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oreohive activity log

oreohive.org - welcome aboard!

2025-02-12 | oreo

a little hello from the bees

a drawing of a space rocket with a doodle of lyra next to it (behind it)

- Welcome to the beehive.

After months of wrestling with webdev, fighting with fragmentation, unifying all into one and taking a stand against technical troubles, we finally placed the cherry on top last night. Now, I've finally set up our 'CMS' (content management system), which is letting me write fantastic, downright awe-inspiring posts like whatever this is.

It's time for us to leap forward, and I'm just going to say this right off the bat; goodness gracious, webdev is a different kettle altogether compared to regular backend programming stuff. Don't let this discourage you, mind; we indubitably made it, by fair or foul.

So, here it is, the beehive. A hub for ideas, tips, tutorials and triumphs, even if takes trifle tackling to get there sometimes.

- So, what kind of content could I expect here?

Honestly, your guess is almost as good as mine, and you haven't even read this entire post yet.

The original idea of the beehive project was to have one subdomain dedicated to each side of the project; one for 'labs' (for programming and homelab), one for 'edu' (for resources for people in secondary and sixth-form education), one for 'human' (for more pastoral resources and docs for advocacy), et cetera.

However, quite late on in my development of the project, I've decided to unify all of these repositories (one of which was assigned to each subdomain) into one monorepo. The entire oreohive.org website project now lives on a single GitHub repo, which lets me reuse components and configurations across all these webpages.

My mentality was that the 'rising tide' would lift all ships, so to speak, and my growth of one of these little, itty-bitty projects would benefit the entire fleet.

As such, right now, we have one Prismic Space, and it's this one.
This is subject to change, but it does mean that, at least for now, a whole bunch of stuff might come under this one umbrella, and appear in this one, centralised place.
Neat for development, yes, but as our content library grows, I do wonder about the implications of not having these particularly organised into their respective topics.

So, to answer the question; stick around and find out.

- Yet Another Random Tiny Blog, then...?

Well, yes, but actually no.

The beehive is largely here because we take quite the issue with the current state of documentation on the web. We feel it's too cluttered, too commercialised, too hamstrung and too barred.

Ever heard of Medium? I mean not to pick on the platform.

Yesterday, when I finally caved and created an account to be able to access its community-generated articles, the resource I was trying to access did prove somewhat helpful. But why did I need to create an account?

This is far from the worst example I've seen, so it's perhaps unfair to bring this up first. Medium has, in all fairness, yet to spam me with ads, plague my browser with a plethora of tracking efforts or try to charge me for the resource I accessed.

While trying to study for my qualifications, I've come across a virtually countless number of resources about texts that have long been in the public domain (The Taming of the Shrew was probably written in the 1590s, for goodness' sake!), but couldn't leverage their knowledge without succumbing to a paywall.

Not everyone wants to, or even can, afford that. There are many such sites, thus many such paywalls and restrictions.

- Our 'hero adaptation'

In my opinion, we, as a human race, have our 'hero adaptation', so to speak.

Elephants have trunks, bees have stings and their striped bodies, and giraffes have their long ass necks. What do we have?

I believe we have our 'theory of mind'.
The capacity to understand that we have info others may want, and, crucially, to understand that others have info we may seek.

Yet, we curb our superpower. We seem to be doing so, anyway.

I'd argue our development of the internet is a natural extension of this.
We identified a way we could more easily share our resources. We identified a way we could so simply, without friction, share our teachings with the world, and be given back to with the practically infinite knowledge wealths of the internet.
Upload, download. Distribute, contribute, consume, receive.

This is yet another basis upon which it's arguable that we, as humans, despite many of our social constructs, identify a need for togetherness and the sheer strength we can hold when pooled together regardless of race, gender, age, disability, income or demographic.

However, it took not long for the cold-blooded claws of capitalistic crushing to crave, and eventually carve, its cut of the cake. This has come to the end user, you and I, in paywalls, excessive ads, bloat, mandatory account creations, and the harvesting of personal data.

