To be fair, it is a very long-winded post. I think it’s not an uncommon use case, though, and so deserved a robust sketch of the desired solution; Farmville and chat are sideshows, and what the people left on Facebook are really there for are the Walls.

There are some excellent apps out there, and by and large they look and work better than commercial apps, IME. So I disagree with the assertion that I have to stay with commercial software.

What I was asking for, in my post, was not which apps have better UX than Facebook, but rather which of the very many OSS, federated (although, not necessary for my use case), self-hosted platforms fit the specific use, and ideally with a straightforward iOS mobile app. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be able to quickly take and post photos to a private channel/community/wall.

Circles really is quite nice in all respects. I think they’re hindered by their choice of backend. I’ve been using Matrix for years, and key management has always been a hot mess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the issues we encountered were related to Matrix’s god-awful and buggy PK negotiation & management process.

It’s true some things are harder to do in the container configuration; it’s easier installed as an OS, especially integrations like Z-Wave, ZigBee, RTSP, Eufy, ESP, and so on. All of these require running other software, and in containers it’s a fair bit of fussing with port and host OS device connections.

I’ve always run it in a container, without issue. It works fine, but I’m comfortable with the command line and LXC. That said, flashing an ESP hardware device and getting it connected to HA running in a container has so far defeated me, because I have to give access to the device in the configuration of the container before I run it, but the device flashing process itself is time limited and expects a process to be waiting on it when it is connected. It’s a chicken/egg problem I haven’t yet figured out which wouldn’t be a problem if I were running the HA OS.

HA isn’t the only software that just works better when it controls the while OS. Kodi is another that encourages users heavily to running it as an OS.

Regardless, it runs fine via

podman pull ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant: latest

and there’s a package in AUR that wraps the container up with a systemd service - it’s as close to a bare package install as you’re likely to get.

What’s a little funny to me is that, despite that I’ve been running HA in a container for the past 4 years, I’m working towards getting a dedicated device and running HA OS on it. If we ever move out of this house, I’m not going to spend weeks going around replacing all of the hardware - smart sockets, lights, garage door opener, security, etc etc - with dumb devices; and for any of that to be worth anything, it’s going to need a controller configured for it, which means, I’m planning on selling the HA server device with the house. For that case, I don’t want anything but HA running on that device, and for that, it’d just be easier and smoother to run HAOS.

My advice is to run HA in a container until you are sure that’s the direction you want to go, but not for so long that it’s going to be a PITA to migrate to a dedicated server. But - hey, just IMHO - plan on running HAOS. If I knew then what I know now, that’s what I would have done.

This guy is looking at the long view. If you read it to the end, he’s starting his own garlic farm and is going to constantly undercut Jim’s prices, so that Jim won’t make any (or many) sales, until Jim goes out of business. He’s doing this even if it means a loss for himself; his goal is to ruin Jim’s business.

Now, this is what’s known in Birdman culture as “a Dick Move,” but Jim seems a bit of a dick himself. However, while it might screw up the beginning of my season, if I were Jim I’d simply pivot to onions.

It all comes down to how far OP’s poster is willing to take it. He certainly seems petty enough to pursue all paths, at whatever cost, to prevent Jim from being able to still produce at that farmer’s market; changing crops as Jim changes crops. If Jim’s invested enough, he could rotate his crops between a half-dozen different root stocks and the odds Vengeance Boy would happen to match whatever he’s selling that season would be slim and spoil his plan.

I have to completely avoid mirrors, myself. Walking down a city street on a sunny day is downright hazardous, lest I catch a glimpse of my reflection.

Yeah, probably. Mostly dark and a bit gloomy, but what else would you expect from a Kardasian outpost?

The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point

And, for computers, was almost exclusively limited to monitors. In 2009, the Energy Star specification was version 4.0, released in 2006. In that specification, the EPA’s objective was to get 40% of the computers on the market to have power management capabilities 2010 – 40% by the year after Bitcoin was introduced. Intel’s 2009 TCO-driven upgrade cycle document mentions power management, but power use isn’t included in any of the TCO metrics.

All of the focus on low-power processing units in 2009 was for mobile devices and DSPs. Computer-oriented energy savings at the time was focused on processes, e.g. manually powering down computers or use of suspension and hibernation - there was very little CPU clock scaling available for desktop computers – you turned them off to save power. DVFS didn’t become widely available – or effective – until 2006, and a study published in 2009 (again, the same year Bitcoin was introduced) found that “only 20% of initiatives had measurable targets.”

