I think you're describing ways to find good online services and avoid shady online services. It's a separate topic from what I was talking about, which is retaining control over your own computing by avoiding unnecessary dependency on a company after you've already received the product. For example, an app that does its processing and data storage on a remote server, when it's perfectly possible to build an app that could handle it all locally.
For the example of paid subscription, a good example of what I'm advising against is those new cars that require you to subscribe just to use some of the features of the car that you've already bought. And they can disable them if you stop paying.
Need some way to sort contributors by "trust", e.g. if their PRs have been accepted before, if their account has existed before GenAI was invented, etc
Using Kiwix you can keep older versions of Wikipedia locally on your computer, so if the online version reaches an unusable state, you can still view the articles as they used to be. Of course, it won't have information about anything that happened after that point, but it could still be useful for some purposes.
There needs to be a Fediverse platform just for viewing and commenting on videos without being a video publisher yourself. Then we'd see a lot more traffic coming to PeerTube channels. It also needs to provide a good mechanism for discovering channels you're not already aware of.
It can be. Controlling your own devices enables you to reject planned obsolescence, which produces unnecessary e-waste. It also allows you to avoid having unwanted "generative AI" features, which are responsible for a lot of electricity and hardware consumption.
Thanks. Privacy can be one benefit of controlling your own computing. I also aim to promote subject matter that is more accessible to people with less technical expertise, whereas self-hosting seems to involve quite a bit of technical experience.
I created the comm after realising that a lot of the problems that people are raising (very valid) concerns about in recent times (declining quality of platforms, privacy issues, etc) all stem from a root cause, that being the transfer of computing tasks to centralised platforms.
Thanks for commenting. I checked my comment, and it seems I did just write "Internet connection" - just a mistake from rewriting the comment and not leaving it in a coherent state. Sorry about that.
I use the Internet daily as well. I'd just like to avoid being locked-in to some remote service.
For someone to participate in this subreddit, they only need to want to rely more on hardware/software that they control instead of those controlled by someone else. As for why they might want this - different people might have different reasons.
A few possible reasons people might be interested:
They have an unreliable Internet connection
Concerns about the privacy implications of using centralised services
Centralised services can arbitrarily change their behaviour or interface at any time
"Smart" devices that require use of a networked app can often be less convenient than "dumb" alternatives
Centralised control over one's operating system can mean unwanted updates being forced on the user
Concerns about having access revoked due to financial difficulties or other issues
But the community is open to members regardless of why they are interested.
Not the Internet, but rather the World Wide Web. The once-humble webpage has become such a complex stack of technologies that it's impossible for small dev teams to make alternatives to the established web browsers.
Because I want to control my own computer. I had to pay for the device, so I should be treated as the owner, yet Microsoft and Apple act like they own people's computers, and build software that treats the computer as property of those corporations.
I don't like tinkering just to get stuff working, so I use more user-friendly Linux distributions, and it's been very smooth.
The real top boss is the Chairman of the Board of Directors, although the Chairman is often appointed CEO, it doesn't always happen. The Board of Directors is made up of large shareholders - the people who actually own the company. The CEO is technically just an employee and needn't own any shares at all (although that would be extremely abnormal).
So, there may actually be a time when a corporation's Board decides to use an "AI" as their CEO to cut costs.
The real security hole is how much information the browser gives to the web server. The only thing a web server needs to know is what content the user is looking for, but sadly web browser send a ton of identifying information to the point where it's become expected behaviour and some websites won't work without it.
It's still useful. You can't guarantee that someone will have access to an emoji picker. I don't think it's built-in to the DE I'm writing this comment in.
How do I actually use it? I have an account, but when I go to the site it only shows me my "account dashboard" - how do I actually see what people have been posting?
LLMs arguably disprove the validity of the Turing Test.
I think you're describing ways to find good online services and avoid shady online services. It's a separate topic from what I was talking about, which is retaining control over your own computing by avoiding unnecessary dependency on a company after you've already received the product. For example, an app that does its processing and data storage on a remote server, when it's perfectly possible to build an app that could handle it all locally.
For the example of paid subscription, a good example of what I'm advising against is those new cars that require you to subscribe just to use some of the features of the car that you've already bought. And they can disable them if you stop paying.
Need some way to sort contributors by "trust", e.g. if their PRs have been accepted before, if their account has existed before GenAI was invented, etc
If anyone has recommendations for ways to preserve personal computing, please share at !homecomputing@piefed.social
Other popular Linux distros include:
It's not. But it would be good if it could be done by the feed creator, if the feed is for image or video communities.
It would be nice if we could set a default layout for feeds as well.
Using Kiwix you can keep older versions of Wikipedia locally on your computer, so if the online version reaches an unusable state, you can still view the articles as they used to be. Of course, it won't have information about anything that happened after that point, but it could still be useful for some purposes.
There needs to be a Fediverse platform just for viewing and commenting on videos without being a video publisher yourself. Then we'd see a lot more traffic coming to PeerTube channels. It also needs to provide a good mechanism for discovering channels you're not already aware of.
It can be. Controlling your own devices enables you to reject planned obsolescence, which produces unnecessary e-waste. It also allows you to avoid having unwanted "generative AI" features, which are responsible for a lot of electricity and hardware consumption.
Thanks. Privacy can be one benefit of controlling your own computing. I also aim to promote subject matter that is more accessible to people with less technical expertise, whereas self-hosting seems to involve quite a bit of technical experience.
I created the comm after realising that a lot of the problems that people are raising (very valid) concerns about in recent times (declining quality of platforms, privacy issues, etc) all stem from a root cause, that being the transfer of computing tasks to centralised platforms.
Thanks for commenting. I checked my comment, and it seems I did just write "Internet connection" - just a mistake from rewriting the comment and not leaving it in a coherent state. Sorry about that.
I use the Internet daily as well. I'd just like to avoid being locked-in to some remote service.
For someone to participate in this subreddit, they only need to want to rely more on hardware/software that they control instead of those controlled by someone else. As for why they might want this - different people might have different reasons.
A few possible reasons people might be interested:
But the community is open to members regardless of why they are interested.
Red Flags:
Not the Internet, but rather the World Wide Web. The once-humble webpage has become such a complex stack of technologies that it's impossible for small dev teams to make alternatives to the established web browsers.
Because I want to control my own computer. I had to pay for the device, so I should be treated as the owner, yet Microsoft and Apple act like they own people's computers, and build software that treats the computer as property of those corporations.
I don't like tinkering just to get stuff working, so I use more user-friendly Linux distributions, and it's been very smooth.
https://sepiasearch.org/ is a multi-instance search for PeerTube.
The real top boss is the Chairman of the Board of Directors, although the Chairman is often appointed CEO, it doesn't always happen. The Board of Directors is made up of large shareholders - the people who actually own the company. The CEO is technically just an employee and needn't own any shares at all (although that would be extremely abnormal).
So, there may actually be a time when a corporation's Board decides to use an "AI" as their CEO to cut costs.
The real security hole is how much information the browser gives to the web server. The only thing a web server needs to know is what content the user is looking for, but sadly web browser send a ton of identifying information to the point where it's become expected behaviour and some websites won't work without it.
It's still useful. You can't guarantee that someone will have access to an emoji picker. I don't think it's built-in to the DE I'm writing this comment in.
How do I actually use it? I have an account, but when I go to the site it only shows me my "account dashboard" - how do I actually see what people have been posting?