Lettuce eat lettuce

I don’t know the details, and honestly I don’t really care for the drama, but if you’re not happy with the current options for servers and governance, just host your own?

You seem to have a pretty clear idea of what you want to operate like, and you said in another response, that you have experience building servers.

It’s not hard to get a server built that has enough compute and storage to support the kind of capacity you’re talking about. Any used, corporate desktop from the last 7-10 years has more than enough compute to handle hundreds of active users. Storage is the main issue, but that’s not unattainable either. As of a week ago, Server Monkey was selling certified refurbished Dell enterprise 6TB HDDs for $175 each. $700 gets you around 18TB with one disk for redundancy using ZFS. 18TB will hold quite a bit of dank memes, especially if you limit the max resolution to something reasonable.

1,500 new pictures per day, all 50 megapixel JPEGs is roughly 670GB per month, so even at that pretty crazy rate (by Lemmy standards) your 18TB server would last two years before getting totally full.

Backblaze archival storage is $1,500 per year for 18TB if you want long term secure cloud backups for your entire server, that’s just $125 a month that you’d need to fund yourself or get donations for. Not nothing, but hardly unattainable for a small instance. I used to play on a tiny Minecraft server that had maybe 15 active players, and they made more than $125 per month on donations.

I mean, again, all of this code is FOSS. If you really feel that your approach would be significantly more successful, dive in and build out your own instance. Get some friends involved, split up the costs, market yourselves, get some nice branding, build alliances and partnerships with other instances, etc. There is literally nothing stopping you.

“Alternative” doesn’t necessarily mean “competitor.”

Very true, but it’s better to use and support a fully FOSS platform if possible.

Buy a Fully FOSS 3D printer. It’s pointless to purchase any peice of tech to “avoid future regulation” if it still runs proprietary software you don’t control. I would highly recommend checking out Voron printers. Fully FOSS at every level, firmware, hardware, schematics, etc. Voron Design

The catch is that you have to build it from scratch yourself. However, there are many places online to buy high quality premade kits, and the community is massive and thriving, you’ll be able to follow guides easily.

I would also buy some bulk, long term digital storage if you don’t have it already, and build yourself a simple NAS. The digital crackdowns are coming soon, and you’re going to thank yourself for having terabytes of digital media and software that is impossible to get down the line.

ServerMonkey currently has 6TB refurbished enterprise HDDs for $175, and 24TB Seagate Exos CMR HDDs for $625 (even cheaper per TB.) if you don’t need crazy performance, you can throw a few of those in an old PC with a few hundred bucks of hardware and be totally fine using it as a NAS/home media server.

Learn how to securely torrent if you don’t already. If you’re into LLMs at all, download current LLM models that are good at different sizes, even if you can’t currently run them on your hardware, they will likely be banned in the near future because they represent a “threat” to the USA’s corporate power and influence.

Download a local copy of Wikipedia and other online sites with something like Kiwix. Purchase pre-LLM era physical books on foraging, cooking, home and auto repair, electronics, child care, etc. Highly practical skills that will be useful to know as the general population becomes further dumbed down and reliant on proprietary, corporate slopware.

For those on a very tight budget, used is your friend. Old computer equipment is still quite affordable. You can pick up used t480 Thinkpads on Ebay for $175-$300. If you’ve got kids who need a laptop for school, pick one of those up and throw Linux on it.

If you’re willing to swap, haggle, and hunt locally, you can get even better deals. Check if your area has a government surplus warehouse. When I was a kid, my family lived 15 minutes from one. They had literal pallets of government mini-pcs you could buy, 40 towers for a few hundred bucks. You could buy individual machines for $40-$75 there. Yeah they were old, beat up, janky, but they worked. And as a 14 year old kid who’s only money came from doing random yard work for friends and family, it was a gold mine.

