, thanks largely to a small number of people on the fediverse and to the accelerating climate emergency, my interest in foraging has also exploded.  I have already bought a number of excellent books and have started tentatively collecting small amounts of fungi from nearby woods just to start working on my identification skills, but time is currently a limiting factor.  When we move to Japan, I really want to hone this skill, I’m not just interested in foraging for mushrooms but the wide range of locally available wild produce (always gathering sustainably) and am developing thoughts around how I might use these in some experimental beers in the future.

Get fit(ter)!

I generally steer clear of this new years’ resolution trap, but I’m including it this time as I’m going to need to improve my fitness to be successful in my move from a desk-bound IT consulting hermit to a far more physical career in brewing.  So, once I’ve finally hung my IT boots up (for the second and last time!), I’ll don my trainers and start getting fit again.  Probably the most likely ways I’ll achieve this are through walking, cycling and yoga, though once we’re settled in Japan, I’d really like to add kayaking to this repertoire.

So there we have it, my initial list of aims for the next year, I will keep checking back on this throughout the year and do my best to adhere to them.  I wish you all luck in your own endeavours throughout the coming year.

頑張ります!

In January last year, I wrote a blog post about my provisional plans for 2021 , this seems as good a time as any to review the plans and assess how well I managed to move towards achieving them.

With the global challenges of 2020 bleeding through to much of 2021, there were certain goals that were either not legally achievable or I simply didn’t feel that the risk of infection was low enough to pursue the goal in question. Protecting my family from covid-19 was a constant consideration and at times perhaps I was more cautious than I strictly had to be but in this regard I have absolutely no regrets.

So “excuses” given, let’s review the plans in order of their placement within the previous post:

Japanese Local Government’s Rural Rejuvenation Initiative (kyouryokutai programme - 協力隊)

Whilst not explicitly highlighted as a goal for the year, my year start blog post mentioned that pretty much everything I planned for the year was done so in order to enable us to apply to this scheme. Both my wife and I successfully applied and were accepted into the kyouryokutai programme for Hidaka village in Kōchi prefecture on the island of Shikoku in Japan. My contract is due to start on June 1st 2022 and my wife will start a few months later once our second baby is old enough to attend kindergarten. I was pretty nervous during the interview with the town mayor, deputy mayor and various village people but they were very lenient on me with their questioning and I held my nerve and responded appropriately in reasonably acceptable Japanese. There is an implicit requirement for a driving license, but as long as we were trying to obtain licenses, the village officials seemed to be content and if we need or needed to learn in Japan, I don’t think this would have been a particularly big deal.

Brew more regularly

In January I set the target at completing 15 brew days by the end of 2021 and in order to enable this to happen we invested in an additional conical fermenter, allowing me to be able to brew more frequently (approximately every two weeks). I am delighted to say that at the time of writing, I have managed 18 brew days with 1 more planned before the year ends!

Thanks in part to teachings from my part-time MSc in Brewing and Distilling course, in big part to great advice from my friend Ken from Mukai Craft Brewing and in part due to my diligence and experimentation, I’ve progressed quite well this year. I decided to put my tech skills to use and developed a beer recipe database and front end web site (which still needs to be more populated) which also helped me lean on the knowledge of other brewers in order to get to the point where I am developing my own recipes. I’ve still much to learn and much recipe development to do but I have been reaching out to family who are experts in tea in order to help me think about flavour combinations that will make for unique and interesting beers featuring their delicious products.

My brewing will hit somewhat of a wall early next year as I’ll need to pack up my equipment for transit to Japan where it is currently illegal to brew anything over 1% ABV (alcohol by volume) at home. I’m not overly concerned by this as I have always planned to brew low alcohol beers as part of my beer line up and this will give me adequate opportunity for experimentation with different techniques for doing so.

Establish brewing network in Japan

I reached out to a number of breweries during the first half of the year and established contact with some cool brewers, I look forward to future in-person meetings with these brewers and more. I had plans to contact every brewer in Shikoku but there are so many new breweries popping up so it was becoming less viable. Instead I accepted an invitation into a facebook group offer to a group for Shikoku craft brewers. I had to create a new account because I don’t have a personal one, nor do I have any intention of creating one, but access to this group of brewers has already proven invaluable and so putting my principles aside in order to be part of this community seemed to be a worthwhile idea.

Once I’m in Japan, I have the opportunity to work with Ken Mukai from Mukai Craft Brewing for a while, which I am very excited about. The details are yet to be discussed and I certainly don’t want to be a burden or outstay my welcome but with our own brewery being 2 to 3 years down the road, I’ll be happy to help Ken out for as long as he can use me. Aside from this, I hope to experience brewing at other breweries around the prefecture or island in order to strengthen community relationships and glean industry knowledge from the brewers who have come before me.

Experience breweries in Scotland

This has unfortunately been the main challenge affected by covid-19’s continuing prevalence. It has been a difficult time for breweries (as it has for everyone) and whilst many of them have adapted well, it just wasn’t feasible to visit them during the year. I did manage a few brief chats during the Edinburgh beer festival but otherwise I’ve not pushed this as a priority due covid concerns, and lack of time really, learning to drive, studying my course, working full-time, preparing for interviews, looking after my daughter and preparing for our second daughter, as well as trying to brew as often as possible has meant that I’ve had almost no free time to allocate to this.

I did contact a brewery, one of the creators of which is a friend of a friend, and whilst they seemed happy for me to visit at some point the timing wasn’t ideal as a new head brewer was about to start and get used to operations etc. Trying to find a good time to even meet for a beer proved to be a challenge and so, unfortunately the visit didn’t happen.

Whilst I am a little disappointed not to have managed a single visit, I’m not going to let it bother me, if I can fit a visit in during 2022 before me move to Japan then cool, but with a new daughter incoming, my priorities are likely to shift.

Continue studying the science of brewing

Very happy with progress in this regard. I’ve completed two courses now and am on the verge of completing my third of four. Indeed, at the time of writing this I am somewhat procrastinating when I should be studying for the final assignment which is due in 5 days time.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that I have enjoyed each of the courses equally but regardless they have all been invaluable and helped me greatly develop my understanding of brewing. Due to the fact that I have been so busy with everything else in the year, I have primarily been studying to pass the assignments and not been able to really deep-dive into the bones of what I am interested in, however, I have been gathering lots of resources so that once I am in Japan and have more time on my hands, I can really settle in and study everything I want to study.