- The current state of the web and technology as a whole

We're no gracious whiteknights of internet freedom and liberty, nor do we promise to be. We're not saviours of a purer internet, nor do we pitch ourselves to be.
If this grows hugely beyond my expectations, the funds for this project are, at some point, gonna have to come from somewhere, so no, it's not impossible that one day, we may display minimal ads or promotional materialsto keep our site and services afloat, even if they wouldn't interrupt the user's activities.

But we deem the current state of the internet more or less unacceptable.
Some websites these days are huge, resource-intensive, device-sucking, power-gulping behemoths, coated in ads, slathered in invasive telemetry and ultimately inconsiderate of your goal in visiting them. None of the things I just mentioned contribute to your search for an answer to some question about Python syntax.

Once again, our promise is not to be entirely free of ads, and especially not telemetry. We'll probably collect telemetry, and make no secret of it. We already do, via our registrar / CDN provider (Cloudflare) and occasionally via our deployment platform (Vercel).

What we set out to do is to put your needs first.

A key mentality of mine is that technology should adapt to us, not the other way around.
UI / UX design is so indispensably important to me for this very reason.
In our day and age, where more and more of our daily lives are relying on technological solutions pitched to enhance convenience and reduce friction in organic, everyday tasks, it is vital that we are able (and willing) to develop experiences truly accessible and intuitive for all who are to use them.

A home appliance that doesn't work without internet is unacceptable.
A smart lightbulb that has its functionality detrimented by the discontinuation of some online service is also, in my eyes, pretty ridiculous.
You could read this article from Android Authority on making your own fully offline smart home with helpful technologies like Zigbee and open platforms like Home Assistant that allow for offline inter-device communication.

In our world, where I use an app on my phone to request my repeat prescriptions of medication that may very well be keeping me alive, we simply cannot afford to sink knee-deep in this convoluted world of inaccessible, unintuitive technology we've found ourselves in.

What's that new thing on your taskbar? You didn't put it there. Why does your email app look different now? Wait, why are there two of them?
And why is it that we can't so trivially do something so simple as transferring pictures from a Windows PC to an iPhone, without jumping through what feels like a gazillion hoops?

We shouldn't settle for this. I shouldn't settle for this, and neither should you.
It's time to expect better. It's time to expect Beehive.

- What the Beehive stands for

Picture this:

You, a few days or so ago, were so gleeful to purchase a new laptop for your college studies.
It's a model from a year or two ago, but it's still a very potent machine, with a discrete NVIDIA GPU, eight CPU cores of pure, undiluted Ryzen blood, and all the connectivity options you could reasonably want (bar RJ45 Ethernet, of course, but you win some, you lose some).
Now, imagine that you unbox it to an absolutely beautiful setup experience, with so much knowledge of UI / UX design put into its buttons, icons, menus and intricacies. So far, so good.
Now, imagine that it asks for your Wi-Fi credentials. Sure, but why won't you let me proceed without them...?
Then, it'll try to prohibit you from proceeding with the setup until you enter Microsoft account credentials. Not once on the box did it state this requirement. Not once on any product page was this requirement stated (or even indicated!), never mind the necessity of a stable internet connection. 'This is where many draw the line', you think, 'but okay, I suppose I'll play along'.
Afterwards, you're faced with an overwhelming assortment of attempts to coerce you into agreeing to submit your diagnostic telemtry data, usage and browsing habits, perceived and analysed interests, user-identifying advertising IDs, and all sorts of invasive tactics to squeeze you of every last advertising penny.
At the same time, you're met with so many pitches of Microsoft products and services, advertisements of 'free trial[s!]' and more promotional efforts clearly and blatantly designed to squeeze you of even more money.
You battle on through, hitting 'Decline', 'No thanks', 'Only save files to this PC', and no, do not, for the love of God, import my browsing history from other browsers into Edge automatically. Please. Bugger off!
At long last you're finally greeted with the Start menu, in all its ad-shamed glory. Promotional entries litter your pinned apps, few of which you'll realistically find any use for.
But at least you're finally starting to feel at home.
You can tell it's the operating system you've long loved, because it finds magical, new ways to destroy itself following practically every update.
Apparently, in addition to the £119.99 you supposedly paid for your precious Windows 11 Home license, the pennies they tried so desparately to squeeze of you throughout that painstakingly arduous setup process weren't enough to make the OS actually good.
Oh, and God forbid you want to open a PowerPoint without installing and setting up Office. Sorry, 'Microsoft 365 Copilot', whatever on this green Earth that means.

