Yes. I’m not very educated on the Worpress side of things… Kinda necessary, though, to keep compatibility with the Fediverse AND the No-AI people in my opinion. I mean the Fediverse is kind of the place for people to go if they don’t want algorithms and bots to dominate the place?!

Also got a nice Dell 7390 for a similar price a year ago. Though you really can’t compare a laptop bought in 2019 with a laptop bought 6 years in the future. You’d need to compare it to a refurbished one available for a similar price in 2019 and then factor in how that turned out for you a few years later. I mean technology always progresses and you’ll always get more a few years later. But yes, I’ve always been a fan of refurbished enterprise-grade laptops instead of the super-cheap consumer ones which include as much cost-cuttings as possible and a legacy CPU which is upmarketed because it’s cheap. I think my old desktop Celeron N4500(?) was like 40€ when it was new, because it was leftovers in production. At that point you can always buy a used processor for the same price with double the processor cores.

I mean if no single software fits your bill, maybe go for a combination of them? Post your blog posts in a Ghost installation, your podcasts in Castopod and have your community on a NodeBB forum? The Fediverse kinda includes the idea it’s all one big network anyway. So you don’t have to squeeze everything on a single server and one CMS.

Other than that: Wordpress is open-source. You could also wait for the enshittification to happen. We’re fairly sure someone is going to fork it and maybe they’ll provide a seemless migration. So if you’re patient enough, you might be able to stick with your current setup. Just that you Wordpress will some day have a different name and developer community. These things happen all the time. I’ll just switch from Firefox to LibreWolf once I’m unhappy with Mozilla’s decisions. Solves the user-facing part of the issues, and there’s almost no effort involved.

No worries. Your post was well-written. And I’m glad people could offer some advice. Not even the proficient Lemmy users get all of this right all the time. I just figured I’d drop you a comment in case the mods take action, to spare you the effort to also learn about the modlog and how to look up their note… But seems it wasn’t necessary 😄

Sorry, I don’t have an answer to your question, but two other communities that would fit: !homelab@lemmy.world and !homelab@selfhosted.forum

They’re both not really active, though. And someone asked about OpenSense hardware before and didn’t get any answers…

Just writing this so you have some other places to look up, in case your post gets deleted, I think you’re technically in the wrong community here. As per rule 3 in the sidebar, this community isn’t about hardware questions.

Sorry, I’m not not able to help with that. Maybe there’s a limit how many old messages your server or client syncs?

I suppose it’s old drama by now. And I didn’t check if there’s new one in the meantime. As of now, both projects are active. Both have a userbase. Judging by the lasst commits, it’s still the case that Tuwunel is a one-man-show and Continuwuity is a community project.

I think whether you do closed source software is a personal choice. Based on considerations of your application. Like money, of if you want to rely on a company and how well they do their job, if it’s still gonna be around in 7 years. If you can customize it enough to suit your needs. Or you base the decision on ideology.

I’ve been using Yunohost on the NAS. And it’s simple, works well and is pretty reliable, I didn’t get any major issues for many years now. (And in general, community maintained open-source software has served me well. So that’s what I do.)

Downsides as a proficient Linux user are: You can’t just mess with the config while the automatic scripts also mess with the config. You need to learn how they’re set up and work around that. Hope software has a config.d or overrides directory and put your customizations there. Or something will get messed up eventually. And you can’t just change arbitrary things. The mailserver or SSO or reverse proxy and a few other components are tightly integrated and you’re never gonna be able to switch from postfix to stalwart or something like that. Or retrofit a more modern authentication solution. It is a limiting factor.
And YunoHost doesn’t do containers, so I doubt it’s what you’re looking for anyway.

I’m a bit split on the entire promise of turnkey selfhosting solutions. Some of them work really well. And they’re badly needed to enable regular people to emancipate themselves from big tech. Whether you as an expert want to use them is an entirely different question. I think that just depends on application. If you have a good setup, that might be better suited to your needs. And if done right might be very low maintenance as well. So switching to a turnkey solution would be extra work and it might not pay off. Or it does pay off, I think that really depends on the specifics.

