Mirlo, which is similar to subvert, but a worker owned thing rather than a cooperative are dipping their toe into federation with more planned I think:

“…If you want your artist profile to be follow-able from other websites, you can now “Enable The Social Web” and people can subscribe to your feed from other places. With support from our NLNet funding we’ve finally enabled the ActivityPub standard integration on our site, so that people across the internet will be able to follow your artist account…”

Great to see so many open source ethical alternatives popping up.

It’s not auto-syncable but PlainApp works great for me. Only needs a phone app installed, works in the browser on a lappy/PC

You can take it as confirmation of the depressing truth that most people will ignore and even try to justify horrific behaviours if the perpetrator is in a position to enact things that they agree with.

There a lot to choose from! I haven’t read this translation myself but I know people who have and say its very good - the Richard Howard edition: https://www.tfobooks.com/book/9781567928273

LMDE - no idea if its the ‘best’ but its the best for me right now in that it does what I want, looks how I want and stays out of my way.

Self hosted Standard Notes?

I’m both cis and hetero. There is not one iota of evidence I’ve seen that there is any sort of movement that wishes death on cis and hetero people, or that organises vigilante groups to hunt down cis or hetero people to beat them up, or that invents bizarre rumours about ‘what they do’ or conflates cis and hetero people with paedophilia or that tries to organise campaigns to get cis or hetero-centric book removed from libraries.

There is no formal or informal system of oppression towards cis and hetero people. It just doesn’t exist.

There’s so many variables to each persons threadiverse experience that its difficult to quantify another’s experience. I don;t think there is an objective default experience. It depends on what instance your on, which also might dictate which software as the two main players don;t have feature parity, it then depends on how you use the available tools each software type has, how you sort your feeds, which communities you’re subbed to, how willing you are to simply block and move on, what your own beliefs are and what sort of experience you expect.

You’ll only think its a ghost town if you are someone who spends the majority of their time on social media. The flip side of that is that there’s also a sizeable amount of people who might simply check in once or twice a day. To them, its not a ghost town at all.

You’ll only think its full of hate if you’re not prepared to be on an instance that curates the hate away and you combine that with liberal use of blocking tools when some gets through.

And there are lots of other wider societal issues going on too - Westernised countries (which includes the majority of users I see on here) are largely descending into right-wing, xtian-fuelled, uber-capitalism, bigoted hellscapes and lots of people are understandably scared and angry about that. Scared and angry people lash out. Doesn’t excuse it a as behaviour but I don’t think growing fear and anger is a threadiverse-specific issue at all.

The answer is that there is no one-sized fits all answer beyond finding the best fit for yourself in terms of instance/software/tools/feeds and posting/commenting on more of what you personally enjoy and maybe lessen the time you spend on here and social media generally. It doesn’t have to be always on, just something you do alongside other things like reading a book, going for a walk etc.

https://filen.io/

Not pricey, e2ee clients, open source, servers in Germany, 10gb free tier to try them out. Been using them for a few years now. The clients used to be a bit crap but they’re very good now.

Someone needs to check your harddrive mate. You’re way, way too invested in splitting this particular hair.

I’m no fan of Starmer, even less of the OSA but Grok is literally producing deepfake CSAM and other non consensual images. The UK government, like I would hope the vast majority of people, think that’s appalling and don’t want it to happen. They asked X/Musk to stop Grok producing non consensual deepfakes and all they did was limit its availability to paying subscribers - essentially making the creation of deepfake CSAM a premium service. All Musk really demonstrated is that X can act swiftly, despite the numerous times it said it can’t, but doesn’t want to deprive its paying users of the ability to create CSAM.

It’s totally insane to me that this is being framed, by US Republicans as a free speech issue but I guess a country that can murder a woman driving a car is fucked up in plenty of other ways too.

Could you DM me a link too please? I’ve got no issues paying for something that makes my life easier!

Yeah, things going wrong is a concern. From the very brief look I’ve had at the repo, it looks like PHP and a standard MySQL/Maria DB runs Castopod so I’m hoping that side of things would be minimal and similar to self-hosting a WP instance.

The VPS side, I’m reasonably OK with. I’ve been running static sites for a few years with zero issues so far but I am less familiar with this side of things.

In terms of bandwidth, based on (basic) stats up until now I would guestimate we have about 100 downloads per month and each episode is approx 90-100mb in size so the package I have my eye on, which offers 24TB bandwidth per month should easily cope with that.

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

For the threadiverse in particular I’d add transferable user created Communities (between instances).

Koreader is theoretically great. Offers a range of connection settings (e.g. FTP, Calibre over wifi etc) that makes life easier. Unfortunately its (in my experience) pretty buggy. I have a Kobo Clara and after the third time of Koreader simply wiping my ereader I just went back to using the stock Kobo software. Koreader is much heavier on battery use too.

Lack of audit is not great I agree. I can see from a basic web search that security is an issue but I’m not sure ‘nightmare’ is warranted. The lack of audit seems to be main focus of concern and I’d say thats a judgement call for each person depending on threat model. I was hoping for something more conclusive than that. Its certainly adequate for a more privacy-centric way of communicating than an app that doesn’t cater for Apple users at all.

Could you link me some resources for that? I may need something to demonstrate that to others.

Seems pretty similar to Jami except that it lacks the iOS and desktop clients that Jami already has.

It’s also easy to learn and ready-to-go on just about every shared hosting package on offer.

Iconography clearly ‘designed’ by coders.