After this current course is done, I have a final course which due to scheduling won’t start until September 2022, it will be focussed on cereals, malting and mashing processes and I look forward to learning more about this from an academic perspective.

Get house in order

After much searching we found some very good tradesmen to work on finishing our garage conversion, unfortunately due to their personal circumstances the work which is almost complete has been on hold for a few months so we’ve not achieved the progress that I hoped but they have done an excellent job and I’m hopeful that they can complete the work soon and we’ll be ready to put the house on the market early in 2022.

We were very lucky with regards to our future living situation and have a rental house being held for us until we move over to Japan. We will need to live with my in-laws for a short while in order to furnish the rental house but I’m very happy that we’ll be able to move into a space of our own shortly after arriving in the village.

Groundwork for future brewery

Nothing much has changed in this regard since the post at the start of the year, which said:

Most of the work required towards our future brewery, can’t really start until we are in Japan. Also, as the intention isn’t to establish the brewery immediately, but rather continue my studies and gain some industry experience, the majority of the groundwork is really just research and clarification into licensing requirements and laws, and understanding the hoops that we need to jump through when the time comes, the more we can line up in advance the better.

At this moment in time, I’m thinking that we may build a taproom before we work on the brewery. The thinking is that a) we’ll need one, b) it will help with networking with other craft brewers if I’m selling their beers, c) will potentially open up collaboration opportunities for exclusive small batch limited edition brews to be sold in our taproom and, d) it exploits my almost two decades of experience in working in pubs in Scotland.

The intention would be to have uniform branding between the taproom and brewery, and so we can do work on reserving web domains, logo design, and as above, reaching out to brewers etc. before moving over.

However, I have reached out to a graphical designer friend who has agreed to turn my logo design draft into something of a more professional quality! I’ll be working on the website and reserving domains etc. soon after moving to Japan.

Obtain a driving license

After paying an agency who were sure they would be able to sort out driving lessons with an automatic car in our area with no issues, they failed to do so, the result being they charged me £150 for booking a £62 driving test. Dicks.. So, in somewhat of a panic I sent out emails to each and every driving instructor or agency that covered our area and was very lucky to get a response from Kate at Fastrackpass .. but we had to go with manual as there was no automatic availability. With an incoming test I had little choice but to go for this option. Kate hooked me up with a local driving instructor Duncan and set about finding a better test date and location as the one I had booked wasn’t at our local test centre (due to covid-19 related backlogs it was a take what you are given scenario). Within days of my first driving lesson, Kate had managed to secure a test a few weeks later than the initial one but at my local test centre. Many lessons were taken before the date but I felt that we had only just finished learning right before the test, so my nerves were a jangly bag of spanners on the day and I failed within the first 10 minutes of the test.

However, I needed to get a license and ideally one with a date of issue that is more than 90 days before our exit from Scotland as this is a requirement for the conversion of UK to Japanese driving lesson to be a relatively straight-forward process. As such, we lined up a few more lessons which were more focussed on practice and confidence building, and tried to find another test date, which was actually yesterday.

My wife who had an issue with a BSM (British School of Motoring) instructor just not turn up for her first lesson, also switched to Duncan, and Kate was lucky enough to find her a test at our local centre (rather than in Stirling which is too far for the instructor to lend his car), her driving test is soon - fingers crossed! BSM were somewhat difficult to get a refund out of but after several months of following their processes, I found an email address in their terms and conditions and we sent an email demanding a refund on the threat of invoking trading standards and solicitors. Refund was issue within the hour!

.. oh yeah, I passed.

Continue to find family time

2021 has been a fantastic year in regards to witnessing the development of my daughter, she is awesome! Frustrating as hell at times, but I am so happy to spend time with her and miss her terribly when she spends time away at her granny’s house.

As also alluded to a few times above, thanks to a last roll of the dice kind of situation, we have a new baby on the way due in mid-March! Opinions were split in the household and wider family over preferences for the baby’s sex (obviously not really important, health being the only real property we care about) with my daughter and I being in the minority with a preference for another little girl. The 20 week scan was inconclusive in identifying sex but the sonographer was leaning heavily in the female prediction camp, a second scan at a local ultrasound centre reinforced this opinion but again couldn’t be certain, so whilst we may still be surprised when they arrive, it seems like baby number two will be devoid of an Y chromosome, packing instead, double Xs.

2021 brought some unexpected, awesome news out of the blue. One Sunday during our weekly Papa & Daughter movie and popcorn session, I heard someone pop something through our mailbox but didn’t get up to investigate immediately as I was enjoying cosy time with my daughter. When I checked later there was a hand-written, hand-delivered letter to me which was a pretty unusual event. Whilst the letter contained some potentially concerning health news (which is in hand and not currently a concern) it also contained the phenomenal news that I have a sister whose existence I knew nothing about until that point. The letter was from her mum, the wife of my biological father (whom I’ve had no relationship with since I was an infant - a pattern which will continue) and it introduced my sister to me as a 20 year old who has “always” known of my existence. The letter rocked me but tentatively I reached out and we finally made contact by email in June, we then agreed to communicate using online chat via matrix and met in person for the first time in November. We have briefly caught up again just a few days ago and we’re looking forward to our next meet up. So whilst not in my original thoughts for the year, this definitely qualifies for inclusion under family time!

-–

This may have been the most stressful year of my entire life, and we’re not out of the woods yet, there is still a lot to get done before we move to Japan (hopefully in late April), but I have to be pretty happy with the goals that I did achieve, yes it would have been great to visit some Scottish breweries but I can become a brewer without having done so and perhaps there will be an opportunity or two in 2022, though I’m not investing much hope in that being the case with Omicron cases on the rise.

We’ll have to see if our plans are affected by covid-19’s resilience, but those are considerations for another post in the new year covering my plans and goals for 2022.

Onwards!