So, yes: technically, there were people thinking about these sorts of things, but it wasn’t a common consumer consideration, and the tools for power management were crude: your desktop was on and consuming power – always the same amount of power – or it was off. And people did power down their computers to save energy. But, like I said, if your desktop was on, it was consuming the same amount of energy whether you were running a miner or weren’t. There was a motto at the time bandied about by SETI@home, that your computer was using energy anyway, so you might as well do science with the spare CPU cycles. That was the mindset of most people who had computers at the time.

Liberally educated populations tend to be more liberal. Kids coming out of Bob Jones University, Arizona State, and Yale can be as archly conservative as anyone you see on FOX News or read the byline of in the WSJ.

The quality of the education matters. I’d argue that Jesuit priests, despite being educated in highly religious schools, tend to be the more liberal branch of Catholicism due to their emphasis on logic and analysis.

What I’m saying is that a good education is one that emphasizes critical thinking; that indoctrination is not education; and that people with strong critical thinking skills tend to be liberal. I believe that it’s because the antithesis of dogma is critical thinking. Sure, it’s not a guarantee, and the fact that Einstein was staunchly religious, and that Jesuits exist prove that you can have good logic and critical thinking skills and still be prone to religiosity. However, history shows that educated populations tend to be more progressive and less prone to falling for rhetoric and ideology.

Your point is important, though, and I’ll emphasize my comment that it’s important to distinguish between indoctrination and education. PragerU tried to call itself a university, but that doesn’t make it one; and education curriculum directed by governments tend to include a fair amount of indoctrination.

There’s a scene in The West Wing where Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) is talking to, I think, Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter). As I remember it, there was a paper arguing a conservative viewpoint on something, and Sam reveals that he wrote the paper as part of a debate exercise. I always thought that was the epitome of a good education: being able to switch your viewpoint and really understand the other side’s argument to the point where you can win a debate arguing for something you oppose. It reflects that you deeply understand both sides, not just your own dogma or opinions; it reflects that your position is probably based on the fact that you’ve considered both sides and chose your position thoughtfully. A good education will force people to debate a viewpoint they disagree with; a bad one will only have them debate the position they already hold. I wish I could find that clip on YouTube; I may have to rewatch the entire series (at least up until Sorkin left) just to find it again.

Zooz 800 ZSE42 800LR. $30, the coin battery lasts about a year IME.

Huh. My memory of TNG was that it was mostly variations of pasty off-white. The LCARS was colorful, but the uniforms were mostly primary colors and everything else was… well, pastel always seems watered-down and bland to me.

DS9 was all browns and blacks, though. It totally made sense, because of the station’s history, but the colors were pretty monotone, like everything was dark sepia, right?

But control of the protocol - the definition and development - is still controlled by the for-profit company, right? It hasn’t been handed over to a nonprofit governance committee, has it?

Federation or not, if Bluesky dominates the protocol, they can decide to stop federating and essentially kill the independent servers. Much like what Signal did. Sure, you can run your own Signal server, but without access to the dominant player’s market, and using a protocol that’s controlled monopolistically, it’s practically useless to do so - which is why almost nobody does it anymore.

I really like the Nostr protocol, though. It’s too bad the network is so inundated by cryptocurrency topics.

It’s simple, it has a nice extension process (standing on the shoulders of giants), and it’s super easy and lightweight to self-host. It reminds me a lot of the early days of http, when it was more common (as a developer) to telnet to port 80 and just type in a couple of lines of header and get a response.

Sadly, Nostr’s association with cryptocurrency, and the fact that 90% of the traffic on it is cryptocurrency created posts, has been a severe handicap.

the Iran-Contra stuff

and throwing one of his underlings under the bus for it. He was a role model for Trump.

I miss the color schemes of TOS.

I have zwave water detectors that are pretty easy to pair. The only problem is that every time they reset, they trigger an alarm event. Fortunately, this only happens when I upgrade zwavejs, or change the batteries, so the false positives are not random. Still, it’s a weird design decision.

Yeah, I think we’re on the same page. The Biden administration did good, but we’d come to a depressingly low point in politics.

I’m encouraged that more conservatives are feeling it’s safe to pop their heads out and criticize Trump, and the radical right who’ve been able to hijack the party thanks largely to party policies started during Ronald Fucking Regan’s administration. But if they do it on Lemmy, they’re assumed to be liberals which may increase the perception of there being few conservatives on Lemmy.

