This is exactly why I’m also not that interested in Bluesky. It’s not decentralized in a way that makes it resilient to a Musk-style takeover.

PDSs are cool, Mastodon can learn something from Bluesky’s tech stack. But Mastodon made the right choices from the beginning to be decentralized for resiliency.

Switched my parents from an iMac to an old Dell Optiplex running Elementary OS. It worked pretty well but there were some glitches with Pantheon DE and OS version upgrades required a reinstall, so I switched them to Fedora after a couple years. It’s easier for me to support because I run Fedora on my laptop. Everyone’s happy now. There is always some amount of tech support to do but lately it has been very low. I even helped my dad upgrade the RAM over the phone once, that was fun.

Make sure to check if it actually ran from the cron job, cron is a finnicky tool

I use Borg Backup, automated with a bash script that Borg provides. A cron job runs the script at the desired frequency. I keep backups on different computers, ideally I would recommend one copy in the cloud and one copy on a local machine. Borg compresses and encrypts its backups.

Edit: I migrated a server once using the backups from this system and it worked great.

Love Inkscape, using it for 15+ years.

I sure hope they fixed the bug from the last version where it would crash if you had a drawing tablet plugged in while opening the app. That has been a huge nuisance for the last few months.

Edit: They fixed it, god bless.

Like many GUIs it makes it so you don’t have to remember and type a bunch of commands to carry out basic tasks. I especially find it convenient for checking logs. But no unique functionality compared to CLI. So it’s a matter of preference.

Yeah it’s total accounts, total monthly active users is more like a million

Look at the Steam Deck as an example:

• Linux is preinstalled
• Integrated hardware and software
• Immutable OS that is very hard to bork
• UI is Windows-like which is familiar to the target market
• Good value for the price
• Offered by a well-known and well-liked brand
• Marketed and advertised to the target market

We need more Linux devices like this to gain market share.

Fedi client app developers need to design fedi client apps in a holistic way to include a custom server (as with Mammoth’s moth.social) or create an account for the user on one of a curated selection of other servers, without forcing the user to choose one.

It’s a severe problem with trying to grow fedi that general users are expected to understand how servers work and make an informed decision about which one to join. General users don’t care about this topic and will quickly turn away when it is forced upon them. That’s why the client app needs to handle this for the user without making a fuss about it.

These apps also need good discovery features and feeds with posts that are trending generally and for specific topics. Then devs need to make money with those apps somehow, then they need to market those apps (at this point, it goes beyond just “devs” and expands into an organization with a marketing department, etc.).

Then, hopefully fedi’s inherent advantages of interoperability and resilience will naturally cause people to choose these user-friendly, effectively marketed fedi client apps over things like Instagram, Tiktok, etc. After all, if it can’t compete on its own merits with all other factors being equal, there’s no point to it for most people.

It’s a hard user experience design problem to create an interface that presents all possible types of posts, content and interactions in a sensible way. This “kitchen sink” approach is kind of what Facebook does and as a result its interface is messy and cluttered. That’s not to say it’s impossible or wrong to do things that way, just difficult and unpopular.

On the technical side, it’s really hard to make a client app that works with multiple server softwares, because they all have different sets of features.

In the current world of fedi software development, it would be a single dev or a small, likely unpaid team that would have to make the equivalent of several different client apps combined into one. I don’t anticipate such a large and complicated project being completed until the devs can make a decent living doing the work.

I think it should be really clear to everyone now that the Steam Deck is exactly the kind of thing that Linux needs: nice hardware with a well-integrated OS that is designed to be user-friendly and has some guardrails to prevent you from breaking it.

Some of my fav quotes:

“Ads in an operating system that you’ve paid for from a company that owns ridiculous amounts of money is so offensive.”

“data, it’s like the new gold to people”

“I got the confidence to really jump into Linux after the Steam Deck.”

[regarding the terminal] “You just see text going across the screen, they’re working at lightning speeds.”

“I’m kissing convenience goodbye, I just want control.”

Nextcloud may be a bit overkill for your use case, but it does have a very good video chat function. It’s also pretty easy to deploy as a snap package or with the AIO docker image. A downside is that the other person has to have an account on your instance and log into it to join a call. However this is not necessarily difficult to arrange.

I’ll quote Vaxry from his blog:

“Obviously, the fact that I am banned from contributing to Freedesktop - and by extension wlroots, is another big factor, and probably the one that finally tipped the scales, because I am no longer allowed to participate in discussion or contribute code to wlroots.”

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-wlrootsRewrite

“I definitely am not a fan of how seemingly weak people online, especially teenagers, have become. Words are just words. Someone calling another person a “retard” shouldn’t really be a big deal.”

"I said:

if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server

that is inclusivity

Which I definitely stand by."

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists

Fair enough

In other words, Vaxry is so unwilling to compromise or learn from others that he would rather isolate his project from the broader FOSS community. That says a lot about him and the people who support him, especially since this conflict with freedesktop.org started over Vaxry condoning hateful trolling of trans people within the Hyprland community.

This is a problem for me as a Hyprland user because if I share some rice I made or make suggestions for other users, I’m leading people into a community that may be actively hateful towards them. It utterly extinguishes any enthusiasm I have for the project. I like the software but I’d rather be part of a project and a community that I can feel good and excited about. Maybe time to find a new tiling Wayland compositor.

Thank you, I wasn’t sure if that video was re: Traefik or VPN. I appreciate the suggestion.

How did you set up a VPN to securely connect to your services over the internet? I have looked for guides to do this and haven’t had much luck. I would really like to implement this in my setup.

I self host jellyfin, nextcloud, owncast, tandoor, komga, photoprism and searxng. I use nginx proxy manager for a reverse proxy and SSL cert automation. Works great for me but I would like to get into traefik sometime.

I self host for privacy reasons, also it’s fun, it’s a learning opportunity and sometimes self-hosted services are functionally better than the other options out there.

Jellyfin is ideal for privately sharing music. Plex is similar but not FOSS.