I don’t mind much paying for streaming (although that’s increasingly more and more annoying and I still tend to just download whatever I actually care about) but until and unless I can pay to “own” a movie and they just provide me with a DRM free video file of some sort, I will never “purchase” digital content like this.

If you tried this kind of bullshit in just about any other context, even normal people would think you’re crazy.

Normal Person: “hi there, one blender please. I’ll take this one for $25.”
Sales person: “Cool here’s your receipt.”
NP:: “It says here at the bottom of the receipt that you can just come in my house and take this blender back whenever you want or maybe never?”
SP: “yep.”
NP:: “And you don’t tell people that ahead of time?”
SP: “no when you buy it you agree to that by opening the box and it is on the receipt you get after you bought it.”
NP: “you fuckin with me rn?”
SP: “afraid not, and would you look at that corp says I need that blender back, thanks.”
SP: “oh, shoot. I see here you also bought a toaster from EvilCorp sold in one of our EvilMart locations a couple years ago, we’ve decided to license that brand instead to our new partners FukUMart, so we’ll be taking that toaster but if you want you can head to your local FukUMart and buy that toaster again for more than you paid the first time.”
NP: spontaneously combusts

I really, really doubt that this is going to be a concern. First, while technically Mastodon can interact with Lemmy, in practice how often does it happen? It’s not zero, but it’s not a lot, either, and I doubt that Threads will change that much because while it’s a neat technical feature, link aggregators and micro-blogging platforms are pretty incompatible culturally.

And then we have to remember that we’re talking about Threads normies. Do we really think that a bunch of Swifties and Kardasholes and other influencers are going to look at the absolute zoo of Marxist/Anarchist/Linuxist users on Lemmy and be like “this is the type of content I’ve been waiting for, I need to interact more with that community”? This reminds me a lot of neckbeards saying they wouldn’t date Megan Fox because she has weird thumbs.

And then we have the whole thing with the actual fediverse and the tech behind it. There is still going to be no algorithm artificially inflating the popularity of what are thinly veiled ads. Meta has no mechanism for introducing ads into the Fedi. Lemmy is not suddenly going to be massively interested in the vast majority of content on threads and start upvoting to the moon.

And the dev team behind the fedi I would wager is going to prevent any sort of real technical takeover, so that means that at any point defederating is possible, and with basically no loss to the fedi.

Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.

I think it’s even slightly different in that Firefox has some dependence on Google (a scary level, actual, if Google ends that deal Mozilla is pretty much fucked) that the fediverse doesn’t - the people on the fediverse right now are enough to keep Fedi alive and moving, and I’d find it really, really hard to argue that they aren’t there deliberately to avoid being subject to the whims of Meta/Twitter/Reddit, etc. Like, in a lot of ways, it’s a sacrifice to be on these services because the bulk of content still exists in the proprietary silos. Because the actual protocols and main developers are also intrinsically motivated by the this separation, it’s hard to picture how they could even try to extend/extinguish here.

Like, if Threads fully federates, I’d guess that quite a lot of people block their instance just to keep their hands clean. Those that interact with Threads via Fedi probably fall into the boat that I would. I want some particular content or to follow some people, just not shoveled at me however Meta decides it should be, and not in a way that they can profit from showing me ads. If Meta pulls some bullshit, it’s likely the Fedi would more or less just block them entirely then give up and start a Threads account. And I have a hard time seeing a world where they go to Eugen or basically any of the other driving forces in the Fedi and are like “we need you to change Mastodon so we can [do some typical Facebook bullshit” and Eugen are like “yeah cool with me.”

I think its more likely that Threads users are eventually going to see fedi users dropping a long comment or some post that is about how it’s nice to have a clean ad-free feed and move clients if not over to the fedi in general. It won’t be enough to really matter for Meta other than to say “see we don’t have a monopoly!” and hey, if the fedi gets a little bigger it’s all good for the rest of us.

I didn’t know that. Hmm, sounds like it’s decently likely this is a bit overblown then. I mean, I suppose there are a lot of lazy companies out there that will skip this, but that severely limits the functionality in a way that it’s going to force the secure method.

Sort of. If you’re receiving a notification from a remote server on iOS or standard android, they go through Apple or googles servers. That said, some apps rather than sending your device the actual notification (where this vulnerability comes from) will instead send a type of invisible notification that basically tells the app to check for a new message or whatever and then will display a local notification so the actual message stays on device and inside of the hosting services servers (like a self host.)

I’d encourage you to dig around after you set this up. It’s basically setting up a docker compose file, and once you get how docker compose works, it’s really, really easy to add your own services. Like if you use usenet, throwing sabnzbd in here is very simple. Or if for some reason you want to run plex and jellyfin at the same time.

I fixed it (forgot to include https:// in the link so Lemmy treated it like an internal link) but this is basically just a script to setup docker lol.

There are a few things I’d consider:

• How many users are going to be on the MC server? MC is pretty notorious for eating RAM, and since most of my home server adventures often includes multiple VMs, I would look for something with at least 32 gb of ram.
• for plex (I’m guessing similar is going to be the case for Jellyfin) how many users do you expect to support concurrently, and how good are you at downloading in formats that the clients support direct play for? Most remote plex users are going to require transcoding because of bandwidth limits, but if you have direct play for most of your local clients or have a good upload and don’t have to transcode 3+ streams at a time, you’re probably fine with just about anything from the last 10 years in terms of CPU.
• also re: plex, do you have any idea in terms of storage requirements? Again, if you’re just getting started < 10 tb of storage in mind, you can get by with most computers.

