APRIL 17-19, 2026
ATLANTA, GA

Mijente and MediaJustice

"Take Back Tech is a gathering for organizers, artists, tech workers, academics, lawyers, and more to rally together and strategize our next power-building moves."

"We’ll feature notable speakers and experts in their fields, including #NaomiKlein, Dr. Safiya Noble, Gil Durán and more!"

https://www.takebacktech.com/schedule

#media #tech #smallTech #bigTech #technology

🥳 New Kitten Release

• Implement garbage collection timeout for unconnected pages

Added a timeout to KittenPage instances so that if they do not connect within 10 seconds, they are garbage collected.

This is to avoid a memory leak in the scenario where a person rapidly refreshes a class-based (state maintaining) Kitten page. In such a scenario, the almost instant page lifecycle does not allow enough time for the page’s default WebSocket to connect and disconnect from the client. As we normally garbage collect pages when their default WebSocket disconnects, this leaves the page object in memory, creating a memory leak.

Enjoy!

https://kitten.small-web.org

💕

#Kitten #KittenReleases #SmallWeb #SmallTech #bugFix

🥳 New Kitten Release

• Fix: Events on `KittenComponent` hierarchies are now bubbled in reverse (from children down to parents). This provides for predictable event firing in cases where parents might emit events (e.g., a page emitting an event from its `onConnect()` handler). Your existing code should work as before with certain edge cases that might have broken before no longer breaking.

Enjoy!

💕

#Kitten #KittenReleases #SmallWeb #SmallTech #web #dev #events #serverSide #eventBased #components #hypermedia #streamingHTML

🥳 New Kitten Release

• `KittenComponent` (and thereby `KittenPage`) gains an `emit()` method.

Use this to bubble events from your page to all child components or from any component to all of its child components.

This is useful, for example, for setting the state of a page or a component where each child component knows how to present itself for that state.

(That, in turn, is useful if you want to be able to restore state based on URLs.)

The naming convention-based mapping of event names to event handler names is the same as for the events you receive from the client. So an event called `myEvent` will result in `onMyEvent` handlers on child components being called.

(Also update @small-web/kitten to version 7.1.0 to get language intelligence for the new method.)

Enjoy!

💕

#Kitten #KittenReleases #SmallWeb #SmallTech #web #dev #events #serverSide #eventBased #components #hypermedia #streamingHTML

🥳 New @small-web/kitten (Kitten globals) release.

• Improved type information.
• Now plays nice with tsconfig.json and tsc.
• Adds `rawBody` to `KittenRequest`.

This is not really a breaking change (in that it won’t break your apps) but I’m releasing it as a major version update so as not to surprise you if you notice the type information is different (more detailed than before).

To update in your kitten apps:
npm install @small-web/kitten@7

For more information on how to use this module, see the Kitten Type Safety tutorial:
https://kitten.small-web.org/tutorials/type-safety/

Full change log:
https://codeberg.org/kitten/globals/src/branch/main/CHANGELOG.md#7-0-0-2026-03-19

Enjoy!

💕

#Kitten #KittenReleases #SmallWeb #SmallTech #web #dev #typeSafety #JavaScript #JS #nodeJS

https://blog.fabiomanganiello.com/reply/the-local-tech-neighbourhood

A corollary to the concept of small tech neighbourhood is the idea of local tech communities.

It's easy for folks like me, who have been self-hosting on computers in our closets since high school, to lose track with the common non-tech person.

It's easy for us to say "just self-host your Nextcloud, Matrix, XMPP, Mastodon, Searxng, Wallabag etc.", adding a "it's just a docker run command".

I've also seen "just run your f*cking website" articles get to the top of HackerNews.

But then I thought: imagine if it was, say, the bakery industry rather than the software industry to go through a process of #enshittification.

Imagine that buying your bread or croissant tomorrow requires a $100/month Bread+ subscription with plenty of upsells, an age verification process that requires you to send your passport or retina scan to the Big Bread consortium, a tracking system that measures exactly how much bread you eat at home, and that keeps selling your eating habits to whoever wants to purchase them - all while your bread quality gets progressively worse over time, and the oligopoly that holds it, after acquiring or putting out of business any credible competitors, starts experimenting also with selling expired products, wrapped in paper littered with ads that you have to spend at least 30 seconds reading before you can make your sandwich.

Of course people would be outraged.

But many, no matter how outraged they are, will just swallow the bitter pill and stick with the Bread+ subscription (perhaps because they don't care enough yet to trigger a change in their habits, perhaps because they have other priorities and battles to fight), hoping that the next change to the T&C won't make it even worse.

And some will instead start looking for alternatives.

Would it make sense for a professional baker who's been in the business for decades to tell those folks "just bake your own f*cking bread" - and then complain that not enough are moving out of the Bread+ walled garden?

Or perhaps would it make more sense for that baker to volunteer for a competitive price to sell their bread to its friends, family and local community?

We all know that running your own stuff on your own machines is the best way to avoid enshittification. Just like wisely selecting and mixing your wheat and butter to bake your bread and cakes is the best way to make those products the way you like them. But not everyone will do it, nor they are supposed to do it.

People live different lives, have different priorities and choose different battles. Any pragmatic human must at some point delegate some tasks - that's how modern societies were born. We don't judge those outside of our area of competencies for not being able or willing to perform a certain task, no matter how trivial that looks to us.

An average neighbourhood has someone good enough at baking that they can sell their products to their local community.

And nowadays perhaps it also has someone good enough with computers that they can probably run on an old laptop or unused VPS stuff like a small Matrix server, a GoToSocial instance, a Nextcloud instance or an Immich server.

And they could probably serve that to small local groups of 10-20 people for something like $10/month (and at low volumes those services usually don't even require much maintenance).

It can be $100/200 month that can abundantly cover the cost of a small VPS, let alone the cost of running a miniPC at home.

It'd be a bargain for the subscribers too - nowadays for $10/month you don't even get a Netflix subscription, let alone a complete cloud alternative with no trackers and no ads.

It can even be a reliable source of income for IT folks in areas that would otherwise not provide other viable employment solutions.

In a healthy society with a high level of immunity against enshittification, your local self-hoster should probably become the digital equivalent of your local baker or your local pub.

#smalltech #techneighbourhoods #selfhosting

RE: https://mastodon.social/@huseinshamia93/116206948581891043

Hospitals in Gaza have turned into tents and caravans. Sadly, they lack proper medical care and doctors, as many have been killed by Israel.
Our sick and wounded are left without help, and the suffering grows every day. 💔

https://chuffed.org/project/117611-donate-for-the-needs-of-rehabs-children

#MutualAid #Palestine #Emergency #gaza
#SmallWeb #SmallTech #web #tech #privacy #humanRights #personhood #democracy #aral #fedi22
#searchable

Big news for Mastodon GmbH. They have formally joined forces with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

If you’re not in the design/tech world, trust me when I say this is a big step for the fediverse. The W3C establishes the standards used for the internet.

This is a solid path forward for small tech.

https://github.com/w3c/socialwg/blob/main/meetings/2026/2026-03-06-WG-kickoff.md

#Mastodon #News #Technology #Fediverse #W3C #SmallTech #FOSS