Since some time in 2018 (maybe 2017), I have been tinkering with self-hosting decentralised, distributed services thinking, as many like me have thought, that once I’d configured, secured and tested the application then I would be able to convince friends and family to move over to it from the big bad centralised alternatives.  I’ve written some blog posts in the past in relation to this (linked at the bottom of the page).

Over time, I came to realise that most people aren’t going to move, and that’s fine but the primary reason that there wasn’t much effort from me to “onboard” *shudder* friends and family to these services is because they were all in varying levels of pre-release development and lacked functionality or reliability that those (largely) non-techy people are used to.. So I simply didn’t really invite anyone to the majority of them, with the exception of my xmpp and matrix servers.  I’m in the process of **hopefully** moving my last friend from xmpp over to matrix and I’ve got double-figures (just) of my people on my synapse instance.

However, that didn’t deter me, I’ve had a great time experimenting with and trying out LOTS of different decentralised apps, mainly activitypub cognisant, over the past few years and regularly raise bug reports, feature requests or generally just try to help the developers of those apps as much as I can along the way.  My whole outlook on software development has changed positively due to these interactions. 

If I remember correctly, over the past few years, I have hosted:

• Friendica
• Diaspora*
• Mastodon
• Pleroma
• Pixelfed
• Osada
• Zap
• Peertube
• Funkwhale
• Plume
• Nextcloud
• Mumble
• GoToSocial
• Prosody (XMMP)
• Synapse (Matrix)
• Dendrite (Matrix)
• Cactus Comments
• Gitea
• Email

My initial hosting efforts were on a chunky x86 server with lots of RAM etc. but for the past few years I’ve moved my sites and apps onto lower energy consumption single board computers (SBC) and rarely have I experienced any issues (though building early versions of plume on one was somewhat of a nightmare!).  I’m not going to go into the various reasons for ditching or keeping the apps that I host currently, but happy to discuss in comments or my contact links, should you be curious.

Whilst I still think that my friends and family should move over to decentralised alternative services, I’ve decided that (with a few exceptions) I’ll not be their host or admin going forward nor will my endless experimentation with the newest distributed app on the scene continue.

The primary reason for this not actually social media or technology-related, but I am on a path to a major lifestyle change and I will simply not have the time or inclination to be sat in front of a computer for as much time as I currently am.  Next year, we are moving from Scotland to rural Japan, I am (again, and this time finally) hanging my IT boots up and will become a craft beer brewer.

I’m in the process of moving those apps that I want to keep and use within my household over to subdomains of this one and ditching the others, again with a couple of exceptions:

• GoToSocial - I love this (under development) app and was the first person to host it on an SBC! I raise bug reports etc. whenever they come up.  I am in the process of integrating it into this website and already, when I post here, the post is also sent to my account on GoToSocial.  I still have to engineer the scripts for two-way synchronising but its not urgent, I’ll get to it.

• Pixelfed - I have a link below to a relatively dated post on why I stick with pixelfed, I see a lot of potential here and as such it is one of the two apps which will remain under my nipponalba.scot domain tree.  I think once bugs are sorted and the groups feature is released this offers the most likely portal for friends & family to move to should they wish (I know this contradicts what I said above but that’s just the way it is).  Also I like the dev and he has been very approachable and grateful for my contributions to the project, which is nice.

• Nextcloud - Currently used by my household and my mum, but as soon as the [Quartz64]https://pine64.com/product/quartz64-model-a-8gb-single-board-computer/ is production ready, I’ll be giving it a beefier SBC and will configure a spare SBC for my parents to have their own instance (backing up all data from Scotland to Japan is not going to be a great experience).

• Synapse (x2) - As mentioned above I now have multiple friends and family with accounts here and I hope to add more - so it is the second of two services to remain under the nipponalba domain.  I also just created a second instance (as dendrite development is glacial) for this domain, primarily to bridge to cactus comments, obviously should any of my close family who happen to share my surname prefer an account on this instance then they can have one.

• Gitea - I’ve conjured a really fast and light website publishing process thanks to gitea and so it remains as long as my websites do.

• Email (maybe) - Currently and until we move to Japan at least, we are using tutanota for our email.  I self-hosted the email before (on a VPS) but the IP address range wasn’t trusted by google or microsoft so emails to people I needed to contact weren’t being delivered, or were sent directly to spam.  If we can get a static IP address from our internet provider in Japan then hopefully I can self-host email again without trust concerns.

That’s it, aside from my static websites and various convenient apps such as bitwarden_rs (password manager) and beehive (automation tool) .

Going forward, rather than wanting to host everything for everyone, I’m more interested in trying to help my family and friends host their own services or sites - should they wish to.

Previous related posts:

Distributed or Federated Social Network

The Fediverse

Why Pixelfed?

Yesterday, for the first time in many years (almost a decade), I took an hour long lunch break, during which, again for the first time in many years (much less than a decade though) I went out for a bike ride. It was suprisingly a beautiful, if not slightly cold day which definitely helped me start this new and hopefully lasting exercise routine.

Today, it is basically a storm outside with very strong wind and much rain but as I noted on a social media site (distributed, federated, free and open source obviously), “Bit of a dreich day for my 2nd lunchtime bike ride.. but I am of rain, I was born in Scotland, dreich is my daily driver, a wee bit of rain and wind won’t stop me… Only my resistant legs can do that! 33 minutes more of this psyching up to go.” and psych me up it did, I completed a revised circuit and though I considered doing a second circuit (as I intend to progress to soon), I figured that it would be better to stop after one so that I can cycle again tomorrow, rather than push through and encourage the jellification of my legs.

In the same update I also said that I’m “Going to give FitoTrack a go today.”, which is a free and open source fitness tracker app with lots of stats, devoid of any data harvesting or adverts, that enables me to track and monitor my progress in much the same way as you might expect of a similar, commercial app tied and bound eternally to a google data centre. The GPS seemed to be reasonably accurate though admittedly not 100%, I seem to recall my garmin watch being of an equivalent level of accuracy and you are able to export your workouts as GPX files or share to whichever apps you have installed on your phone that you may wish to share to, in the form of a png image file. On this point, I have raised a feature support ticket requesting an option to choose the size and file format of the shared file as it is quite large.

If this sounds like something you might like then you can find the FitoTrack app on F-Droid - or other non-ethical purveyors of apps which I’ll not link to here, alternatively you can download the source from their codeberg page .

