I guess it depends on how much you can abuse or ignore it. Debian works just fine if you put it in a locker for 3 years and then try to update. With gentoo, if you didn’t update for a week, you might as well reinstall :)

Arch is somehow in the middle, I had an arch VM that never had any problems except that certificate issue despite not getting many updates.

Honestly, while probably annoying, that is not a bad first question. It shows concern for your wellbeing and (hopefully) willingness to learn.

Perfectly fine if it does what it should. That is imo the essence of this post: Better is the enemy of good. I wouldn’t buy a new one (again), this one was a bit of an exception (customer return, with a little scratch), since used touch laptops with good performance were quite rare.

Nah, L390 Yoga. I wanted touch because i thought I’d use it, but it ended up in a docking station most of the time anyway. Upgraded RAM and SSD, battery still hold “a few hours” despite being 7+ years old. I figured those 8th gen quad cores would last a while, and so far, they do. Doesn’t feel too terrible compared to my modern core u 235 work laptop.

“I’m in this picture and it’s quite OK here.”

My car is a 20 year old shitbox, my bike gets new brake pads and a bit of random lubricant on the chain once a year and other “maintenance” only when parts fall off, and my stereo is a mix of hand me downs from my dad’s college days and some eBay home theatre stuff that got sold because it didn’t support the newest HDMI bullshit.

Oh, and of course it is a Thinkpad, thanks for asking.

Just the other day, a friend of mine running Arch tried to install something, which resulted in him having to do a full system update, including fixing several “that should not happen” s. Meanwhile, every few years I spend an evening update to the newest stable, and never had bigger issues than the color of some icon being unfamiliar.

Sorry if I came across as condescending, I assumed you genuinely didn’t know. Part of the reason why those services never caught on is precisely that barely anyone knows them.

I disagree that more federalized always means better, because it has serious issues:

1. What if you are offline? I’d like it if messages would eventually find me even when my computer is off, or I am in a remote area, a basement… even worse for file sharing.

2. Power. Modern always-on devices like smartphones are so power efficient because they mostly are sleeping in a standby mode. Every now and then, they wake up, check if something important happened, and immediately go back to sleep. If you want to serve data from a phone, you need a way worse running / asleep ratio, meaning a lot more battery drain. A central-ish server can efficiently do the small bits of work from many people in a place with plenty of electricity and on hardware that is suited for it.

3. Discovery is a hard problem. Having one or more central sources of information simplifies things a lot.

4. Management/admin effort. Instead of hundreds of slightly different installations, you have one, maintained by a few people who know what they are doing. Much more efficient.

But for example, all of the things I mentioned can be self-hosted. Granted, some like IRC are not federated in the modern sense of the word, but I would argue that “any single group of friends can set up their own server with a raspberry pi in someone’s closet” is already pretty good. Especially if your goal is to avoid the corporate surveillance state or censorship.

General tip: almost all kinky stuff can be sourced from non-kinky stores, at non-kinky prices. Get your ropes and chains from a hardware store, get your safety shears from some online first aid supply store… As an added bonus, it will be much better quality than the general sex shop trash.

It is not perfect guaranteed 100% success for everyone, sadly. The doctor told me some people are practically cured, some have a mild improvement, and some none.

I fall in the middle ground category. Exposure therapy for 1-2 years managed to get it from being a pain in the ass to manageable. Maybe getting older also played a role, on my father’s side, people seem to get less allergic in their 20s and 30s. Also, if I take a little care of what I eat, I practically have zero issues with eczema any more, while as a kid I was an itching, bloody mess if I even thought of the wrong food. So maybe it is just growing up.

Now, I can ignore most symptoms with one or even just a half ceterizine pill in summer. Generic versions are pretty cheap now.

Loratidine somehow knocks me out and makes my mood go down for 1-2 days, so I avoid it.

I’d say if you cannot open knots or cut the ropes safely, they were drunk drunk. And way too drunk to play with ropes.

People do, and have done for a long time. Before Lemmy was Friendika/Diaspora, before Mastodon were WordPress blogs, before Matrix it was Xmpp and before that, IRC. File sharing happens a lot through many Nextcloud and Seafile instances. There are/were countless projects to simplify selfhosting for individuals and small businesses. Every month I hear of a new small social network, “old internet” style thing, federated platform or self-hosting project.

It is all out there. It is not a technical problem.

There is just one glaring issue: you have never heard of any of these instances, because they don’t have billions of as budgets and don’t crave paying customers.

Why should a friends-only Nextcloud instance put ads in the newspaper of a foreign continent? And therefore, nobody hears of them outside the company / friend group / soccer club. Plus, with small networks there are no billionaire owners bribing officials to push out small competitiora and spreading propaganda that everyone without a WhatsApp account is weird and potentially suspicious.

1 was the best, but I have to admit my interest fizzled out a bit when the ideas were no longer fresh

Congrats on that btw, it’s those things that give me a tiny shred of hope in humanity.

But the “uneducated” part is not necessary, come on. Just because someone on the other side of the planet has probably not investigated the finer details of your domestic politics such as what social media platform was used to organise protests?

Honestly? At this point, I’d rather verify with dick pics than with my face. My dick looks pretty generic, I doubt there is a national dick pic database, and you cannot easily identify me with my dick pick in the street. Really, the privacy-focussed compromise is taking a picture of your junk.

Reading this makes me realize how many people had really fucked up childhoods. I feel sorry for all of you, don’t give up hope for humanity, and choose (if you can) how to live your own life. There are better people out there.