Oh wow, I’d forgotten all about geek code.

Are you being human trafficked?

Short stories is the answer. They do seem to mainly the province of horror and sci-fi but even if that’s not a favoured genre(s) it’s a way back in. Try Night Shift or Skeleton Crew by Stephen King (give The Mist a miss though, it’s not really a ‘short’ short story). Take it a page at a time, stop reading the minute you start to lose interest, try again 15mins later. Remember it’s fun activity not a competitive sport, take all the time you need, the books you want to read are going nowhere :)

You really need to re-read that book, but without the preconceived rightwing slant.

Are you trying to compare OP with Galileo?

Thank you, I’ll look into that.

A VPN service isn’t for illegal stuff. It can be used that way but for me its usefulness is in providing a layer of privacy between me, my ISP and online services I use.

F. is no longer true. They recently removed support for this after lots of people abused the feature.

Does docker need to be already installed on my local machine and my VPS?

Forum packages have been around for at least 20 years. I’m terms of forum like features the only difference is federation.

They have recently removed support for port forwarding. That won’t stop a user being able to torrent but it will stop seeding and will affect discoverability and speed somewhat.

Has no negative impact on their privacy features

Another vote for Mullvad. You can pay by cash, vouchers (in some countries) or Monero for total privacy.

Reddit is not going to go away. And if there’s a set of tools to autoedirect/replace content to a Lemmy based community it won’t be long before its automodded and possibly even excluded server side in the reddit codebase.

They’ve said it themselves - profit is their target. They’ll do pretty much anything to prevent that being impeded.

I will have to participate on Reddit as I help mod a sub for an org that risks being misrepresented. But that’s all I’ll go for, no more participation in any other sub (unless I spot some misrepresentation of what’s happened or of the fediverse). My community is here now.

Maybe its time we just moved on from Reddit and worrying about what its done and concentrate on building the community here.

Its convenience. 99% don’t care about anything apart from getting what they need. The blackout caused them inconvenience so its therefore annoying. Its the same attitude that can appear when workers take strike action.

‘Better’ is relative. To me its better because no one person or group owns or controls the software. There’s no central authority. Don’t like the instance you’re on? Just move to another. Cant find an instance you like? Host your own. Don’t like the path the developers are taking? Fork the code. As long as the very core remains standard (ActivityPub), all possibilities are on.

There needs to be a return to being patient. Most fedi software is not beyond beta yet. They will develop and they will mature but right now the fediverse is a toddler learning to walk. There are issues but with time they’ll get addressed. We’ve all got so addicted to shiny cool apps and services we’ve become prepared to sacrifice our privacy, our choices and our reason at the altar of a quick dopamine hit.

There’s no big money to throw at these issues and therefore no dedicated team. This means solutions come slower. But they will come and they will be motivated by usefulness not profit. The people developing these things have lives and day jobs. Give them time.

I have Ampache running on a self hosted server, which has desktop and mobile apps.

The Meta Plan:

1. We’re going to use ActivityPub because we love the Fediverse!!!
2. Now we’re live, here’s some improvements to AP, now they’re not standard but we’re working closely with the AP guys. It would help if you all pleaded with them to accept these changes- they’re just to make things better!
3. Yay! All the changes were implemented and we’ve formed the AP Council, we might invite some of the old AP guys to it.

Is u/spez a dick? Yes.

Did he used to mod r/jailbait? Not really. This happened back when any mod could auto add any other user as a mod without them having to self-approve. IIRC he removed himself not long after a screenie was taken and became aware it had happened.

Let’s not dilute his actual assholery with fake assholery.

I bought a 2nd hand laptop from ebay for less than $60. 8gb ram, 250gb SDD to which I added a 2TB external drive I had. It was cheap as the screen was broken and the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, both of which things are irrelevant for yunohost. Runs VPN client, Ampache, NextCloud, WordPress and GOGS with zero problems.