Back in January 2020, I wrote a blog post about plans for the upcoming year . The other day I was reading through the post and wrote a reflective review of progress made during the past year. This was a pretty satisfying process for me, so I figured that I would do the same for 2021 in the hopes that when I review progress at the end of the year, I’ll be even more satisfied.

The overarching goal for the year is similar to last year, progress towards becoming a brewer and preparation for applying for the Hidaka village kyouryokutai (協力隊) scheme with a view to moving to the village once we’ve wrapped up the house sale and other loose ends here.

During the past year, we’ve been evolving and re-prioritising plans for future projects in Japan should our application be successful and the focus from a career point of view will be in the realm of craft brewing, putting food-related plans on the backburner for future attention. With that in mind and reflecting on the progress made during 2020, the following are my plans & goals for 2021.

Brew more regularly

I managed 7 out of a planned 12 brews during 2020, and many lessons were learned during each brew. Following great advice from a new craft brewer contact in Japan, I will be focussing on brewing more frequently as I need to make the focus shift from learning to beer design. I am hoping to brew a new beer every 3-4 weeks. If I can crank out 15 beers this year, I’ll be delighted.

My final beer of 2020 is currently conditioning in its keg and is a Scottish export (80 shilling) style. I intend to brew a few more similar beers but each time adjusting the balance of grains, in order to further my understanding of the influence of different types of malts. I also want to introduce oats into the recipe because oats are fucking great in beer!

After my brief experiment with brown ales, I am intending on focussing single malt, single hop (SMaSH) brews during which I’ll use the same malt but change up the hops for each brew. I hope to really gain a greater understanding of both the different flavour contributions and bittering qualities of each distinct hop. There are a huge number of hops available so I’ll need to be selective as I aim to have completed this run of beers by around the middle of the year.

After these two experiments, I’ll move on to attempting to design the three beers that I have in mind for my main lines in my future brewery. I don’t expect to be able to master or finalise these designs this year but I hope to produce some tasty, if unpolished, beers of my own design during the second half of the year.

As my new friend explained, there will likely not be the opportunity to brew again in Japan once we move until I either find a job working at a brewery or I establish my own brewery as Japanese homebrewing laws are very restrictive.

Establish brewing network in Japan

In December last year, I wrote an 8 page letter to a brewer in Japan (Ken Mukai of Mukai Craft Brewing ) in order to congratulate him on opening his brewery and to introduce myself as a hopeful future collaborator (and friend!). I was pretty nervous about this if truth be told, but the letter was well received and coincidentally a mutual friend had been talking to Ken about me the day before the letter arrived! In an email response, Ken provided me with some really useful information and advice and key amongst these was the suggestion to reach out to other brewers as well and tell them my story and plans. So, I will!

This is going to be a challenge as I’ll need to really un-rust my Japanese in order to contact the majority of brewers, there are some other non-natives who I’ll be able to more easily communicate with but I need to improve my Japanese anyway and this is a great opportunity to do so!

In addition, there is a new resident of Hidaka village who joined under the same kyouryokutai scheme as I intend to apply to, his business plan is also to create a craft brewery in our small town. Far from considering this as a potential threat to our own plans, I hope to engage with our future neighbour and help in any way that I can to collaborate with and ensure the success of his brewery.

Reaching out to strangers like this is pretty daunting for me but it’s one of the few steps we can take whilst not in Japan to help with our future plans.

Experience breweries in Scotland

Once the covid-19 situation calms down and is hopefully eliminated, I intend also to reach out to some breweries in Scotland with a view to visiting and hopefully witnessing or assisting in a brew. I have a reasonable relationship with my favourite brewer up in the north east of Scotland (no not that one), and though the specifics might need to be negotiated, they are very open to a brewery visit once things calm down.

I also have a friend of a close friend who has his own brewery in East Lothian and who is apparently also very open to a visit and for me to ask any questions I can think of.

I’ve previously visited Stewart Brewing in Loanhead in Edinburgh on one of their craft kitchen brew day experiences, and I believe they have pretty close ties to my university so I may be able to arrange an active site visit there too.

Also, at previous craft beer festivals I’ve briefly spoken with the owner of the Alechemy brewery here in my town and he was pretty open to a visit too, so I’ll need to get in contact with him.

There may be other breweries who I can speak with, such as Barney’s or Pilot in Edinburgh who I’ve had friendly conversations with in the past but this is all dependent on lockdown restrictions being lifted and covid-19 being “under control”.

Continue studying the science of brewing

I have so far completed one semester of my MSc in Brewing & Distilling programme and am very happy with how it went. My next course which is focussed on maturation, barrel aging, filtration and packaging starts on Monday 4th of January and I am excited to get started again.

My second semester course will either be on malting, grains and mashing or yeast and fermentation, I’m not sure which I’ll opt for first as I need to do both but either will be really interesting and these are the two courses that I’m most excited about.

In between semesters, I hope to find time to enhance my understanding of topics I studied in my first course, such as microbial spoilage and cleaning-in-place with a view to researching brewery design to take the first steps in investigating options for my future eco-friendly, sustainable craft brewery.

The year ahead looks really interesting in this sphere, I will only have one course left to complete (as I’m only doing the brewing specific courses for a postgraduate certificate) and likely it will be in the second semester of 2022 with a gap for the first part of the year - which will hopefully enable us to move over to Japan and get settled in.

Get house in order

We couldn’t make any progress here last year and we have to this year in order to hopefully sell our house in 2022. We need to finish the garage conversion to the level that the council will provide a completion certificate, we need to renovate the en suite and give the garden and external brickwork some love. It should all be achievable if the current plague gets the fuck out of town.. but I’ve been burned so many times by contractors so confidence in this area is low.

Groundwork for future brewery

Most of the work required towards our future brewery, can’t really start until we are in Japan. Also, as the intention isn’t to establish the brewery immediately, but rather continue my studies and gain some industry experience, the majority of the groundwork is really just research and clarification into licensing requirements and laws, and understanding the hoops that we need to jump through when the time comes, the more we can line up in advance the better.

