/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021
Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website
They’ve been extremely transparent about this:
It’s not hopeless! The Fediverse is AFAIK entirely nonprofit, and smaller instances means more moderator eyes on everything, too.
If I had to predict the future, I think apps like Reddit, Twitter, Tioktok, etc will be the places for entertainment and the Fediverse will become the place for conversation.
The reason is because they use that stuff to help determine if you’re a bot.
reCAPTCHA Enterprise interacts with the customer backend and webpages to trigger a sequence of JavaScript, HTML, and token authentication events.
It seems like we agree on the facts, and I certainly won’t disagree that it’s worse now, but I would characterize Twitter’s (pre-Musk) response to extremism as “measured, lacking and lethargic”, before I would use “imperfect”, which still implies “pretty good” and from my perceptive it was not good enough to make me want to use it. I think maybe we just have a different tolerance for hate speech.
While TrueNAS is great I found it to be significantly more NAS-oriented than a general “home server”. It’s certainly capable just very into the weeds with permissions, users, groups, etc. It’s not very noob friendly. If you aren’t primarily dealing with a ton of data, you might want to look into something like CasaOS or Homarr which make sharing data on the network very “set it and forget it” and are more focused on apps.
Also recommendations include PiHole, Immich, Qbittorrent, Plex (or Jellyfin) obviously, SyncThing, Duplicati, Home Assistant (although you probably want to run that in a VM) and Tailscale and NGINX proxy manager for accessing outside the house.
but what are they expecting the server admins to do after moving off Discord when Nintendo’s lawyers send them a letter
…Not… kick them out? Discord doesn’t kick out extremist groups. This seems comparatively mild. I think they had a reasonable expectation to be left alone. Nintendo got a court injunction but Discord didn’t fight it.
Can you provide any examples of ads someone (maybe you?) received directly due to Apple’s policies and behavior? Totally serious question.
If you use an iPhone and have app tracking transparency enabled then any targeted ads you’re seeing are almost certainly coming from data that Apple has collected from you.
A few years back Apple made a big change to iOS that prevents user data from being sold to data brokers and ran a big ad campaign about how they are the good “privacy option”. But the reason they made the change was not to protect user privacy, but because Apple wanted the money that Facebook was getting from iPhone users. The same data is still being collected and sold, just by Apple now instead of Facebook. That was the crux of Facebook’s big lawsuit against Apple accusing them of anti-competitive practices.
Apple is one of the best Hardware companies out there for not selling your data.
Don’t believe their ads, they are actually one of the worst!
But the threat of Apple turning on its customers isn’t limited to China. While the company has been unwilling to spy on its users on behalf of the US government, it’s proven more than willing to compromise its worldwide users’ privacy to pad its own profits. Remember when Apple let its users opt out of Facebook surveillance with one click? At the very same time, Apple was spinning up its own commercial surveillance program, spying on Ios customers, gathering the very same data as Facebook, and for the very same purpose: to target ads. When it came to its own surveillance, Apple completely ignored its customers’ explicit refusal to consent to spying, spied on them anyway, and lied about it:
The greenest/cheapest way is to recycle an old laptop. They’re pretty efficient and unless you’re transcribing video anything in the past 10 years will be plenty powerful. Also the built-in battery is great in case of a power outage.
Then, just get one of those multi-disk USB HDD enclosure and pop some drives in.
For an OS, I like CasaOS which runs on top of Debain. It is a single-line install, and makes running docker apps very easy, for the services you mentioned and many others it can be set up entirely using the GUI.
You just reminded me of this piece by Danah Boyd
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
I’m surprised there’s no fedi version of Facebook but I’m also sure as the fediverse evolves we’ll see the return of personal websites but with activitypub-based social features.