MudMan

Sorry, but no. My current path is

C:\Users\<user>\Documents

I literally just navigated to my documents folder in a explorer window and copy pasted the path here. I swear I’m not making this up.

I’m pretty sure that these days syncing your documents folder with OneDrive is two separate opt-ins: one to log in to OneDrive at all and one to select whether to sync your libraries.

I am not going to set up a VM just to check this, but I have multiple Windows machines in operation on Win10 and Win11 at home right now and none of them are syncing my libraries. That ranges from five year old Win10 installs to Win11 installs as recent as a couple of months ago.

For the record, I don’t think you’re crazy either. There’s definitely something baked into the install we’re doing differently or some version difference or whatever. It’s surprisingly hard to suss this out at this point, since there’s a fairly complex set of could-backed choices, first time setup choices and maybe even regional changes, I’m not sure. The one interesting, kinda shocking takeaway is how differently our machines can be set up based on probably some checkmark we each set up differently once ages ago or whatever the hell this is.

I am baffled by this language you speak. Are you trying to break an AI overlord by speaking in paradoxes or…?

I mean, what’s to understand? Kids are dumb and can’t understand media, adults are dumb and can’t understand media they didn’t watch as kids.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Because at some point the enshittification breaks the UX and the rising costs of services become more comparable.

I find that being a question so emblematic of the mindset in the current OSS community and a big cause of why it’s hard for it to reach wide audiences.

The point I’m making is that commercial services are becoming increasingly less convenient and having worse UX. Convenience and UX are the only two things that matter for user-level software. Customization doesn’t matter, security doesn’t matter, control doesn’t matter. Convenience and UX are it.

We’re getting to the point where having your email hosted at home is becoming more convenient than having to endure a million warnings about how your inbox is 85% full and you should pay Google for storage. It’s less convenient to set up and it has worse UX, though, so average users don’t even consider it.

We’re getting to the point where putting an offline file for whatever you want to watch in a drive is looping back around to being more convenient than going to a website to see which of a hundred streaming services has what you want to watch, then navigate past a bunch of updates and ads to get to it. We’re getting to the point where having Google disable random features of your IoT stuff with no warning is worse than having them all plugged in to a local device via Zigbee or Matter. To where storing your files yourself may be on par for cost long term, where it may be easier to stream your old MP3 collection than deal with Spotify and so on.

But the software to do it is still a bridge too far. It doesn’t have to be, but it’s hard to get it to where it needs to go.

I think there’s a bit of misunderstanding there. I’m not saying we should force self-hosting. I’m saying that when you get enshittification to a certain point, the idea of a non-shitty service becomes a selling point and you can compete on that as a feature.

You see that in commercial software all the time. Davinci Resolve exists because nobody wants to deal with Adobe, ClipStudio grew for the same reason, then went around that loop and now Affinity is getting some attention, and so on.

So what I’m saying is a self-contained package/service for self-hosting has a good chance to compete on price and features with enshittified services. The problem with getting that out of the OSS community is that they typically have more decisionmaking power on the engineering side and you end up with overly flexible, customizable software no mom and pop normie would ever get into unless they’re making a project out of it.

See, Jellyfin should be a hit. Everybody should have a Jellyfin server. But instead they have an overly powerful thing that is trying to allow you to customize the UI and incorporate every single piece of media and do everything Plex does except for the one useful thing Plex does which is give you Internet access to your library.

That’s the opposite of what an eventually successful self-hosted thing would be. You want one thing that does one thing with zero hassle and has the hard feature but none of the superfluous easy features. That’s why I’m saying HA, Plex and Synology are best positioned.

I think Synology is going the Plex route, where they are starting to enshittify their hardwareto sell you more hard drives. Their software is a better version of Yunohost already, though. And crucially they do provide a one click OpenVPN install, which is the still-too-complicated version of how all of this should work.

But if you really wanted to make some money one can envision a world in which a ISP (particularly a Starlink-style connect-anywhere ISP) sells you a one time stop package with a box that does your routing and also has a big app manager thing that sets you up for what you want. “It works just like Gmail but it’s at your place” is the pitch, not “ironclad security and full access to set it up just like you want”. That’s for nerds.

And then you charge them for cloud backups, if you’re clever.

Thanks for coming to my pitch, I’ll be in meeting room 4 all week.

