• 0 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle







  • The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn’t something your friends have or are willing to get, then it’s not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I’m a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn’t be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it’s still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.


  • A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what’s missing is defederation policy.

    Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you’re on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I’m on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there’s a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.

    Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that’s due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That’s their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).

    //edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will ‘live’ on your instance, and thus be under your instance’s rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don’t today intend to create any communities, it’s good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.


  • First- understand that everyone goes through this, everybody has an answer for you, but the answer that worked for them may not work for you. There’s no right or wrong answer. A lot of people say ‘the way to get over someone is to get under someone’ personally I’ve never subscribed to that sort of thinking. It leads to unhealthy rebound relationships IMHO.

    The only thing that will really fix this is time. So there is no magic bullet. There are things you can do to help though or pass the time faster. The biggest one is find ways to not ruminate. Focus your attention on other things, ideally useful things. Take some time to improve yourself in fun ways. Hit the gym is an obvious one, but I generally recommend take up a hobby or learn an instrument or take a class. Basically learn some fun new skill and focus your attention on that. It serves as a distraction from your grief, but also a source of engagement and a little happiness.
    It WILL get better.


  • I’d be interested. I have experience moderating Reddit communities (I’m /u/SirEDCaLot over there too).

    I’m Eastern time. But I can’t commit to any specific amount of availability for two reasons. 1. My real life is pretty hectic and many days I literally have no time at all to participate let alone moderate, and 2. Lemmy/Reddit for me is a hobby, not a job, and I have no desire to change that. So my availability is ‘when I have time and feel like doing it’. Sometimes that will mean I disappear for days, sometimes that means I’m on for multiple hours per day.

    What I will say though- is that whatever I do have time to do, I will do well. I believe in treating users with respect, even when they break seemingly simple rules. I’ve found that if you don’t assume bad faith and treat people with respect, even when they appear to be idiots, more often than not they return the gesture.
    I also believe that moderators are more like janitors than gods. So I’m not interested in ‘power’.




  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.mltoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSynology vs DIY
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Honestly I think you’ll be happy either way. Synology is very very good at some things. And the software makes it very easy and approachable to spin up a lot of private cloud type stuff without a lot of technical messing around. That said, you will get more hardware/performance for your dollar with a PC server. You can go the DIY route, or if you don’t mind a little more power consumption and want more performance buy a used Dell PowerEdge on eBay. Based on what you say, I think you’ll be happy either way. The real value you get from Synology is their software. Their photo app is very wife friendly. And I don’t think you’ll find any serious restrictions with it, you get full root SSH access into the box.

    So I guess my suggestion would be evaluate the photo management in TrueNAS versus Synology. You can spin up a virtual machine of TrueNAS on your desktop and play with it if you want. The only other gotcha is if you want Plex to do transcoding you definitely want the PC because you can throw in a GPU and accelerate that a lot.

    //edit- the one other thing to mention is backups- Synology has GREAT backup software and it’s free. Active Backup for Business will back up your desktop/laptop, versioned, deduplicated, very efficiently. And Hyper Backup will backup your Synology itself (or some parts of it) to the cloud, optionally with client-side encryption. I suggest Wasabi as the backend for that, it’s only like $7/TB/mo. Or just get another Synology and put it at the house of someone you know and you have an instant offsite backup with no recurring cost.


  • I don’t think he’ll sell willingly. I just could see a scenario where his creditors who paid for a large part of it demand to see some return on investment and force him too.

    I think for that to happen, 1. value of TSLA would have to drop a lot making creditors question his ability to repay, and 2. value of TWTR would have to remain relatively high. Right now TSLA is rising and TWTR valuation is falling so if I was a creditor I’d much rather hold Elon debt than a piece of TWTR.

    Agreed. The fact that especially Reddit, but a lesser extent Twitter have been unable to monetize genuine human posts and all the data that gives (Reddit is basically the only way to make Google useful nowadays and Twitter is basically the only place to go for breaking news) seems negligent to me.

    Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc haven’t found any creative way to monetize the numerous genuine interactions on their platform other than data mining them for ad targeting. So they double down and triple down again on that- Facebook went creepy and might as well be a credit bureau, Reddit tried to stay non-evil for a while, Twitter just kind of did their own thing and burned cash and never really made money but investors stayed in because a company that big has to eventually make money somehow.
    Now they all say HOLY SHIT WE ACTUALLY HAVE SOMETHING OF REAL VALUE TO SELL!!! and see AI training as their winning lottery ticket.

    What strikes me though is how un-creative it all is. Here’s a bunch of the most important databases in human history and the best they can think up is ads and AI training?
    And they all do the same thing- grow into huge companies with tons of distraction side projects and middle managers that burn cash, then wonder why they aren’t profitable.
    Elon saw that with Twitter- to run Twitter you need server people and developers and ad salespeople and the rest of them probably did little of use. Same thing is probably true with Reddit though. Reddit has like 2000 employees. What the hell do they all do? It sure as hell isn’t productive development. I’d bet money they have a ton of useless middle management.

    Any one of these companies (IMHO) would do much better trying to be a utility more or less. Make it easy and cheap/free for everyone, but keep operating costs down. Make a little money off a lot of people. And do what Reddit would do if they had two brain cells to rub together- pay us a fee and you are the customer and can use the thing however you want; or don’t and you see a ton of ads.


  • I don’t see Elon selling Twitter. He’s too far in. He paid $44bn for it, by most estimates it’s probably worth half that today (both due to lower traffic and Elon seriously overpaying from the start). So if he sells, best case scenario he takes a 50% haircut. Crazy or not he has a plan for the thing, so he’s gonna do his plan and if it works he’ll make a bundle and if not then it’ll shrink a lot. But I see him hanging on to it with a skeleton crew before he sells it.

    This scraping isn’t new and hasn’t increased to the level where it is costing them anything. It’s just it now has hype and a price tag around it so they want their cut.

    Well yeah, that’s what I meant. The costs of having someone scrape the database are essentially zero for Twitter/Reddit. The lost opportunity cost however is astronomical. Reddit and Twitter both are sitting on an incredibly valuable database of genuine interactions. And I understand not wanting to give that away for free.
    Problem is, it’s too late. Reddit and Twitter have both been scraped already. So locking barn door after horse has left just pisses off the users.


  • I agree that there’s plenty of FOSS projects as good as or better than Signal from a crypto POV.

    NONE of them are anywhere close to signal when it comes to number of users. And if your friends don’t have it, then you can’t talk to anyone on it.

    And if your friend loses their phone and finds out they just lost all their chats too, they’re gonna say ‘fuck that, I’ll just use iMessage so next time I don’t lose anything’.


  • I tried hard to push XMPP back in its day. Little success sadly, that was when IM was going out of style in favor of SMS. I kept using Trillian and watching as more and more contacts went offline never to return. Then Google announced they were killing their XMPP gateway and that was a nail in the coffin.

    The bigger problem with XMPP was varying support of various XEPs leading to an uneven user experience with mismatched clients. That in itself was fixable, and not a problem for people like us, but it became a problem when trying to get ‘normies’ interested. Tell someone like us ‘you can’t video chat that guy, his client doesn’t have calling capability’ and that makes perfect sense. Tell an average person that, and they hear ‘this system sucks and I can’t count on it to do what I want, I should stop using it’. Then they go on Discord or iMessage or whatever, and it works right the first time every time, and they stay.

    And therein lies the real problem. You and I can wax poetic about the pros and cons of this or that system and its security, but if I can’t get my non-cryptohead friends to use it, then it’s worthless.
    And THAT is why Signal succeeded and XMPP failed. Because it’s dead fucking simple to set up. Download the app, punch in the SMS security code, and you’re online. Questions like ‘choose which client software you want’ or ‘pick which instance you want to sign up with’ kill adoption for average non-techie people. They say ‘I don’t know what to choose, I don’t want to choose wrong and cause a bigger problem, so I’ll just not choose and close this’.