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.

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.

What is this from?

Furry DM, pushing a fetish on their players.

Problem is, you have to play all of them to get all the specialized terminology, and it sometimes overlaps between games.

I’ll bet I’ve played at least one game you haven’t. I know there are dozens of games I haven’t played, and even if I had time and wanted to dedicate all of my free time to RPGs, I doubt I could play then all enough to learn them well enough to recognize each from a half-dozen words in a meme.

Who’s your manager? I want to speak to them.

I vote post titles must be prefixed with “[GAMENAME]”. Many of these posts are just noise in my feed, without context.

Oof, I mean, CGI can go a long way, but still… some actors stay young-looking (Johnny Depp did, for a long time), but it’s a large cast and not all of them will. And they have to do it for an entire season, which gets expensive.

But, we’ll see. My money’s on a fast-forward into the 90’s, like someone else suggested.

That’s probably wise. 90’s nostalgia seems to be “in” these days.

How so? Like the ones they’ve done before? The season jumps ahead a few years? That’s what I’m expecting; I guess I’m saying it’s not quite right still calling them “kids.”

They could do something like X-Men: Days of Future Past, where the Earth has become a sort out Vecna hellish nightmare and they go back in time to fix it, maybe run into their younger selves, or around themselves, like the DS-9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations. It’d be a pretty sad knock-off plot device, and it’d be expensive for them to run an entire season like that.

Anyway, all I was saying that they’re not kids anymore. I think it was the recent announcement of Millie Bobby Brown’s marriage that really made me aware of how much time has passed. Season 1 first aired 8 years ago.

They’re not kids anymore. Eleven just got married. No way they can pass them off as younger now.

Hugo isn’t a server, per se. It’s basically just a template engine. It was originally focused on turning markdown into web pages, with some extra functionality around generating indexes and cross-references that are really what set it apart from just a simple rendering engine. And by now, much of its value is in the huge number of site templates built for Hugo. But what Hugo does is takes some metadata, whatever markdown content you have, and it generates a static web site. You still need a web server pointed at the generated content. You run Hugo on demand to regenerate the site whenever there’s new content (although, there is a “watch” mode, where it’ll watch for changes and regenerate the site in response). It’s a little fancier than that; it doesn’t regenerate content that hasn’t changed. You can have it create whatever output format you want - mine generates both HTML and gmi (Gemini) sites from the same markdown. But that’s it: at its core, it’s a static site template rendering engine.

It is absolutely suitable for creating a portfolio site. Many of the templates are indeed such. And it’s not hard to make your own templates, if you know the front-end technologies.

It depends on how you want to write. If you want to use a web interface, WriteFreely is decent. If you like your text editor, Hugo is fantastic.

:shrug:

It’s trivial to host yourself, and super light on resources. Personally, I don’t use it; for blogging I write markdown and rsync it over to the server where Hugo picks it up and turns it into a blog. Now that I think about it, I should probably go shut my WriteFreely down. I have a few pages on it, but I hate web app interfaces, so I didn’t put much content in it.

AND it seems that cultures either domesticated cats or ferrets for the same purpose: pest rodent maintenance.

I find it not surprising, but really interesting, that some of the animals that have become the most common pets in the West had competition; and that it may have taken only some relatively small events and it could be raining foxes and ferrets instead of cats and dogs.

It’s taken me forever to reply because (a) I feel guilty about short replies to long messages, (b) I had to think about this a bit, and © I almost exclusively access Lemmy on my phone and I hate typing long messages on my phone. Not an excuse, just an explanation. There are no good Lemmy desktop clients, but I’ve finally logged in to my instance’s web interface to respond to this. 3 months later.

So, yeah. I honestly didn’t pay much attention to whatever backstory the software authors were selling; I was looking for a feature set, and Session had it. I got some of my circle using it, and we eventually stopped because message delivery reliability was iffy, and there were enough of some UI issues with (e.g.) attaching photos that everyone drifted back to what we were using before. I’m sure Session will improve, but just for the record, I haven’t been using it because of technical reasons.

I don’t have an issue with cryptocurrency per se. There are issues with current implementations, but the fact that it’s used for laundering money or scamming people is also an argument that can be made for fiat money, but you don’t see people saying we shouldn’t use dollars because a vast amount of them are used to enable the military industrial complex that is killing people around the world. I haven’t read that Bitcoin is being used to fund any of the attempted genocides currently underway – but fiat money has. People have been scamming people using regular money for far longer than cryptocurrency has existed. A lot of people have lost a lot of money trying to get rich in various cryptocurrencies; do you think more people have lost more money in cryptocurrency than people have lost trying to dabble in the stock market? Have more fortunes been ruined by cryptocurrencies than were ruined by the collapse of the “legitimate” currency of Germany during the Weimar Republic? And what, exactly, is a “fake economy?” If people are willing to exchange goods and services for A Thing – whatever that Thing is – it’s a real economy by definition. The argument that because the currency isn’t endorsed or backed by a government means it’s not real seems debatable, at best.

While I think a debate about the relative merits and evils of cryptocurrency is a good thing to have, since the OP topic was messengers, to answer your questions: in the entire time I used Session – and though today it’s still on my phone and receiving messages, although nobody’s sending any – I would not know that the developers behind Session had some grander vision involving cryptocurrency unless it had been brought to my attention here. That they want to improve privacy by using an anonymous method of payment for services – one not based on the collection and sale of metadata, or on a traceable currency (which all electronic fiat transactions are) seems reasonable. I imagine that, eventually, they’ll build something like Lightning into the app, so users can transfer cryptocurrency to other users, or to the operators of their servers. If it ever gets to the point where you must pay to use the service using crypto, then maybe I’d be concerned. It’d be no worse than buying tokens at a video game arcade – a practice that was around for more than a decade without an indignant uprising.

I think it feels sleezy to you because the devs are also interested in integrating cryptocurrency into the Session ecosystem, and you believe cryptocurrency=bad. I think it doesn’t feel icky to me because I’ve been working as a software developer since long before Bitcoin was introduced; and I understand how blockchains work, and know what “proof-of-work” means and what it implies; and I’ve watched the evolution of the internet and the growth of the web, and lived through the eternal September; and I saw how email turned from a communication tool for people in higher ed into a way for scammers (and legitimate businesses) to deliver spam. And I believe that a very many people will try to take advantage of other people and take their money, and they’ll use any possible tool to do so. But I believe that scamming is not fundamental to the nature of cryptocurrencies in the same way that killing people is in the fundamental nature of a gun, any more than buying heroin is fundamental to the nature of a dollar bill.

Docker of one version of software that uses Linux containers to encapsulate software and that software’s dependencies, while limiting that software’s access to the underlying OS. It’s chroot, but for more of the system. It can make running software that has a lot of moving parts and dependencies easier. It can also improve your security running that software.

For how-tos, watch one of the 875,936 YouTube tutorials, or read one of the 3 million text tutorials. Or ask ChatGPT, if you really need hand-holding.

Yeah. I wish folks would do a simple web search before picking names. Radicale has been around for years; it even has a domain, radicale.org .

I ended back on the vendor messages app, too, when every other FOSS option failed to manage group messages correctly. The worst was one that looked fine on my end, but to everyone else in the group it looked like I was sending out 1:1 messages to each of them. This particular group it a mix of Android and iOS users, and the Android users saw it funky, too, so it wasn’t just an Apple thing.

I guess SMS messaging is just a lot harder to get right than most.