Both are terrible for this purpose. You don’t need fancy features for a Q&A.

And I have never used Discord for getting tech support.

No, I really don’t like walking for pleasure, I only walk to get places. I bike a lot more, again, to get places. In suburban areas, there are a ton of side streets to take, so as long as I avoid the main arteries and the “arteries” (side streets the locals race down), I’m good.

Some areas don’t have a ton of options, especially commercial areas like strip malls and whatnot. But generally speaking, there are options. For example, we have one main road where pretty much all the stores are, and cars go quite fast. But there are also alleys behind stores where the big trucks go that are almost always empty and where the employees tend to go on break, so I can avoid a lot of the busy roads and parking lots that way. That works well in suburban areas, whereas in urban areas, those alleys can be a bit sketchy.

But yeah, it really depends on the area and where you work.

Nah, OP is just dipping into the drugs a bit.

I’d take a 40min walk over my 30min driving commute, traffic sucks.

I’ve kind of had the opposite experience as you.

I don’t mind walking in rural areas because there aren’t many cars and people tend to just leave me alone. I have had people ask of I need a ride or something, never had cans thrown at me or anything. Yeah, sidewalks aren’t really a thing, but there’s usually a generous gravel or grass strip next to the roadway. It’s a bit sketchier at night with drunk drivers, but they’re rare enough that you just need to stay aware of approaching cars.

In suburban areas, if you know the area somewhat, you can avoid 99% of the traffic by taking side streets. Sidewalks are hit and miss, but walking in the road is usually fine since people are watching out for kids amyway. Night is a little sketchy, but it’s mostly teens and you can hear them blaring music and squealing tires from fairly far away.

Urban areas scare me because population density is way higher so your chances of being in the same place as a criminal is pretty high. I didn’t grow up in the city, so I maybe spending more time there would help me feel more comfortable, but it seems like he bad areas are pretty close to the “regular” areas and it’s possible to accidentally take a wrong turn somewhere and get into trouble. Nights are terrifying since with drunk people on the streets both in cars and as pedestrians. It’s fine if you’re in a nicer/commercial area, not great elsewhere.

So my order of preference in walking is first rural areas, then suburban areas, and urban areas last. But I’ve spent most of my time in rural and suburban areas, so I admittedly don’t have a ton of experience in urban areas.

Exactly, and this is my main complaint about Lemmy and Mastodon, they’ve prioritized resiliency of the network but not resiliency of user data. If an instance goes down, all communities hosted there are frozen in time, so I’m not getting updates from other community members from different instances. The platform is decentralized, but the data isn’t.

Plebbit looks to be similar, but at the community level instead of an entire instance. I don’t know what happens if a community owner disappears, but I imagine it’s similar to Lemmy.

They day they’re not using DHT

I thought they’re using IPFS, which I believe uses a DHT under the hood.

I’m working on my own P2P reddit alternative, and I’m using a DHT. If they’re using something else, that’s potentially concerning. I haven’t looked into Plebbit a ton though, I’ve just seen it mentioned a few times, but then I’m a bit of an outlier since I’m playing in the same space.

I’m pretty sure it’s just for community names. If you check out one of the clients, you’ll see <community>.eth. So I’d look at the code for creating a community to start.

Yeah, Markdown is pretty rad, and most of these Reddit alternatives use it. I’m working on my own and Markdown is definitely what I’m using.

Someone’s not a fan of hot coffee.

It’s probably because things get janky on high FPS. I wasn’t able to complete the game until I capped the FPS in the final mission (helicopter scene).

Competition naturally degrades over time as companies go out of business and consolidate.

And it naturally improves over time as companies challenge established players and “distupt” the market. As long as the barrier to entry remains sufficiently low, there’s no reason for a net degradation in competition.

Large companies tend to become less efficient. Yes, they have economies of scale, but they tend to scare away innovators, so they switch to lobbying to maintain their edge.