I hadn’t, but at a glance, while well intentioned that’s pretty much exactly the “still a bridge too far” thing I’m talking about.

Effectively that mimics the interface (bit uglier, but same idea) you get in a Synology NAS or other commercial home server services.

Here’s the problem, Jellyfin itself might already be alien tech. The type of solution they’re proposing is trying to streamline something end users don’t even know exists.

And I’d be moderately interested on it at my level of awareness, but now I am looking at redoing my own self hosting machine from scratch and wondering if some of the things I’m doing with it will be doable with this, so as of right now, moving to it is more complicated, not less.

The bar self hosting needs to be mainstream is this: I click a button on a Windows PC and it downloads a piece of software. I click “install” and said software installs itself like a normal application.

There is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.

Alternately, I buy a little box, plug it in and there is now an application I can use to do a thing everywhere.

The only examples that approximate this in my view are Plex (NOT Jellyfin) for scenario one and HA Yellow/Green for scenario two. And even those two will set up the hardware and software but you’ll still be pointing at a LAN IP for access. They both will only do remote access via a subscription and a connection to an external could-based service, so they aren’t even a fully self hosted solution if you want to go with the “easy” proper external access.

See, then you fell for a dark pattern, because I refused to use it on first boot and there is no One Drive folder in this brand new computer I’m currently using at all. It isn’t the standard My Documents folder, it doesn’t have a folder at all and the application icon isn’t on my system tray.

That’s why I was asking about the Win10 install being different, but I’ve installed Win 11 twice this year, once in a computer for personal use that currently doesn’t have any One Drive folder at all and one for work where One Drive is logged in to a work account (along with Office 365) and it only syncs that work folder, not the personal folders, photos and whatnot. You can absolutely have a Windows (11, anyway) install with no One Drive synced to anything at all, or even running.

It sucks that Windows designs its install process as a dark pattern-ladden attempt to get you to sign up for crap, but you can reject all of it. Maybe I do it enough I have the habit and I underestimate how hard it is to choose what you actually want. I guess that’s the equivalent to having a working Windows 98 key memorized in the early 2000s.

No, you’re thinking about the Microsoft Account login (which still has workarounds but whatever). OneDrive needs to have its own separate login, in case you, like me, have a separate account for work or need to have multiple One Drive accounts or if you have paid One Drive, 365 and whatnot.

So you can absolutely log in to Windows with a MS account and log in to One Drive with your work account… or not log in at all and just not have it running, which is what I do.

I have installed Win11 on a new computer build this year. I promise I’m looking at my system tray and there is zero One Drive icons on it. No One Drive folder in my Windows file explorer, either.

I’m confused. Are you logged in to OneDrive?

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loathe OneDrive. It’s the flakiest, most unreliable piece of software in MS’s current end-user-focused stable…

…but it still needs you to log in. If you log out from OneDrive it does nothing. It’s a separate login from the Windows login, too, if you’ve used one of those to install Windows.

I genuinely haven’t used Win10 in enough time I don’t recall if it gave you more notifications to re-enable it, but after refusing to log in and taking OneDrive out of my startup tasks I don’t think it’s come up again on any of my Windows devices.

Kinda not the point, but at the risk of starting a huge tangent: yes, there are a bunch of self-hosted applications that are reasonably practical and easy to install, but there’s still the layer of having to understand how to access a thing in your LAN from each device, and ideally you’d want some sort of dedicated server running at all times and a bunch of this stuff is provided in multiple formats, including containerized versions or versions for virtual machines, all of which is way over the heads of normie users.

The closest to a fire-and-forget self-hosting platform is maybe Home Assistant or perhaps some of the commercial NAS sellers, like the Synology suite of apps that will mooostly set themselves up. Maybe Plex. But even those don’t work in quite the way mainstream users think about applications working. You really need something you plug in and it goes. Maybe the branded Home Assistant hardware is closest to that, but HA itself is so overengineered and customizable it’s not so much the start of a commercial self-hosting revolution as a relatively accessible hobby project rabbit hole.

I’m far from an AI hater, but I fully agree with this.

I think there’s a distinct business oppotunity coming up for two things: Hassle-free self-hosting and back-to-basics apps and services.

