I hope the rubber or whatever on the sticks doesn’t turn gross & sticky with time like the original.

Like how the GOP crumbled after two Obama losses to put in a ‘populist’ in Trump, the DNC should fold over, kick out the donors, fire everyone & let the populist movement Bernie really kicked off take over, & let Bernie lead it while he has the vigor to do the leading but not run for presidency. Neocons on both sides should be exiled (lol at taking the Cheney endorsement). A wave of young voters & workers would love to see such a populist overthrow of the establishment (even if they don’t yet understand that what they really want is to overthrow capitalism).

Instead the DNC will adopt the Haskell programming language motto: avoid success at all costs.

I am pretty sure no one at Google tests outside Blink & only gets around to it when there are bug reports

Trying to meet users where they are over where you want them to be. For free software or creative commons endeavors, if a proprietary collaboration products (especially if exclusively) like Microsoft GitHub or Discord or Slack or Figma is

• locking issues behind their account + ToS
• ban projects that undermine capital interest (Yuzu, youtube-dl, third-party clients flagged as malicious, constantly breaking API to make building upon difficult)
• blocks a swatch of potential users for US sancations or a local regime
• happily hands off data to feds
• collects gobs of data to either sell and/or use to train AI models they will sell back to us
• Requires userStyles, userScript, filter lists to scrub the ads & social media features to have a worthwhile experience (kids call these “mods” on Discord for some reason)
• uses social media hook tactics to get you to spend more time on the platform
• have bloated clients that tear into your RAM

When there are free software alternatives that fit the bill (& crucially aren’t resource hogs hurting feasibility) or even non-profits running competing so you don’t need to pay, reach for these options. These projects might be less polished, but since they aren’t fighting to profit propped up by investors, this is to be expected? By getting curious users in the space they will report bugs & contribute upstream instead of building “mods” to correct the predatory option. If you have witnessed even one “enshittification” instance, you know this is inevitable so don’t waste your effort propping these up. Choose tools/services that align with your principles instead handwaving them as unimportant—or assuming users are too inept to learn something new. But also, there is a block of folks that are under respresented that already do know how to operate these platforms that are possibly disinfranchized or blocked that you haven’t even accounted for by choosing the corporate option.

Anyway it is a good habit to avoid github entirely ~~(when hosting a repo)~~.

FIFY

Hey now. A lot of that effort has been poured into turning a code forge into a corpo social media platform like Microsoft LinkedIn as well as a way to siphon out a percent chunk of donations via Sponsors too.

You don’t need to worry about data retention when you own the server & you are the only user. It’s the servers you or someone you know & trust don’t own where you should actually worry about this.

It’s also more problematic with all systems built on eventual consistency models, so best to avoid those since you’ll never be able to get the data dropped. Chat being ephemeral is good.

…Agreed & real weird to see a specific client mentioned instead of a protocol.

Digital privacy matters as much as physical privacy & we need to keep the governments & corporations out since they can constantly surveil. Method for doing so need to legal, cheap, & accessible. If decentralization is a requirement, you system that requires Amazon S3 buckets & a beefy VPS are not sufficient when these sorts of things rarely have a technical reason why they couldn’t be democraticized to run from an apartment (why some ISPs don’t let you have an IP (v6 or not) or symetric connections as bits are bits is a different matter).

Those components are not really meant for self-hosting, its open to be looked at. You would need to patch out the SIM requirement, point the hardcoded server/clients elsewhere, find some way to sideload modified clients to those using iOS lol, & it’s not federated so you would need a separate app for just this task. At this rate you are 100% better off using a choosing systems where server & clients are actually built with this in mind… Signal’s chat features are not novel

Most distros are running the same software. The biggest difference is your package manager & community. Personal preference is NixOS but that ain’t beginner-friendly even if the rollbacks from bad states would help. Arch isn’t as difficult to set up as it used to be & has been more stable than a lot of distros in my experience so I wouldn’t discount it but .pacnew files can bite you if modifying in /etc instead of in the home folder (when possible). Of the things folks normally suggest as a first go, Fedora would probably be my pick (not yet had a problem) as everything Ubuntu-based still rubs me wrong for support & leadership.

I got a Sony Xperia III last month. You can use a fingernail with it since the tray also holds your SD card