Yes, surely. I mean we’re a bit in a different situation in a digital place. Votes are way easier here (than in real life) and we can easily automate it into bigger processes.

For example I could envision something like a jury to make judiciary decisions. Not sure if that counts as direct democracy… But we don’t have to ask everyone about every moderation decision. Maybe just grant everyone the ability to report stuff and then the software goes ahead and samples 15 random people from the community (who arent part of the drama) and makes them decide. I believe that could help with fatigue. And speeds it up, we can just set the software to take people who are online right now, and discard and replace them if they don’t get at it asap.

Or make it not entirely direct, but at least do away with the hierarchies in a representative democracy. Instead of appointing moderators, we’d form a web of trust. I’m completely free to delegate power to arbitrary people and if my web of trusted people arrive at a score of 30 it’s spam, it is spam for me. And someone else could have a different perspective on the network. That’d help with all the coordination as well, because I can just not care, and the platform automatically delegates the power. And once I do care, I’m free to vote and that spares other people the effort to do the same. That’d at least make it direct in a way that we’re all moderators and users at the same time.

Of course democracy is a trade-off. And there’s a million edge cases, and we need some other things which go along with it. Accountability and transparency. We’d need an appeal process, for example with my first example if the jury doesn’t do a good job.

I’m probably not at a 100% perfect solution with these ideas. But I’m fairly sure we’d be able to do way more in a software-driven platform than the analogies we can take from countries and their approach at decision making. Especially regarding hierarchies within the system. However, things also clash. Transparency might be opposed to privacy. We have a lot more abuse on the internet than in the real world and it’s maybe not just easier to do votes here, but also easier to manipulate them, than what we’d take inspiration from in the offline world.

2. PieFed did a public poll to form a roadmap for 2025. I think it turned out very well. PeerTube also does that. The open-source tool that looks like GOG’s website is called Fider

I love it as well. Though, from a software developers perspective, it rarely goes all the way. There’s just so many technical decisions to be made, limitations, vague requirements, contradictions. Sometimes users think they want something but they really need the opposite of it… And they always want wildly different things and more often than not it’s not healthy for the projects to approach it that way. They’d instead do it in order as mandated by the technical design, have more pressing issues and all of that is buried beneath layers of technical complexity. So the users hardly know what’s appropriate to do. I believe that’s why we often gravitate to the “benevolent dictator” model in Free Software. Or why some regular (paid) software projects fail or exceed budged and time planning.
It should be that way, though. If software is meant for users, the developers should probably listen to them, so I love what these projects do, to at least augment their development process with some participation and guidance by the target audience. And some people are really good at it. (Edit: And we might have elements of a meritocracy as well, and people need programming skills to participate in some ways… So, I think we might not be able to do more than try to make it as democratic as possible. At least as far as we’re talking about the development process itself.)

I think the most obvious one is moderation. What gets deleted, who gets kicked out. Then for example community rules, what’s the topic and rules of discussion. Every user/member could have a say in that. Maybe we could do some more structural and organizational decisions.

It gets a bit tricky with technology. Ideally we could do things like democratically decide to have a voice chat (if that’s what people want) and somehow 3 months later the platform has a voice chat… But it’s not that easy, software development doesn’t work this way.

Uh, I’d love someone to have a try at full-blown direct democracy. Most aspects being controlled (and ideally owned) by the very same people who use the platform. Not sure if that’s good or feasible, though.

And what I always love is to see design principles that foster a nice, amicable atmosphere. Some online communities, games etc have aspects of that. It’s somewhat more rare on modern social media. I sometimes wish hanging out on the internet was a bit less about politics, trolling and memes, getting agitated amongst random anonymous people. And a bit more like an evening at the Irish Pub with friends. Or getting to know new friends there.
We do things like that. I just think good platform design still has potential to achieve way more than we currently do.

deleted by creator

I’d expect at least the authors who do talks about the Fediverse to be here: Cory Doctorow… Marc-Uwe Kling… There are some webcomic authors as well. And we have some journalists. Heise Online comes to mind, they have their own Peertube instance. Then some other known activists, bloggers… And some people share drawings, fanart etc, not sure if that counts.

