And I think we’d all agree a sophomore dating a college student would be pretty imbalanced.
I was a college student at 17, but I think you had a larger age difference in mind. I do think we can all agree there should be laws against adults sexually exploiting teenagers.
Yes, though legally that’s a bit of a grey area. It’s only really entrapment if law enforcement or informants entice the offender to commit a crime they weren’t predisposed to commit. I imagine it would be an uphill battle to convince a judge or jury of that when it comes to meeting minors for sex.
The decoys were careful so that it would never even be a question.
There’s a significant distinction between servers that are actively malicious as you’re describing and servers that aren’t fully compatible with certain features, or that are simply buggy.
Lemmy, for example modifies posts federated from other platforms to fit its format constraints. One of them is that a post from Mastodon with multiple images attached will only show one image on Lemmy. Mastodon does it too: inline images from a Lemmy post don’t show on vanilla Mastodon.
I’ll note that Lemmy’s version numbers all start with 0. So do Piixelfed’s. That implies the software is unfinished and unstable.
I remember looking up the people To Catch A Predator worked with and reading some of their chat logs. The decoy was always very upfront in giving an age unambiguously below the age of consent in their jurisdiction, and never initiated conversation about sex or suggested meeting in person.
Of course, the decoy would always agree to do so if the offender asked, but the criminal conduct was unambiguously criminal, and unambiguously the offender’s idea. What we see in this article appears to abandon that sort of rigor to manufacture more opportunities to confront someone.
We’ve decided, as a society, that humans cannot consent until 18.
Older criminal laws were based on that idea, usually called “statutory rape”. Modern laws about sexual abuse of children usually ignore the concept of consent entirely to allow for more nuance.
One example of nuance is exceptions for people close in age so that non-abusive relationships between teenagers don’t suddenly become crimes when someone has a birthday. Another is that consent is often a factor in the severity of the penalty.
Federation doesn’t inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it’s a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there’s a new post. There’s a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it’s not a resource-intensive operation.
Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.
I’d put it farther removed from the technical side than that; dreadbeef is thinking like a manager. OP might be better off paying a third party $3/month to handle the details and host a heavyweight, full-featured blog for them, but that’s not what they asked for.
This is selfhosted, which I think implies a desire to self-host things even if it might seem a wiser use of resources to do something else.
It’s pretty bad, however the headings appear be colored by the author’s moral indignation. Many models from brands in the “Avoid at all costs!” section are, in fact unlockable.
Here’s a list.
https://github.com/melontini/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame
I’m thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.
This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there’s inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That’s a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.
I’m sure there’s a way around it for institutional customers.
It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I’d probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.
Some people have privacy expectations that are not realistic in an unencrypted, federated, heterogeneous environment run by hobbyist volunteers in their spare time.
It you have something private and sensitive to share with a small audience, make a group chat on Signal. Don’t invite any reporters.
I see where you’re coming from now. In most English-speaking cultures, it is not conventional to use hand gestures as a substitute for spoken words in a conversation. Breaking social conventions for no apparent reason is at least potentially rude.
You’re translating those conventions directly to chat. Chat is not spoken word, and it is conventional to use emojis, at least the really unambiguous ones, instead of typed words in chat some of the time. People do not usually do this with any rude or insulting intent.
It depends on what it’s in response to.
Dinner at 6 at Greasy Spoon?
👍
Entirely reasonable.
Should we do the project in COBOL?
👍
Entirely unreasonable, but not rude.
My cat just died.
👍
Rude.
Kind of defeats the purpose
That’s why the why matters. Some people might just not trust Windows to keep private data secure, but be comfortable running certain software on it in a VM, possibly a VM that isn’t usually allowed network access.
If you’re sufficiently motivated to get off Windows to invest time learning different workflows, there certainly are options. It sounds like you’ve tried some for image processing and found gaps. People might be able to help fill them if you go into detail about your current workflow, but there is no 1:1 replacement for Photoshop on any platform. If you’re a heavy Photoshop user, there may be no path to happiness for you.
There’s surely a 1:1 replacement for Visual Studio outside of Windows-specific development (which wouldn’t make much sense to attempt on Linux anyway).
I really want this to work out.
Why?
I don’t ask that to talk you out of it. I like desktop Linux. I’m typing this on desktop Linux. I’ve been using desktop Linux for most of my adult life. I ask because your reasons will inform the advice people can give you.
I do a lot of .NET programming and photo editing [with Windows-specific proprietary software]
There isn’t necessarily a good solution to this. Those are large, complicated programs with very deep workflows that are almost certainly going to be dissimilar in any substitute software, which is itself going to be large and complicated with its own ways of doing things. Using those specific programs may be more important to you than what OS you run them on.
It looks like Photoshop is probably usable with Wine, while Visual Studio isn’t. Using Wine means putting up with occasional instability and reduced performance. If you spend a lot of time in Photoshop, this may not be for you.
Another option is to run Windows in a VM for those apps. This will likely work smoothly with regard to the apps themselves, and generally performs near native, but does mean a less polished interaction with the rest of your desktop.
If you’re patient and want to gain a deeper understanding, try Arch itself rather than an Arch-based distribution that’s easy to install.
You’ll spend a long time on the initial installation and setup and you’ll read a lot of documentation in the process. When you have a usable system, you’ll understand what’s installed, how it’s configured, and why. Expect to spend a couple days just to get it usable though - this approach isn’t for everyone.
The Arch docs are top tier, but they’re not necessarily step by step guides because there’s more than one way you might choose to set things up. The docs tell you how the pieces can fit together, but it’s ultimately up to you to to do the assembly.
It makes my phone just as secure or insecure as my PC. I’m good with that.
If I was at higher risk of being directly targeted for attacks, I’d probably rethink that.
A couple of them.
Both have RSS feeds and associated Mastodon accounts. It’s also possible to follow the latter directly with ActivityPub software that allows following users (not Lemmy). I might put up a third and talk about programming and tech.