Jan Lehnardt

Find me at #FOSSBack o/

Talk to me about:

- whatever fun thing that occupies you right now
- the sovereign tech agency and contributing to free and open source software
- offline capable apps

My talk is today at 12:10 :)

RE: @ramsey@phpc.social

Changing an established open source project’s license is a year-long effort requiring consent by all contributors, not an afternoon of prompting an LLM.

RE: @janl@narrativ.es

Every time a FOSS project adopts “ai” tooling it feels like a founding member of the rebellion joins the empire.

Hulu is cancelling the Buffy reboot :( I really hope someone else picks it up. We need that show, especially now that we are actually facing multiple apocalypses. #beep

RE: @janl@narrativ.es

Note that this is the Luddite (proudly) position: we’re not against the technology and its benefits, we’re against the exploitative, predatory and earth-damaging application of the technology.

RE: @janvhs@hachyderm.io

We’re quickly approaching a bifurcation in FOSS with projects including or not including LLM generated code.

We’ll have to come up with a name so we can talk clearly about it.

I desperately hope the non-LLM side is going to be large enough to include a full stack, otherwise there’s a lot of work ahead of us for no good reason.

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At least until we have truly free and open, non-exploitative, consentually sourced, sustainably powered tooling, which is a bubble or two away at least.

RE: @zerodogg@hachyderm.io

Adding Debian to the disappointment list.

Full refusal of these systems based on humanistic principles is actually very easy.

And reducing their acceptance on the usefulness of their output is exactly the thing that’s missing the point.

ACAB includes CORS.

Let’s fucking go 🌱🌷💐

Was ist eigentlich das Gegenteil von Arschkalt?

The industrial revolution also lead to a lot of misery, so we don’t have to do any better with the AI age is exactly the kind of thing that makes people say we learn nothing from history.

The bad examples are for learning and doing it better next time, not repeating the same patterns with the same predictable outcomes.

That is what human society is all about.

RE: @ThisIsTrue@mastodon.social

[Don’t worry, it’s his sister]

Lese gerade, dass das Zugreinigungspersonal im DB Fernverkehr verdoppelt wird. Von 110 auf 220. So weit so gut.

In Japan werden Fernverkehrszüge (bis zu 16 Waggons) an End/Startbahnhöfen in ca. 10 Minuten mit drei Personen pro Waggon grundgereinigt, bevor die Züge dann direkt zu ihrem nächsten Ziel fahren.

Man wartet schön aufgereiht, bis die Reinigung fertig ist und wenn die Crew aus dem Wagen steigt, vor dem man wartet, bedanken sich Zugchef und Fahrgäste beim Reinigungspersonal.

RE: @tinker@infosec.exchange

Dropping DUO like a hot potato. Who thought this was a good idea?

Log4j, *the* project that escalated the need for funding open source in the first place, is currently being DOS’d by slop vulnerability reports. Well done everyone. Slow fucking clap.

https://github.com/apache/logging-log4j2/discussions/4052

The moral of the story of the Meta AI person getting their email deleted by clawdbot is not “haha, so funny” or even “haha, so irresponsible in their position” but “it’s normal to be reckless with AI and it screwing up” in order to get you more comfortable giving these programs access to your most personal data. Do you think it would have gotten past Meta PR any other way? Don’t fall for it.

I wrote up our experience eating 100% #vegan in #japan on our recent trip. I have 23 restaurant recommendations for you covering 13 cities, towns and villages.

tl;dr: I has gotten a lot better in the last 5 years and I have eaten some of my favourite food of all time on this trip.

Come for the culinary tour, stay for the riveting pictures! From Kaiseki to Fast Food, we’ve got it all.

Complete with links to the excellent veganguide.org powered by OpenStreetMap :)

https://writing.jan.io/2026/02/15/vegan-japan.html

My team and I have worked hard these past two+ years to help over 15 open source projects as part of the Sovereign Tech Agency.

This is both challenging and rewarding work. We also learned a lot along the way.

