Most people […] write […] comments […] and hope AI picks them up

Really quite sad if there’s even one person out there doing that.

This is also as much of a grift as any SEO that claims to have cracked the code of getting to the top of results. Even if they have figured something reproducible, it will get fixed. If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that’s a bug they will fix

Huh, typically you’d set an instance to scale out, not in when CPU usage spikes

the only stuff that’s really on there is some music, photos, backups. If it gets lost, nothing important really is lost.

Photos are pretty important to a lot of people, I know that’s the most obvious thing on my server that people would miss and not be able to get anywhere else

Donate to Lemmy (or Piefed) development directly, then your home instance. If you’ve still got some cash burning a hole in your pocket, donating to instances that host communities you particularly care about is also something you can do

Not necessary preppers as that is someone who’s motivation is to mitigate some hypothetical future bad thing happening

I think most self-hosters are doing it out of a combination of technical exploration and mitigating real issues that exist today, e.g. cloud service outages or market exits causing something previously bought to be useful to become a temporary brick or permanent e-waste. Well, and cost in some cases, no one particularly enjoys having an extra bill for hosting.

I’m good with the ActivityPub threadiverse tyvm

Primary sources tend to disagree

Here’s a study from 2019 about it that backs up my assertion that more is conservative https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/69/2/168/5425470

And of that propaganda being created, that conservative inclined people are most likely to fall for it: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231220330

There seem to be plenty of other papers that more or less reach those same conclusions with a good number of citations, but I can’t find anything really at all on Google Scholar concluding the opposite with a quick search, let alone something also credible.

The closest some papers come is saying that they try groups all over the political spectrum, as their goal is disunity ultimately, but they seemingly don’t really have any kind of continued success with misinforming those groups anywhere near as effectively. They more or less all end up concluding that most of the propaganda targets conservatives, because they’re the ones that fall for it.

Remember every time we find Putin backed propaganda outside of Russia in the wild, it’s nearly always boosting predominantly conservative viewpoints versus anything else.

Outside of their borders they’re more interested in people fighting with each other than anything like coming together. Right wing politics is how they do that

Nearly the same for me, but it was closer to the end of June that I moved.

I’ve not contributed to Reddit since, and only really occasionally browse it from my computer when I’m looking for something in particular now.

Kinda helped by the fact the Reddit I used to enjoy seems to be more or less dead anyway. Weird bot filled comment sections, ads shoved in your face, weird monetising features no one asked for, increasingly weird moderation.

I think there’s an alpine build too if your system has low oxygen levels

In the magpie nests

(Sorry, you made me think of this article)

For a good while, Plex was the only game in town that did the job well, and they put the transcoding feature behind the paywall.

Given it wasn’t that expensive for a lifetime pass a number of years ago (I remember it was cheaper than a game anyway) and they still seemed relatively user-centric at the time, many people like me felt like they were supporting developers building something that was useful to us.

I still run my Plex server since it’s not really costing me not to, but I’ve been running Jellyfin too for a little while and it more or less can do the same job these days

Probably true, worth pointing out I browse with the “old.” theme when I’m at my computer which doesn’t come out bad at all given it’s pretty basic HTML (just tried it on my phone too, which is something I wasn’t sure would give a good result)

You’re right though, it would be a good pull request to the Lemmy UI to add a print stylesheet

I was going to say this but using the print to PDF functionality in most OSes

Welp here’s hoping something pops up to replace gravity sync soon, can’t really upgrade until it does.

I just found https://github.com/mattwebbio/orbital-sync but it’s not apparent if it’s compatible with v6 yet

Assuming you mean hosting stuff on a VPS or similar, I think the Lemmy selfhosting communities consider that also self hosting on some level.

If you more meant for commercial hosting, there’s no harm in asking, I’d wager a fair few people subscribed probably work in the industry.

If you meant the behind the scenes stuff of running a hosting provider, you might have a little less luck, but you never know

I think I’m very similar to you

I want to have a feed of topics I’m interested in, very rarely do I care about a specific individual, and the case that I do it’s probably because they’re a local restaurant or something like that, basically all I use Instagram for is a glorified photo menu for food I might want on a given weekend

https://social.bbc/about

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like they’ve really stuck with it

Essentially for something to be decentralised and not ephemeral, everyone needs a copy of the data.

To go into a bit more detail—one of the biggest benefits of decentralised systems is generally redundancy has to be built in otherwise you have a Single Point Of Failure™️, and then you get data loss when it’s gone. Given any sensible decentralised system is designed to avoid this scenario, that data has to be somewhere, and generally the simplest and less expensive (in terms of processing) way to improve on data in one place, is to have it in every place. Any time the data isn’t in one place or every place, you then have an exercise in figuring out where it actually is. This “finding it” processing is going to take time and effort, and if you imagine a standard semi-popular lemmy post, that’s potentially data coming from all sorts of different places, which may or may not be there—this would inevitably make request times ridiculous and basically no one would use it.

At the end of the day, any kind of processing is energy, cost & time expensive, whereas storage makes that part of the process effectively instant and is much cheaper than increasing processing power in both cost and energy.

So basically in this use case and many like it: it makes sense if you’re trying to pick what to optimise, you optimise for lower processing and higher storage requirements rather than vice versa.

The history aspect is more straightforward to understand given the above, if you expect people to care what happened a year ago and want to support that, that data needs to live somewhere

My friend, it’s not nonsense, it’s basically how decentralised communication has to work if you want any reasonable level of recency & history in the data.

Usenet was basically the original and I believe a modern news provider requires something like 50 petabytes of storage to run a 10 year data retention service