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.

It sucks the same way Python sucks. Some people just really don’t like indentation-based syntax. I’m one of them, so I dislike both formats. However, if you groove on that sort of thing, I don’t think YAML is any worse than any other markup.

Oddly, I get along with Haskell, which also used indentation for scoping/delimiting; I can’t explain that, except that, somehow, indentation-based syntax seems to fit better with functional languages. But I have no clear argument about why; it’s just an oddity in my aesthetics.

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.

djot for text markup. It addresses a lot of the issues in Common mark (and of course far more of the issues of Markdown).

I love that there’s someone out there who’s that passionate about JSON.

Love, love, opus. It’s a fantastic format.

Minnesotan here. Can confirm that 32 is still long-sleeve shirt weather.

I regularly see people here walking into a store from the parking lot in T-shirts, in 32° weather. Wind chill makes a far greater difference. 38° from wind chill is far colder than 32° with no wind.

The week-of-year is far more relevant in Western Europe, and is used quite a bit in business. I have a Junghans watch that has a week complication.

It’s an important format outside of the US, and gives ISO-8601 an edge as a standard of conformance.

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.

There are already quantum resistant algorithms available as open source libraries, and some tools which already use them. It’s nice to see some standards emerging, although I’ll be more confident after external reviews pronounce them “clear.”

As long as it’s a legitimate offer, and not an “accidents happen; it’d be a shame if something happened to you if you stayed” Monty Pythonesque arm-twisting. An offer to move somewhere contested, where there will absolutely be further fighting, and where one side has no compunction about inflicting massive civilian casualties… it’s hard to leave your home, but it’s a compelling offer.

Wow. All 20 of those people want to nuke Washington? Even the half of them who aren’t joining in the chant? Were they not told the words?

I want to see more enthusiasm. The hairy gnome is carrying all of the load.

Plus, the paper maché missile looks like it was made by chimpanzees.

You have nearly enough people to do a decent Harlem Shake, and you wasted it on this?

I’m disappointed. 3/10 performance.

I’m not a Halo fan, and while I thought the series had some weak areas, I didn’t think it was horrible. And it seemed to be getting better.

It had almost nothing to do with the original game that I played, but I can live with that.

There’s “bad” when the story diverges from the original so much, it’s only irritating that they’re trying to capitalize on a title; I’d put Halo in this category. I thought the writing and acting was pretty good, and the FX were decent.

Then there’s “bad” where the characters are unlikeable with poorly written dialogue, like Foundation. In the latter case, it’s especially depressing because the design was gorgeous, there were some outstanding actors, and the source material had such potential to be a great series.

It sounds as if Borderlands was just an all-around shit-show, without even the few redeeming qualities Foundation had.

I’ll never forgive Apple for what they did to Foundation. I literally canceled Apple TV because of it.

OK, thank you.

It honestly baffles me how, after decades of experience, Hollywood still doesn’t understand what’s necessary to properly execute a successful franchise with a large fan base. When they’re spending millions of dollars in a film, you’d think they’d be smarter about choosing producers, directors, and writers. I saw the criticism of some of the casting choices, but rarely are the actors the problem.

Lucky guys. Their best chance at surviving this war is not being prisoner swapped back to Russia.

Except when there’s a draft, nearly all US soldiers spend the first 2 years of their duty as teenagers. In Vietnam, the combat rotation was 2 years; many men joined as teenagers, and died as teenagers. This really isn’t unusual.

You’re right about Putin, but he’s no different than any other leader of a country with a military WRT enlistment age.

I didn’t know they’d made a movie. Should I be sorry that I now know they did? More importantly, do I have the inner strength to resist watching a movie from my favorite video game franchise, despite the warnings?

the practice of deliberately wasting enormous amounts of energy for the purpose of being able to prove that you’ve wasted enormous amounts of energy.

C’mon, that’s being disingenuous. Back when Bitcoin was released, nobody was giving a thought to computer energy use. A consequence of proof-of-work is wasted energy, but a focus on low-power modalities and throttling have been developed in the intervening years. The prevailing paradigm at the time was, “your C/GPU is going to be burning energy anyway, you may as well do something with it.”

It was a poor design decision, but it wasn’t a malicious one like you make it sound. You may as well accuse the inventors of the internal combustion engine of designing it for the express purpose of creating pollution.