I’ll tell you all about it at @FOSSBackstage@floss.social this year:

@neighbourhoodie@toot.berlin

Web dev friends: @pouchdb@fosstodon.org is looking to move from Jekyll to another static site generator type, preferably JS based.

Our overarching concern with this is that it is low maintenance.

We had to maybe patch things twice in over ten years of Jekyll use, otherwise we could simply add new pages as desired and go on with our lives. We should not have to do any updates to our website just because a new version of the generator came out.

We mainly need markdown to html conversion, easy to install across different platforms, and again, low low low maintenance.

Please chime in on the issue, if you have direct experience *and* are willing to help with the migration: https://github.com/apache/pouchdb/issues/9135

Hey #Øredev my friend and colleague Alex is talking about The UI/UX Benefits and Trade-Offs of Local-First Apps today at 13:55 in room Curie on the Web track.

Alex helped coin the term Offline-First and has been designing and building offline capable web and native apps since 2013, you’ll learn a lot!

https://oredev.org/line-up/91fef3b5-2b5b-4642-9e3a-9b348c8df1ab?tags=Web

Folks are just not migrating away from @couchdb@fosstodon.org. Some are loyal for over a decade. Learn what makes CouchDB special.

Oh and: “I’ve had 0 production issues in 15 years.” 😎 @neighbourhoodie@toot.berlin

I’m officially done with takes on AI beginning “Ethical concerns aside…”.

No! Stop right there.

Ethical concerns front and center. First thing. Let’s get this out of the way and then see if thre is anything left worth talking about.

Ethics is the formalisation of how we are treating one another as human beings and how we relate to the world around us.

It is *impossible* to put ethics aside.

What you mean is “I don’t want to apologise for my greed and selfishness.”

Say that first.

Berlin! Free(!) @pouchdb@fosstodon.org Workshop next Monday as part of the local first community day. Hang out with us and learn all about CouchDB & PouchDB.

Sign up here: https://lu.ma/v8ggp0u9?tk=qKT3SE / Programme here: https://app-2025.localfirstconf.com/schedule/community-day (description currently in flight)

#OfflineFirst #LocalFirst

Fresh CouchDB, get your fresh CouchDB! Truly parallel shard reads and writes (+40% throughput with lots of concurrent requests coming in), a conflict finder scanner plugin, faster integrity checking on by default, more secure password hashing on by default, more built-in reducers for common tasks, lots of other little things improved.

Aside from the release announcement, the detailed change log is quite the fun read: https://docs.couchdb.org/en/stable/whatsnew/3.5.html
@couchdb@fosstodon.org

Gonna play this Andor (S01E05) clip whenever I’m asked why I’m staying away from vibe coding.

Finally! @couchdb@fosstodon.org 3.4.1 has been released! We’ve been working on this for quite some time and I’m beyond thrilled you can now all try it out all the good stuff we put into it.

https://blog.couchdb.org/2024/09/27/3-4-1/

It’s a .1 because of the safe-to-upgrade discussion from the other day: @janl@narrativ.es

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Also, for the first time we are publishing for everyone, the @neighbourhoodie@toot.berlin CouchDB guidance that interprets the release for our customers.

https://neighbourhood.ie/blog/2024/09/23/couchdb-3-4-1-released

Wrapping up an intense week on a project that I can’t really talk about yet, but that immediately went to “my third once-in-a-lifetime” project after working on the Ebola first responder & vaccine trial software as well as the Bavaria Covid vaccine logistics projects.

This one is challenging because I’m on vacation as of now and I have to trust my team to wrap this up in my absence. But we hired great people and I hope I left enough of a structure. I know they’ll succeed.

Last Friday, we released @pouchdb@fosstodon.org 9.0.0 — A pocket sized database for your browser that seamlessly syncs data with CouchDB on the backend. It lets you build truly offline capable web apps and we have done some astonishing things with it (help make an Ebola vaccine, offer COVID jabs to everyone on Bavaria, e.g). This release is 18 months in the making and comes with a big performance boost, under the hood modernisations resulting in smaller bundle sizes. #JavaScript @pouchdb@fosstodon.org