Isn’t that a Nintendo Switch game? You’d need to install and run an emulator for that, like you did with Yuzu on Windows. I don’t think Yuzu is around anymore, but there are some sucessors, Eden and Citron? I’d install one of those. At least Eden has SteamOS mentioned on it’s homepage. You need to install it, though. The SteamOS or Linux version from their homepage, not copy the entire emulator over from Windows. After that you can transfer the game files and load them into the emulator. Any variant to copy files between computers should work. A windows network share, USB stick, microSD card, a cloud drive or filedrop/sync tool…

Yes, surely. I mean we’re a bit in a different situation in a digital place. Votes are way easier here (than in real life) and we can easily automate it into bigger processes.

For example I could envision something like a jury to make judiciary decisions. Not sure if that counts as direct democracy… But we don’t have to ask everyone about every moderation decision. Maybe just grant everyone the ability to report stuff and then the software goes ahead and samples 15 random people from the community (who arent part of the drama) and makes them decide. I believe that could help with fatigue. And speeds it up, we can just set the software to take people who are online right now, and discard and replace them if they don’t get at it asap.

Or make it not entirely direct, but at least do away with the hierarchies in a representative democracy. Instead of appointing moderators, we’d form a web of trust. I’m completely free to delegate power to arbitrary people and if my web of trusted people arrive at a score of 30 it’s spam, it is spam for me. And someone else could have a different perspective on the network. That’d help with all the coordination as well, because I can just not care, and the platform automatically delegates the power. And once I do care, I’m free to vote and that spares other people the effort to do the same. That’d at least make it direct in a way that we’re all moderators and users at the same time.

Of course democracy is a trade-off. And there’s a million edge cases, and we need some other things which go along with it. Accountability and transparency. We’d need an appeal process, for example with my first example if the jury doesn’t do a good job.

I’m probably not at a 100% perfect solution with these ideas. But I’m fairly sure we’d be able to do way more in a software-driven platform than the analogies we can take from countries and their approach at decision making. Especially regarding hierarchies within the system. However, things also clash. Transparency might be opposed to privacy. We have a lot more abuse on the internet than in the real world and it’s maybe not just easier to do votes here, but also easier to manipulate them, than what we’d take inspiration from in the offline world.

2. PieFed did a public poll to form a roadmap for 2025. I think it turned out very well. PeerTube also does that. The open-source tool that looks like GOG’s website is called Fider

I love it as well. Though, from a software developers perspective, it rarely goes all the way. There’s just so many technical decisions to be made, limitations, vague requirements, contradictions. Sometimes users think they want something but they really need the opposite of it… And they always want wildly different things and more often than not it’s not healthy for the projects to approach it that way. They’d instead do it in order as mandated by the technical design, have more pressing issues and all of that is buried beneath layers of technical complexity. So the users hardly know what’s appropriate to do. I believe that’s why we often gravitate to the “benevolent dictator” model in Free Software. Or why some regular (paid) software projects fail or exceed budged and time planning.
It should be that way, though. If software is meant for users, the developers should probably listen to them, so I love what these projects do, to at least augment their development process with some participation and guidance by the target audience. And some people are really good at it. (Edit: And we might have elements of a meritocracy as well, and people need programming skills to participate in some ways… So, I think we might not be able to do more than try to make it as democratic as possible. At least as far as we’re talking about the development process itself.)

I think the most obvious one is moderation. What gets deleted, who gets kicked out. Then for example community rules, what’s the topic and rules of discussion. Every user/member could have a say in that. Maybe we could do some more structural and organizational decisions.

It gets a bit tricky with technology. Ideally we could do things like democratically decide to have a voice chat (if that’s what people want) and somehow 3 months later the platform has a voice chat… But it’s not that easy, software development doesn’t work this way.

Uh, I’d love someone to have a try at full-blown direct democracy. Most aspects being controlled (and ideally owned) by the very same people who use the platform. Not sure if that’s good or feasible, though.