Edit: I forgot George Takei, and several other people.
Here’s some list of noteworthy accounts including some celebrities: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts

Sure. Sadly I don’t have the proper tools around to do that. And in my case I wasn’t too sad. These devices had 100mbps ethernet and a slow wifi standard. Now they’re on e-waste and I got an upgrade to Gigabit ethernet and 5GHz wifi 😆

Not sure if I get your point. Abstraction is a concept used by IT people to deal with complexity. You’ll use Docker containers in order not to have 200 very specific problems and learn about the intricate details of all of them. Or use a turnkey solution because a working day has a finite amount of hours and you can just not care and have somebody else set the XY value of Postgres to 128 because that’s somehow needed for software M on python x.xx… Of course you’re then not going to learn about these things. It is not “bad”, though, in itself to abstract these issues away from you. Same for the other things I mentioned, networking, virtualization. Abstraction there allows to swap out complex things, do things once and in a clean way because it’s easy to miss things without abstraction and you always need to pay attention to a bazillion of specifics. Also helps with backups, deal with issues because things should break within confined layers, punch above one’s weight, security, do something once and roll it out several times…

I think what you want to avoid is poorly designed or written software. Or poorly done setups. Or not learn about important things. Abstraction is generally something you want, especially with complex things.

Maybe try something like YunoHost. That’s a web server Linux distribution. And it’s supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You’d need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn’t the only option to help with the set up.)

But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.

Yes, OpenWRT lasts way longer. Main thing that ends support is hardware requirements. My old devices with only a few megabytes of memory got dropped eventually. Not because of the chipset, a modern OpenWRT would just not fit any longer. I rarely see other reasons for them to discontinue updates.

Not sure if it’s really gritty. Seems it is to a degree. But more like table salt. I stirred it for a bit and it was pretty scratchy for a while but then dissolved entirely after about 2min. I think it’s more water pressure and chemicals doing that job. It sure seems abrasive to coated surfaces, though. I used to put my non-stick pan into the dishwasher. And it wrecked the surface over the course of several months or a year or so. Now I’m not doing that any more and the pan after that lasted me longer. Just my anecdotal evidence, not science… But I’m positive that’s why we’re not supposed to put these things in there. I guess putting a non-stick pan in 5 or 10 times wouldn’t make a noticeable difference, though. But there are other materials, where once does damage. I once (acidentally) put some kind of scoop in, I believe made of aluminum, and that had wrecked it immediately. Had disgusting colors after that.

You mean AMD or Intel? I can’t find any variant with an ARM processor. According to the internet, both the Intel and AMD version should work with Linux. My wife actually owns the Intel X13 Gen1. With Linux Mint Debian edition on it. Seems to work fine, she didn’t ever complain. Just be aware these are 5 year old devices. She paid 404€ for a refurbished one. We went with the 16GB RAM option, since that’s soldered and not upgradable. Also had an i7 processor at that price point.

If that traffic is going through an encrypted Wireguard tunnel, I don’t see a reason to encrypt it a second time. Judging by your description, it’s already encrypted on transport between the router and VPS. HTTPS would add nothing there. It will however add encryption within your DMZ, if you expect something nefarious going on within your DMZ.

You need to jump through several hoops to have privacy while ordering online. I mean per default they need your address to deliver the thing to you, need some bank details to get the money, you’ll be motivated to create an account (for example for warranty/returns…). And there’s always some things running in the background with your IP address and bank details because there’s fraud and shops have to mitigate for that. So… I’m sure it is possible to order online with varying degrees of privacy. But it loses all the convenience that online shopping is supposed to provide.