This is the kind of experience we deem absolutely unacceptable.

It's confusing, unintuitive, downright sickening in its greed and, crucially, not prioritising of the user's needs and desires.

If you buy a computer, you might want to use it to create. You might just want to answer emails on it. You might want to watch YouTube. You might want to play games.

When you fork over such (increasingly copious!) amounts of your hard-earned money for such a capable piece of hardware, why is it, then, that it does the biddings of multi-billion dollar corporations, not yours?

- The Beehive mentality differs

The Beehive mentality is to prioritise the user and their perceived needs and desires.

In a hypothetical world where the Beehive sat atop a pile of virtually infinite resources, much like these huge corporations I speak of, and we devised a similar setup experience, I feel it could do a much better job of prioritising the needs of the user, and respecting the fact that generally, they deserve an experience that adapts to them, rather than one they are forced to adapt to and exercise patience with.

You shouldn't have to bend over backwards to your computer. These tools are pitched to be designed to help us. So, it's time to expect better.

- The good internet

While they could easily be considered a dying breed, places of the web (and places in our digital lives) that do legitimately respect our intentions and aims do still exist. In addition, I feel we don't need to let them be as endangered as they are.

An example is a nifty little website called https://cobalt.tools.
It's by a little not-for-profit group called imput (https://imput.net) that, largely in cobalt, have inspired this journey I've set out to traverse in building experiences and knowledge bases that centre the user. It has zero ads, privacy-respecting analytics that can easily be disabled, and it's blazing fast.
I highly encourage you head over to these links I've provided here to learn more about it, and donate to the project if you're feeling particularly generous and supportive, and have a few to spare

cobalt runs almost entirely off of donations and community contributions, The generosity of a hosting provider also helps in keeping it sustainable, and, even if this may've been ultimately for for-profit purposes, I still deem this proof that we're still able to and more than capable of building experiences respectful of the user.

Thus, here, the Beehive is being born. It's a little seed as of now, but I hope to, in the coming days, weeks and months, grow it into something beautiful.

And, should we get our way, there will be a virtually countless collection of fruitful resources to help you build resources and experiences of your very own.
We can beat the endangering of user-respecting experiences with the power of openly encouraging their reproduction. By allowing for remix culture.

Our GitHub repository should be opening soon enough, once we clean up our codebase and make some docs.

- Conclusion

Let's keep the user-respecting experience alive. And let's work together to do it.

Whether you're a seasoned programmer (in which case, congratulations, you most definitely have a much better idea of what you're doing than I) or you're wondering what channel the Netflix is, I invite you to join us in the fight to keep user-respecting experiences alive.

Whether you're here to laugh at how pathetic my JavaScript is (it may bring you to tears, actually, so be careful; it's like an onion with layers of confounding nonsense), or you'd consider yourself a layperson with no expertise in development, homelab, systems or writing whatsoever, you've got something to chip in. Being here is your first step.

It's worth noting that our content is not going to be exclusive to our website and platforms; we intend on publishing content, resources, guides and development logs on established platforms built by people who have more an idea of what they're doing than us.*

However, we're so glad you're here so early on, and we can't wait to set out on this new journey with you in the name of digital freedom and experiences that truly serve and respect us as they should.

Let's control our systems again.
I don't know about you, but these tables have turned much too far for my liking. I think it's about time we turn them back.

See you soon!
- oreo :))

*
Take a gander at our far-out Tumblr: https://oreohive.tumblr.com

Cheer us on on Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/oreohive

Stay tuned for some stuff on my DEV Community presence: https://dev.to/dopreo

Check us out on GitHub for when our site's repo goes live: https://github.com/oreohive

Thank you!

you can also check out:

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made with <3 by a kid in the UK

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