I don't hate apple. Especially from a privacy record, they actually have a far superior history than essentially every other hardware manufacturer out there.

I think they're overpriced and I don't agree with some of their design decisions, and in general feel like they could give the consumer more control over things, which is why I don't personally have an iPhone or iPad etc., I use them at work and have nothing against them in general)

I've recently found out about https://search.marginalia.nu and want to start using it.

Nostr does some interesting things! What I mentioned here is actually just the identity part of what I think could be a significantly improved version of the fediverse. I have ideas on how to support subreddit style communities and decentralized moderation and things like that that make the whole idea a bit different from nostr.

Yeah, I disagree with that part as well. I think it's fine for servers to store the content and provide endpoints for specific queries/sorts, and expecting the clients to have all the posts is a tad extreme.

In this case, yes the data needs to live somewhere, but that's the nature of having data be retrievable.

For matrix specifically, I recommend fluffy chat on mobile and cinny for web/desktop. Most notably, they both support the not-yet-official spec on custom emojis and stickers, which I think is important for any slack-like.

For the server (since you want to self host), you'd probably want to do Synapse - it supports not being federated as well as SSO. Also it wasn't mentioned by mp3, but xmpp is another protocol that's used by many large companies for internal chat systems as well.

Mbin?

Honestly, these use cases all sound very cool, but I'm highly concerned about the idea of federating information that could effectively tie you to your physical location with a bunch of random servers. Even if all they see is a pseudonymous activitypub id.

Yes it does. I even host a forgejo instance where you can only login via SSO and it works perfectly!

Edit: sorry, got my wires crossed with idp and SSO. But yes, forgejo can also act as an idp.

Funkwhale seems really interesting and I'd love to be able to listen to music without relying on a company's servers and getting tracked, and not being locked into that corporation's apps, but music specifically is just so hard to justify switching. I use YT music and it has access to soooo much music, and the recommendation algorithms are useful in letting me discover new music. There's just now way I'd be able to transition from something with effectively access to all music in existence to something with none. I kinda wish there was some service that could discover all videos tagged as music on YT, add them to funkwhale without downloading them, and then allow them to be in search and radios and stuff and just download the song with youtube-dl or something the first time they're requested. Ideally with some way to trim outros and such manually. I know even the first step of this (discovering "all videos" on YT) makes this completely infeasible though.

I'm big on urbanism and walkable cities and absolutely don't mind people who don't want to live in cities. We don't tend to argue rural areas shouldn't exist, but rather point out that suburban areas have a lot of problems and are way more common than they should be, when looking at demand for mixed use development, walkable cities, etc.

For what it's worth, for most of human existence rural towns existed without need for cars, so there's still some truth to the idea that America has been rebuilt for the car, even in rural areas. There's a variety of explanations out there for why and how they worked, but one I'm a fan of is how many rural towns would organize around a central "main street", and keep the houses near it while the rest of their land spread outward. That way food, entertainment, and neighbors were all still easily accessible despite the large average amount of land.

And tbh, even setting that aside, I don't think many urbanists actually have an issue with rural areas. The movement really focuses on suburbia. A lot of the problems stem from suburbs being spread out like rural areas, but with city level amenities, without paying the amount of taxes to get those amenities that far out. Most notably, paved roads are extremely expensive to maintain and gas taxes are not high enough to pay for it. But to some extent most services suburbs get are going to be subsidized by those living in a nearby city, because it's just so much cheaper to provide those services when everyone lives closer together. And besides the subsidization, suburbs (unlike both cities and rural towns) just have a lot of qualities to them that make them bad for the environment and unpleasant and dangerous to live in - I understand not wanting to live in a city, but no one thinks hour long commutes through rush hour traffic is a positive.

I use a self hostable identity provider called zitadel, and then chose services specifically that would support zitadel, or added support myself in the case of mbin.

This looks cool, but I'm not sure there's any reason to use it over Foundry if you already have a license.