Anyway, to give you an idea, I run both of these and quite a few other things besides on a Dell R710 I bought like 4 years ago and never really have any issue.

My suggestion would be grab basically any old computer laying around or hit up eBay for some ~$100-$200 used server (be careful about 1u’s or rack mounts in general if noise is a concern, you can get normal tower-case servers as well) and start by running your services on that. That’s probably just about what all of us have done at some point. Honestly, your needs are pretty slim unless you’re talking about hosting those services for hundreds of people, but if you’re just hosting for you and a few friends or immediate family, pretty much any any computer will do.

I wanted to keep things very budget conscious, so I have the r710 paired with a rackable 3016 jbod bay. The r710 and the rackable were both about $200, and then I had to buy an HBA card to connect them, so another $90 there. The r710 has 64 gb of ram and I think dual Xeons plus 8 2.5" slots. The rackable is 16 3.5" slots, so what this means is I basically don’t have to decommission drives until they die. I run unRAID on the server, which also means that I can easily get a decent level of protection for drive failure, and I don’t have to worry about matching up drives and all that. I put a couple of cheap SSDs in the 710 for cache drives and to run things I wanted to be a little more performant (MC server, though tbh I never really had an issue running it on spinning disks) and this setup has been more or less rock solid for about 5 years now hosting these services for about 10 people.

Honestly, the original is pretty good, bare bones start up. Most of those comments are recommendations, not show stoppers.

Like, the suggestion to use lets encrypt is kinda moot if you don’t expose to the outside world. I personally choose to add a VPN (wireguard) and access services from outside of my network through that. OP kinda mentions adding a vpn as well, I do that through gluetun.

I’ll also take just about any opportunity I can to point out yams.media which got me started using docker for this and you can see how easy it is from this post to add additional services. You can be a real noob and still get a functional server in like 10 minutes.

Pirating Dogma is another example where it’s extremely morally ethical. Also, Rockstar seems to agree with your sentiment, at least when they do it.

Maybe if the Linux community decided on one default there would be more progress on inroads with desktop Linux.

Well, Linus at least agrees with you. I just watch a talk he gave the other day in which he described one of the biggest problems with Linux desktop being that the distros can’t even decide on a default package manager/way to package applications and all of the difficulties that creates.

It’s funny because even for simple stuff like when I used to update my Plex install manually I’d go to the Plex website, and the list is:

Windows
Mac

Linux: Debian x 32 Bit Debian x.1 32 Bit
Debian x 64 bit
Debian x.1 64 Bit
Fedora …
Ubuntu …
Cent …

and god help you if you’re not on one of those versions or you don’t use one of those distros.

I’m going to have to interject on even on the first point. FWIW, I’m a person who vastly prefers to use a keyboard when possible, can totally live on a CLI only system, etc. Anyway:

It’s faster and easier than using a GUI. This is because you can type a lot faster than you can click-click-drag with a mouse.

This is just not true for the vast majority of people. Have you ever watched normies type?

The other thing is that even with simple stuff like file operations normal users get lost with a GUI where it’s far easier to visualize what is actually happening. If they get a few basic mechanics (click+drag, right click, double click) that’s about all they have to remember to move files around. Compared to learning ls, cd, mv, cp, the directory tree, symbols like . and .. and so forth. Or perhaps my favorite example, quick name a valid tar command. On a GUI system like windows/Mac, they just need to remember they can do things to files by selecting them and right-clicking them. On a CLI only system, how the fuck are you supposed to get a regular user to remember that to compress a file, you type in tar to start with, much less remembering flags (my flavor of choice is usually -xvf.) How many people who regularly use linux even know wtf it’s called tar?

And that’s even forgetting the things like the defaults often being much harder to recover from. In Mac/Windows (and I think even most distros, though I haven’t daily driven a gui linux in a while) deleting a file the default way is a safe operation and easily recoverable because by default the gui is designed to be more user-safe.

Though I don’t think anyone will disagree with the fact that the CLI is an immensely powerful tool that a lot of us can’t do without, it has never been really designed in a way to be accessible to normal users, and I’d be willing to bet that if you were designing a CLI today in a vacuum, it wouldn’t look anything like the one we’re familiar with. It’s why I’d also guess that very few of us that use the command line all of the time don’t have a mile long list of aliases, scripts, switching to shells like zsh and things like zsh-autosuggestions or zsh-syntax-highlighting, colorls, a specific terminal emulator they use, and so on and so forth.

This, and the general business ecosystem. Few companies even ship hardware with Linux support, especially at big business scale. I didn’t even see an option from Dell any longer, Lenovo has one machine it looks like, so you’d be going for something like System76 which operates no where close to the same scale.

I also think that it’s not a great take that the OS vendor shouldn’t include decent default apps for most people. I mean, I know we’re in c/linux, but the vast majority of people don’t want to start with a terminal and build their system out from there. Hell, even the vast majority of linux users don’t, so then it’s just nitpicking where the line of which defaults should be included is.

I have to believe the person who uses Apple Notes, Reminders, Safari, Calendar, etc

I am that person now. Your example about Reminders is basically exactly why. I used to try and then pay for a ton of services to cover reminders/todos because I too was looking for that perfect app that worked just the way I wanted, and really the only thing I got out of it was making a slightly different trade off that I was then paying for in quite a lot of cases. it also happens that nearly all of those apps were closing gaps with the reasons I moved away from them to begin with. For the average user, they likely won’t even look much past the defaults because the defaults are actually pretty good, and so if you don’t have an advanced use case, your needs are covered. Like, I used Trello and Todoist for kanban for larger projects and it’s now native in Reminders.