Honestly AirBnB used to be cool but now it kinda sucks.
Even though there’s now a ‘total price’ option, booking a basic hotel is still less painful. There’s cleaning fees and a lot of hosts have stupid requirements like you have to do the laundry or take out the trash or whatever. If I’m paying hotel level fees I want hotel level service. Plus every now and then you hear about one of these places having cameras in the unit. Fuck that.
Very interesting.
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/8969 This may be of interest- it’s basically the same thing. Seems that before that patch was merged, bridge-created puppet contacts would show up in searches.
Of course that’s for Synapse not Dendrite. So it sounds like Dendrite never applied that same functionality.
Honestly I think you’ll be happy either way. Synology is very very good at some things. And the software makes it very easy and approachable to spin up a lot of private cloud type stuff without a lot of technical messing around. That said, you will get more hardware/performance for your dollar with a PC server. You can go the DIY route, or if you don’t mind a little more power consumption and want more performance buy a used Dell PowerEdge on eBay. Based on what you say, I think you’ll be happy either way. The real value you get from Synology is their software. Their photo app is very wife friendly. And I don’t think you’ll find any serious restrictions with it, you get full root SSH access into the box.
So I guess my suggestion would be evaluate the photo management in TrueNAS versus Synology. You can spin up a virtual machine of TrueNAS on your desktop and play with it if you want. The only other gotcha is if you want Plex to do transcoding you definitely want the PC because you can throw in a GPU and accelerate that a lot.
//edit- the one other thing to mention is backups- Synology has GREAT backup software and it’s free. Active Backup for Business will back up your desktop/laptop, versioned, deduplicated, very efficiently. And Hyper Backup will backup your Synology itself (or some parts of it) to the cloud, optionally with client-side encryption. I suggest Wasabi as the backend for that, it’s only like $7/TB/mo. Or just get another Synology and put it at the house of someone you know and you have an instant offsite backup with no recurring cost.
I don’t think he’ll sell willingly. I just could see a scenario where his creditors who paid for a large part of it demand to see some return on investment and force him too.
I think for that to happen, 1. value of TSLA would have to drop a lot making creditors question his ability to repay, and 2. value of TWTR would have to remain relatively high. Right now TSLA is rising and TWTR valuation is falling so if I was a creditor I’d much rather hold Elon debt than a piece of TWTR.
Agreed. The fact that especially Reddit, but a lesser extent Twitter have been unable to monetize genuine human posts and all the data that gives (Reddit is basically the only way to make Google useful nowadays and Twitter is basically the only place to go for breaking news) seems negligent to me.
Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc haven’t found any creative way to monetize the numerous genuine interactions on their platform other than data mining them for ad targeting. So they double down and triple down again on that- Facebook went creepy and might as well be a credit bureau, Reddit tried to stay non-evil for a while, Twitter just kind of did their own thing and burned cash and never really made money but investors stayed in because a company that big has to eventually make money somehow.
Now they all say HOLY SHIT WE ACTUALLY HAVE SOMETHING OF REAL VALUE TO SELL!!! and see AI training as their winning lottery ticket.
What strikes me though is how un-creative it all is. Here’s a bunch of the most important databases in human history and the best they can think up is ads and AI training?
And they all do the same thing- grow into huge companies with tons of distraction side projects and middle managers that burn cash, then wonder why they aren’t profitable.
Elon saw that with Twitter- to run Twitter you need server people and developers and ad salespeople and the rest of them probably did little of use. Same thing is probably true with Reddit though. Reddit has like 2000 employees. What the hell do they all do? It sure as hell isn’t productive development. I’d bet money they have a ton of useless middle management.
Any one of these companies (IMHO) would do much better trying to be a utility more or less. Make it easy and cheap/free for everyone, but keep operating costs down. Make a little money off a lot of people. And do what Reddit would do if they had two brain cells to rub together- pay us a fee and you are the customer and can use the thing however you want; or don’t and you see a ton of ads.
I don’t see Elon selling Twitter. He’s too far in. He paid $44bn for it, by most estimates it’s probably worth half that today (both due to lower traffic and Elon seriously overpaying from the start). So if he sells, best case scenario he takes a 50% haircut. Crazy or not he has a plan for the thing, so he’s gonna do his plan and if it works he’ll make a bundle and if not then it’ll shrink a lot. But I see him hanging on to it with a skeleton crew before he sells it.
This scraping isn’t new and hasn’t increased to the level where it is costing them anything. It’s just it now has hype and a price tag around it so they want their cut.
Well yeah, that’s what I meant. The costs of having someone scrape the database are essentially zero for Twitter/Reddit. The lost opportunity cost however is astronomical. Reddit and Twitter both are sitting on an incredibly valuable database of genuine interactions. And I understand not wanting to give that away for free.
