Great post. Full of useful tips I always need to remind myself of.

I had one til a few months ago!

I wonder this too, but I’m coming to believe that as long as investors are throwing money at housing and people need it, it might not burst. With enough wealth concentration, maybe it just all gets progressively bought up and rented out at insane prices, with growth coming from speculation among massive institutional investors.

But I haven’t really thought of this deeply or looked into whether it’s sound.

Got an XPS 13 9350, works fine, bluetooth and all, though I upgraded Ubuntu and the kernel and the integrated webcam hasn’t worked since, which I still don’t really understand.

This may not be relevant since I have a different gpu and am on Ubuntu, but when I installed proprietary drivers I didn’t have display either because I was using a version of the driver that was too recent (whether due to dropped compatibility or a bug I don’t know). An older one might work!

Google en passant

There might be some kind of trust system that could work. I have no idea of course but I’m envisioning something like Stack Overflow’s system and a bit of community correction and authority à la Wikipedia.

Why can’t the government just build it as a public utility?

Yeah, I saw a link to a study that modeled outcomes within the next fre decades where acidification kills enough marine life and favors the reproduction of other microbes. Something about either low oxygen in the oceans and/or the atmosphere, or maybe a dangerous increase in stmospheric toxins resulting from that.

Maybe I’ll try and find it to verify.

Nah, I think they’re just being mass-created. No one’s actually spamming anything so far. You can see so on this directory of instances: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

If you scroll around you’ll find some that have like 10k or 20k users and 11 posts at most.

I’ve been thinking of hosting my own instance for myself, but I was wondering if you’d noticed any oddities! I’ve heard of some bugs that occur when interacting cross-instance. Also stuff about content being out of sync, which I notice currently with lemmy.ml from my current instance (lemmy.world).

The hurdle to that is much greater here since there’s a common protocol adopted by multiple open source projects (of which Lemmy) which allows interoperability. If a profit-driven group would try to capture it, people could move instances/use a fork/use a different but similar activitypub project like kbin, etc.

At least I think that’s correct? It seems to me there are multiple lines of defense which each have a good amount of redundancy.

But certainly the proposed defederation isn’t the same as suppressing utterance, considering there would remain a publicly accessible instance for that speech. This would be closer to keeping in check by public opinion, since it’s the action of exterior social forces.