The fact you’re getting downvotes to fuck shows, I think, how unrealistic a lot of people here are. Proprietary or open, a service lives or dies based on it’s uptake. Uptake requires marketing, marketing requires money, money requires investors, investors who aren’t going to spend their money on something that isn’t profitable for them and it’s hard to see how giving users control of their data and giving them the tools to turn their backs on abusive monoliths leads to profit as compared to, say, the exact opposite.

One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it’s not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.

A personal favourite of Michael Gorbachev if the old urban legend is to be believed.

It’s easy. Just read the manual.

The rolling release thing isn’t for me, but I get why that model might appeal. Brave, though? Why?

All this, plus the well-established legal notion of “informed consent”. If I rent a megaphone from a shop it would be utterly unreasonable for that shop to tell everyone I’d bought a megaphone - I wasn’t informed and wouldn’t reasonably assume that’s what they would do, so I couldn’t consent - but if I walk around using that megaphone to shout at people it would similarly be utterly unreasonable to argue that the shop is responsible for keeping my bellowings private.

Yeah, that was the “oh, shit” moment for me too. I bought into the bullshit until that point.

Centralised, monolithic online services. Even when they were ‘good’, I was leery of services like YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp because they made no attempt to be interoperable or peerable. Two GMail users will have a richer experience emailing with each-other than they would with someone on, say, Yahoo Email or an Exchange server, but it would always work, eventually, somehow. Obviously we now have the concept of the Fediverse, but federated peers forming ad-hoc connections using an lowest-common-denominator protocol is the basis of the whole Internet.

You can use NextCloud as the front end for an SMB share, which is what I do. I can access all my file shares using a protocol designed for intermittent Internet connections, I can sync any folder I want for offline use and, because NextCloud support file rehydration, I can even sync folders bigger than my local disk and it will stream in the files as I use them.

I like it. The “progress bar” style fill is nice and clear, and it’s so much better than having an icon with a number next to it. “BuT iT dOeSn’T lOoK LiKe A bAtTeRy” what, do you think your phone is full of AAs? A plain oblong is actually closer to the mark.

Yeah, if you’re used to Microsoft servers and have a Microsoft network it integrates really nicely and is great to manage. Plus, it’s free.

Yes.

Here are some complaints people have.

It doesn’t use ActivityPub. So are we demanding that all applications use a specific protocol? Does that mean email, Matrix, the web, Nostr, Frendica, BitTorrent, etc aren’t part of the Fediverse? Nostr, AtProtocol, ActivityPub, Diaspora are four popular, open protocols for federated social media - there are many more - and they’re all part of a wider Fediverse.

It’s owned by a corporation. Great! So if YouTube started to publish all their videos using PeerTube, that wouldn’t count? If your local supermarket creates their own Mastodon instance and are active on it, is that a no-no? Does GMail not count as part of email, or Amazon as part of the world wide web for that reason? Are corporations not allowed at all? No-one is asking your opinion of corporate culture here.

It doesn’t support federation. Yes, it does. Every part of AtProtocol is open source and free for anyone to implement, allowing you to create your own fully independent instance that fully integrated with both BlueSky and other, independent AtProtocol servers.

It’s not open. Yes, it is. Fully open source and permissively licensed. Anyone can implement their own AtProtocol server, reusing as much or as little as they want. But AtProtocol does a lot more than ActivityPub, leading neatly on to:

It’s too complicated. I see this complaint a surprising amount. AtProtocol’s complexity exists because - let’s be honest - ActivityPub doesn’t provide any good way of discovering or searching. If you saw a load of fire trucks barreling down the street and wanted to know what was happening, a quick search on any AtProtocol relay will tell you if anyone on any instance has commented; ActivityPub doesn’t work like that. Hell, it’s hard enough to even find communities without resorting to non-ActivityPub services. AtProtocol’s Relay Servers and Firehoses are demanding applications, but that is required for a true Twitter/Facebook/TikTok replacement.

So, yes, BlueSky is part of the Fediverse. Does that make BlueSky a good thing? That’s a separate debate. But there are a lot of comments in this thread which amount to “no, because I don’t like it” and it’s important we don’t let our personal hangups override our ability to be rational. Maybe instead of moaning about AtProtocol we should at least give a thought to why it’s needed.

Eviscerating Sinister.

If you just want great scrambled eggs without adding anything else and can be arsed: separate the yolks and cook the whites to your preferred consistency. Then, turn off the heat and whisk in the yolks straight away. The residual heat cooks through but by cooking them less than the whites you get a lot more flavour.

Waaaaaaaaay too expensive, but I’d love it if big eink displays became a thing, even with shit refresh rates, mostly because I want some for displaying Home Assistant dashboards.

This still works. Most debit and credit cards can still be used to authorise offline payments up to a set limit, though it’s kinda of moot if the PDQ’s battery is dead.

This depends on where and why. I know that in some parts of the Carribbean, for example, most towers will only last a day or two, but there are some that can last weeks with satellite backhauls providing minimal service to large areas.

Yeah, I have this conversation and lot on the sad truth is that until there’s a Linux distro that’s as manageable as Windows is with Group Policy, no big organisation is adopting it. Unfortunately, nothing in the Linux space comes close.

There’s a particular BBC comedy that you can mine for insults once you’ve established no-one else present has seen it.

• He’s so dense light bends around him.
• As useless as a marzipan dildo
• As useless as lube at a funeral
• I’ve never seen anyone look so fucking ugly with just one head
• Do you know 90% of household dust is made of dead human skin? That’s what you are to me.
• Watching him work is like watching clown running across a minefield.
• He’s here, depriving a village somewhere of their twat.
• I’m like flypaper for dickheads today.
• Sorry I’m late. Traffic was an absolute bitch. No offence.

My personal variation, “couldn’t organise a pissup in a pissupery”.