Problem is, it’s too late. Reddit and Twitter have both been scraped already. So locking barn door after horse has left just pisses off the users.
I agree that there’s plenty of FOSS projects as good as or better than Signal from a crypto POV.
NONE of them are anywhere close to signal when it comes to number of users. And if your friends don’t have it, then you can’t talk to anyone on it.
And if your friend loses their phone and finds out they just lost all their chats too, they’re gonna say ‘fuck that, I’ll just use iMessage so next time I don’t lose anything’.
I tried hard to push XMPP back in its day. Little success sadly, that was when IM was going out of style in favor of SMS. I kept using Trillian and watching as more and more contacts went offline never to return. Then Google announced they were killing their XMPP gateway and that was a nail in the coffin.
The bigger problem with XMPP was varying support of various XEPs leading to an uneven user experience with mismatched clients. That in itself was fixable, and not a problem for people like us, but it became a problem when trying to get ‘normies’ interested. Tell someone like us ‘you can’t video chat that guy, his client doesn’t have calling capability’ and that makes perfect sense. Tell an average person that, and they hear ‘this system sucks and I can’t count on it to do what I want, I should stop using it’. Then they go on Discord or iMessage or whatever, and it works right the first time every time, and they stay.
And therein lies the real problem. You and I can wax poetic about the pros and cons of this or that system and its security, but if I can’t get my non-cryptohead friends to use it, then it’s worthless.
And THAT is why Signal succeeded and XMPP failed. Because it’s dead fucking simple to set up. Download the app, punch in the SMS security code, and you’re online. Questions like ‘choose which client software you want’ or ‘pick which instance you want to sign up with’ kill adoption for average non-techie people. They say ‘I don’t know what to choose, I don’t want to choose wrong and cause a bigger problem, so I’ll just not choose and close this’.
Very good info. Guess I hadn’t fully realized it was using scan lines to create infrared-level bandwidth (kilobits) out of a CRT. Very cool stuff.
A call phone might be the answer. Many phones use OLED screens, meaning an app that sends your calendar to the watch with no extra hardware might be possible.
I love this whole cyberdeck thing.
I remember back in the early 2000s, there was a lot more innovation when it came to portable devices. There were gadgets that sort of resemble modern smartphones just clunkier (iPaq), ones with keyboards below the screen (BlackBerry), ones with slide out keyboards (HTC and others), ones that flipped open like laptops but could fit in your pocket (HP Jornada), etc.
Somewhere along the line all that innovation went out the window and now every single phone or gadget looks more or less exactly the same. Like take the top 10 or 15 smartphones, debrand them, and put them in a box, and 99% of people couldn’t tell the hardware apart.
You would think there would be a market for some level of variation, or just have one company that makes the phone 5 mm thicker but the battery lasts for 3 days. But we don’t even see that.
Foldable screens seem to be spurring a little bit of innovation so I have hopes. But until then, I would love to see some of these cyberdeck designs put into production. I would happily pay a couple hundred bucks for a raspberry pi equivalent of a Jornada 720 (as long as the keyboard is touch typeable like the old one).
Personally I don’t think it’s likely that signal will close, or that they will sell out. I think the more likely problem is the sort of thing I mentioned, that having a single dev team will be a bottleneck or will reduce user choice. The iOS backup thing I mentioned is one example of that. Usernames rather than phone numbers is another one. Having only one code base does make it easier to audit. And having one foundation in charge does mean there’s an easy path to pay for those audits. But it is still a single point of failure.
To be clear- as single point of failure go, I trust Signal more than the next 10 put together. What I don’t trust is the whole using phone numbers and SMS verification for sign up. And I would prefer their architecture was a bit more open/federated.
From what I’ve seen of the people in charge of Signal- they’d probably close before they sell out.
That said, you make a very good point. Having all the registered users in one place, is a vulnerability. A great many of us have non technical friends/partners/siblings/coworkers/etc; and encouraging them to use ANYTHING new is pulling teeth. So Signal is great, but it’s still eggs in one basket- if they do something user-unfriendly or sell out or close, we are back to square one in begging/pleading/cajoling people to (please) try this (much better) app.
I’ve also lost a few people who used Signal over one stupid problem- the iOS version has no backup/restore function. If you lose your phone, or uninstall the app, all your saved chats are gone and there’s no way to get them back. Android version at least has a useful backup/restore.
Exactly.
This is Elon hate-porn. Some people LOVE to hate on Elon and make it out like every misstep he does is a DISASTER AND THE MELTDOWN WILL HAPPEN ANY MINUTE NOW!!!. No it’s not. Twitter is alive and well. Some heavy users are pissed I’m sure. But the whole ‘running it into the ground’ thing just isn’t happening.
