Even after 40, there’s no shortage of people calling you “young”. The actually young people don’t call you “old” the same way. Just be glad you’re alive.

On desktop, using testing + manufacturer repos is fine. Don’t use repos intended for other distributions.

That’s a good point, and I don’t really have enough insights to properly respond to that. I did think about Peertube, and I believe that a site like TikTok is different, because it relies on the ability to broadcast a large number of short videos, specifically with lots of skips.

Streaming one video for several minutes, and skipping between numerous videos every couple of seconds, is orders of magnitude more expensive. Video compression works on the idea that you store entire pictures rarely, and then just encode the difference between each frame. When you constantly need the start of videos, you constantly need the full picture of the first frame. This induces a much higher bandwidth requirement than with video that streams for several minutes continuously. Also consider the response time that is required to make the TikTok experience work. Then also consider that you need to attract enough content contributors to make this work. You can’t just upload some ancient archive of 45 minute videos. You need to drive the machine.

So, to produce a TikTok experience, you also need to design for an attractive ingress of free content.

This is just not replicable in a free environment.

Nobody pays for that much bandwidth without the ability to manipulate you through profiling and impressions. You are the product. The product is not sharing videos. There is no fediverse platform that makes you its whore. If you were to make a video sharing platform, it would never work, because that is not the product, it’s only a feature of what makes up the dopamine machine.

Lemmy will also never outgrow commercial platforms, because the commercial platforms also never were about content.

Makes sense. If you’re contributing less than $1000 monthly to anything, you’re not making a difference. If you want dedicated people to be on the receiving end, who also do a great job, every single person will cost thousands each month. Wikimedia is literally spending millions each year.

Honestly, don’t try to hunt for the “best” spot to contribute your exact amount of spare money to, with the hope of having the largest possible impact. It won’t happen. Treat a good friend to some food instead.

If you really feel like you already got some value out of a service in the past, give what you can, without limiting yourself financially in the process. If you feel like you don’t have the $1 to spend for Wikipedia, don’t spend it. Don’t guilt trip yourself into donations ever. Your donation today will not prevent a service from turning into shit tomorrow. Pay for what you got

I’ve been a funding member of the Wikimedia Foundation for over a decade. I have looked at their finances several times before and during financing them.

As with a lot of similar non-profits, a considerable amount of donations does not go into “running the servers”. You have to judge this by yourself, but they don’t embezzle any money and there is a reasonable bottom line. Wikipedia continuously helps tons of people, and the people who run the operation enable that.

You can download a full dump of Wikipedia any day. Compared to other lying companies, they have been true on their promises for some time.

Of all the $1 I could spend in a year, the one I give to Wikipedia is probably the least wrong invested, and that $1 actually already makes a difference