And what I always love is to see design principles that foster a nice, amicable atmosphere. Some online communities, games etc have aspects of that. It’s somewhat more rare on modern social media. I sometimes wish hanging out on the internet was a bit less about politics, trolling and memes, getting agitated amongst random anonymous people. And a bit more like an evening at the Irish Pub with friends. Or getting to know new friends there.
We do things like that. I just think good platform design still has potential to achieve way more than we currently do.

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I’d expect at least the authors who do talks about the Fediverse to be here: Cory Doctorow… Marc-Uwe Kling… There are some webcomic authors as well. And we have some journalists. Heise Online comes to mind, they have their own Peertube instance. Then some other known activists, bloggers… And some people share drawings, fanart etc, not sure if that counts.

Edit: I forgot George Takei, and several other people.
Here’s some list of noteworthy accounts including some celebrities: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts

Sure. Sadly I don’t have the proper tools around to do that. And in my case I wasn’t too sad. These devices had 100mbps ethernet and a slow wifi standard. Now they’re on e-waste and I got an upgrade to Gigabit ethernet and 5GHz wifi 😆

Not sure if I get your point. Abstraction is a concept used by IT people to deal with complexity. You’ll use Docker containers in order not to have 200 very specific problems and learn about the intricate details of all of them. Or use a turnkey solution because a working day has a finite amount of hours and you can just not care and have somebody else set the XY value of Postgres to 128 because that’s somehow needed for software M on python x.xx… Of course you’re then not going to learn about these things. It is not “bad”, though, in itself to abstract these issues away from you. Same for the other things I mentioned, networking, virtualization. Abstraction there allows to swap out complex things, do things once and in a clean way because it’s easy to miss things without abstraction and you always need to pay attention to a bazillion of specifics. Also helps with backups, deal with issues because things should break within confined layers, punch above one’s weight, security, do something once and roll it out several times…

I think what you want to avoid is poorly designed or written software. Or poorly done setups. Or not learn about important things. Abstraction is generally something you want, especially with complex things.

Maybe try something like YunoHost. That’s a web server Linux distribution. And it’s supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You’d need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn’t the only option to help with the set up.)

But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.

Yes, OpenWRT lasts way longer. Main thing that ends support is hardware requirements. My old devices with only a few megabytes of memory got dropped eventually. Not because of the chipset, a modern OpenWRT would just not fit any longer. I rarely see other reasons for them to discontinue updates.

You mean AMD or Intel? I can’t find any variant with an ARM processor. According to the internet, both the Intel and AMD version should work with Linux. My wife actually owns the Intel X13 Gen1. With Linux Mint Debian edition on it. Seems to work fine, she didn’t ever complain. Just be aware these are 5 year old devices. She paid 404€ for a refurbished one. We went with the 16GB RAM option, since that’s soldered and not upgradable. Also had an i7 processor at that price point.

If that traffic is going through an encrypted Wireguard tunnel, I don’t see a reason to encrypt it a second time. Judging by your description, it’s already encrypted on transport between the router and VPS. HTTPS would add nothing there. It will however add encryption within your DMZ, if you expect something nefarious going on within your DMZ.

Hehe. I feel a bit “offended” by the …“stopped coding once they saw AI could do it.” Because that’s not my reality. I do a lot of computer hobby stuff, tinkering, electronics… And for me it does shit. Doing the maths for sensor values failed, can’t ever do memory allocation the way it’s done on microcontrollers. Fails with slightly complex regular software projects… I mean it can do some quick and dirty webdesign and code some rudimentary apps and games if you’re into that… Whatever people can do after they read a beginners coding book and a bit of copy-pasta. And it helps look up documentation. But I see zero reason to quit my hobbies with what AI can do as of today 😉

Doesn’t sound good, though. I mean a grandpa will consume a lot of media after he can’t get up and walk around any more. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be at 30yo. It is somehow modern society, though. Social interactions get displaced by para-social relations, like to a favorite streamer or influencer and you’d take part in their world. Combined with resignation we get people like incels. I’m about 10 years older and I still have a lot of friends who do stuff. Go running or whatever. Or they have kids and that takes up their time. I can see however, how things like social media steer attention away from human elements of life.