Nothing wrong with having a key pair, but yeah, most of the content in Nostr is unfortunately cryptocurrency related.

Yeah, despite the strong anti-crypto sentiment on Lemmy, this is exactly the problem that projects like Nostr is trying to solve by integrating Lighting as a first-class payment system in the ecosystem.

Services get paid for by one of four ways:

• Harvesting and reselling of user data. Which is wildly unpopular, and why a lot of people are on Lemmy and not Reddit or Facebook.
• Ads. Which is also unpopular and again why people come to services like Lemmy
• Pay-for-service, which is what you’re suggesting, only via crypto, which is easier than accepting credit card transactions, and safer for users.
• The hosted paying for it out of the goodness of their hearts. So, charity. Sometimes there’s corporate charity, and that’s nice, except for the potential for money coming with strings attached, now or eventually.

Someone always pays; its expensive to host a popular instance. People suggesting you should host for free are selfish freeloaders, so know that some people understand that hosting costs, and sympathize with with your desire to offset that cost.

I like the volunteer micro-transaction model. Those who can afford to pay some amount for good service, and hopefully this provides welfare for those who can’t afford to pay. But the cryptocurrency space is a mess at the moment, and an economical currency (probably proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work) needs to gain some traction, and overcome a lot of ignorant bigotry.

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.

Compiling has never been the hard part. The challenge is making it through the entire configuration menu system before succumbing to the urge to gouge your own eyes out with blunt sticks.

Once that’s done, kick off make take a long break; it’ll be compiled by the time you get back to it.

I hear build times are getting longer with the Rust parts, though, so do it soon before you need mainframe access to get a compile within your lifetime.

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.

The AMD graphics driver is reputedly the biggest that mainstream Linux users will encounter, approaching six million lines of code.

That does seem a bit … excessive.

I agree; it probably didn’t occur to them. But it was a fairly common job in IT in the 90’s. Not a career or job description, maybe, but a duty you got saddled with.

I can see that, although TBH I almost never have to “admin” EndeavourOS. I just upgrade every once in a while.

Most important to me is being able to find and install whatever software I want, and I have a string preference that it either be installed in my ~, or be managed by the package manager. I really dislike sideloading software globally. And Arch does this better than most. AUR is massive, and packages are trivial to write and install in the rare event something isn’t in AUR.

What they really got wrong was the clothing: so much anime/hentai.

This is a techno-goth.

Base Arch can be fussy, but that’s because there’s a lot to set up, so many opportunities to forget things and only discover them later.

I ran Artix on a laptop for about a year; that was a constant PITA, although I still value their goals.

But EndeavourOS has been an entirely different matter. It’s a “just works” Arch derivative.

I had so many fewer problems with Arch that I went through the effort to convert my 3 personal cloud servers from Debian to it. I went through a lot of work to replace thee default Mint on an ODroid to Arch, and it’s been so much better. I put Endeavor on the last two non-servers I installed. So, yes, I personally find out far more reliable and easier to work with than Ubuntu, Debian, or Mint.

That said, I had dad install Mint on a new computer he bought because I had to do it over the phone and he never, ever, upgrades his packages, and almost never installs anything. If all I’m going to do is install it once and then never change anything, Mint is easier. But for a normal use case where I’m regularly updating and installing software, Arch is far easier and more reliable.

The power to choose, just before dying, to come back to life as a healthy 30 y/o.

But you probably meant only selfless acts allowed, hence the “sacrifice” verbiage. In that case, instantaneous worldwide post-scarcity society. That’d address most of the world’s ills, eventually. Being ultra-rich means nothing in post-scarcity; not needing Middle-East oil and African mineral resources would eliminate most international meddling in those locations. While it wouldn’t immediately address climate change or cure all diseases, it’d mean enough food and energy for everyone, and it’d give us the means to accomplish these.

If so many of us weren’t spending all our time working just to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, we could accomplish much as a species.

A studio should be able to afford a good LTO tape drive for at least one backup copy; LTO tapes last over 30 years and suffer less from random bitrot than spinning disks. Just pay someone to spend a month duplicating the entire archive every couple of decades. And every decade you can also consolidate a bunch of tapes since the capacity has kept increasing; 18TB tapes are now available: $/MB it’s always far cheaper to use tape.

They could have done that with the drives, but today you’d have to go find an ATA IDE or old SCSI card (of you’re lucky) that’ll work on a modern motherboard.

But I’d guess their problem is more not having a process for maintaining the archives than the technology. Duplicating and consolidating hard drives once a year would have been relatively cheap, and as long as they verified checksums and kept duplicates, HDs would have been fine too.

The assassination attempt on Reagan also failed, and was bigger news, for far longer. Not JF Kennedy level, but it was more enduring than the attempt on Trump.

The news cycle on the Trump attempt was astonishingly brief.

In Living Color; 1988.

Search for “Kennedy.” Long before Trump was a “thing” in the American zeitgeist.

I think John F. Kennedy qualified; he’s been practically deified since his assassination, and his supporters were MAGA-level enthusiasts. Just the sheer level of conspiracy theory around his assassination, missing from all other assassinations - successful or attempted - is a good indicator. Even the attempted Trump assassination, which generated considerable tin-hat response, is now almost completely forgotten; certainly, nobody’s talking about it in mainstream forums.

In my opinion, Kennedy was an incredible president and great statesman, but yeah, I think you could reasonably claim there was a cult of personality around him.

Github is full of lists of things. There are even several lists of “awesome lists”. Far more than I can list here, and it starts to get painfully recursive (an awesome list of awesome lists of awesome lists?). Just search for “awesome list” on github; some live outside of github, so you could search for “awesome list” in Ecosia, or DDG, or whatever you use.

• https://github.com/athityakumar/awesome-awesomes
• https://github.com/topics/awesome-list
• https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness

The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point

And, for computers, was almost exclusively limited to monitors. In 2009, the Energy Star specification was version 4.0, released in 2006. In that specification, the EPA’s objective was to get 40% of the computers on the market to have power management capabilities 2010 – 40% by the year after Bitcoin was introduced. Intel’s 2009 TCO-driven upgrade cycle document mentions power management, but power use isn’t included in any of the TCO metrics.

All of the focus on low-power processing units in 2009 was for mobile devices and DSPs. Computer-oriented energy savings at the time was focused on processes, e.g. manually powering down computers or use of suspension and hibernation - there was very little CPU clock scaling available for desktop computers – you turned them off to save power. DVFS didn’t become widely available – or effective – until 2006, and a study published in 2009 (again, the same year Bitcoin was introduced) found that “only 20% of initiatives had measurable targets.”

So, yes: technically, there were people thinking about these sorts of things, but it wasn’t a common consumer consideration, and the tools for power management were crude: your desktop was on and consuming power – always the same amount of power – or it was off. And people did power down their computers to save energy. But, like I said, if your desktop was on, it was consuming the same amount of energy whether you were running a miner or weren’t. There was a motto at the time bandied about by SETI@home, that your computer was using energy anyway, so you might as well do science with the spare CPU cycles. That was the mindset of most people who had computers at the time.

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.

the Iran-Contra stuff

and throwing one of his underlings under the bus for it. He was a role model for Trump.