Check with your local businesses and schools and ask somebody there if they have “e-waste computers” they are looking to get rid of. Often times they do, and they will happily give you them for free. Normally, they have to pay a company to take those off their hands, so they will have no issue with you just taking them for nothing. I’ve gotten a bunch of old computers this way over the years. Don’t be afraid to even ask the IT department where you work too. Some places have strict e-waste policies, but most don’t. As long as there’s no storage installed that could contain company/organizational data, they usually couldn’t care less if an employee wants to take an old “junk” PC home with them.

I agree with Stallman and others on this sort of thing, it should be illegal for any public institution to use proprietary, corporate software in any capacity.

Public institutions are supposed to serve and benefit the public good first and foremost. The idea that they can do that equally well or better by partnering with mega-corps who’s only fundamental drive is to generate as much profit as possible for their shareholders, is idiotic.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo flatpak update -y

Was this the guy who had that blog post about Europe being “ruined” by immigrants?

We need more apps for linux phones and more userbase.

This is what killed the Windows phone. Microsoft’s attempt to break into the smartphone space had everything else. Massive user base, huge brand name recognition, deep industry ties for cheap mass production, fantastic hardware, advertising, and a great mobile OS. The dreaded Windows 8 tile system sucked for traditional desktops and laptops, but it was great on a phone screen. I had 2 Windows phones, to this day they are the only Microsoft products that I have anything good to say about.

But there were no apps available. I mean, sure, they had their own Microsoft apps like a mobile version of their office suite, and there were a handful of other popular apps that devs had ported over like Evernote. But their appstore had almost nothing compared to Apple or Android, and Microsoft never was able to convince devs to port their apps to a third platform.

Linux is in a much worse initial starting point. ARM-based versions of Linux have always lagged behind the typical x86 versions. That’s changed a little in the last few years due to popular ARM SBCs like the Raspberry Pi, but it’s still not nearly where it would need to be for anybody other than hardcore enthusiasts to adopt.

No normie is going to be interested in paying $500+ for a phone that has a few hours of battery life, worse performance, far less compatible software, and barely any no compatibility with Apple/Android integrations for things like car play.

I’ve wanted to switch to a Linux phone for at least 5 years. Every new mobile Linux project that comes up I was following closely, but they all fail in similar ways. Sadly, I think that Google will have to basically kill open Android before we see a really strong push towards a Linux phone that isn’t just a tinkering platform for early adopters and devs.

Don’t let this nut sully your views on actual leftists, most of us are pretty sensible. ❤️

They are very likely a bot anyways lol

If you’re using a 30+ year old computer in the modern day, you’ve already sacrificed security.

The price and availability of a 15 year old computer is almost the same as a 30 year old computer, you can get a fully functional 1st gen i5 PC that will sprint circles around the highest end 90’s PC for $40. Honestly, most people are just e-wasting computers that old, I’m sure you could easily get them for free, hell, lots of people would pay you to take them off their hands.

You’re right, it’s way better.

1. Check your thermals on your CPU and GPU, make sure they aren’t running too hot.
2. Turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall. Then check all your physical connections from the power supply to the motherboard and your graphics card. Everything should be fully seated in the sockets and firmly locked in. Loose connectors can cause power delivery issues that freeze or crash a system. In rare cases they can short out, causing severe damage to the components, or even a fire. So it’s important to do anyways.
3. Check your motherboard manufacture’s website and make sure you’re using the latest BIOS version. Your BIOS screen will tell you what your exact model number is and the current BIOS version.
4. Check to make sure you’re not running out of system RAM.
5. Use Furmark to stress test your GPU. If it runs in stress test mode for at least 4 hours straight without any crashes, that’s a good sign that your GPU isn’t the issue.
6. Use a CPU stress test program to do the same to your CPU. I actually like to go to Lichess.org, open their analysis board tool Lichess Analysis Tool, go into the settings and max out the move search depth, memory limit, and maximum lines calculated. Then I just make 15-20 random moves. The chess engine will sit there and calculate as long as you have that tab open on your local machine, and it will max out every core on your CPU 100% but there are dozens of other ways to stress your CPU, so feel free to search for them.
7. You may have a lemon of a CPU or GPU chip. All chips are “binned” meaning they are tested at the factory and depending on how they perform, they are accepted or rejected within certain boundaries, but there is a range. Some chips just barely pass the minimum standards brand new. Since all electronics degrade over time, especially modern chips with billions of microscopic transistors, if your chip already was barely good enough to pass the minimum specs when it was fresh out of the box, it can start to become unstable even under normal workloads, let alone more heavy use like what you’re describing. Undervolting and underclocking can help fix this. Using your motherboard’s settings or 3rd party tools (like LACT for GPUs), you can limit the maximum voltage and/or maximum frequency of your chips. This not only will reduce the thermal output of your chips, making them run cooler and slowing the degradation process, but often will make them run much more stable.

