So the user is just stupid eh 😉

Not sure I have said that. I think the problem is users somehow treat software different. Explaining them advantages of federated services over the corporate silos is something that will help them. I am talking about education and not that someone is stupid. In that sense everyone is stupid because you never know everything.

It’s like choosing a linux distribution. When you know how the fediverse works, it’s easy, but when you don’t, you don’t want to hear that “it’s just like email!!”. Why not? The fundamental understanding of how something works is important. I was that person in the past and understanding the idea of distros and abundance of choice is what drew me into Linux (20+ years ago). I don’t see why this should be avoided, but even if, there are major ditros that are ready to use out of the box which most of the new users endup using.

It has to just work without any kind of choice what so ever,

Why? Why does it have to work like this. Why is email working differently without the problem but other things do not. How do you want to resolve this in services that use FEDERATION as the main selling point. Randomly assign new users to servers? This will either lead to dumping people on servers that are unstable, totally alien in terms of local content or if you want to be the safe side and assign poeple to established big server, contradicting the fundamental core feature of decentralization. It’s like expecting every single alternative to be the exact clone of the big corp. Why not add algorythms since otherwise people might find it hard to discover content, why not more funding through VC or ads to compete with big ones marketing product. This can’t be the same as the corp. stuff because it has been created to be different. And it’s not that peopel are stupid and thats why they dont use it. Majority of people did not hear about the alternative and/or do not see the benefit it brings.

Also IMO it does “just work”. And is pretty slick as a default if I compare it to the state of federated services 15 years ago. It’s pretty convenient if you just want to use it. It’s not like you NEED to spend days researching servers. Mastodon’s main landing page provides onboarding to that. IMO the problem as your Signal example comes down to the fact that big corp operates with marketing budget that is no match for anyone, even Signal. This is the main reason it does not gotten traction. I just hope people will see the added value in community hosted services.

congrats

Does it? Also there is so many frontends to choose from and so many other projects. What normal people needs to realize is that they are played and the whole “But there is so much choice” argument is stupid. Imagine going to the shop where there is one type of bread called bread (super easy to use, without crust so people without teeth can chew), one type of milk (cause with bother with people having different preferences), one type of pasta etc. The more choice the better and federated networks offer exactly that. You can walk into the store and choose product you like for whatever reason. But no matter what type of bread you choose, you can still make sandwich. And this whole “W” thing is an easy money grab. Create some media attention, grab VC/European funding and create shitty clone noone will use, then say “Well looks like US corporate offerings are better afterall. Oh look democrats are back”.

oh man. this is haven. when I lived in Poland I hated them. after 20years I decided to make them for dinner and ever since I love those. also my family (not Polish) go crazy about it every time I make klusky

Yes and that’s why volunteer fees are nowhere near minimum wage. It’s basically a way to compensate all sort of volunteers helping out non-profits. IMO it’s quite a good system and more of a symbolic then a real pay.

Currently best solution is home batteries. Something I need to start looking into because unlike the “Flip the switch” suggests, everyone who actually has solar panels should make sure to consume as much energy as they can during those hours.

What’s to stop an employer from hiring someone, paying them a few bucks an hour and calling them “volunteers”?

Because most likely would not find volunteers that are ok being paid approx. 170euro a month. Also I think this setting is only applicable to foundations and associations.

Second that. yunohost is perfect for all in one self hosting solution for small groups. As for hardware requirenments, for 10 peeps you could get away with any VPS (then based on the needs you can check if to upgrade). If you want to self-host on your own hardware most likely a minipc like Hp’s prodesk with 16-32GB RAM would do.

Interesting. Is there a non-apple solution like this?

is the mac mini really that good? running 12-14b models on my radeon rx 7600xt is ok’ish but i do “feel it” while running 7-8b models sometimes just doesn’t feel enough. I wonder where does mac mini land in here.

Wow! very cool rack you got there. I too started using mini pcs for local test servers or general home servers. But unlike yours mine are just dumped behind the screen on my desk (3 in total). For LLM stuff atm I use 16GB radeon but thats connected to my desktop. In the future I would love to build a proper rack like yours and perhaps move the GPU to a dedicated minipc.

As for the upgrades, like what others stated already, I would just go for more pc’s rather then rpi.

I think they are OK. When switching to it couple of years ago ifeared there will be no-one but was please tly suprised. For sure you do t have situation where most of the participants in the room are ghost accounts because presence actually works. So might look smaller but you are sure it’s real users.

Not to mention you can run a server on anything pretty much and for surprisingly big amount of users. Toaster or potatoes will do just fine.

I think there were two reasons for that. One was that without centralized server where element could flash nunbers in front of VC there would not be much funding just like other open source protocols like xmpp experience. It also attracted more people because you didn’t have to think of servers or bother with the whole federation concept (just join the main server, as everyone is there already).

Additionally matrix is pretty good distributed database but imo horrible chat protocol. It’s extremely heavy on resources making other small servers impossible to compete or run on the same terms as the big ones. Back in the days I was running one of the top 5 size matrix server but I realized that the ever growing database, load issues when users joining large rooms and ton of other problems all, I went back to xmpp. It made me realized how crazy expensive and unsustainable in long run was running essentially text chat app became, and that could be better spent elewhere. Matrix is basically not designed for the purpose it’s pushed for. It might be great as a communication platform in a organization or corporation or government agency ( you can accurately track the room state from its inception so great to have an overview of who, when, what). For fedi-like chat servers XMPP which can run on a potatoe is much better choice. Both from financial perspective (as your small server joining a big room does not affect you cause you don’t need to replicate the room state essentially killing your server), but also environmental (its light and scales depending on your community needs better).

Yeah. Pity indeed. Also think the stylus is coming soon ™. Still I wouldn’t mind one.

This is great. I have couple of those HP machines which are awesome but was just stacking them on my desk. 10 inch rack will be great for them. Need to do some hunting.

You dont need to explain email so federation does not seem to be the issue here IMO. The problem is money which FLOSS projects usually don’t have. The successful ones have perhaps enough so that the devs can put food on their table, but not much else. Most of the apps are after Dayjob hobby projects. It’s hard to compete with those who have teams of paid staff.

Will GPG be baked into the app or still relay on third party like open key chain?

That youtuber is pretty much paid advertisement for startups. I would not take this guy serious. I have seen also number of videos about this type of turbine and also some debunks. Harmony turbine is project that has not yet shown results apart from lots of publicity. I will try to find a nice video I saw about it, but yeah I wouldnt put too much hope in that. Specially when something’s featured on that youtube channel.

Solarthermal is something I thought about but seeing how little is produced on the roof now I wonder how much impact it will have. I know the efficiency of solar collectors is about 80% while solar panels are 20-30%, but installation of solar collectors adds more complexity with plumbing and in summer you again have situation where you have nowhere to spend the heat on and need to either close the system (drain it) or cover the collector. Plus it’s not that cheap. It’s mainly reason why we went for solar panels as although solar panels require more space to provide eqiuvalent power, the low maintenance and the fact the energy can be spent on more stuff then just heating water. So I’m looking at diversifying the energy source. Thats why looking into wind.