Lemmy is still more generally politically Left than American Left, which is, after all, pretty centrist compared to western Europe. This feeds even more into OP’s question about why there aren’t more conservatives on Lemmy: if you look at Lemmy as a European, the pro- Trumpers are neo-Nazis, not conservatives; the center is so far right, anything more right is essentially legally banned in Germany.

I think that your metrics for picking covert Trumpers based upon that appaling debate is incorrect and simplistic.

Well, yeah, it’s simplistic. I’m generalizing.

I watched every second of that shit show and believed that we were doomed for another 4 years of the orange turd.

I agree. Biden had a bad night (and, it appears in retrospect, had been declining for a while). Trump has been a deranged narcissistic sociopath since day 1; Biden was held to a higher standard than Trump. Biden performs poorly, and the heart sunk out of the Democratic faithful. Trump performs poorly, and that’s just par for the course, because all Trumpers care about is hurting liberals.

However, I admit I don’t know what you’re arguing; I think we agree on most of this. The Harris bump was because (as I said) it gave liberals hope that they could win. The bump came from undecideds who suddenly saw an energized, engaged, and competent viable candidate as an option; or people who before saw only two decrepit old white men (The Patriarchy) feebly flailing for control, and suddenly one of the candidates was strong, under 60, female, and a minority!

We’re answering OP’s question why there aren’t more Trumpers on Lemmy. There are; they’re just hidden, and how they respond to the debate outs them. The debate was just an example:

1. Non-Trumper: If Joe had a cold, it looks like a staffer gave him Nyquil instead of amphetamines. He’d have paid for the uppers the next day, but it if ever there was a time to push yourself and pay the price later, this debate was it. He was horrible. Trump was his usual lying self, rambling nonsense, and looked like his usual re-animated corpse.
2. Trumper: Biden was awful; he’s obviously going senile, unable to answer questions, losing his train of thought, weak.

Democrats are far more critical of their own candidate than Republicans are of their’s, and that’s how you identify the conservative lurkers. They’re there, and they’re not hard to recognize.

There are a couple masquerading as Green Party supporters, and you do see blatently pro-Trump posters occasionally, but most of them are lurkers who, if they comment, hide behind criticizing Democrats rather than voicing pro-Trump sentiments.

Look for the people who were smashing Biden for the debate behavior while ignoring Trump’s Alzheimer’s symptoms. The people being nitpicking Harris or Walz, while being silent about the Couch-Fucker and Orange Stalin. Those are the pro-Trump lurkers. There aren’t many, though, because they don’t thrive outside of an echo chamber.

Lemmy’s an echo chamber as well, but you’ll find plenty of people who criticize both parties, and while a lot of people like Kamala, very few claim she’s perfect, or worship her. And there’s plenty of legitimate criticism of the Democratic party, and strong sentiment about a need for change in US politics. This is the sort of discussion and debate which would not be sanctioned in most conservative forums, and could easily get you banned. So I think it’s fair to say Lemmy is far less echo-y than most.

Although she’s mainly focusing on Picard, this person has the same complaint about what’s going on in the Star Trek genre. It’s really long, but it’s essentially the same complaint - with which I sympathize.

Enshittification afflicts everything.

Mine is 3-pronged:

1. btrfs + snapper takes care of most level-1 situations, and I take a snapshot of every /root change, plus one nightly /home snapshot. but it’s pretty demanding on disk space, and doesn’t handle drive failure; so I also do
2. restic + USB drive, which I can cram way more snapshots onto, so I keep a couple of weeks of daily snapshots, one monthly snapshot for a year, and one snapshot per year, going back several years. I currently have snapshots from my past 3 computers on one giant drive. However, these drives can also fail, and won’t protect me from burglary or house fire, so I also do
3. restic + BackBlaze. I just take a nightly snapshot for every computer and VM I manage. My monthly B2 bill is around $10. The VMs don’t change much, and I only snapshot data and config directories (only stuff I can’t spin up fairly quickly in a container, or via a simple install command), so most of the charge comes from a couple of decades of amateur digital photography, and an archive of all our digital music (because I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend weeks re-digitizing all those CDs).

The only “restore entire system b/c of screwing up the OS” is #1. I could - and probably should, make a whole disk snapshot to a backup drive via #2, but I’m waiting until bcachefs is more mature, then I’ll migrate to that, for the interesting replication options it allows which would make real-time disk replication to slow USB drives practical; I’d only need to snapshot /efi after kernel upgrades, and if I had that set up and a spare NVME on hand, I could probably be back up and running within a half hour.