At this moment in time, I’m thinking that we may build a taproom before we work on the brewery. The thinking is that a) we’ll need one, b) it will help with networking with other craft brewers if I’m selling their beers, c) will potentially open up collaboration opportunities for exclusive small batch limited edition brews to be sold in our taproom and, d) it exploits my almost two decades of experience in working in pubs in Scotland.

The intention would be to have uniform branding between the taproom and brewery, and so we can do work on reserving web domains, logo design, and as above, reaching out to brewers etc. before moving over.

Obtain a driving license

In order to apply for the kyouryokutai scheme and to move to Japan, I need to have a driving license. I’ve previously taken some lessons but due to the demands of work over-reaching into my life those were put on hold. That was several years ago, so I’ll now need to resit the theory exam as my previous pass has now expired. The intention is to find someone who does intensive lessons for automatic cars and I’ll try to arrange that for the Summer (the season referred to as Summer in the rest of the world, not the 3 days of sunshine during the Scottish year). I’m going for automatic as most cars in Japan are automatic and I’m just not that in to driving.. It’s a necessity for both the application and for future plans as we’ll be living very rurally, but excitement levels aren’t overly high and I’m holding out what hope I have that we’ll be able to buy a second hand electric car when we move over.

Continue to find family time

Finally, as busy a year as I have lined up for 2021, these plans cannot be at the cost of restricting time to spend with my daughter and wife. There are goals that must be achieved in order for our plans to progress on schedule but they will need to be achieved around family time.

Onwards!

In January last year, I wrote a blog post about my provisional plans for 2020 , this seems as good a time as any to review the plans and assess how well I managed to move towards achieving them.

It probably goes without saying that the global disruptions of this past year have rippled into each of our lives and resultantly some of the plans have been impacted due to situations outwith my control. Also, during the first five months of the year, my wife was working on her MA dissertation, which meant that most of my spare time was dedicated to looking after my daughter, which was great but not conducive to productivity in other realms.

So “excuses” given, let’s review the plans in order of their placement within the previous post:

Japanese Local Government’s Initiative (kyouryokutai programme - 協力隊)

Our plans to apply for this scheme early 2022 have not at this moment changed and feeling around the family is that we have a very good chance of success with our application, however there is one dependency that is going to require a little more social stability and less prominence and threat of covid-19 to achieve. If I’m to apply for this scheme I need a driving license!

Japanese Language Proficiency Tests

I did initially start studying for JLPT N3 at the beginning of last year but this was railroaded by the pandemic and continuous lockdowns slashing my available free time considerably. I’ve re-evaluated the necessity of sitting these tests and as I don’t really intend to work for someone else in a permanent role, I don’t actually think that the proficiency tests are really that necessary. I will have to work on improving my Japanese both spoken and written (typed) and may revisit in the future but for now under current circumstances this is being shelved.

Brew Regularly

My plan for last year was to try and brew a beer each month, so 12 in total, 1 of which had already been brewed (and poured down the drain), I managed a further 6 brews - taking my total at this point to 8 brews over two years. Obviously, this is a little less than I had hoped, but given the circumstances and the tangible improvement in both my brewing knowledge and the quality of the beers, I’m reasonably happy with progress made.

I managed to brew 2 American IPAs, 2 New England IPAs and 4 Imperial Stouts, with the latter darker brews I played around a little with adjuncts, coffee and cacao nibs in this case, which was very rewarding.

Study the Science of Brewing

In this realm, more than any other, great strides were taken! My application to join the MSc Brewing & Distilling (distance learning) programme at Heriot Watt University was successful and I’ve completed my first course, which was Beverage Microbiology and Biochemistry. I’m still awaiting the final marks for this course but my first couple of assignments were well received and very well marked(!) so I have high hopes.

Studying microbiology and biochemistry with no background in science was certainly a steep learning curve, and as I have no aspirations to becoming a scientist, sometimes the content of the course felt a little unnecessary to my particular aims, however other parts were fascinating and really helped boost my understanding of the brewing processes. I still have a lot to learn in this area, and have certain sub-topics that I really want to drill into when time allows, these are: cleaning-in-place, microbial spoilage & strategies to mitigate and eliminate contamination.

Cook-A-Lot

I probably cooked just as often in 2020 as in previous years, however, most of the time the main aim was sustenance rather than making time to cook delicious dishes. It did happen, but with constraints on time being what they were the frequency of cooking “sessions” was lower than I’d have liked. I did make some pretty memorable stews with barley over the last few months.. I might have become somewhat of a barley addict..

Get the house in order

Lockdowns, a neighbour who ignored lockdowns from day 1 and had a constant, daily supply of labourers and other craftsmen visiting his house and a general urgency to protect my daughter from this coronavirus strain meant that absolutely no progress was made here.

All in all, considering that circumstances we all had to face, I’m reasonably content with progress towards our plans during 2020. I would have liked to brew more often, I would have liked to have sat and passed JLPT N3 and it would have been great if some work on our house could have been completed. However, I am firmly on my way to becoming a brewer and whilst more focus will be required over this next year to further progress, I’m happy with the steps taken to achieve this goal during the past year.

Onwards!

Since December 2018 I have hosted a Pixelfed server, intended for family and friend use but in actuality currently only used by myself and very occasionally my wife.

The reason that I’ve not applied a @dansup level of marketing to encourage my circle to move over to the platform yet is due to a few bugs and polish items that I am awaiting, but as we are edging closer to a version 1 release, I thought this might be a good time to jot down my thoughts on the application. Primarily intended for the audience that the instance is targeted towards.

I have previously written about the fediverse and why I have left facebook, google etc. so if you need a primer then that’s the place to go first.

What is Pixelfed?

Pixelfed is, in a nutshell, a free and open-source instagram replacement. It allows you to upload photos and short videos, create albums, collections and ephemeral stories and enables sharing and interaction across the fediverse.

Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica etc. users can follow a Pixelfed account and interact with the posts and account owner from the safety and comfort of their own hidey-hole.

Further information can be found at pixelfed.org .

Why use Pixelfed?

I’ve been asked this question a couple of times by folks already using federated social media. Their reasoning is usually that the other application such as Mastodon and Pleroma not only allow you to upload media but also to have media only tabs so why have another account on a photo & video only site?

