I think I may not be presenting my position well, and thus am coming off as a right wing partisan hack of the sort that wants to defund the EPA. That’s not my position.

A lot of people (mostly conservatives and big businesses) that complain about ‘red tape’ as a way of attacking various regulations. For example, people will say it’s impossible to build a power plant because of environmental red tape.
A lot of that regulation is positive though. For example, even if the land is cheap, you can’t build a power plant next to a nature preserve because the pollution will kill all the birds. And I like that regulation. The power people will of course complain as will the mines that were going to sell the plant coal. In cases like this, IMHO, they can all fuck off.

At the same time though, the ‘red tape’ that many businesses complain about does sometimes actually exist. That is, to do business you have to get endless streams of licenses, approvals, permits, etc for things where the bureaucracy and licensing process adds little or no value to either the industry or the population at large.
From what I’ve read, this sort of thing exists a lot in Germany. I’ve talked to a few people who were starting a business in Europe and they specifically avoided a few countries for that reason.

Making an account is easy. Consistent time, not so much. Heh.

True, but that brings up another point which I just edited into my parent comment- instance rules. Any communities you create will be hosted on your home instance and thus subject to your home instance’s rules. So you should make sure those rules align with the sort of activity you’ll want to be doing.

The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn’t something your friends have or are willing to get, then it’s not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I’m a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn’t be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it’s still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.

A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what’s missing is defederation policy.

Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you’re on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I’m on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there’s a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.

Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that’s due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That’s their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).

//edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will ‘live’ on your instance, and thus be under your instance’s rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don’t today intend to create any communities, it’s good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.

I’d be interested. I have experience moderating Reddit communities (I’m /u/SirEDCaLot over there too).

I’m Eastern time. But I can’t commit to any specific amount of availability for two reasons. 1. My real life is pretty hectic and many days I literally have no time at all to participate let alone moderate, and 2. Lemmy/Reddit for me is a hobby, not a job, and I have no desire to change that. So my availability is ‘when I have time and feel like doing it’. Sometimes that will mean I disappear for days, sometimes that means I’m on for multiple hours per day.

What I will say though- is that whatever I do have time to do, I will do well. I believe in treating users with respect, even when they break seemingly simple rules. I’ve found that if you don’t assume bad faith and treat people with respect, even when they appear to be idiots, more often than not they return the gesture.
I also believe that moderators are more like janitors than gods. So I’m not interested in ‘power’.

Don’t underestimate that red tape. Makes it very difficult / slow / expensive to do business there.

Very interesting.

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/8969 This may be of interest- it’s basically the same thing. Seems that before that patch was merged, bridge-created puppet contacts would show up in searches.
Of course that’s for Synapse not Dendrite. So it sounds like Dendrite never applied that same functionality.

Honestly I think you’ll be happy either way. Synology is very very good at some things. And the software makes it very easy and approachable to spin up a lot of private cloud type stuff without a lot of technical messing around. That said, you will get more hardware/performance for your dollar with a PC server. You can go the DIY route, or if you don’t mind a little more power consumption and want more performance buy a used Dell PowerEdge on eBay. Based on what you say, I think you’ll be happy either way. The real value you get from Synology is their software. Their photo app is very wife friendly. And I don’t think you’ll find any serious restrictions with it, you get full root SSH access into the box.

So I guess my suggestion would be evaluate the photo management in TrueNAS versus Synology. You can spin up a virtual machine of TrueNAS on your desktop and play with it if you want. The only other gotcha is if you want Plex to do transcoding you definitely want the PC because you can throw in a GPU and accelerate that a lot.

//edit- the one other thing to mention is backups- Synology has GREAT backup software and it’s free. Active Backup for Business will back up your desktop/laptop, versioned, deduplicated, very efficiently. And Hyper Backup will backup your Synology itself (or some parts of it) to the cloud, optionally with client-side encryption. I suggest Wasabi as the backend for that, it’s only like $7/TB/mo. Or just get another Synology and put it at the house of someone you know and you have an instant offsite backup with no recurring cost.

Salt and/or butter with a little pepper and garlic powder. Or pesto, mmmm. Plenty of shit other than tomato that can go on pasta.

