# Do Flamingos Know They're Pink
> Articles about how technology works, who it serves, the systems around it, and what it all costs. Digital sovereignty, open source governance, and internet rights.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).

## Pages
- [About this Blog](https://tarakiyee.com/about.md) - Do Flamingos Know They're Pink is a personal blog about technology, the systems around it, and what it all costs. The name came to me in a dream. It's the kind of question I keep circling back to: how much do we understand about the systems we're embedded in? Do the tools we build shape us in ways…
- [About the Author](https://tarakiyee.com/author.md) - Tara Tarakiyee is a public interest technologist based in Berlin and a supporter of human rights, free and open internet, and open source software. Their work sits at the intersection of technology and society: helping protect those most vulnerable to surveillance and censorship, and unlocking the…
- [Privacy Policy](https://tarakiyee.com/privacy-policy.md) - Cover Image: Licenced CC-BY-SA 3.0 Laitr Keiows Last updated: 22 February 2026 Who I am This is a personal blog operated by Tara Tarakiyee, based in Berlin, Germany. You can reach me at me@tarakiyee.com. Analytics This site uses Umami, a self-hosted, open-source analytics tool. Umami is designed to…

## Posts
- [Open Source Is Indefensible](https://tarakiyee.com/open-source-is-indefensible.md) - Codeberg's members voted to stop hosting mostly AI-generated projects. The freedom worth defending is not the freedom to be taken from, it is the freedom to refuse.
- [Fork It or Walk Away](https://tarakiyee.com/fork-it-or-walk-away.md) - "Fork it" too often just means there's the door. But exit isn't the only tool we have.
- [An Afternoon of Tedium as an Exit Tax](https://tarakiyee.com/an-afternoon-of-tedium-as-an-exit-tax.md) - TOTP is an open standard for 2FA, but the app I chose over a decade ago locked me in anyway. Getting out took a whole afternoon of tedium.
- [I Cannot Be Trusted to Send Email](https://tarakiyee.com/i-cannot-be-trusted-to-send-email.md) - I left Gmail after 21 years, but instead of going for another mail provider, I decided to self-host (what I can).
- [I Get No Ideas Inside the Machine](https://tarakiyee.com/i-get-no-ideas-inside-the-machine.md) - At Cables of Resistance, I ran a workshop asking if we can build hardware without capitalism. I was grieving what AI is doing to open source. Technologists need to see there's no innocent ground under the machine. It was always someone's land.
- [Laying the First Stones](https://tarakiyee.com/laying-the-first-stones.md) - A VPS, a reverse proxy, a password manager, and a DNS zone full of forgotten history. The autonomous stack begins to take shape.
- [On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse](https://tarakiyee.com/on-the-enshittification-of-audre-lorde-the-masters-tools-in-tech-discourse.md) - Somewhere between Audre Lorde's 1979 speech and contemporary tech discourse, the "master's tools" became a meme. This essay traces what was lost in the translation.
- [Three Servers and a Tunnel](https://tarakiyee.com/three-servers-and-a-tunnel.md) - Credentials first, then email, then everything else. Before a single service can move, the migration has to be ordered by dependency, and the infrastructure to hold it has to exist first.
- [For the Love of the Linux Desktop](https://tarakiyee.com/for-the-love-of-the-linux-desktop.md) - Twenty-five years of Linux on the desktop, long enough that the muscle memory outlasts the code. A love letter to the thing I look at and touch every day, and how it got that way.
- [The Inventory I Should Have Done Years Ago](https://tarakiyee.com/the-inventory-i-should-have-done-years-ago.md) - Every self-hosting guide starts with software. This one starts a step earlier: the unglamorous inventory of what you actually depend on, done after one too many price hikes dressed up as upgrades.
- [Why I'm Doing the Autonomous Stack Series](https://tarakiyee.com/why-im-doing-the-autonomous-stack-series.md) - Technology is a proxy for power, and power belongs to whoever controls the infrastructure. This series asks how much of my own I can take back, and what it costs to try.
- [Oiling the Doors at FOSDEM](https://tarakiyee.com/oiling-the-doors-at-fosdem.md) - No tickets, no badges, no lanyards: just a Brussels campus handed over to thousands of FOSS enthusiasts for a weekend. Notes from three years at the largest volunteer-run event in open source.