This is a fair question and I sometimes upload photos to my pleroma account rather than Pixelfed.

However, most of the applications that I host are provided on the basis of the use cases of family and friends. In my circles instagram is very popular and pixelfed is pretty close functionally to instagram, getting closer by the day and improving on the concept too.

I do also use Pixelfed though and there are unique aspects of it that I like such as the organisational functions such as the ability to create collections or hashtags discovery groups.

I like that Pixelfed processes the photos on upload (massively decreasing storage space for me) and I like, though rarely use the photo editing functions such as cropping and filters.

I don’t think I ever used stories, if it was even called that on instagram, but I can understand why others might find it fun, interesting or useful.

An upcoming feature named circles which will enable you to create groups of friends/followers who you can share photos or video with and no-one else will see them. This sounds good, whether or not I’ll personally use it in practice remains to be seen.

Scopes enable you to manage the visibility of your posts, either:

• public - visible by everyone via a public timeline
• unlisted - will appear on publicly profile page but only followers can see in their timelines
• followers only - can only be seen by followers even on profile
• circles - SOON™

This enables me to have a private account for photos of my daughter which are only visible to people I personally approve - family and friends only. This is a common feature across fediverse applications.

Embedding! You can now embed photos and profiles into other blogs or web pages, which is nice!

I like the developer(s). This is generally common for most of the open source apps that I use, the developers are generally very open to feedback and are excited that people are using their application. Marketing mogul and time-illusionary @dansup is no exception! I have had many interactions with him over the past 15 months or so, and whether it be a unique issue I was experiencing during initial set up, a feature suggestion or a bug report the interactions are always gratefully received and pleasantly handled, and wherever possible bugs are fixed as quickly as they are reported. This interaction means a great deal to me, it re-affirms my decision to leave faceless corporations in favour of people-oriented open source developers.

Wish list

As mentioned above, I have been waiting for the application to be in a more polished ate before trying to onboard family and friends and whilst I feel we are nearly there I have small list of outstanding tasks or features that I’m looking forward to being addressed:

• A federated timeline or federated discover page - I think that the discover page will only really bask in it’s glory when it allows discovery of accounts and media from other Pixelfed instances.
• Remote account avatars - Currently avatars for accounts from other remote instances are not pulled, it’s a minor thing but it makes the application feel unfinished (which it is of course!)
• Fixing the bug I raised eons ago ;) - #1359
• Notifications for all interactions - Currently notifications are limited and don’t include comments.
• Ability to choose photo order when uploading multiples
• Webfinger support - a bit jargon-y but makes searching for other accounts more user-friendly. Added since post
• Instagram and Pixelfed imports - The ability to import media from instagram or other Pixelfed accounts. It’s coming, I’m patient.
• Pixelfed app - There are a number of apps on your chosen phone OS and I like them, but I think having an official Pixelfed app will help bring people onboard.. most folk are used to an app per site which seems pretty inefficient to me but for this reason a Pixelfed app will be really help shift folk over to the platform. This is also in progress.

This list used to be a lot bigger and I’m sure it won’t be long before it shrinks again.

Pixelfed is a fantastic application and I look forward to encouraging tho close to me to join.

Pixelfed on Mastodon

On our return from our most recent trip to visit my wife’s family in Japan I posted on my pleroma account about my ambitious plans for 2020 in order to hopefully facilitate a move to rural Japan as early as Spring 2022.

This article is an attempt to flesh the out a little and to have somewhere that I can more easily refer to for updates, amendments etc. So in no particular order:

Japanese Government’s Rural Initiative (not correct name but will update and write about in greater detail in the future)

This is a scheme aimed at encouraging more families to move from the big Japanese cities to rural locations, with a focus on encouraging retraining, community involvement and company creation. Each town government has its own requirements and the can change on an annual basis.

Successful applicants have up to three years to make a life in the town and contribute to the local economy, during which time the government will subsidise rent, home refurbishments and pay a regular, sufficient wage. After three years then you are on your own so to speak but by then hopefully you have established an income of your own.

A brief look into the scheme would suggest that so long as I have a driver’s license by the time of application and am capable of participating in an interview, then I should qualify. I already have a litany of ideas the biggest of which is to have my own craft beer brewery however, it is a mid-to-long term plan and hopefully some of my more immediately implementable ideas will impress the government officials when the time comes.

Japanese Language Proficiency Tests

Initial plan is to sit and pass JLPT N3 - which I should already be able to do, but the intention is to study for it properly in order to establish a study pattern for the more challenging N2 exam which I hope to sit in 2021.

If I’m to get back to a level where I can participate in a Japanese interview for the above scheme then the JLPT exams will help to focus me and fill the large gaps in vocabulary that have appeared since I graduated with an undergraduate degree in Japanese in 2011 - not that I was particularly good with the language back then, I was more interested in Japanese feudal history.. regardless, N3 this year, N2 next.

Brew regularly

Starting next week, I’ll be trying to brew a different beer each month and attempting to study the science of brewing so that by the time we move to Japan I have a solid knowledge-base from which to reach out for potential brewery internships as brewing beer at home is kind of illegal in Japan (unless under 1% ABV).

I am still a beginner and my second brew was somewhat of a failure. I hope to improve my understanding of the basics, tighten my quality control process and become very familiar with the different grains, malts, hops and yeasts over the next few years. I’ll initially probably be focusing largely on IPAs but before we move to Japan I want to experiment with dark and sour beers. I’ll endevour to record everything in my blog and as my Japanese improves, add translations where relevant or interesting to build towards a profile which can be understood by potential future employers.

Study the science of brewing

Hand in hand with the brewing plans, I hope to find some online courses or books from which I can learn more about molecular biology etc. I want to be in a potion where I understand protein chains, yeast storage and quality, water quality etc. This knowledge will be very important when the time comes to establish a brewery but also before then it will enhance my ability to design beers based on more than a hunch about tasty flavour combinations.

I recently re-visited the Heriot Watt University MSc Brewing & Distilling course page and discovered that it may be possible for me to study towards a Postgraduate Certificate online which if an application was successful would enable me to study exactly the content that I will need to for a career in brewing. I have contacted HW admissions and if I get a positive response to my multiple questions then I think I’ll apply for this course which would begin in September this year. Fingers crossed!

