Nextcloud Notes has become my go-to (Oh look, SJ is advocating for Nextcloud again! How original!)

I’m cheap.

So far, Conduit is the only answer for me, since I don’t own any quantum supercomputers.

I think it depends a lot on the federated service.

For mastodon, you follow individual users, so if there’s a million users or ten million or a hundred million, their instances will only be contacting other intances they’re federating with so it’s quite scalable.

For Lemmy, you follow communities, so every server pulls all the posts and comments the common community. This means that for an instance like lemmy.world hosting lots of different big communities, every new server hammers the one central instance.

A strategy for improving the situation I think would be to spread the load. Instead of everyone piling into megacommunities, if people spread out into smaller more tight knit communities over many different instances. Of course, this isn’t really compatible with the purpose of having communities like that.

It does seem to suggest that ActivityPub isn’t necessarily the most appropriate protocol for this purpose, even though it’s what was used because it’s the de facto standard on the fediverse.

Stuff like wealth tax is being sold as a way tomfix inequality

That’s not really true though. You can choose between the blue uniparty and the red uniparty (and occasionally an orange or light blue or purple uniparty)

Its a false choice. You get to choose between different colors of corrupt establishment who become rich off of their time in government because it turns out when you give someone that level of money and power they’ll definitely find ways to get some of it for themselves.

Literally thought of it in the shower.

You’re not entirely wrong, but you’re not entirely right.

You can use a screwdriver to stab someone, or you can use it to fix something. It isn’t about the tool itself, it’s about what you’re doing with it.

Some people take social media and use it to connect to others, or they use it to help build something they wouldn’t have otherwise. Many people take social media and use it as a weak simulation of what they’re missing from their lives. It’s all about what you do with the tool.

You don’t need a local DNS server to set up https, but you do need a domain name. If it’s something that you wanted to pick up, you can buy them at a number of different places and you’d have to set up a mechanism to make sure the IP address referenced is the correct one. You can either do that by having a static IP address or by setting up some form of dynamic DNS. Then you can use letsencrypt to set up https.

Okay so here’s I think the core of your question though: the only way that someone outside of your network can access your nextcloud is if you have set up the server to be accessible from the outside world. You would have to go into your router and forward Port 80 to the local IP address of your nextcloud server. If you don’t do that, then it will only be accessible to the people inside of your network. Rotors do something called Network address translation which lets many devices on your local network connect to the internet despite only having one external IP address. If you’re accessing the server using a 192.168 address or a 10.x.x.x address you are already using the internal IP address and not your external Internet IP address so you’re likely safe.

One neat trick because remembering IP addresses is a pain in the butt is the hosts file. On windows it’s in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and you can set a hostname to immediately resolve to a certain IP address. It’s particularly nice because it’s free, it’s fast, and once you set it you can forget it.

My websites are on the public internet, but I use the host to file to point them at the internal IP address because that way I can directly connect to my servers even when the internet is down.

If I had a lot more of them then I probably would do that, but I’ve got a little guy who loves fresh fruit, they will be eating the moment they get picked. Haha

I’m actually happy to see the reduction in echo chambers for myself because it does 2 things:

1. It reminds me that the people I think I disagree with have good points I need to remember, and
2. It reminds me that the people I think I agree with have terrible points I need to remember.

For someone who thinks for themselves, seeing extremism in some cases actually makes you less extreme because you see it and realize you don’t agree with it at all.

A bunch of people who have only been on lemmy for two months are telling someone who’s been here for years how things are.

I was going to say this, I’m glad you did instead.

People’s opinions have changed a lot in the last 25 years. In the late 90s we got to see the last gasps of the real power of the religious right, in the early 2000s we got to see the dominance of the neoconservative right, in the late 2000s we got to see a massive shift leftward as a backlash against the religious right and the neoconservative right, then from the more chill hippie left wing we got to see the rise of the authoritarian woke left, and right now we’re starting to see a backlash against that. It isn’t always from different people, it’s often from the same people changing their minds.

For quite some time I’ve thought of it like steering a car. If you steer hard to the left you’re going to hit the ditch, if you steer hard to the right you’re going to hit the ditch. Really what you need is to course correct at times just stay on the road. Sometimes you need to turn the wheel pretty hard in one direction or the other, other times you want to just nudge the wheel, and get other times you don’t really want to move it at all.

Some regions voted hard for Clinton, then voted for bush, then voted for obama, then voted for trump, then voted for Biden. Such a thing might look completely inconsistent, but politics is a dynamic system where circumstances change, certain movements win and then we get to see the consequences of those movements, new movements form, and maybe old movements collapse.