- [Welcome to Do Flamingos Know They're Pink](https://tarakiyee.com/welcome-to-do-flamingos-know-theyre-pink.md) - The blog has a new home on self-hosted infrastructure and a new name. Flamingos aren't born pink, they become pink from what they eat, which is the kind of question this place keeps circling.
- [Building a Digital Sovereignty Castle in the Sky](https://tarakiyee.com/building-a-digital-sovereignty-castle-in-the-sky.md) - European leaders keep summoning digital sovereignty into being with summits and tech champions. A speculative proposal for the thing they keep skipping: an institution that funds open hardware through public bonds.
- [The UK's Online Safety Act: A Lesson in Technosolutionism](https://tarakiyee.com/the-uks-online-safety-act-a-lesson-in-technosolutionism.md) - The UK spent two years and billions making the internet less safe. The Online Safety Act as a case study in why you cannot regulate complex social problems away with surveillance and algorithmic band-aids.
- [The Hardware Innovation Monopoly Problem: Why Europe Should Stop Chasing Unicorns](https://tarakiyee.com/the-hardware-innovation-monopoly-problem-why-europe-should-stop-chasing-unicorns.md) - Europe's hardware problem is not too few unicorns. It is mistaking private control over public infrastructure, from ASML's lithography monopoly outward, for innovation success.
- [How can Open Hardware catch up with Open Source Software?](https://tarakiyee.com/how-can-open-hardware-catch-up-with-open-source-software.md) - Open source reshaped how software gets built. Open hardware hasn't caught up, and the reason is funding: venture capital and data extraction are incompatible with the commons that open hardware would need.
- [Gardens, Not Roads: Cultivating Open Source Communities](https://tarakiyee.com/gardens-not-roads-cultivating-open-source-communities.md) - For a decade, 'roads and bridges' has framed open source as infrastructure to maintain. This piece argues for a different metaphor: gardens to cultivate, not roads to repair.
- [Digital Sovereignty in Practice: Web Browsers as a Reality Check](https://tarakiyee.com/digital-sovereignty-in-practice-web-browsers-as-a-reality-check.md) - Servo, a memory-safe browser engine, is kept alive by five engineers and a trickle of donations. A reality check on what an independent browser would actually cost the digital-sovereignty talk.
- [FOSS is more than just Licences](https://tarakiyee.com/foss-is-more-than-just-licences.md) - Openness is not neutral. Prompted by a new Open Knowledge Foundation report, a frustration with how small our imagination of free software has become, and what it could be for instead.
- [The Last CVE: A Science Fiction Short Story](https://tarakiyee.com/the-last-cve-a-science-fiction-short-story.md) - A short story. In 2035, after the global vulnerability management system collapses, a small collective guards the last allocation from an underground bunker. Fiction, entirely.
- [Training an AI on Ancient Undeciphered Texts: What I Wish I DIDN'T Learn](https://tarakiyee.com/training-an-ai-on-ancient-undeciphered-texts-what-i-wish-i-didnt-learn.md) - A skeptic of machine intelligence trains a model on an undeciphered ancient script, and learns something about pattern-matching, meaning, and himself that he would rather not have.
- [Shakespeare in the Code: The Tragedy of Xzlibius](https://tarakiyee.com/shakespeare-in-the-code-the-tragedy-of-xzlibius.md) - The xz-utils backdoor, retold as a Shakespearean tragedy: a noble robot prince, a hidden deceiver, an overburdened maintainer, and the kingdoms of giants watching from the edges. Entirely fictional.
- [Two Visions: Digital Sovereignty Between Reform and Transformation](https://tarakiyee.com/two-visions-digital-sovereignty-between-reform-and-transformation.md) - Two proposals for digital sovereignty that look like rivals but aren't. On reform versus transformation, public procurement as a lever, and why the difference between them matters more than the overlap.
- [Optimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will](https://tarakiyee.com/optimism-of-the-intellect-pessimism-of-the-will.md) - With apologies to Gramsci. On the particular exhaustion of being certain a better world is possible, and then talking to people who have been taught that this one is the only one on offer.
- [We Need More Than the EuroStack](https://tarakiyee.com/we-need-more-than-the-eurostack.md) - The EuroStack initiative is hard, valuable work, and still not enough. Where Europe's flagship digital-sovereignty proposal runs into the same lack of political imagination it was meant to escape.
- [The Luddite Stack: or How to Outlast the AI Ice Age](https://tarakiyee.com/the-luddite-stack-or-how-to-outlast-the-ai-ice-age.md) - Subsidise, kill the competition, lock in the overpriced mess: the monopoly playbook now runs on AI. A guide to building the kind of stack that can outlast the subsidies when they end.
