I scrolled a bit through the communities. We already have several “DIY” communities. But they’re mostly somewhat inactive, except the slrpnk.net one. Not sure where to go with this. Eiter we just use that one. Or make a new one. I think I could mod some community on piefed.social. But the question is whether that should be some more general maker lounge. I like the unfinished projects idea. But maybe it’s just too much niche of a niche… But if it’s just another DIY community, maybe we rather post a bit in the already existing community… I’m really not sure what’s best here.

How about making it live on in a smaller form as a community on an existing instance, no additional hosting needed? There’s already one with the same name on LW. Or we could create a new one for people to move to.

I think a bit of a problem is, how it only facilitates creating alternative communities. I mean it definitely does… And now we have 15 technology communities. But that in itself isn’t necessarily better. And it’s super confusing for beginners who now need to learn all the drama and find out whether they want to join technology, or technology, or tech or another technology… It’d be better if we somehow managed to go some extra mile with that kind of functionality. I have all the expert knowledge to tell apart the tankie community from the anti-zionist one, from the pro-AI one… But that regularly takes a good amount of experience and getting yelled at. And I can see how it can be a bit of a letdown for newbies. They might just want to get started with some Reddit alternative without all the identity war and confusing (and not obvious) fragmentation.

I have a business internet connection as well. I’m going to cancel it though, eventually. It’s a bit pricey. And they don’t do IPv6 for longterm customers, I just got my static IPv4 and that’s it.

Yeah, what I meant with DNS: I run a DNS Adblocker. And the big German ISPs do some silly DNS censoring, mostly for movie piracy websites. So I run my own DNS server. I had that configured on all my devices. Which is kind if great, I’ll get a good amount of ads and trackers blocked without any additional effort. But it’s a huge single point of failure. So now I have some services like DNS run on a VPS.

I’ve been selfhosting at home for quite a while. And we had power outages, construction work cut the internet cable, I messed up the computer… And the annoyance level just varies a lot depending on the specific service. I’m completely fine without mail for a few hours, Peertube and the Fediverse being unreachable. There will also be error notifications on my phone because Nextcloud can’t sync the calendar etc any more. But all that stuff will recover and I’ll manage to find something else to do. What I found more annoying is my instant messenger go down, because I use it to communicate more time-critical stuff with my family. Also annoying to hardcode the DNS server onto every device, they’re now all offline and I need to google the phone number of the power company. Though changing the DNS settings back isn’t too hard. And my Home Assistant sometimes does weird stuff so I’m gonna need to check on all the devices. And the Ikea lightbulbs will turn on anyway the moment power has been restored.

Currently not looking too good… We have a pretty constant 1 million active users. Despite all the previous enshittification of mainstream social media. But yeah, that’s the spirit 👍

It depends on what you’re trying to do on your computer. No command line is needed for web surfing, checking emails, writing office documents, playing games, watching videos… It’s not too dissimilar to Windows in that regard. Windows also has the command line and the power shell. You can use it if you like, but you don’t have to. There’s other tasks for which you need it, though. For example fixing your computer might involve the command line. Or software development.

There will be a trace. First of all, the way the Fediverse it set up, the instances all cooperate from distributing posts and comments, to deleting them. There’s no guarantee every instance does it (correctly). And as the Fediverse is made up of different software, it also depends on the specific implementation.

And then we also have AI scrapers, the Wayback Machine and other internet archives. It’ll end up there as well.

So better treat everything as easily traceable which you post in public. And it’s notoriously difficult to really remove stuff from the internet anyway.

Plus the US has some absurdly large datacenters for surveillance. Idk if it’s clever to lie to them about your social media history. They certainly have the capacity to scrape posts and store them forever.

Idk. That’s a bit of a treacherous point in itself. I mean first of all life isn’t supposed to be just the bare essentials. But than that argument gets abused a lot, the usual stuff being “a bit of beating didn’t harm me”… but it probably did. At least I’ve rarely seen it been used in a good context. I’d say it depends. Some things used to be better, or simpler back in the days. Some weren’t. I think a lot of things (in society) improved in the 20 years or so since I’ve finished growing up. I don’t think the internet did. All the social media stuff got way worse. But it’s complicated. I don’t see any reason to be on 4chan at 13yo. But at the same time we also don’t want some “clean” dystopian society like in the dark sci-fi movies. Sexuality is part of life. And so is making mistakes, experiences…

Awesome!

Hmmh. Is there good Free Software to do these things with a Linux server at home?

Yeah, I mean they do have to be able to communicate with their friends, listen to audiobooks… Do their homework assignments, look up the bus schedule or text/call mom to pick them up, read/watch stuff if they like… Learn about the world. So there needs to be some sane way to do these things.

But it’s not like anyone needs to send in their ID to Google to accomplish that.

Huh. And how do these age checks work? Is that something you’d call your internet service provider to remove for you? Or is it just the average “Are you over 18? Y/N” popup?

But doesn’t sound too different from what we got. My ISP here in Germany has some secret list of forbidden piracy sites. So I switched to a different DNS server and I’m all good. Is that what they do in the UK as well? Sorry I’m lacking a bit in first hand experience. Haven’t been there in a while. An when on vacation, I rarely try to watch porn or read about automatic rifles 😅

Hmmh, sure. That’s usually 300% of what this is about. Though they have some “genuine” attempts at filtering the internet over in the UK. From what I gather, ISPs are supposed to filter pornography, copyright violations, gambling, weapons and violence and all sorts of stuff (Edit:??) per default. So there seems to be some wish for a “family safe” internet mixed in with the usual exploiting children to manifest some surveillance dystopia… Which definitely is the major reason why this is pushed all around the globe.

Yeah, since it’s the UK, I have a hunch that will include scanning your ID and uploading it to 5 different “international parners” aka American companies. To be tied to all online activity… Why not simply mandate parental controls be implemented in all phones and tablets, and we can do it without all the privacy invasion?

How about you have a look at some public instances, scroll through some content, watch a few videos and see which one you like better from a user perspective? I mean technically, they both work. Setup of an instance is just done once, and I guess uploading videos has about the same complexity… So it’s down to what interface you like, and where you’d find your audience.

Uh. I kinda dislike all these closed-source additional moderating systems flange-mounted to the Fediverse. I think in the long-term, we should come up with a good system with good effectiveness, plus (/despite of) transparency, and share it amongst the entire Fediverse.

The thing is, a link to a Wikipedia article isn’t structured data either. It could very well link to the article about The Little Mermaid. Or the List of fictional pirates. So in that regard, both approaches are about on the same level. The hashtag just cuts off the unnecessary “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…”

I’m afraid if the idea is something like that, it won’t allow users to search for content nearby. That’d require some coordinates to calculate distance. If it’s just names, it’s closer to the concept of hashtags. You could as well add #Melbourne in the text (on Mastodon for example). And people would then be able to click on #Melbourne or maybe subscribe to the hashtag once/if that feature is ready on Lemmy.

Really hard to tell. I mean there are situations in which people think they’re doing someone a favour. But they’re really not. Upside of doing it individually is: affected people get to pick the model they like best. And they can prompt it however they like. Depends a bit on your expertise on the matter if your pre-generated stuff is on the same level or more a disservice. Upside of pre-generating it once is: maybe a bit less CO2 in the atmosphere and a few less trees killed. But that certainly depends on how many people read those descriptions. If there’s just 2 people with screenreaders out there, who don’t even click on all the images, you might very well be wasting compute. And have a negative balance on the environment.