big fan of mini PC’s
Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the “reputable” vendors.
I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it’s perfectly functional, it’s using an ethernet chipset that doesn’t have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.
Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.
Search will never search non-local content.
Which is the point I’m trying to make: right now, you cannot use search as a discoverability medium, unless you’re on something the scale of mastodon.social.
Search with a focus on new content discoverability is utterly useless for smaller or single user instances, because a search that only finds things you already know about isn’t exactly a useful search for discoverability.
If I have to be on the biggest instances, then there’s very little difference between something like Bluesky and Mastodon in terms of usability, and uh, I might as well pick the one that’s more likely to have the most growth and diversity of content.
We have to give up on the idea of having easy and direct access to the whole of thw fediverse.
I agree, and it’s why I’ve pretty much migrated back to centralized services with the exception of Lemmy, because Lemmy works very well in terms of finding useful shit to follow in a way that literally no other federated platform does.
Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place,
They’re also subject to interpretation, regulatory capture, as well as just plain being ignored when it’s sufficiently convenient for the regulators to do so.
“There ought to be a law!” is nice, but it’s not a solution when there’s a good couple of centuries of modern regulatory frameworks having had existed, and a couple centuries of endless examples of where absolutely none of it matters when sufficient money and power is in play.
Like, for example, the GDPR: it made a lot of shit illegal under penalty of company-breaking penalties.
So uh, nobody in the EU has had their personal data misused since it was passed? And all the big data brokers that are violating it have been fined out of business?
And this is, of course, ignoring the itty bitty little fact that you have to be aware of the misuse of the data: if some dude does some shady shit quietly, then well, nobody knows it happened to even bring action?
How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?
I think what they’re saying is that the ideal wouldn’t be to force everyone to host their own, but rather for the people who want to run stuff to offer them to their friends and family.
Kinda like how your mechanic neighbor sometimes helps you do shit on your car: one person shares a skill they have, and the other person also benefits. And then later your neighbor will ask you to babysit their kids, and shit.
Basically: a very very goofy way of saying “Hey! Do nice things for your friends and family, because that’s kinda how life used to work.”
The problem I ran into is that every single platform that primarily interacted with Mastodon (The keys, etc.) had the same exact same set of problems.
While yes, my Firefish instance had search, what was it searching? Local data only, and once I figured out that Mastodon-style replies didn’t federate to all of someone’s followers, it became pretty clear that it was uh, not very useful.
You can search, but any given server may or may not have access to data you actually want and thus, well, you just plain cannot meaningfully search for shit unless you go to one of the mega instances, or join giant piles of relays and store gigabyte upon gigabyte upon gigabyte of garbage data you do not care about.
The whole implementation is kinda garbage for search-based discovery from it’s very basic design all the way through to everyone’s implementations.
For me, it’s full text search.
I tend to want to find an opinion on something very specific, so if I can just toss a phrase or model number or name of something into a search field and get actual non-AI, non-advertisement, non-stupid-shit results, that’d be absolutely ideal.
Like, say, how Google worked 15 years ago.
I gather that’s a meme that’s older than you are?
By linux ISOs I meant any content you’re torrenting: movies, software, audio, my little pony porn, whatever.
Frankly, it probably means absolutely nothing.
Even when captain coffee cup was the FCC chairman, did you lose the ability to torrent linux isos? Did usenet stop working?
I wouldn’t expect anything different this time, either.
Two thoughts come to mind:
and
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-11-iot-enterprise-ltsc
Keep in mind, though, that you’ll still have to do some activation and KMS hackery to make them usable, but you can at least use an installer that’s going to be clean.
From Microsoft. They actually provide ISO downloads for the 11 LTSC versions, so there’s not really any reason to go grab some random one off totally-legit-software-and-totatlly-not-malware.com or whatever.
The big thing for #2 would be to seperate out what you actually need vs what people keep recommending.
General guidance is useful, but there’s a lot of ‘You need ZFS!’ and ‘You should use K8s!’ and ‘Use X software!’
My life got immensely easier when I figured out I did not need any features ZFS brought to the table, and I did not need any of the features K8s brought to the table, and that less is absolutely more. I ended up doing MergerFS with a proper offsite backup method because, well, it’s shockingly low-complexity.
And I ended up doing Docker with a bunch of compose files and bind mounts, because it’s shockingly low-complexity. And it’s just running on Debian, instead of some OS that has a couple of layers of additional software to make things “easier” because, again, it’s low-complexity.
I can re-deploy the entire stack on new hardware in about ~10 minutes (I’ve tested this a few times just to make sure my backup scripts work), and there’s basically zero vendor tie-in or dependencies that you’d have to get working first since it’s just a pile of tarballs and packages from the distro’s package manager on, well, ANY distro.
Everything Whedon has ever done was mid, and I’m going to be banned for saying that, probably.