The correct approach IMO is to counter the lobbying efforts of large orgs, and that means stripping governments of a lot of their power. Regulations tend to result in more monopolies, requiring antitrust to fix, and as you noted, that’s extremely rare.

Do you think a more direct “medical patient union” would work? Skipping a government intermediary?

Yeah, that can work. I’m thinking of having your primary care orovider offer your “insurance” policy, and they’d be on the hook to fund any procedures you need. So they have an incentive to keep you healthy, and that agreement could be a legal obligation that the doctor is doing their best to keep you healthy.

I do think we should socialize emergency services though. If a paramedic determines you need an ambulance ride, that should be free.

I’d prefer socialized healthcare over single payer

I prefer privatized care with transparency in pricing across the board, shortened patent durations, and some government assistance for the poor. But failing that, socialized care is probably the next best. Anything in the middle just breeds corruption.

There’s no real / true decentralization

That’s not exactly true.

That said, you do need some form of centralized service to connect peers, but you can federate those. It’s only job would be to connect peers, and a STUN server w/ TURN fallback is usually the approach here. These instances don’t need to store any data long term, they just need to connect peers, and the client is free to choose any instance they want, or host their own.

That’s how Tor works (entry nodes), and most decentralized systems use a similar system.

One of the best parts here is that offline often just works, and you can sneakernet around firewalls (e.g. if you visit China or something), and all you need to do is connect to a local relay to find local peers.

Blockchain

My understanding is it’s only used for name resolution, so the number of data points here should be in the thousands, not millions or billions, so the resource usage should be minimal.

Basically, the blockchain is functioning as DNS here.

Lemmy is not decentralized; it’s federated. “Decentralized” and “federated” are not synonyms,

This isn’t quite accurate. Lemmy is decentralized, but it’s not distributed. It’s decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn’t your instance, but your instance caches content for that community locally.

They’re not synonyms, true, but federated systems are typically (always?) decentralized, and rarely (never?) distributed.

Plebbit seems to be a weird mix of both. Communities are centrally managed, but the data seems to be distributed, at least upon creation (everything probably makes its way back to the creator for moderation).

DHTs and distributed ledgers are notoriously difficult to design well, often suffering from syncing lags and block delivery failures

I haven’t looked into it too closely either, but it seems the blockchain is only used for name resolution (seems to be used for community names), so updates should be fairly infrequent.

I assume they’re using a DHT for data though, probably a separate one for each community, but maybe not. Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn’t be an issue.

I really don’t think that would scale at all. A reasonably popular community could have tons of simultaneous posts, and if everyone needs to sync before posting, that would suck. You could probably avoid the worst of it by having posts use uuids, but you’re going to have IO issues at scale. Also, would you need the full repo cloned? That can get big, and you generally only care about recent posts.

Also, if you’re doing the UUID thing, you’d have sort everything every time locally. That’s fine if you only have a few thousand posts, but if you get into millions or billions, it’ll get bad, especially if you’re dealing with files.

Databases solve these problems really well. Even a simple SQLite dB would be much better than a filesystem, like orders of magnitude better.

My understanding is the blockchain bit is optional and only used to establish ownership over a name. The posts and whatnot are not on a blockchain, that would be silly.

That’s a reasonable reaction if it was true. But it’s not, plebbit is FOSS.

Yeah, that’s a super uninformed take. Blockchain is perhaps the best solution for authentication in a P2P system. I assume they’re linking blockchain to cryptocurrency, but AFAIK, there’s no cryptocurrency in Plebbit.

For authentication, you need a central authority of some form, and blockchain is about as decentralized as you can get while having that central source of truth. It’s a good solution.

Bluesky. If you’re okay with Twitter/X, you should be okay with Bluesky.

Yeah, when you’re easily replaceable and need the job, you tend to work yourself to death. It’s really hard to get a tech job in India, and I assume the same is true for Pakistan.

So yeah, dude has no EQ.