I’ve never had a Discord account. And just to quell any other mud you’re slinging, the only two social media accounts I’ve ever had in 71 years was Reddit and now Lemmy.

Hey, hey, hey! Way to pull the trigger. Sounds like you’re having a great time learning the ins and outs. I’ve never stood up a Lemmy instance, probably never will. But it’s good to see you jumped right in with your ambitions. Best of luck.

Well, I’ve had a computer in front of me since the 70s. Don’t conflate longevity with knowledge tho. I’ve had no formal training, even tho I ‘ran’ the IT dept for a small construction company in another life. One of my jobs was to train old head construction workers on how to use a lap top, a digital camera, how to interface with our servers to upload data from the field. That was wild.

But, no formal training here. Most of what I know I learned by: Reading, screwing it up, doing it again, ad nauseam. And then when something worked, write that shit down.

Once again, let me quote the relevant part:

It’s a headache I will never engage in again.

Ok then bro. As you were.

weird self-enlightened moral grandstanding.

No, no moral high ground or grandstanding…just reality

People are absolutely justified and allowed to criticize the greed of this company.

Perhaps you missed the part where I said to criticize and backlash all you so desire until it makes you feel better. What I’m pointing out is that, at the end of the day, it’s not your lump of clay to mold even if you disagree with the way it’s being molded.

objective reality is that you reap what you sow.

Did you actually read my comment? Here let me paste the relevant part for this: If they go tits up because of said rug pulls, then they go tits up. Life will continue and other options will be chosen.

So if they reap what they sow and they go tits up because they are a shitty acting company and do all sorts of things to piss you and their customers off, then they go tits up. How much more clear could I be? You are merely a user of their software. You have no other stake in the company. All you can do is voice your opinion loudly, but at the end of the day, that’s all you have and if they choose to ignore your opinion, your bellyaching serves no purpose other than being an ax to grind on your enshitification stone.

nameofservice_funSaskathchewanwordplusthreerandomnumbers@reannlegge.ca.

That’s not a name, that’s a sentence.

contrarian fence-sitting

I view it as living in reality.

Developers (companies) are not entitled to be free from criticism or backlash for acting shitty.

I didn’t take it as such. Sure, criticize and backlash all you need to feel comfortable again, but at the end of the day, open source dev teams pretty much chart their own course. That also applies the the entire kingdom of software, hardware, etc. Yes, they may lose customers or users, but it’s still their lump of clay to mold as they see fit. If they go tits up because of said rug pulls, then they go tits up. Life will continue and other options will be chosen.

And that’s it. Self-hosted and open source software is a double-edged sword. Developers have the freedom to build and share whatever they’d like, but that same freedom also allows them to make unpopular decisions No, you are not entitled to anything from software you haven’t paid for.

Yet another nugget of truth. Muh boy be ringin’ the school bell.

Alas, I see not much of interest this week.

This is just from my experience with Bitwarden, but if a site changes it’s login subdomain, you will have to search Bitwarden for the last subdomain, go ahead and log in and Bitwarden should ask ‘Do you want to update Bitwarden?’

But actually, specifically on the topic of reddit…

I use https://safereddit.com/ a lot. It’s just the one LibRedirect is pointed to.

Just a note to say that devs of large, well established projects are always receptive to donations. A lot of these projects have demo sites, which cost money. So, if you can’t contribute to the code side of the project, a few $$ here and there is always welcome in my experience.

I mean, people fetishise it. Ad blocker, third-party cookies blocked, fingerprint-resistant browser, Pi-hole, VPN… all to visit Reddit.

Well, if I were visiting the raw, unfiltered version of Reddit, I’d want a condom for my network. That place is nuts.

When the simple solution is Lemmy.

Reddit is a vast repository of data and info not really present in Lemmy.

As far as plugins for anti fingerprints, et al, I keep them to a minimum. My standalone pfsense firewall does a lot of the heavy lifting so all I really need on my browser is Ublock Origin.

ETA: I didn’t notice who I was replying to, lol. Good to see you again.

I’m probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in “OK…shit’s expensive…what’s the MOST I can do with the LEAST?”.

Not really. As far as server equipment, I like to ride the top of equipment using DDR3. I can get DDR3 cheap. Sure, it’s not cutting edge, but it works nicely for my purposes. Now I did provision a box that uses DDR4 which is expensive; $437 USD expensive. I’m now trying to get over the sticker shock of a 5090 GPU so I can use it as a local AI machine. The box came with 32 GB ram, so I topped it off with another 96 GB RAM

but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.

How so? I haven’t seen ads on any of my devices in decades. In fact, if I can’t bend a site to my will, with my parameters, I’ll go elsewhere. 90% of the time, that info is duplicated a hundredfold across the internet.

I spin up a new address for everything so I did not get those ads at least.

This is the way. Silo all accounts. I use Firefox relay, and another service called BurnerMail. I can literally spin up unlimited email aliases. In fact, BurnerMail will allow you to specifically name the alias for the specific account. So, you could have reddit.5742@mailbeaver.net. Which is handy for filtering and directing emails to specific folders, including the trash can in your email client.

it is quite jarring to see the unfiltered ad-infested scape of the web.

It’s more than jarring. It makes me want to rage quit when I’m over at a friend’s house trying to help them work through an issue. Especially now that most people have migrated to Windows 11. So, now you have webpages of ads and popups, and the OS itself is inundating you with popups and ads. And it’s not like I haven’t spent hours with my friends trying to get them to cut that shit out.

I still run an instance of Windows 10 on a local account, but it has been severely detached from the mother ship and de-bloated. Telemetry, communications with Microsoft, etc, are handled by a very long host file. Services are to a bare minimum. Pfsense filters Microsoft crap as well. Now since updates are no longer being offered, that door has been shut too. So now, it’s just an OS without the umbilical cord to the mother ship.

I have a good stack of 2.5" and a stack of 3.5" HDD, but most are in the 1 to 2 TB range with a couple that are 500 GB. They’re salvaged drives that I’ve just been collecting. I guess I could daisy chain them all together, LOL, but I’ve been just saving them for emergencies. I have an old Seagate ST-225 20MB, but I framed that one in a shadow box as a curio.

I’m not trying to throw shade on your project nor am I trying to discourage you in any way. I think it’s a noble ambition. I hope you make a mint doing it. If I live long enough, I’ll be able to tell people ‘Yeah, I met the dude on Lemmy before he was so successful.’ But if 71 years of experience has taught me anything, it’s that it has to be so easy a cave man could do it - as if it just fell in your lap, and it has to be work and trouble free. Otherwise, the average Joe Schmoe citizen isn’t going to spend the time. Having a secure network takes work. Keeping up with updates and making sure they aren’t going to make the wheels fall off, takes work. Work is where the vast amount of people fall off the wagon.

I bookmarked your project and I’ll give it a serious look see. I will tell you that the demo site: oasis.circuitforge.tech, returns a bad gateway Error code 502 from Cloudflare.

Rock on with yo’ bad self.

Alright man. Best of luck. Give it a go. You’ll never know how it will turn out unless you try.