Running your own email server is also a good way to get a ton of headaches from your isp

I’m middle aged and my phone basically just has rhythm games

It’s not but it’s android only and that person is pretty clearly rocking a newer ARM iphone

I promise you your definition of worthless is far different than an investors

The stock market is overwhelmingly owned by about 10% of Americans who tend to be on the very wealthy side and the “mindless capitalism drones who simply want number to grow” side. They just see user growth and applaud. They love this change and all the changes Reddit has made over the past few years because it means harder to scrape for free and more likely to convert casual browsers to users

What is potentially killing Reddit (and twitter, Facebook, etc) is that advertisers are starting to lose patience with bot activity, which is the overwhelming amount of content on social media. The misleading statistic that those companies throw out is that bots make up a (relatively) small amount of accounts, which is arguably true, but sidesteps that those bots post like crazy. Thus the “power user” effect, where 5-20% of the user base makes up like 90+% of content. Advertisers are getting wise to the fact that an overwhelming number of social media interactions are just nothing (and no one they can sell to) and they’re starting to demand better analytics as well as run their own

This is where Reddit is potentially screwed; meta has dozens of other things to fall back on besides ad revenue. Twitter has Elon propping it up. But this is still pretty wishful thinking, the reality is that Reddits valuation will likely be propped up by institutional investors for years, maybe decades, on the hope of something that never comes (see: Tesla). The quality of the site is essentially irrelevant

Reddit sucks but this is asinine. The stock is down ~35% this year but still up almost 250% since ipo.

Discord is privately owned still but you bring up another key point: the players you’re up against are so powerful, with so much wealth and the most comprehensive legal representation, that even if you manage to have some success they will either buy you or destroy you. Meta has a presence on the fediverse, even

The numbers are staggering. A game is incomparable. Facebook has over 3 billion users and instagram has another 2.5. Even a game like Fortnite “only” has a bit over 600 million users, and the vast majority of games see nowhere near that

You can bootstrap an audience in the millions, maybe, with a lot of luck, but getting to meta numbers takes significant capital to sustain your advertising. More importantly even with that it will still take ages. Facebook took almost a decade to get to a billion. Reddit took 18 years

Both platforms (and twitter, etc) are obviously infested with bots but what’s interesting is that from some research it appears the percentage of user accounts that are bots are far lower than many guess. I’ve seen people guess like 50+%. Per Facebook it’s more like 4-5%, and while Reddit doesn’t disclose based on content removal the numbers are similar (possibly slightly lower). This is definitely underreported though as it’s in their best interest to inflate user counts. Independent research pegs it closer to 20%. But the really interesting part is what validates the people guessing 50+%, which is user activity. Neither network comments on this but independent research pegs bots as responsible for like 50-70% of user activity.

So if you can get a network going with power users you can make it feel much more alive with possibly only 30% of the user base. But that’s where the staggering numbers come in. For Facebook that’s still 900 million people, almost 3x the entire population of america

They won’t do that because it’s expensive and free software generally doesn’t have the budget to do this

I don’t know why you think the “just works” is any different from tunneling with a service. Your server is still opened to the internet through upnp with direct connections and through a tunnel to plex.tv when a direct connection is not possible. In fact plex is inherently less secure because their infra is both the encryption endpoint (as opposed to your client with Jellyfin and Tailscale or whatever) and their infra has been vulnerable in the past (like the massive breach in 2022).

Jellyfin with something like nginx and a vpn is open to the internet, yes, but a service that tunnels (like wireguard, Tailscale) bypasses this issue and it’s up to you to set it up as to your level of comfort

Plex is just easier but as with all things tech (especially those infected with VC dollars) “ease” translates to less secure and far more likely to exploit your data

Yeah obviously, you can also use Tailscale to tunnel to whatever service you want (including just to the server itself). But if you’re bothering to override remote plex access with all this I don’t know why you wouldn’t just pick the option that doesn’t harvest your data and increasingly treat its customers as hostile

Outside the network you still have to open your server to allow plex cloud to access it and potentially tunnel your traffic through plex.tv if a direct connection doesn’t work. This happens automatically but it does happen

With Jellyfin you just have to supply your own relay, like Tailscale or wireguard, which does require more setup but is completely free, means that you can stop your media traffic from being funneled through services that harvest your data (which plex absolutely does), and doesn’t go to shit if plex.tv goes down

Also working to repeal glass-steagal for his Wall Street buddies which set in motion the collateralized debt that created the 2008 recession

Also DMCA which led to weaponizing copyright against fair use with basically no recourse (and even a path to easily dox people by invoking it, though this was unintended)

And wrt the op shifting the welfare burden onto the disability system. Since the changes in 1996 disability claims have significantly increased year after year (especially claims related to mental health, which are impossible to quantify objectively) which has led to it becoming substantially more difficult in most states for the disabled to receive benefits.

