Linux gives you freedom.

Freedom lets you break stuff.

If, like Windows or MacOSyou just use it as intended by official support, it should be fine. If you start just adding everything and anything from anyone you’re gonna break stuff.

Other stuff is made to be idiot proof, Linux is not.

I’m not new to linux but the GPL seems quite complicated and I couldn’t even tell you which GPL Redhat subscribe to without going to check.

RHEL may not be going ‘closed source’ but they are closing down the channels to access the code and will prosecute any customers who distribute the code.

Decent breakdown from The Register:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/

Seems they have been quite focused on the embrace, extend, extinguish plan for a decade or so.

A little, but keeping options open. My Gentoo and Void machines seem like they will survive a Redhat power grab but I’d have to figure out 4k playback elsewhere on my rpi if they decide to break things as that’s my current weakpoint.

I’m keeping an eye on BSD but feel there’s still a lot of potential in linux; musl, toybox & s6 are doing good work. If RedHat manage to break Gentoo everything is fucked and I need to flee to BSD but I don’t think they are capable of that yet.

I’m hoping Discord is passing phase I can largely ignore. I will deal with it if I need to but it seems like world of proprietary crapware.

Slightly faster performance doesn’t seem like a great reason to swallow Red Hat code at the moment.

Reddit was maintained by unpaid mods. It it now being shat on by unpaid mods.

I appreciate the need for funding I just don’t see the ‘funds health bar’ being useful fediverse server feature.

Awesome & thank you, makes sense.

I’m freeloading from FMHY, kbin.social and mastondon.uk as I try to figure out how this works and been playing around with self hosting instances, this is interesting.

A small fee for a safe and reliable place seems reasonable, cheers for the post :)

In light of recent IBM/RH activity those keeping the old ways, and user choice, alive are more important than ever.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:NeddySeagoon/YeOldeGentoo_2021_Edition

Alsa may be a bit awkward but the other stuff is just more chaos on top of it, it’s not an alternative.

I try wayland once a year or so, maybe one year I will manage more than a few hours or days.

lvm/luks/ext4 is still better than btrfs which still hasn’t gotten round to addressing encryption, big hopes for bcachefs.

Thanks, appreciate the insight. I did not consider that and am still trying to get grasp of things.

I mentioned Pat & Theo as it seems on the few occasions they do reach out to keep the servers running beyond current donations, people do reach out to help with running costs. People don’t jump ship and the community persists for decades.

If a linux distro is struggling to keep up, freeloading users will often jump ship too. Linux isn’t short on distros to choose from or small community distros that died.

I’m not sure what you provide…what is the advantage to using your service over just deploying a lemmy or mastodon instance on any cloud service?

Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it’s bulletproof.

I’d prefer communities and instances focus on providing clear mission statements, support commitments, community guidelines and working on what is possible with what we have. I’d hope that much of the work being done on the Lemmy code over the coming year or so is cve’s, bugfixes, mod tools, scalability & further integration with other areas of the fediverse.

A financial health bar sounds like a lot of work to add and a lot of work for people running an instance to commit to keeping up to date for little gain, or possibly negative gain. Most businesses struggle to provide accounts every year or two and this would likely involve international market and crypto integration alongside converting donated or removeded hardware, hosting and maybe most importantly labour given freely. Real time financial reports for thousands of open source social instances seems wild. To make a personal instance appear green I’d need to show the running cost of ~3.72% of my server and then donate to my own instance and publish it, even then it might be red for half the month if I don’t get my direct debit date in sync.

A lot of money changing hands on Reddit was mods being bribed to promote content, we’d need a bar for that here too so we can see how corrupt the mods of each instance are. Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.

Prosperity is often linked to abrupt change.

In my experience of open source over the past decade or so often the most reliable projects over the longterm are those with a focus on code & community, not finance. If the finances go too far into the red they will ask the community for support. Pat’s Slackware or Theo’s OpenBSD seems like good examples, they are beyond dependable and the finance model seems to involve ignoring it until the lights are about to go off and then asking the community for help. Gentoo & Debian for the community approach.

A small instance with a dedicated admin and a solid community behind the admin that’s currently losing money may be more likely to be still growing and thriving in a few years than a huge instance at the moment with an admin focused on the short term financial possibilities of another mass Reddit migration next week.

Tolerance of own farts > tolerance of the farts of others

You could just use Fedora and not submit any bug reports as that would help them. Just quietly leech.

It’s nice if you can find something that both does what you need and agrees with your philosophy…but usually some compromise is required.

Rocky’s reaction seems the same as Alma, current long-term solution is they don’t know. A more businessly optimism in the post doesn’t really make up for a clear technical plan going forward.

The source can be open, just not easy to access…send an email and in 30 days they provide it, they are not obligated to have everything available instantly as they do now or provide an infrastructure to make life easy for community projects.

They could also mix in proprietary code to make things more awkward afaik.

I’d bear in mind in-house made applications RH provide include systemd, wayland, pipewire & gnome…as long as your distro and use case don’t depend on any of these, there’s no need to worry.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Rocky & Alma were easy targets. Next up thumbscrews on systemd!

Working between servers.

Just simple stuff like searching, adding, customizing feeds. Clicking an alert to take me to the content will take me to a server I’m not logged into and I need to go back and find the same post via my own server to comment. Not the end of the world for me but likely a big issue for many potential users if the are use to mainstream social media that ‘just works’.

I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps.

Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.

Trying to get groups of people to connect meaningfully over email didn’t work. Messenger apps did work as they removed user freedom to top-reply and break everything.

I’m vaguely interested in IT, seflhost a little and compile a kernel from time to time but email still seems esoteric and confusing to me.

Join the fediverse! It’s as simple as setting up an email server!

Good points.

I’ll be going back to Reddit too but I suspect everything will not be as it once was and much of it will be finding out where others have fled to.

There was ~1-5000 people on here over the last year or so which isn’t huge in terms of subreddits, it seems to have jumped to 100,000+ in the past week or two. Teh current content seems reasonable for an ~100k subreddit.