Yeah, despite the strong anti-crypto sentiment on Lemmy, this is exactly the problem that projects like Nostr is trying to solve by integrating Lighting as a first-class payment system in the ecosystem.

Services get paid for by one of four ways:

• Harvesting and reselling of user data. Which is wildly unpopular, and why a lot of people are on Lemmy and not Reddit or Facebook.
• Ads. Which is also unpopular and again why people come to services like Lemmy
• Pay-for-service, which is what you’re suggesting, only via crypto, which is easier than accepting credit card transactions, and safer for users.
• The hosted paying for it out of the goodness of their hearts. So, charity. Sometimes there’s corporate charity, and that’s nice, except for the potential for money coming with strings attached, now or eventually.

Someone always pays; its expensive to host a popular instance. People suggesting you should host for free are selfish freeloaders, so know that some people understand that hosting costs, and sympathize with with your desire to offset that cost.

I like the volunteer micro-transaction model. Those who can afford to pay some amount for good service, and hopefully this provides welfare for those who can’t afford to pay. But the cryptocurrency space is a mess at the moment, and an economical currency (probably proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work) needs to gain some traction, and overcome a lot of ignorant bigotry.

To be fair, it is a very long-winded post. I think it’s not an uncommon use case, though, and so deserved a robust sketch of the desired solution; Farmville and chat are sideshows, and what the people left on Facebook are really there for are the Walls.

There are some excellent apps out there, and by and large they look and work better than commercial apps, IME. So I disagree with the assertion that I have to stay with commercial software.

What I was asking for, in my post, was not which apps have better UX than Facebook, but rather which of the very many OSS, federated (although, not necessary for my use case), self-hosted platforms fit the specific use, and ideally with a straightforward iOS mobile app. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be able to quickly take and post photos to a private channel/community/wall.

Circles really is quite nice in all respects. I think they’re hindered by their choice of backend. I’ve been using Matrix for years, and key management has always been a hot mess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the issues we encountered were related to Matrix’s god-awful and buggy PK negotiation & management process.

I agree; it probably didn’t occur to them. But it was a fairly common job in IT in the 90’s. Not a career or job description, maybe, but a duty you got saddled with.

What they really got wrong was the clothing: so much anime/hentai.

This is a techno-goth.

A studio should be able to afford a good LTO tape drive for at least one backup copy; LTO tapes last over 30 years and suffer less from random bitrot than spinning disks. Just pay someone to spend a month duplicating the entire archive every couple of decades. And every decade you can also consolidate a bunch of tapes since the capacity has kept increasing; 18TB tapes are now available: $/MB it’s always far cheaper to use tape.

They could have done that with the drives, but today you’d have to go find an ATA IDE or old SCSI card (of you’re lucky) that’ll work on a modern motherboard.

But I’d guess their problem is more not having a process for maintaining the archives than the technology. Duplicating and consolidating hard drives once a year would have been relatively cheap, and as long as they verified checksums and kept duplicates, HDs would have been fine too.

Github is full of lists of things. There are even several lists of “awesome lists”. Far more than I can list here, and it starts to get painfully recursive (an awesome list of awesome lists of awesome lists?). Just search for “awesome list” on github; some live outside of github, so you could search for “awesome list” in Ecosia, or DDG, or whatever you use.

• https://github.com/athityakumar/awesome-awesomes
• https://github.com/topics/awesome-list
• https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness

But control of the protocol - the definition and development - is still controlled by the for-profit company, right? It hasn’t been handed over to a nonprofit governance committee, has it?

Federation or not, if Bluesky dominates the protocol, they can decide to stop federating and essentially kill the independent servers. Much like what Signal did. Sure, you can run your own Signal server, but without access to the dominant player’s market, and using a protocol that’s controlled monopolistically, it’s practically useless to do so - which is why almost nobody does it anymore.

I really like the Nostr protocol, though. It’s too bad the network is so inundated by cryptocurrency topics.

It’s simple, it has a nice extension process (standing on the shoulders of giants), and it’s super easy and lightweight to self-host. It reminds me a lot of the early days of http, when it was more common (as a developer) to telnet to port 80 and just type in a couple of lines of header and get a response.

Sadly, Nostr’s association with cryptocurrency, and the fact that 90% of the traffic on it is cryptocurrency created posts, has been a severe handicap.

I may know someone who used an fmovies site to watch something last night, so some are still up.

Dead.

Pirate streaming is a Hydra. Cut off one head, two more grow.

Mine is 3-pronged:

1. btrfs + snapper takes care of most level-1 situations, and I take a snapshot of every /root change, plus one nightly /home snapshot. but it’s pretty demanding on disk space, and doesn’t handle drive failure; so I also do
2. restic + USB drive, which I can cram way more snapshots onto, so I keep a couple of weeks of daily snapshots, one monthly snapshot for a year, and one snapshot per year, going back several years. I currently have snapshots from my past 3 computers on one giant drive. However, these drives can also fail, and won’t protect me from burglary or house fire, so I also do
3. restic + BackBlaze. I just take a nightly snapshot for every computer and VM I manage. My monthly B2 bill is around $10. The VMs don’t change much, and I only snapshot data and config directories (only stuff I can’t spin up fairly quickly in a container, or via a simple install command), so most of the charge comes from a couple of decades of amateur digital photography, and an archive of all our digital music (because I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend weeks re-digitizing all those CDs).

The only “restore entire system b/c of screwing up the OS” is #1. I could - and probably should, make a whole disk snapshot to a backup drive via #2, but I’m waiting until bcachefs is more mature, then I’ll migrate to that, for the interesting replication options it allows which would make real-time disk replication to slow USB drives practical; I’d only need to snapshot /efi after kernel upgrades, and if I had that set up and a spare NVME on hand, I could probably be back up and running within a half hour.

GadgetBridge (Android). You need one of the (many) supported smartwatches. Data is easily exported and processable with, eg, R.