At this point in my state it is basically well understood that if you are claiming disability for any mental illness (including things like autism and intellectual disability) unless you’ve spent years in residential inpatient you should anticipate being denied and having to do a lengthy appeal. It’s also highly recommended to get a lawyer involved which is either costly (typically they take 25% of back pay, max $7200, so if the appeal took two years and payments would’ve been $1100 a month they get $6600 of the 26,400 that is owed to you and you likely desperately need as someone who has had no income for at least 2 years (possibly ever). Or you can get legal aid but qualifications for that are very strict and you’ll likely wait awhile as they’re always slammed

that’s true but they’re more expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. If you want an oled panel they’re basically unfeasible, especially if you want a larger panel >55”

It’s true that things are worse on a cheap tv but even if you buy a $5000+ flagship model it will still have advertising baked into the os

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Sky1AyDzM

Depends on what kind of sprinkler system and how old it is. Some of them are closed systems and the water stays stagnant until it’s set off, so when it finally goes the water itself is a hazard because it’s been sitting potentially for years. It tends to come out very disgusting, black sludge that smells like actual shit. And then you have a whole specialized response and cleanup required because it’s loaded with bacteria.

They won’t clean it though, they’ll piss away more money to hire specialized cleaners and contractors to fix the damage

It’s also worth noting that microplastics appear in basically all body tissue, including the brain, when looking at samples from cadavers in recent years. I don’t remember the name offhand but one study found enough microplastics in the average brain to make a plastic spoon.

So this might be more of a correlative thing, hopefully. Because the world ain’t stopping with plastic everything

I saw it too. It also made no sense because his fears are not addressed in any way. He lays out all these intense concerns about AI in his home and the result is literally having the AI go “oh hey don’t worry about that here’s a thing to distract you”, he takes the bait, and then it just ends.

DNS Adblocking although you’ll need special rules for your tv (each vendor varies) and it has limitations. The ad networks have known about dns Adblocking as long as it’s existed so they circumvent it. On a pc with something like ublock (especially the old manifest 3 version) you can also stop scripts used to get around this but obviously on tv that’s not an option (plus it doesn’t always work, cat and mouse game)

I’d really like the ad industry to burn and everyone who works in it to go to jail

I agree with this. I am not self hosting for some end of days apocalypse (except I do have a whole house generator and am looking into off grid electricity, though I really missed the boat on that one haha).

It’s because literally all of these services are parasites run by scumbags. I don’t want anything to do with them. I use Jellyfin/komga because I don’t want my watch/read history sold.

I seek out local only iot devices and isolate them to a physical switch that does not have internet access, only a physical link to the pfsense box where there is an isolated vlan on their own subnet with a hard rule in the firewall to block any outbound traffic. I can still view things like cameras and home assistant remotely via headscale or even homebridge (with some added risk) but not nearly as much risk as the plethora of security issues created by lazy iot firmware developers who rarely, if ever, update their shit. But further than the massive security risks created by 500 iot devices are the massive amounts of profiling data.

I run my own apps like nextcloud and local llms because I don’t trust companies like openai and Google not to suddenly shutter products or drastically change the tos once I’ve integrated them into my workflow (plus tons of data harvesting).

I refuse to use apps and run local proxies to view paywalled news articles because I either don’t trust websites that offer this service or they capitulate to everyone that sends a cease and desist (see: 12ft.io).

Etc etc etc

It’s inescapable in the modern age and I’m so goddamn sick of it. I was talking to a family member the other day and they were signing their literal fucking infant up for daycare. The daycare is owned by private equity, because of fucking course it is. Group homes for the disabled, emergency rooms, drug and alcohol rehabs, etc have been bought up by those scum in increasing numbers over the past decade with the anticipated results (people dying, worsening outcomes, etc) so why wouldn’t they sink their disgusting claws into child and infant care?

The daycare (bright horizons, fuck them) will only send updates to parents via a proprietary app, of fucking course. Updates include pictures of their child, diaper changes, feedings, play, social time, developmental milestones, etc. both parents work so they’re sending the kid there 40 hours, it will be a lot of data - daily updates. The TOS is disgusting. Of course the company owns all the data, of course they can and will share it with third parties, of course they collect as much personal info as possible, and of course they do the bare minimum in terms of cybersecurity. Anything to drive up profits, even if it means exploiting the children you’re supposed to be serving and educating.

The worst part is that when I point this out, when I point out that COPPA exists and they can insist that an account not be made because their child is under 13 and demand an alternative, I look like the pain the ass. they know that ultimately the daycare can be like “fuck you, the app is policy, do it or no pictures”. everyone just wants it to be easy and wants pictures of their kid. And we’re so indoctrinated by tech at this point to just click “agree” and not think about it. It just fucking sucks. No one wants to be the martyr and people like me that demand to be respected are seen as assholes. Meanwhile the company that’s charging them $1600/month for childcare that’s spitting in their face to earn extra on the side with their literal infants harvested data gets a pass because “that’s what companies do I guess”.

They definitely just made an account on the app. In 10-20 years their child will probably have higher health insurance premiums because predictive modeling will have data starting from day 1 and it shows a higher risk of colorectal cancers or whatever.

I cannot stress how badly I hope for a drastic change in the next 5-10 years. This is unsustainable. The villains are winning.

It made me love small cars forever. Even now I am a fairly large person at 189cm but I drive a Smart Fortwo. They just are far more nimble and responsive, like a go kart. Whenever I drive a friend or family’s suv or truck it’s like “how do you do this? This is like piloting a boat”