This isn’t a new idea. Hegelian dielectic proposes that in politics, a dominant idea (thesis) eventually leads to its opposite or challenge (antithesis), resulting in a resolution or synthesis of the conflicting ideas. Such an idea predates Marx, so it’s been around for quite some time.

There are quite a number of examples historically of people completely changing their mind on a topic. The father of Canadian universal healthcare, Tommy Douglas, was a powerful advocate of eugenics when he was younger, and as he got older he realized that he made a terrible mistake and changed his mind. Solzhenitsyn apparently early on in his life believed in the Soviet project but once he learned of the gulags had his views fundamentally change. A lot of people like to pretend that national socialism died with Adolf Hitler in that bunker, but a lot of people believed in and supported national socialism in Germany, and those people continue to exist after world war 2, but I think it’s safe to say that for the most part they learned the error of their ways. I’m sure there are lots of people who supported Putin internationally in the 90s who wish they could go back and change that decision now.

To me it’s one of the deepest dangers of the purity spiraling we are seeing from the left right now. The fact of the matter is, as you kick more people out of the left, it becomes a less and less viable movement. As the left acts as if people become irredeemable the moment that their opinions are wrong, it becomes something that will inevitably fail.

I feel like the modern left would take a look at post war germany, and post to japan, and would just immediately start implementing genocide. “Nope, they were Nazis they are irredeemable they need to be pushed into the sea”. The most amazing thing about the end of world war II is the incredible wisdom with which the world powers helped to rehabilitate Germany and Japan into some of the most powerful nations in the world today, but for the most part lacking in the qualities that set them off to war and atrocity way back when.

Thanks to Big tech censorship, there are lots of people who are more anti-establishment right on the fediverse. Lots of fairly large instances. Some of them are real nasty pieces of work filled with folks dropping n bombs and swastikas, some of them are filled with some of the sweetest religious right folks you ever met in your life.

I think one of the biggest differences is that you don’t have the Jerry Springer algorithm trying to match up a bunch of black people with a bunch of KKK members. Most far right instances don’t defederate anyone, but many of the far left instances defederate the moment anyone looks at them funny so despite sharing a platform, typically there just isn’t that much engagement between the two groups. In the middle of there are instances that are more than happy to federate with both as long as they aren’t too big of jerks.

That’s just wrong. Totally ahistorical.

There’s a good chunk of the rest of the fediverse that’s more right leaning, for the most part they’ve actively avoided Lemmy because Lemmy was actively hostile to any kind of wrongthink. It was one of the things that really limited it’s growth because you could only be on Lemmy if you believed exactly what you were told to believe.

I stayed on the threadiverse through lotide despite it all, and despite having some pretty limited takes, I quickly found myself banned or defederated from many instances. To this day I don’t participate on those instances because I’m not welcome. Wolfballs and exploding-heads came to exist, but were similarly rejected and even now the very first thing to be done by many instances is defederating from those instances.

I’ve heard through the grapevine that some of the people who run fediverse instances are considering starting Lemmy instances now that the platform is growing.

No, I’m saying it does work, but other clients might not.

Besides lacking spaces and some rooms not letting you join, (and the lack of admin tools) the only big issue I find is that you plan to run something other than Element as the interface, you’ll have to test it because many matrix clients expect synapse or dendrite and won’t start with anything else. I’ve run fluffychat, I think kchat(whatever the kde matrix client is), and nheko, they all worked well with conduit.

My experience has been that dendrite and synapse totally maxxed out the server I ran it on (100% cpu utilization for days on end), so I run conduit.

The one downside of conduit is it’s a bit behind, so it doesn’t support all the latest rooms, and it doesn’t support spaces yet, and it has minimal admin tools so you’ll want to create all the accounts you need then close logins because bad actors will try to create logins and get you banned from half of Matrix. That said, I can tell you that even on my piddly little server (an Intel Atom D2550), it runs Conduit, ejabberd, nostr, and lotide, and the server basically sits idle. I can’t speak of bridges, unfortunately, because I don’t really use them.

This is the guide I used, it worked well to set things up:

https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/blob/next/DEPLOY.md

So there’s 2 things, I think.

1. Does your bios allow you to boot from SD card? If so, then you can boot from the SD card and so you can install software onto the SD card directly.

2. If you can’t boot off of the SD card, then perhaps you can install all the software on the SD card and then install a boot manager on the main drive. In this way, you boot off the main drive, then let the boot manager deal with loading the software.

You might be disappointed by the performance of software running off an SD card, mind you.

I see arguments like this for why everyone has to go live in cities where a single family home is a million bucks.

It’s categorically wrong. Of course if you go to live somewhere with a cheaper cost of living, there’s going to be a cheaper cost of living. The data does not bear out the idea that a high cost of living also necessarily means a commensurate wage.