Totally agree, I threw a quick filter on some public domain, actual human artwork, and cropped it square. Took me as long as it would have taken to generate that slop logo.

Here’s the original source: Citation

For the love of anything even mildly good or wholesome…enough of the fucking AI slop images!

Finamp has been my goto for my music collection for several years. I know there are better solutions, but I’m not hardcore, I just want a simple app that streams my music from the server reliably.

The only thing that is a pain is getting all the tags and metadata correct, but there are lots of good apps to help with that also.

Same conclusion for me. Been using Linux for years, Mint is the only distro I’ve used that #JustWorks in my experience.

I use LMDE as my personal laptop, it’s rock stable.

It’s easy to slop together the 10 Billionth remake of Pacman, Minesweeper, Kanban board, ToDo list, etc.

Actually making something innovative, unique, interesting, and useful is tough. It requires skill, knowledge, creativity, and passion to keep at it long after the high of vibe coding your first solitaire game fades away.

If LLMs are blockchain 2.0, then Vibe coding is its NFT fad. Just a way to take advantage of useful idiots who think being a software engineer consists of typing code all day as fast as possible.

Same for me. I clearly separate my “experiemental” machines from my “just works” machines now.

My laptop runs LMDE, my servers are mostly Debian 13, a handful of Ubuntu Server in there. My gaming rig is Nobara Linux, which is just Glorious Egg roll’s gaming-optimized Fedora build. When I first set it up a few years ago, I had everything all customized, themes, fonts, icons, fancy desktop/window effects, etc.

I actually considered just going with something vanilla recently, not because I have had any major issues with my current set up, but just because I don’t feel like tinkering with it anymore.

My tinkering desire has shifted more and more towards server/enterprise infrastructure and DevOps automation.

I’m older now, my career has taken off, and with that comes more responsibilities and mental energy required during the workday, then family obligations through the week/month, etc. I find myself with less time and mental energy to just tinker and play with tech. So when I do find myself with a bit of free time, I want to maximize it and work on stuff that both helps with my actual career, and helps me get more stuff self-hosted for myself and my family.

Way back in college, I used to spend more time tweaking my PC’s overclock than actually gaming xD

It’s a lightweight, independent distro for power users. It’s also currently one of the very few distros still offering an official 32 bit version out of the box.

I use it on my oldest and lowest power machines. It’s snappy and stable. Plus, the name is badass, for whatever that’s worth lol.

Very true, but that may make things worse down the line. Once they realize that kids are circumventing their restrictions, they won’t think, “Hmm, maybe a blanket ban of social media for minors wasn’t a great idea.” They’re just going to double down and say that there needs to be more hardcore restrictions on all internet/computer activity. More sensorship, more data harvesting, mandatory governement spyware in all devices.

Essentially the Great Firewall in China. Many governments have already expressed interest in modeling national internet access after China.

To a large degree, yes, but blanket bans on social media use for minors will fail for multiple reasons.

1. This has already been the case in Australia, and the latest numbers indicate that a vast majority of youth still access social media via black/grey market account purchasing, VPNs, and other methods.
2. The ban doesn’t include some popular platforms like Telegram, which arguably provide a more risky experience, due to it being a popular platform for criminal activities.
3. Taking away a huge swath of social platforms from kids without providing any constructive or healthy alternatives will mainly encourage destructive behaviors.