I have to contend with 70-80 year olds doing 30km in an 80 while swerving across the midline because they saw a bird across the street.

What I already see around me is more and more people moving their files and identities offline into home NAS and filesharing setups, like Nextcloud. Their conversations are moving to Signal, Mastodon, Lemmy, Nextcloud Talk, or just plain text. For now its the more technically savvy, but even non professionals with low levels of admin experience are reaching out and asking now, and non technical people are looking for access to those private resources.

The snowball isn’t big yet, but it is rolling. How far it goes and how big it gets, we’ll see.

However what surprises me is that this did not happen sooner and due to ads, but rather it is AI and the complete uphill battle it is becoming to keep your private data out of the multitude of inbound AI vectors that is finally pushing people down the hill.

Many people have FODMAP sensitivities and confuse them for gluten.

Its what makes it more secure. Why do you need a chat app that allows your parents to accidentally stumble into a group of con artists or kids to stumble into things they shouldn’t be exposed to? It’s a messaging app, not gamer group chat.

This is what puts is way ahead of the others.

Unlike the other two, there are no servers that run discoverable group chats.

Imapsync

Man I miss Webrings.

It really was a great thing. It happened naturally too. Started as just a site I posted my writing to, a personal site in 1997, and friends wanted to add their stuff. By 1999 it was renamed from Routhy’s Den to the Den of Amateur Poetry, and then the domain was purchased and the site renamed to The Den of Amateur Writing.

I still remember the pre-PHP days. People would email their works to me and I would manually build an HTML page and update the site within 24 hours.

Yep, I fought against it for years but eventually my new user intake was lower than the rate at which the typical user would fizzle out and move on. We had users that were there for 20 years and regulars, but without fresh ideas and posts things would get stale. So I had to yield and start adhering. Around 2018-2019 things really took a dive in traffic and I could not afford ads as it was all completely out of pocket, so I started a new codebase and rewrote it over 4 years in my spare time. The site before it shut down had a top grade from all of Googles site scanners and I had thought “Perfect… now folks will trickle in again at the right rate.”. And then the delisting.

This is why I shut The Den of Amateur Writing down after 25 years of running and developing it. I had written the entire codebase for Googles SEO, rolled out the update so my users would see a bit more traffic trickle in, and then watched them delist all my URLs 3 months later when this change rolled out. I just gave up. It was taking way too much of my life fighting googles bullshit to provide a free community.

Because I dont need to pay rent for my files and I don’t have to worry about AI and VCs trying invade my privacy.

Squid

Yeah, Im excited about the cards but getting a 1GB switch with a 10g uplink was expensive… 10g switches are… a lot.

A tale of how a plastic eating bacteria moonlighted as a flesh eating one.

Even more unaffordable for an American. They need to have bankroll to survive a year without income and that includes covering possible medical expenses for 3 months. I have friends who have wanted to move here for years and the hurdles are large even with skills and secondary education. Only those with highly in demand educated skills get an easier path.

Wow. In Canada you cannot get prescription renewals any other way

I’d rather use SMS than sign my rights over to Meta. They can use that if they can use facebook or whatsapp.

I just don’t communicate with anyone that insists on using products that have user agreements I don’t agree with. The amount of bullshit user agreements are getting overloaded with makes them dangerous legal contracts that can have serious implications on your rights. Just ask the family whose daughter died at a Disney theme park and when they tried to sue Disney tried to force them to arbitration because their son had tried Disney+