Sadly, many wifi-enabled devices only work with some proprietary cloud-service and even if not, they’re only one configuration error (or intentional backdoor) away from talking to the outside. Better have something that isn’t physically able to talk to the internet no matter how badly I fuck up its configuration and my firewall.

The solution is not more but different connected devices so I can decide for myself what needs to be connected and by which protocol. Get the dumbest device on the market, no wifi, no internal clock, maybe not even a humidity sensor and then, if and only if I need to remote control it, for example to put it on a schedule, I can use the cheapest “smart” device on the market to connect it to an in-house machine that can turn it on and off.

I run home automation with lights, switches, outlets, heaters and some more and not a single device has internet access. They all use Zigbee (a simple radio protocol) to talk to homeassistant which is open source and hosted on a machine that lives under my desk.

Separating tasks between the dehumidifier and outlet has the advantage that each individual device can be a lot simpler, leaving less attack surface. My power outlet can’t read the humidity sensor, it doesn’t need to talk to an external server, it doesn’t even need to know that the thing connected to it is a dehumidifier. It’s just a chip that receives a radio signal and toggles a relay on or off. That’s it.

Separating the two concerns also lets me replace the devices separately if one breaks or my requirements change. If I suddenly need wifi or bluetooth instead of Zigbee or if it’s for some reason no longer supported by homeassistant, I can just replace a 9€ outlet instead of the whole dehumidifier that could get bricked by the proprietary app losing support.

This can be done with something like Zigbee. Or even simpler: you hook a non-connected device up to a “smart” power socket. No need for the device itself to talk to the outside world.

And I think letting everyone decide for themselves how they run their instances and who they federate with is an important cornerstone of the fediverse. I’m more than fine with people not wanting to interact with threads. But what happens on my tiny instance with me as the only active user shouldn’t be cause for outrage.

I’ve once been downvoted to oblivion for not defederating threads.com before it even went online. Fediverse people are weird.

I‘ll give my best to give you some feedback if you post something

Dooo iiiiiit! I really enjoy reading about niche homebrew settings.

I even made a new account specifically so I could make it there and not on my personal instance.

There is one effect that I’ve seen described in an article a while ago that seems plausible:

Every dating app user base tends to separate itself into one group that’s relatively popular and one that is less popular. For this post, let’s assume women are the popular group but on some apps it could be the other way round or an entirely different split when you consider non-heteronormative matches. The problem is that this effect causes a feedback loop. Women get a lot of matches so they get more and more selective and give out fewer and fewer likes. This causes men to get fewer matches so they give out more and more likes so they don’t miss the few potential matches they might get. Which in turn causes women to get flooded even more and so on. In the extreme case, women can assume that almost every time they swipe right on someone, this will lead to a match while men need to swipe right dozens or even hundreds of times and include people who don’t really match what they are looking for until they get a match.

There is no easy way to fully solve this but making incoming likes visible might at least reduce the fear of missing a potential match if you don’t swipe on everyone who’s even remotely interesting. Of course this is the number one feature that dating apps try to monetize.

Just a regular Mastodon server with federation disabled might be a good start.

I don’t think so. French “tiens” is a form of the verb “tenir” (“hold”). German “tja” is pronounced almost exactly the same and is only used as an interjection with a similar meaning but doesn’t have any related forms that I could think of.

Especially the southern German dialects have quite a few words that originated as loan words from French so it’s at least plausible. Could of course just be a coincidence as well. Languages are full of those.

And this is the moment I realized that German “tja” (“well”) probably comes from French “tiens” even though I’ve had five years of French in school.

I really hope they’ll streamline that a bit more or at least create some documentation that’s more than a hand full of bullet points.

Please rewrite this or at least add a tl;dr and change the thread title to something more descriptive. I’m sure you have a great idea somewhere in there but I’ve had to stop reading after a couple of paragraphs that just sounded preachy and got nowhere.

Then please update your category name to reflect that. Right now it says “Self-Hosting” which to the majority of readers means hosting it yourself, whatever the reason may be: privacy, configurability or just being safe from future enshittification.

As far as I know most Lemmy instances leverages paid-for or freemium services to have their instances work easily/properly

Yes but you can’t compare a whole lemmy instance to an account on an email server that you share with others. The fair comparison would be hosting a lemmy instance to hosting your own email server and creating an account on Proton Mail to creating an account (or a community) on lemmy.world.

This looks at how technically easy it is to run your own backend (e.g., email server, Mastodon server)

Edit: also the description text “This looks at how technically easy it is to run your own backend (e.g., email server, Mastodon server)”. Relying on Proton Mail or similar free services is not running your own backend.

Here I’m a bit in two minds, sure it’s difficult to SELF host email, but in practice it isn’t because there are hundreds (Thousands?) of hosting options to choose from where you can choose your own domain etc. for the low price of basically-free

I would prefer to limit this to actually hosting it on a machine you control. We don’t consider redirecting a custom domain to a subreddit “self-hosting”, do we? Yes, there are many email providers out there but that’s more like existing lemmy or mastodon instances and not like hosting your own where you have full control over your data.

Why are we using a random repo created a few hours ago by a random github user as a reference ?

They aren’t. That’s the repo that has the latest version of the survey. The actual references are one section up.

Having set up a couple of mail servers myself, I wouldn’t call it easy. Most solutions boil down to a tangled web of dovecot, postfix, ldap and amavis. There are preconfigured docker containers which make setup easier than a couple of years ago but if your use case is even just slightly different than the maintainers’, you’ll have to dive deep into a few dozen different config files. And of course, you’ll have to find out how to configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC to have even a remote chance of your mails getting through to the big providers. I’d probably give email somewhere in the range of 8-12 points in that category.

Other than that, great summary!

Oh, thanks for the heads up, I didn’t notice.