sinza

What a misunderstanding of the nature of the Fediverse and how federation works. The point of federation is more to a connected social network while distributing infrastructure across volunteers.

I will have to be pedantic and note that r/Anarchism on Reddit does elect moderators, but not based on the criteria you suggest. In fact, it’s quite problematic as the skills of linking cool things/writing good posts and managing people like you would as a moderator are quite different skills! While I’ve never ran a Lemmy community or a subreddit, I did run a Discord server once as well as a traditional forum, and the social aspect was far harder than the technical aspect, and I did not know Discord as a platform at all when I did that. The community was a trainwreck as a result.

That being said, a democratically-run instance isn’t a bad idea. I agree with givesomefucks on lemmy.world in that the best way to go about this is to have an instance with that kind of rule set. In fact, there are Mastodon instances that are cooperatives like social.coop and cosocial.ca that could be looked at for inspiration for a Lemmy cooperative, which is what it sounds like you’re looking for to some extent. I think in practice it’d probably look like a very scaled down version of Usenet’s Big 8 Board.

I’ve had that happen to me on archive.is 🙃

Xeovo appears to use WireGuard and OpenVPN. They don’t even seem to have their own client.

KeePass is made with Windows in mind, so it might not have come across OP’s radar if they don’t use Windows.

I do love Posteo, but they explicitly do not support custom domains, as said in their FAQ. However, it is very strongly anti-AI, and has strong ethics that I think anyone in your situation would agree with.

For VPNs, I love AirVPN a lot, though I hear it can be rather slow. For me, I personally use it for downloading Linux ISOs as well as getting past wonky internet connections and it works really well for those use cases. From what I could see, Xeovo also seems to be torrent-friendly as well.

I’ve recommended Aegis to close family and have used KeePass (as well as XC and ChiPass, which is an AI-free fork of XC) in both a personal and professional capacity. I will have a look at AliasVault though, as I would like to move away from BitWarden myself.

It does.

A quick look at the sidebar and hovering over, one of the moderators of this community appears to be a lemmy.world admin if that’s what you mean.

Considering how big lemmy.world is, I’d guess it’s more a bit of overlap than it being the same people.

I’d seriously suggest looking into the history of Usenet or maybe even Fidonet and BBSes in general if you want to look at distributed forums that don’t have Reddit-like karma systems as examples, and the lessons you can draw from them.

One of the first things, as someone who came of age long after the heyday of Usenet, I noticed was how similar Usenet is to Reddit as a forum.

For VPN I do like AirVPN a lot.

I do currently use Bitwarden for my 2FA as well as my passwords, though I should look into Ente Auth.

I’ll be honest, I forget that NodeBB has become federated. Despite having run into an actual incompatibility problem between Piefed and NodeBB. 😅

I personally use Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin/etc. for social news rather than bolted on forum-like features. That’s where I think this software shines.

If you want a decentralized forum, I’d seriously recommend you look at Usenet and NNTP. Then again, I promote the usage of network protocols for what they are good at over forcing everything through the web. 😂

Definitely a very good post.

It reminds me of Chimera Linux’s stance on systemd, which I found to be the best explanation on systemd before these blog posts.

Not my instance (I’m posting from PieFed lol), but I noticed that lemmy.blahaj.zone has five UIs, including mlmym, set up.

I can second AirVPN. I’ve never had an issue with it, at least one that wasn’t ultimately user error.

Wow! I guess AI was worth all that water!

…seriously, what’s the point of making it an image aside from posting a (probably unpaid!) ad on Twitter?

Makes sense to me. As I said, I’d find this a mild annoyance (at worst even!) if this weren’t a Linux distribution. Could (theoretically anyways) be fine enough for OP though.

The policy doesn’t seem to be a full ban on AI within the distribution’s infrastructure, permitting some usage such as for translation and for research.

For anything else, this would be a mild annoyance to me.

For a Linux distribution, not fully banning AI is a dealbreaker for me due to the direction that the Linux kernel is going. Thus the resistance that a Linux distribution does against AI must be stronger for me to consider it, especially when there are other Unix-like OSes that have less AI-generated code due to not using the Linux kernel.

This line of thinking also helps me narrow down Linux distributions to recommend.

Regrettably, I don’t think there’s a good middle ground distribution that’s anti-AI. It’s either very technical distributions like Chimera and Gentoo or opinionated distributions geared towards newcomers like elementary OS or more specialized distributions like Nura (formerly postmarketOS) that are explicitly anti-AI.

I think your best bet would be to go with elementary OS, honestly. It uses its own DE, Pantheon, rather than KDE, but I think it’s easily your least worst option. I’ve never used it extensively myself, however.

Of course, I also am obligated to mention that the Linux kernel is extremely pro-AI. However, an anti-AI Linux distribution is leagues better than using, say, Windows when it comes to AI.

That being said, here’s a list of distributions known to be affected by AI as well as those that are anti-AI.