If you disagree, my answer is simple- try using it. It works. Articles like this paint an awful picture of a service circling the drain that’s gonna go bankrupt any minute now. It’s clickbait, an article trashing him pandering to a bunch of people who hate him and want to see him fail.
To be clear- I disagree with a lot of what Elon’s doing at Twitter. I understand he wants to monetize AI scraping, but I also think that if he wants Twitter to be the ‘public square’ it has to stay, you know, public. As in no registration required, Google can index.
But I have no need to hate on the guy. If he runs Twitter into the ground or pisses users off too much, Mastodon and other fediverse platforms win. If he succeeds, then good for him. No skin off my back either way.
It’s definitely going to be different. Probably a mix between the old and the new. But I think the real benefit is it offers space for everybody. The people who want to be wild can do so, and those who don’t need to have nothing to do with them.
So what?
There’s a place for that. Back in the old IRC days there was a place for AOL. Let TikTok and Reddit keep the idiots.
I think that number is way too high.
The developers of Lemmy are doing it for free- unlike those of Reddit etc.
That means you just need the server resources to host the instance.
Now if you’re hosting hundreds of thousands of users, then sure it may get expensive. But the whole point is you have a few thousand here, a few thousand there, and thus the load gets greatly distributed.
Instead of 50 servers costing $1000+/mo, you have 500 servers costing $100/mo (or whatever).
And the $1000/mo server can collect enough in donations or simple ad banners to cover their costs.
What you’re missing isn’t costs, it’s profits. The little guys, and the big guys, all want to make a lot of money. They don’t want to cover their costs, they want to cover the mortgage on the beach house. Little companies often don’t make enough profit to do that, so they sell to the big guys who will slash costs and service and go profit-focused.
But start to run things with the goal of providing the service rather than the goal of making money and things change drastically. For most of its life, Reddit was ran with the goal of providing the service, which is why it grew so fast. Then a few years ago it shifted to the goal of making money and that’s when things went downhill- because they didn’t have a clue how to actually monetize the service so they pushed the ‘typical buttons’ (aka sell out the users) and of course the users are now pissed off.
But get rid of software dev costs, and look at just the hosting cost, and the number is MUCH lower.
There’s also the fact that we don’t need to host 52MM users. There aren’t going to be 52MM users on Lemmy anytime soon.
Windows users will want to check out BlueIris
Otherwise, Synology has a great surveillance package, but you only get 2 cameras licenses with your NAS and more licenses are like $50 each
LazaroFilm slaps SirEDCaLot around a bit with a large trout
I love it! I remember that…
The tech stuff was a bit of a filter, true. There will always be a place for services like AOL was back then- the super easy to use ‘dumbed down’ platform for those who don’t want to learn. I think the result of ‘Rexxit’ may be that- the smart folks come to Lemmy and the dumb ones stay put. Not sure if that’s good or bad.
By dumb ones I don’t mean people who lack technical knowledge, I mean people who need the answer spoon fed to them. Because I think we should be realistic. Compare Matrix to WhatsApp, compare Lemmy to Reddit, the biggest ‘filter’ is having to choose a home server when signing up and then not having all the content sprayed at you automatically. If that is what we call ‘difficult’ then I argue our standards as a society are too low.
And I think in the old internet culture there was plenty of space for different levels of skill. The people with technical skill were the ones setting up little servers on their cable modems with spare laptops, The people without technical skill were the ones just using them and learning. Nothing wrong with that I don’t think. Big platforms make both groups equal, anybody can spin up a discord server or start a subreddit, but at the expense of everybody’s control. If the experienced user and the inexperienced user both want things running differently, they don’t get that choice because it’s not under their control.
100% agree. I think we were better off with the Wild West. Users were actually in charge, server admins were small operators who didn’t have to answer to venture capitalists who wanted to 10x their investment, not everything was data scraped and logged to build advertising profiles on the entire population. Each community set its own rules, you didn’t have one guy in California deciding what the AUP would be for millions and then changing it on a whim because some advertiser got pissed off.
While the big companies have created some very cool stuff, and using it is very approachable without any technical knowledge, I would trade it all in to go back to the situation where not everything is hosted on some megaplatform. I think it’s better for the internet that way.
I like to think that sort of movement is making a resurgence, I’m seeing more people involved in self-hosting stuff, and with recent changes at Reddit and Twitter there’s a lot more interest in decentralized communication platforms.
I also think the platform is the key. I don’t think any one person or group should be in charge of the public square. Not Spez not Elon and certainly not Tencent or anyone connected with an authoritarian government.
The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn’t something your friends have or are willing to get, then it’s not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I’m a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn’t be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it’s still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.