Depending on work-load and progress with this, I may also reach out to some Scottish craft brewers to see if there are any prospects for short-term internship or shadowing to set in place for next year.

Cook-A-Lot

I already do a fair amount of cooking at home and when time allows like to spend 4-6 hours in the kitchen making delicious #vegan food. However, as my future in Japan will revolve around both drink and food and in all cases vegan varieties of them all, I need to up my game and focus on mastering some fundamentals from which potential menus in potential cafes or food trucks might be devised.

I’ve previously worked in the kitchens of hotels and pubs in a variety of roles and several of the roles involved cooking for the public so I’m not completely unfamiliar with the requirements, but if I’m to be a lone vegan cook in our wee village in rural Japan, then I’ll need to really understand dashi options, umami and cooking with the local ingredients I’ll have at hand. Fun!!

Get the house in order

Literally! We’ve had an unfinished garage conversion for several years now! The building contractor who was hired to do the work upped sticks and ran away when the council returned a list of issues. Since then it has fluctuated in importance and several attempts to enlist the help of other contractors to finish the job have failed. We need to get this fixed once and for all or selling the house in a few years time is going to be somewhat of a challenge.

Sundries

Undoubtedly there will be more plans made, developed and or abandoned as the year progresses, but I hope to write about as much of it as possible, particularly where it relates to potentially interesting information uncovered as we learn more about the process and challenges of moving (back) to Japan.

Next year: driving license, JLPT N2, studying for Japanese beer proficiency tests (yes, really), strengthening of pretty much everything above.

A logo I made in my parent’s house, whilst incredibly bored awaiting my year in Okayama to begin.

Bushido Dreams was my first real blog, the first which actually attracted readers (albeit in small numbers) from all around the world.

I started it in advance of moving to Japan for the exchange year of my Japanese undergraduate degree. I was a mature student, starting the degree at 30 years old and it gave me a chance to write a little about my experiences, practice some Japanese and as it turns out gain the attention of an amateur photographer in Okayama who would offer me a loan of the camera I had hoped to buy before the trip! (which I lost along with an iPhone I had won, one drunken day in Yoyogi park in Tokyo).

Unfortunately due to a database corruption I lost a lot of the blog posts (including ALL of the Japanese ones) and what remains has been imported into this site from the soon to be retired bushidodreams.com

Kilted Scot

When the .scot TLD went live I went a little crazy and booked a handful of domains, primarily for my own future use but also with a thought that maybe, just maybe someone might be interested in purchasing one from me.. it almost happened too with a domain I’m also about to give up (rebellious.scot) when I was approached by a craft brewery in the Borders of Scotland.. I was keen to do a deal, maybe for a case of beer or something like that.. but I never heard back from them..

Anyway, I decided that kilted.scot seemed fitting for the home of my journal recording my experience of learning Gaelic (or Gàidhlig) and so started an unfortunately short-lived and infrequently updated blog. Sadly, after a very interesting first year of night classes the second year moved to a day of the week which was at the time impossible for me to attend and as such, the blog ceased to be.

I only managed 16 blog posts (actually a couple more that I didn’t think needed importing to here) but this turned out to be a really good educational tool for me, I re-realised that an important process in language learning is regurgitation of what you’ve learned and whilst I wasn’t able to speak to anyone at home or in my social circles in Gàidhlig, the blog gave me a way of committing what I’d learned to memory.

Farewell kilted.scot - you served me well.

Sovereign Scot

This was another .scot domain that I booked early without any real notion of how to use it.. but then my political awakening happened in around 2011 when the SNP were elected by majority, breaking the system and we knew an independence referendum was on the cards.

In the build up to the independence referendum an abundance of excellent digital resources popped up in order to inform the populace on our choices, however due largely to disparagement from the “Scottish” media many of the sources were deemed untrustworthy through the eyes of an unsure and confused majority. I had briefly thought that in my social circles (which were already largely YES confirmed or heavily leaning) that I might be able to help some NO-leaning or undecided friends to vote YES if I researched and presented my research in my words on a blog, intended purely for the audience of my own social circles.

As it transpires, I spent most of my time researching and not enough time presenting and when I did share or post on Facebook, it seemed (surprisingly) that no-one was seeing or acknowledging my posts.. (I suspected foul play at a very early stage - fucking algorithms!).. A mixture of lack of spare time, rescusitating Bushido Dreams and creating Kilted Scot, a concern about over-sharing of my blog to folks outwith my social circle and a lack of confidence in myself, that I was presenting something that hadn’t been said more succinctly than others.. all contributed to the site never really being populated or published.. but for posterity, I’ve imported those posts to this blog.

The lights were never switched on for sovereign.scot

Going Forward

I intend to transfer this blog into a self-hosted federated blogging site at some point in the future, when I’m happy with the progress and suitability of the available options. In the meantime I hope to semi-frequently compose new posts covering a wider range of topics than the three blogs above. There is a fairly good chance given our desire to move to rural Japan in the future that the ethos of Bushido Dreams will spill into nipponalba, but otherwise I’ll likely post about all manner of diverse topics and hope some of you will find them interesting!

Since then I’ve built and destroyed multiple instances of various flavours of federated social media:

• Diaspora x 2
• Friendica x 2
• Mastodon x 1
• Pleroma x 1 - still active.
• Plume x 2 - unfortunately the main devs are stepping down so moved blogs here.
• Pixelfed x 1 - well.. many iterations but still active.
• Peertube x 1
• Osada x 1
• Zap x 1
• Matrix x 2 - now lighter and more responsive, but still awaiting cross-signing before inviting folks on to it.
• Funkwhale x 1 - active

In addition I’ve built a nextcloud server and an xmpp server, as well as self-hosting all of my email accounts.

There are other types of federated services such as Prismo and GetTogether that I haven’t even had a chance to properly explore and I am perpetually on the lookout for a federated photo album application which can replace my koken photo website (even briefly considered writing it myself!).

Why bother doing any of this, when most of the services are already provided by Google, Facebook or Twitter?

READ A NEWSPAPER!