- [The Future is Meaningless and I Hate It](https://tarakiyee.com/the-future-is-meaningless-and-i-hate-it.md) - The Semantic Web promised a digital future that actually understood us. Instead we got brute-force models passing probability off as comprehension. On the meaning we were promised and the noise we got.
- [Mozilla: All We Want is a User Agent](https://tarakiyee.com/mozilla-all-we-want-is-a-user-agent.md) - Part frustration, part former appreciation. On Mozilla's turn toward 'privacy-first' advertising, and the quiet wish that it would go back to building a browser that works for the person using it.
- [I Was Wrong About the Open Source Bubble](https://tarakiyee.com/i-was-wrong-about-the-open-source-bubble.md) - A follow-up, and a correction. Revisiting the open source bubble argument after the responses came in, including the ones that stopped at the title.
- [Suspending X: Brazil’s Ongoing Struggle to Govern Big Tech](https://tarakiyee.com/suspending-x-brazils-ongoing-struggle-to-govern-big-tech.md) - Musk called it a free-speech violation. Brazil called it refusing to follow the law. Past the inflammatory tweets, what the suspension of X reveals about whether any state can govern Big Tech.
- [Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?](https://tarakiyee.com/is-the-open-source-bubble-about-to-burst.md) - Open source isn't a hype bubble like crypto or the metaverse. It's something stranger: a real one, built on how completely the digital world has come to depend on work it barely funds.
- [Faking Git Till You Make It: Open Source Maintainers Beware of Reputation Farming](https://tarakiyee.com/faking-git-till-you-make-it-open-source-maintainers-beware-of-reputation-farming.md) - It has a name: reputation farming. The under-reported, slightly dangerous practice of manufacturing open source credibility through hollow GitHub activity, and why maintainers should care.
- [What on Earth is Open Source AI?](https://tarakiyee.com/what-on-earth-is-open-source-ai.md) - The Open Source AI definition fight, from someone who thinks the AI gold rush is both an environmental disaster and badly oversold. What 'open' can and cannot mean once you bolt it onto a model.
- [Can I figure out if I'm legally required to use an SBOM in my OSS without asking a lawyer?](https://tarakiyee.com/can-i-figure-out-if-im-legally-required-to-use-an-sbom-in-my-oss-without-asking-a-lawyer.md) - SBOMs keep showing up in cybersecurity regulation, and the rules are a maze. One open-source developer's attempt to work out what actually applies, armed with a search engine and no lawyer.
- [What's Elections got to EU with IT](https://tarakiyee.com/whats-elections-got-to-eu-with-it.md) - It's EU Parliament election season. A short, non-partisan recap of the recent digital regulations, from AI to privacy to cybersecurity, that reach well beyond Europe's borders.
- [Let's Talk About Open Source in Munich (and Everywhere Else)](https://tarakiyee.com/lets-talk-about-open-source-in-munich-and-everywhere-else.md) - Schleswig-Holstein is dropping Microsoft Office for LibreOffice, and the framing matters as much as the switch. On public-sector open source, and what the migration is really about.
- [The FCC is coming for BGP, what about the EU?](https://tarakiyee.com/the-fcc-is-coming-for-bgp-what-about-the-eu.md) - If DNS is the internet's address book, BGP is its motorway, and it has run on trust for decades. As the FCC moves to regulate it, a look at whether the EU should follow.
- [What I Learnt from What We Learnt from the xz-utils Incident](https://tarakiyee.com/what-i-learnt-from-what-we-learnt-from-the-xz-utils-incident.md) - Not the xz-utils backdoor, but the month everyone spent talking about it. On the attention economy of a security incident, and what the conversation revealed that the vulnerability didn't.
- [SconePro with Network Jam and Clotted Streams](https://tarakiyee.com/sconepro-with-network-jam-and-clotted-streams.md) - Notes from an IETF working-group-forming session where internet providers and video platforms tried to make traffic shaping work a little better, and what that cooperation means for net neutrality.
- [Hello W- nah just messing with you 🤣](https://tarakiyee.com/hello-w-nah-just-messing-with-you--f0-9f-a4-a3.md) - The first post back after a long silence. Where the old archive went, how the internet I used to write about turned out to be fiction, and why it feels so good to be writing anyway.

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