Do you have a credit card?

If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.

You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.

And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that’s no reason to not take free shit from them.

(And to the next group of people: I’m closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven’t banned me, so I’m inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than “nothing”.)

The only way you could make that worse is if Palantir bought them all first.

fax the FBI their plans

Opsec is not the fediverse’s strenth, no. Anything you post here is going right to the FBI, courtesy of Palantir and Peter Thiel.

Anything you post online ANYWHERE is likely to end up there: if it’s not e2e encrypted, then you just told the FBI, and even if it is, you probably shouldn’t trust that it’s actually secure unless there’s public audits showing that it is, and you’re using a reproducible build from verified source.

…also, unrelated rant: stop taking pictures of people at protests and posting it online. Why is everyone doing state security’s job for them?

Look, if you can post your way out of this, then we should have been able to post our way into not having to.

But, judging from the outcomes of all THAT posting, I strongly doubt there’s a single thing anyone can post anywhere that’ll suddenly make people decide to wake up one day and go ‘Oh my! What a mess, I should throw away my entire world view and do ________!’ because that’s very much not how people actually work.

Best case, there’s enough pain and blood to nudge the lazy fucks into doing something in 2 years, but really, that doesn’t do anyone any good for the next 2 years and also very much isn’t assured: at least some of the lazies are actually in favor of this and the facists have a pretty good grip on the media and social network effects, so you can’t make a toot and expect it’ll do shit.

We’re past the polite letters to the editor stage, and in the misery and violence phase, even if it’s still being mostly coated in decorum.

I’m not a huge fan of the email analogy, because nobody knows how email works who isn’t a tech nerd anyways.

See: people who ask what your gmail is, not what your email is.

I’ve started explaining it as picking a user and server name you like, and then that’s how and where you login to the ‘fediverse’.

Less tech people have seemed to follow that at least, since it’s a much simpler thing they can understand: they get what a username is, they get what logging in is, and they get that a username and a login lets you access something.

And before everyone comes in with why that’s a horrible explanation, I know. It’s terrible, but it’s terrible enough that I’ve got family members who can’t keep left and right clicking sorted out to understand what I’m trying to say and how all these things are related.

Oh, maybe I wasn’t clear: this isn’t the usual mods doing mods, they were such bad posters the admins banned their entire sub.

Getting banned from a subreddit is easy, getting the admins to kick you, your friends, and your community off the site requires exquisite and well-developed shitposting skills beyond those of most mortals.

Hexbear is the big instance of people who are so fucked they tend to get banned even from there.

No, no. They’re a group of posters so awful they got banned from Reddit.

And let’s be honest, you can be pretty much the worst person on earth and survive in your own little bubble on Reddit, but, for whatever reason, they couldn’t.

Insert oh-no-well-anyway meme here.

See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially.

Right-ish, but I’d say there was actually a simpler problem than the one you laid out.

The immediate and obvious thing that killed OS/2 wasn’t the compatibility layer, it was driven by IBM not having any drivers for any hardware that was not sold by IBM, and Windows having (relatively) broad support for everything anyone was likely to actually have.

Worse, IBM pushed for support for features that IBM hardware support didn’t support to be killed, so you ended up with a Windows that supported your hardware, the features you wanted, and ran on cheaper hardware fighting it out with an OS/2 that did none of that.

IBM essentially decided to, well, be IBM and committed suicide in the market, and didn’t really address a lot of the stupid crap until Warp 3, at which point it didn’t matter and was years too late, and Windows 95 came swooping in shortly thereafter and that was the end of any real competition on the desktop OS scene for quite a while.

Ah cool. I never noticed that option, but that certainly improves things.

That should probably either be default or a thing asked on setup since I’d wager most people probably actually do want that.

It’s both horrible discovery and a limited number of creators.

But, for discoverability, https://sepiasearch.org/ might help you find things to watch, since it’s the only good multi-server search I’ve seen. (And run by the peertube devs.)

If you’re running HomeAssistant, you can integrate the printer into HA, and have camera streams and full controls.

If you’re not running HA, well, this is not especially useful.

It means they don’t plan to add support but don’t want to tell you that so it’s “on the radar”.

Wouldn’t hold my breath or expect anything.

Well I have a new project for the weekend.

loops, whatever the hell that is

FediverseTok, which I expect to get a lot more popular in the US pretty soon.

That’s probably true, though I’m not sure who has ever actually made a legitimate determination since you’d have to remove the non-humans from the numbers first and, well, Reddit isn’t going to tank their MAU numbers by ever releasing that kind of stat.

It’s also not helped once you hit a certain size and the nature of scale takes over and the level of toxicity goes up: even in small groups, when a new person shows up and asks the same question for the 20th time, they start taking shit for it. If you’re in a BIG group, it turns into a giant dogpile, and people stop asking questions because who the hell likes that kind of response, so you end up with a lot of people who are subscribed to something, but none of whom actually contribute at all.

It sounds like British politicians are the ones deciding harmful content, no?

So this will probably go exactly how you’re expecting, in the long term.

A Lemmy community with 100 active members is more likely to be 100 active humans than a subreddit with 10,000 members is, based on the last time I went to Reddit: it was so, so clear that everything was either ChatGPT, or a repost of shit even I had already seen, or was just otherwise obviously not an authentic human sharing something interesting.

So yeah, not entirely surprising.

Because they’re ancient, depreciated, and technically obsolete.

For example: usenet groups are essentially unmoderated, which allows spammers, trolls, and bad actors free reign to do what it is they do. This was not a design consideration when usenet was being developed, because the assumption was all the users would have a name, email, and traceable identity so if you acted like a stupid shit, everyone already knew exactly who you were, where you worked/went to school, and could apply actual real-world social pressure to you to stop being a stupid fuck.

This, of course, does not work anymore, and has basically been the primary driver of why usenet has just plain died as a discussion forum because you just can’t have an unmoderated anything without it turning into the worst of 4chan, twitter, and insert-nazi-site-of-choice-here combined with a nonstop flood of spam and scams.

So it died, everyone moved on, and I don’t think that there’s really anyone who thinks the global usenet backbone is salvagable as a communications method.

HOWEVER, you can of course run your own NNTP server and limit access via local accounts and simply not take the big global feed. It’s useful as a protocol, but then, at that point, why use NNTP over a forum software, or Lemmy (even if it’s not federating), or whatever?

Considering what’s going on in the world, I for one would certainly love to hear from someone who’s done the emigration thing more than once.

Very relevant to my interests going into 2025, that’s for damn sure.