I like shopping offline. And maybe my small contribution is going to help some real-world stores stay afloat in our modern world. I have GrapheneOS on my phone, I don’t think Google Pay works on my phone. And even if it did, I wouldn’t provide my credit card number to Google. I’ll just pay with my card in the usual supermarket or at the gas station for convenience, or use cash if I don’t want to leave a trail. And I don’t do all the discount programs. They’re mostly there to keep track of my shopping behaviour. I’m going to need at least some 10 or 15% discount for me to start with that shit.

At least that’s how I do it. It’s not 100% privacy, by any means. But my dislike of Amazon etc at least makes me order few things there. So they only know about a small chunk of my life. Not what kind of washing detergent or phone or computer I use, what size of clothes fit my body. I buy all of that in offline stores. And I’ll keep doing that as long as there’s still some around. And the only thing they know about me is whatever number an EC terminal leaves when I swipe my card. Unfortunately they’re all being displaced by online shopping. I hope my government regulates what kind of things proper German stores can do with my credit card numbers.

Well known in the industry how you don’t assess programmers by lines of code. You kind of want them to be efficient and clean. Spend their day thinking and design clever solutions… Not pump out lots of unmaintainable low quality stuff. And have a million lines of that by tomorrow. But yeah, guess every aspect of this aligns well. You should be using Linux by now. Or at least do the switch in the near future.

Well, I tinkered around a bit with Speech Note which has a good amount of features and is easy to install as a Flatpak. I think it has an option to do this, but requires a bit off fiddling, an extra tool and permissions for the Flatpak. I didn’t find any software with a particularly good integration into the Desktop, though.

Also read about Blahst but didn’t try it yet. Maybe that one is an option.

Good question. maybe I was wrong, I’ve used Debian for so long, I’ll either just update it or use the advanced installer… It’s certainly on the installation media now. Not sure if it copies it over to the system. Would make sense, though if it did…

Good luck! And don’t forget to add the non-free-firmware repo and maybe the other additional ones if you need them. A standard Debian comes without. And if you’re following an old tutorial, that might not cover the split between non-free and non-free-firmware which happened somewhat recently in Debian terms. Their own documentation is good and up to date, though.

Atrophy or deskilling is a underrated problem in my opinion. And it applies to all things in life. Some people suggest computer literacy went down, because people are on their phones and tablets these days and everything works smoothly, so there is little to no motivation to learn how these things work, what they do behind the scenes, what privacy is…

Furthermore a general lack of worth or value of things, because everything is available in abundance and will arrive from China at your doorstep the next day. So we used to have nice hand-knitted norwegian sweaters. And these days we wear arbitrary cheap stuff and we just throw it in the bin after one season. Of course this leads to all kinds of societal issues once things lose value. And all malls are going to close and get displaced by Amazon. And manufacturers will discontinue quality products, since they’re competing on a low-quality market now.

Same likely applies to knowledge. Why all the hassle to learn something from the grounds up, in a years-long process, if there’s cheap results available right now, and the question doesn’t call for quality in the first place?

(CW:Political opinion. I know it’s a bit fatalistic, but I think we can see the same dynamics in the political landscape. People’s grandpas still fought against the nazis and they held up democracy. People now know little about the value of democracy because they didn’t need to fight for it. So for all they care we might as well appoint fascists to lead us. I think on a more abstract level, it’s all one and the same form of atrophy. Also fits the question/answer theme of this video. Because fascists for sure have simple and easy to understand answers ready to our questions.)

Me too. I guess the internet is going to change soon anyway. AI Slop is going to displace a lot of things. And these cooking recipes don’t really work. So there will be a demand for genuine, human content. And the only way to tell is if you have some connection to the creator. So we might see a revival of human connection online. At least that’s what I hope will happen… And seems lots of people are fed up with social media as well.

Nah. She doesn’t. And I think the days of Blogs and personal websites are mostly a thing of the past. These days people doomscroll on Instagram. But I have some fond memories of the good old times as well. I used to have friends (of different genders) who would write publicly about technology, sugar-free recipes, I knew someone who did styling videos on Youtube. But that toned down as we all grew older and got other things to do, and the internet changed as well.