Nobody is tapping into those correctly (you’re going to want to give me examples of self-hosted things, and you’re wrong), and it’s extremely hard to do either right, but if you can figure it out and are ballsy enough to build a proper business around it I may be interested in your pitch deck.

A bit more than exit polls now. The official fast count gives him more than half of the overall vote, so that should be it.

Not even a little bit. And posting “I am the new president of Chad” is absolutely fricking hilarious and extremely on brand.

It is also horrifying and chilling in light of the actual results, because you know he’s following the MAGA playbook and depending on how close the diaspora made him look in the end he was hoping for a version of the US capitol raid.

But if I’m going to have an opinion about this tweet it’s going to be about that, not the flag thing, for obvious reasons.

Would have confused it with Moldova instead, I suppose.

But yeah, of the MANY things I can throw at this guy, confusing 🇷🇴 with 🇹🇩 when tapping it on your phone is not it.

Mostly because I’m pretty sure I’ve done it myself more than once.

Hah. If anything you’re giving US democracy way too much credit there.

I think something’s got to give, and European strategic independence will certainly be a requirement, both in this area and others.

I just don’t know what that looks like or what the path to it looks like. And in the meantime the antidemocratic dynamics are already at play. We may be in a much worse position on all of this by the end of today.

I had managed to keep myself entertained this morning and not fret about this but… yeah, nope, there you are, anxiety, I guess you didn’t go far.

Here’s hoping that a bunch of Romanians woke up a little. With how low participation typically is people could figure this out if they could get over their whole “politicians are just thieves” deal for five minutes for anything but supporting Russian nazis.

I’m gonna go see if I can get myself distracted again. Good luck to everybody voting today.

Preventing monopolies single-handedly is pretty hard. At least they are better than others at reclaiming some revenue and deploying some modicum of control.

But I think you may underestimate how much of a handicap there is in breaking out. If you go look at areas that need some degree of localization, like eBay, Uber or Amazon competitors what you end up seeing is that nation-specific startups tend to thrive and slowly spiral out to other countries. They often dominate indefinitely unless the US global leader decides it’s time to sink billions in scorching the earth in that market.

When you don’t need logistics, infrastructure and region-specific services it’s almost impossible to compete with unlimited willingness to sink money in creating a monopoly. I don’t know how you stop that, because particularly in social networks, but online in general people typically want to use THE thing. It’s extremely rare that two competitors on the exact same service survive, grow and make money indefinitely, let alone a well populated market.

I don’t know what the solution is to that. Nationalization? I mean, I can’t believe there isn’t a public EU payment provider, at least. That seems like key infrastructure that shouldn’t be privatized, let alone existing almost entirely outside your country. Social networking and online comms are even harder because, frankly, you also don’t want them to be controlled at the national government level, that’s just as scary.

I don’t know about monetization being the challenge. Most people creating Twitter content are not doing so to monetize it on Twitter.

It think the semi-deliberate inability to ride an alogrithm to any sort of sustained virality and the terrible moderation tools make Mastodon a very bad fit for anybody expecting a big following and to use it as an outreach or promotional tool. And yeah, those are fundamental design choices that make Masto a bad fit for public institutions, celebrities and brands.

Which, hey, that’s fine if that’s the thing you want to make. It’s just weird to then spend so much effort in trying to grassroots promote a thing not made for the thing you’re pushing.

It’s not Mastodon, it’s never going to be Mastodon.

Several key design issues prevent that from happening. It’s just not built for that purpose. For one thing, a chrono-only firehose is a TERRIBLE fit for governmental notifications.

Also, nobody flocks to a social network for official admin accounts. That’s just not a thing.

Bluesky maybe, but people around these parts absolutely refuse to acknowledge why that is or any differences between BS and other social media, so this conversation will likely remain inside the weird Fedi echo chamber that missed that this debate is now over for everybody else.

For the record, there isn’t a lack of investment in tech keeping European social media from happening. There were a bunch of early competitors in Europe that did quite well as Facebook/Reddit/Myspace alts at the national level.

They were pretty uniformly either acquired and dismantled or pushed out of the global market by the increasingly monopolistic current leaders, and particularly Meta.

It was venture capital and the insane advantage of launching in a consolidated, monocultural 350 million people market that drove that process. Alternatives in markets with less overlap or with more barriers to US competitors did not suffer the same fate.