Hi!
My name is Matthieu and on the Internet I go by artectrex, I’m a Computer Science student and currently doing my Masters at EPFL.
📚 I like reading high fantasy, and to a lesser extent science-fiction, but I also appreciate reading literary classics.
🎲 I like playing board games: Carcassonne, Catan, …
🕹️ In the few occasions I have some time to spare for gaming1, I like to play Grand Strategy games like EU4, or sometimes RimWorld, Tropico, … I also like to play FOSS multiplayer games like Minetest, Teeworlds, etc with friends.
🚴 I like to go on big trips (~1000km each) on my bike, often with friends. I’ve done most of France in various directions, and planning to discover more of Europe in the future.
🇪🇺 I’m a citizen of Europe. Our current institutions are not perfect (far from it!), but I believe in the European project.
🇨🇭 Currently spending most of my time in Switzerland.
Free Software
Why Free Software? You can look at some of the essays on gnu.org, they are much better at explaining the philosophy behind it than I am.
Free and Open Source Software is necessary for a free society. This is something I’m utterly convinced of.
I’m involved in several FOSS projects, including but not limited to:
- PixelDroid, an Android client for Pixelfed
- Cuttlefish, a GTK client for PeerTube that aims to also work on mobile form-factors like the PinePhone and Librem 5.
I got funding from NLnet for both Cuttlefish and PixelDroid.
Decentralization, self-hosting
Centralization is at the root of a lot of the perverse power dynamics that define the “mainstream” digital world, and even with free software behind it, centralized services inevitably give power to a limited group of individuals.
In the last few years a lot of good stuff has happened on this front: Mastodon and the fediverse in general (including PeerTube and Pixelfed) has become a viable alternative for a lot of us, Nextcloud has gotten more and more polished and awesome, Matrix is slowly but surely making progress…
Things are looking up for the federated internet!
To help make the Internet decentralized again, I self-host2 the vast majority of my digital infrastructure, including but not limited to:
- A Nextcloud instance for myself and my immediate family
- A Jellyfin instance for myself, immediate family and my friends
- A Tiny Tiny RSS instance for myself and immediate family
- A Weblate instance for the translation of my FOSS projects
- A Quassel instance for IRC with reasonable UX
I use email on my own domains, hosted by a privacy-conscious hosting provider. Self-hosting that is possible but quite hard and easy to get wrong, but I might try it in the future.
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games are the only proprietary software I still occasionally use (discounting the occasional program required by my school, but that is rare). I don’t like it, and they run in a seperate OS, but it’s a vice I sometimes indulge in. ↩
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And by self-hosting I mean on a physical machine on my residential connection. Hosting things on a VPS is admirable and a lot better than using someone else’s services but I don’t agree that it is self-hosting since it’s on someone else’s computer. ↩