I’m not as optimistic as you.

Hosting video is really expensive. Making video is really expensive. YouTube was losing money for about 15 years despite having a monopoly on online video for most of that time and the best advertising tech in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to make a free competitor to YouTube.

On the paid side, there’s plenty of streaming services that are making money. But you have to be already established in order to get a contract. And since you will typically have to use social media in order to get past that initial barrier, it might as well include YouTube.

However, my guess is that YouTube makes the majority of it’s money from larger channels. If the larger channels all join paid streaming services(e.g. Nebula) then gradually that may be able to bring YouTube down.

It isn’t on a mobile device where you might go out of wifi or cellular coverage. But it’s probably a good thing as I don’t want my tab habit wearing out my disk

Why would you hand your browsing data to the VPN company? It’s just moving the problem.

Unlike Google Maps, OSM is just as useful if you don’t drive. I love it for walking and cycling, it’s got all the little paths, categorized correctly.

Debian. The basic install is very bare bones.

By the way, 1 tablespoon of peanut butter does not weigh 14.79 grams. 1 US tablespoon is a unit of volume that’s equal to 14.79 milliliters(mils). Grams are a unit of mass. In order to convert between them we need the density. Because the metric system is great, the density of water is 1g/mil, so 1 US tablespoon of water weighs exactly 14.79 mils. However the density of peanut butter is a bit higher, so the US tablespoon of peanut butter will weigh a bit more.

Additional pedantry, yes I did have to write US tablespoon every time. A US tablespoon is 14.79mils, a metric tablespoon is 15mils, a traditional Australian tablespoon was 20mils although now they mostly use metric tablespoons.

Further evidence for this is ChromeOS. It’s just a Linux distro, but worse. It does little more than run Chrome. Yet it’s popular. Anyone that tolerates ChromeOS would have an even better time on most of the standard distros if they had someone to set it up for them.

I haven’t had any issues with Nextcloud yet. But any torrent client refuses to work. I’ve tried various qbittorrent containers, transmission, deluge briefly, they all work for a while but eventual refuse to do anything.

The same thing is true here. A novice shouldn’t be hosting their own instance, heck a experienced user shouldn’t host their own instance unless they want a hobby.

Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that’s the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as “self hosted social media”, I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.

We’re not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they’re the people that are most likely to stick around.

In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That suggests it’s about right.

Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.

I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.

Email is the only federated social platform that every normal person is familiar with. It doesn’t matter that the technical specifications are completely different. The metaphor goes as far as “in the fediverse anyone signed up with any instance can communicate with anyone on any other instance, like email”. For that purpose, it’s a good metaphor.

But isn’t that the whole point. The working class becomes the new rich class. That sounds like equal distribution of wealth.

But why is it less weird to suck on rotten plant ovaries? That’s what alcohol is. Food is fucking weird.

The same could be said for K-9. What more could you want from an email app.

If it’s faster to get an AI to write your commit messages than to write them yourself, your commit messages are too long. They should be one sentence.

Yes, exactly, you get it! I don’t like paying for things, you don’t like paying for things. Paying for things sucks. We need post scarcity communism.

Corporate welfare is a problem in all capitalist countries

There’s a nice explanation of how caddy reverse proxies work here. https://caddy.community/t/using-caddy-as-a-reverse-proxy-in-a-home-network/9427

Essentially you setup your router to port forward any new incoming connections to Caddy, which then decides what to do with them according to the configuration (Caddyfile).

Even simpler: Your local network is like a castle, inside is a safe and secure place where your devices communicate freely. Your router is a firewall around the castle, by default it blocks incoming connections. This is good because the internet is scary. By port forwarding you allow a door in the firewall which leads to Caddy, which is like a guard. Caddy asks them what they want, and if they say e.g. jellyfin.example.com, then it sets up an encrypted connection with https to your local jellyfin server. If they want anything else they aren’t allowed in.

I guess so. Your question was

Would anyone be interested in something like that?

Which most of us have answered with a clear “no”. So I guess we’re done here.