𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

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 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 
  • 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2022

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  • Yeah, despite the strong anti-crypto sentiment on Lemmy, this is exactly the problem that projects like Nostr is trying to solve by integrating Lighting as a first-class payment system in the ecosystem.

    Services get paid for by one of four ways:

    • Harvesting and reselling of user data. Which is wildly unpopular, and why a lot of people are on Lemmy and not Reddit or Facebook.
    • Ads. Which is also unpopular and again why people come to services like Lemmy
    • Pay-for-service, which is what you’re suggesting, only via crypto, which is easier than accepting credit card transactions, and safer for users.
    • The hosted paying for it out of the goodness of their hearts. So, charity. Sometimes there’s corporate charity, and that’s nice, except for the potential for money coming with strings attached, now or eventually.

    Someone always pays; its expensive to host a popular instance. People suggesting you should host for free are selfish freeloaders, so know that some people understand that hosting costs, and sympathize with with your desire to offset that cost.

    I like the volunteer micro-transaction model. Those who can afford to pay some amount for good service, and hopefully this provides welfare for those who can’t afford to pay. But the cryptocurrency space is a mess at the moment, and an economical currency (probably proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work) needs to gain some traction, and overcome a lot of ignorant bigotry.



  • There are some excellent apps out there, and by and large they look and work better than commercial apps, IME. So I disagree with the assertion that I have to stay with commercial software.

    What I was asking for, in my post, was not which apps have better UX than Facebook, but rather which of the very many OSS, federated (although, not necessary for my use case), self-hosted platforms fit the specific use, and ideally with a straightforward iOS mobile app. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be able to quickly take and post photos to a private channel/community/wall.

    Circles really is quite nice in all respects. I think they’re hindered by their choice of backend. I’ve been using Matrix for years, and key management has always been a hot mess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the issues we encountered were related to Matrix’s god-awful and buggy PK negotiation & management process.





  • I can see that, although TBH I almost never have to “admin” EndeavourOS. I just upgrade every once in a while.

    Most important to me is being able to find and install whatever software I want, and I have a string preference that it either be installed in my ~, or be managed by the package manager. I really dislike sideloading software globally. And Arch does this better than most. AUR is massive, and packages are trivial to write and install in the rare event something isn’t in AUR.


  • Base Arch can be fussy, but that’s because there’s a lot to set up, so many opportunities to forget things and only discover them later.

    I ran Artix on a laptop for about a year; that was a constant PITA, although I still value their goals.

    But EndeavourOS has been an entirely different matter. It’s a “just works” Arch derivative.

    I had so many fewer problems with Arch that I went through the effort to convert my 3 personal cloud servers from Debian to it. I went through a lot of work to replace thee default Mint on an ODroid to Arch, and it’s been so much better. I put Endeavor on the last two non-servers I installed. So, yes, I personally find out far more reliable and easier to work with than Ubuntu, Debian, or Mint.

    That said, I had dad install Mint on a new computer he bought because I had to do it over the phone and he never, ever, upgrades his packages, and almost never installs anything. If all I’m going to do is install it once and then never change anything, Mint is easier. But for a normal use case where I’m regularly updating and installing software, Arch is far easier and more reliable.




  • It sucks the same way Python sucks. Some people just really don’t like indentation-based syntax. I’m one of them, so I dislike both formats. However, if you groove on that sort of thing, I don’t think YAML is any worse than any other markup.

    Oddly, I get along with Haskell, which also used indentation for scoping/delimiting; I can’t explain that, except that, somehow, indentation-based syntax seems to fit better with functional languages. But I have no clear argument about why; it’s just an oddity in my aesthetics.



  • But control of the protocol - the definition and development - is still controlled by the for-profit company, right? It hasn’t been handed over to a nonprofit governance committee, has it?

    Federation or not, if Bluesky dominates the protocol, they can decide to stop federating and essentially kill the independent servers. Much like what Signal did. Sure, you can run your own Signal server, but without access to the dominant player’s market, and using a protocol that’s controlled monopolistically, it’s practically useless to do so - which is why almost nobody does it anymore.


  • I really like the Nostr protocol, though. It’s too bad the network is so inundated by cryptocurrency topics.

    It’s simple, it has a nice extension process (standing on the shoulders of giants), and it’s super easy and lightweight to self-host. It reminds me a lot of the early days of http, when it was more common (as a developer) to telnet to port 80 and just type in a couple of lines of header and get a response.

    Sadly, Nostr’s association with cryptocurrency, and the fact that 90% of the traffic on it is cryptocurrency created posts, has been a severe handicap.