I am done with being harvested for marketing data or for national election\referenda manipulation.. I don’t want an algorithm to decide what content (that has been shared with me) I am or am not permitted to see.. I am sick and tired of opening an app on my phone and being presented with ads for products and services that the app should not know are suitable (or not) for me.. and I don’t want my daughter and any future kids to be no more than a cog in a data machine, inadvertently being harvested by corrupt mega corporations for profit or indeed, worse.

As such, I’ve decided to provide alternative services for those of my family and close friends who wish to use them as privacy focussed, decentralised alternatives. It may well be that they have little to no interest and that’s fine, but should they be curious or change their mind then I have their back - and if they don’t trust me with their data more than they do Facebook then, I will happily help them set up their own self-hosted services.

So why have I chosen the services I am currently hosting?

1. They are privacy and security focused by default and being self-hosted, hardened where possible by myself.
2. They are federated services built on the ActivityPub protocol. This means that the different sites speak the same language and therefore can communicate with each other despite providing different services. So a pleroma user can follow a friendica user or a mastodon user, a pixelfed user or a writefreely user etc.
3. They are distributed services. Rather than being in one global corporations’ data centre(s) the network is comprised of thousands of smaller, often self-hosted installations. This makes them less vulnerable to attacks, and much harder to censor.
4. They are open-source applications. The source code is available for anyone to verify it, report bugs/flaws and strengthen the application on a community basis.
5. They can be self-hosted, which means I am in complete control of my content.
6. They are free - though buying the developers, moderators, hosts and contributors a coffee would be appreciated.
7. There are no ads, no algorithms and complete transparency.

The services which I currently host

1. Pleroma - this is my main social media site, it is a micro-blogging site (think twitter) with several front end options. It is light enough to run on a raspberry pi on a home network (mine now runs on a RockPro64 from Pine64 alongside my matrix and xmpp servers). The devs are very approachable and are very active.
2. Pixelfed - an instagram replacement, it is still under development though basically functional, the next beta update (due very soon) should bring a lot more functionality and the following update will bring instagram & tumblr import functionality. I wrote a bit more about why I like pixelfed here .
3. Matrix - It can provide audio, video and text chat as well as conferencing.. rooms can be bridged to other services such as RSS feeds, IRC etc. It could be a replacement for WhatsApp, LINE and Telegram but has a little more work to do for multi-user encryption.
4. XMPP - A simple enough FB messenger replacement, a chat service with file sharing capabilities, fully end-to-end encrypted.
5. Nextcloud - this is a home cloud system with a huge amount of customisation and applications including text, audio, video chat, social media (via ActivityPub ), distributed filesharing and collaboration, phone tracking, email client, phone backups, rss reader, calendar, audio player etc. This is just for us in our house but potentially in the future I may re-create a shared talk/social media nextcloud server with limited storage quotas.
6. Funkwhale - a music site soon to be podcast capable. I host my music collection here privately so that I can lien remotely (replaces spotify for me). It can be used to host and share creative commons music but I’m a novice in finding CC music (that I like) so I haven’t yet explored this.

The website switching.software has a lot more information about different alternatives to centralised srvices, written in plain, non-techy language, however here are some of the main alternatives (disclaimer: in various states of active development)

I recently saw a post via pleroma:

Friend: Are you OK? You haven’t posted on Instagram in ages

Me: I quit FB, Instagram, and Twitter.

Friend: Why’d you quit the internet?

Me: Actually I’ve rejoined the Internet.

This about sums it up for me, I’ve left the data harvesting silos but I’ve re-joined the internet.

One common observation of those on “the fediverse” is that everyone is much friendlier.. that’s because we’re not being manipulated, our timelines are not manufactured and we’re able to have genuine discourse with humans free of corporate interference. There are still asshats and bots but you have the ability to curate your own timeline and have the support of an admin who cares about his instance who will assist if required.. and if you don’t feel that your admin has your back.. then you can just move to another instance or make your own.

As a side note: I have also replaced Google’s android on my phone with LineageOS without any google services and have deleted my google, facebook (including whatsapp & instagram) and twitter accounts. In April, I’ll hopefully take delivery of a Purism Librem 5 phone which is built on a security and privacy focused linux distribution and not android at all.

Edited (February 5, 2020) to update currently hosted apps and mention I’m ill waiting for the fucking Librem 5 phone..

Edited (April 23, 2020) to update currently hosted apps and mention that Purism are on rocky ground, if I don’t get some sort of update about my Librem 5 phone soon then I’ll be requesting a refund and opting for a PinePhone.

These are decentralised, open source, social networks which are interoperable (they all talk to one another). There is no advertising, no data-mining, no central ownership, but also no censorship. The don’t insist you sign up with your full name and indeed recommend you not doing so.

There are a number of different networks available with the most popular currently being Mastodon, Diaspora*, Hubzilla, Friendica etc. Each flavour offers slightly different services\functions such as chat, RSS feeds, photo albums, interactions with other social networks etc.

However, they are not owned by corporations and as such are generally not as feature-rich as those centralised, closed-source social networks such as facebook, google+ and twitter etc.

Each has a learning curve though not unsurmountable, I’d imagine pretty easy to overcome if you join one of the bigger population public servers. I’ve set up my own server so it was a slightly more complex process for me.

I tried diaspora*, friendica and briefly mastodon..

I loved the simplicity of diaspora* but it lacked some functionality that I was looking for (such as photo albums).

Mastodon is very twitter like and the server that I joined was overwhelmingly full of Japanese anime otaku so it wasn’t a great experience. So I don’t have much info to share on that one.

So I have settled (I think) on Friendica, it has an integrated RSS feed so I can see news articles etc. that I was accustomed to seeing in FB. It can integrate with other non-federated social networks. You can have multiple profiles, so for example a work profile and one for more personal relationships. I’ve integrated a FB like chat. The bigger public servers will have these features and more.

Friendica also has the greatest connectivity to other networks with in the two entities that are the federation and the fediverse (free network link below)

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network

A quick guide to the free network

Popular public sites for diaspora*, friendica and mastodon:

Diaspora*:

• joindiaspora.com
• framasphere.org
• diasp.org
• diasp.eu

Friendica:

• libranet.de
• squeet.me

Mastodon:

• instances.social (a good tool to find a suitable instance)