I think new laws in Europe have something to do with it. EU is trying to force the big platforms to interoperate. Facebook/Meta is of course one of the most targeted. So I think their thought is by signing on to the existing fediverse, they can say hey we are playing nice no need to regulate us further

It’s a user name. Users are @name@instance.tld Communities are !community@instance.tld

So I’m @SirEDCaLot@fmhy.ml
Posting a reply on !no stupid questions@lemmy.world
To you @tofurious_is_god@lemmy.world

I love this whole cyberdeck thing.

I remember back in the early 2000s, there was a lot more innovation when it came to portable devices. There were gadgets that sort of resemble modern smartphones just clunkier (iPaq), ones with keyboards below the screen (BlackBerry), ones with slide out keyboards (HTC and others), ones that flipped open like laptops but could fit in your pocket (HP Jornada), etc.

Somewhere along the line all that innovation went out the window and now every single phone or gadget looks more or less exactly the same. Like take the top 10 or 15 smartphones, debrand them, and put them in a box, and 99% of people couldn’t tell the hardware apart.

You would think there would be a market for some level of variation, or just have one company that makes the phone 5 mm thicker but the battery lasts for 3 days. But we don’t even see that.

Foldable screens seem to be spurring a little bit of innovation so I have hopes. But until then, I would love to see some of these cyberdeck designs put into production. I would happily pay a couple hundred bucks for a raspberry pi equivalent of a Jornada 720 (as long as the keyboard is touch typeable like the old one).

I think it’s more they’re trying to make a Twitter-killer then kill Mastodon from the inside.

This is the answer. They aren’t stupid, they know that if they just spin up a Twitter clone, nobody will use it. They need a reason to exist. Honestly I don’t think they give a single shit about Mastodon or killing it. But what ActivityPub does, is get them an instant content base. And if they are building their own AI, it’s a whole lot of live conversation for them to train it on.

Or, maybe they just don’t consider at an important enough problem to get fixed. A big part of my point is that if there was a specific reason why they chose not to do it, that reason would be communicated to the users. As far as I am aware, no such reason has been communicated. Don’t get me wrong, I like signal a lot. I’m a little bit critical sometimes because I feel that there are important features like this, which have a serious effect on usability, that are not getting the priority they need.

Then why on Android do they do a full database backup encrypted by a simple PIN code?

If privacy is the ultimate goal, I think Signal is a bit better.

That said, Signal is doing a bunch of user-unfriendly stuff that turns me off a bit. For example, they had a great SMS integration on Android that they’re now killing for no obvious reason. And more problematic- on iOS there is NO backup/restore functionality. None. So if you lose your phone, all your chat history is gone. It doesn’t backup to iCloud or anywhere else. The ONLY backup or transfer option is if you get a new phone you can transfer data from old to new.
Android has a full backup/restore function that backs everything up to an encrypted file. No idea why they don’t do the same on iOS.

Matrix is also better for multiple device access. On Signal, you can connect additional devices (laptop etc) but they are always subservient to the main device. Conversation history doesn’t transfer from the main device to addon devices, although conversations stay in sync on both devices from the point you add the device forward. But if you get a new phone for example, that’s a new parent device, so your desktop convo history gets wiped.
Matrix on the other hand, no device is primary and conversation history is stored (encrypted) on the server. So backup your crypto key and you can access everything from any device (including a web browser).

For Matrix- Element is the one to use most of the time…

Exactly. There may be a piece of knowledge that a person should already have, but not asking the question just means continuing to be ignorant.

I’ve always liked the saying ‘there’s no such thing as stupid questions, only people too stupid to ask and fix their own ignorance’

Windows users will want to check out BlueIris

Otherwise, Synology has a great surveillance package, but you only get 2 cameras licenses with your NAS and more licenses are like $50 each

A lot of the value isn’t technical, it’s social. Each instance can set their own rules for acceptable conduct and what sort of content they want or don’t want. That’s one of the most valuable parts of decentralization, an instance like Beehaw can try to be an open and inclusive space and thus have a longer list of rules, while another instance can be more permissive and allow NSFW and more offensive speech. And thus the two can coexist in the same network with the same namespace.