The same thing is true here. A novice shouldn’t be hosting their own instance, heck a experienced user shouldn’t host their own instance unless they want a hobby.

Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that’s the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as “self hosted social media”, I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.

We’re not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they’re the people that are most likely to stick around.

In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That suggests it’s about right.

Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.

I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.

Email is the only federated social platform that every normal person is familiar with. It doesn’t matter that the technical specifications are completely different. The metaphor goes as far as “in the fediverse anyone signed up with any instance can communicate with anyone on any other instance, like email”. For that purpose, it’s a good metaphor.

But isn’t that the whole point. The working class becomes the new rich class. That sounds like equal distribution of wealth.

But why is it less weird to suck on rotten plant ovaries? That’s what alcohol is. Food is fucking weird.

They weren’t gaining anything with the free service, now they might get a bit of money from it.

5 year olds are pretty cringe

Their aggressive, misleading and clickbait ads, particularly as YouTube sponsorships. From my experience the product is fine, but the ads make it seem like their covering up for something.

Podcasts are just a RSS feed with an mp3 downloas link. It’s trivial to open the RSS feed in your browser and locate the mp3 download link. Download the mp3, open it in any audio editor, edit out the ad. Or find the folder where your podcast app stores the mp3s and edit them from there.

Personally, I’m OK with podcast ads as there’s limited opportunity for tracking or personalization. If we don’t encorage podcasts to remain as an open platform, they will be swallowed up by Spotify.

Yes, exactly, you get it! I don’t like paying for things, you don’t like paying for things. Paying for things sucks. We need post scarcity communism.

The last paid Mac OS update was Mountain Lion in 2012. Wasn’t the last paid Windows update Windows 7 in 2009, since it’s technically possible to update all the way to Windows 11 without buying another license.

Corporate welfare is a problem in all capitalist countries

There’s a nice explanation of how caddy reverse proxies work here. https://caddy.community/t/using-caddy-as-a-reverse-proxy-in-a-home-network/9427

Essentially you setup your router to port forward any new incoming connections to Caddy, which then decides what to do with them according to the configuration (Caddyfile).

Even simpler: Your local network is like a castle, inside is a safe and secure place where your devices communicate freely. Your router is a firewall around the castle, by default it blocks incoming connections. This is good because the internet is scary. By port forwarding you allow a door in the firewall which leads to Caddy, which is like a guard. Caddy asks them what they want, and if they say e.g. jellyfin.example.com, then it sets up an encrypted connection with https to your local jellyfin server. If they want anything else they aren’t allowed in.

I guess so. Your question was

Would anyone be interested in something like that?

Which most of us have answered with a clear “no”. So I guess we’re done here.

If you’re confused about a specific term, ask about that specific term, and you’ll get many people eager to help. Sorry nobody wants to get on an open ended video call with a stranger to teach you how to run a server, but that’s just how these forums work. Everyone’s setup is different so there’s not much I could do to help in your video call.

Learning this stuff is hard, don’t let anyone tell you any different. We all went through the same struggles, perhaps for some people that was so long ago that they forgot how hard it was.

If people took existential threats seriously, we should immediately devote all our resources into escaping the simulation to prevent it from being turned off. But yeah… we’d ignore it and go back to TikTok

That’s an arbitrary line too though. Insects experience some form of emotion, but it appears not as complex as a mammal. If you’re going to define value of life by (estimated)complexity of experience, then we’re both agreed on a similar heirachy with humans at the top.

My point is that there’s nuance. Everyone has their own opinion and none of us are right or wrong.

You don’t axiomatically presuppose human supremacy? I don’t understand how that moral position works, and I want to hear more.

In general, we empathize more with creatures that are more similar to ourselves, and creatures that are cute. Given that, human supremacy follows logically for me. Humans are top of the heirachy, followed by similar mammals, then birds, then fish, then insects. It’s sad that’s there’s a heirachy, but the alternative is considering the life of an insect equal in value to the life of a human. I think that’s a less moral position, but it would also drive you insane because we murder so many insects in our lives.

I don’t believe it’s possible to have a consistent and non-hypocrytical ethical system, and if it was that wouldn’t be desirable. Every meat eater I’ve ever met agrees that agriculture kinda sucks, but they have other priorities.

But you do exploit humans. The food you eat, the clothes you wear, actually pretty much everything you use was made with exploitation. The fact you can choose to go vegan and complain about it on the internet means you are incredibly privledged. As am I.

You talk about rational discussion but all I’m seeing from you is the opposite, “all meat eaters are evil”.

The world is complicated and there’s a lot of things wrong with it. You chose one problem to focus on, and that’s great. But just because other people have other things that they prioritize doesn’t mean they are bad people.