Whilst a 100W delta seems unlikelly, a 50W delta seems realistic as the kind of stuff you have in a NAS will use maybe 5W (about the same as a Raspberry PI, possibly less) whilst the typical desktop PC uses significantly more even outside graphics mode (part of the reason to use Linux in text mode only is exactly to try and save power there). It mainly depends on what the desktop was used for before: a “gaming PC” with a dedicated graphics card from an old enough generation (i.e. with HW from back before the manufactures of GPUs started competing on power usage) will use signiificantly more power than integrated graphics even in idle mode.

That said, making it a “home server” as you suggest makes a lot of sense - if that thing is an “All In One” server (media server, NAS, print server, torrent download server and so on) loaded with software of your choice (and hence stuff that respects your privacy and doesn’t shove Ads in your face) it’s probably a superior solution to getting those things as separate standalone devices, especially in the current era of enshittification.

A NAS is basically some software running on a computer, so you can use a desktop as that computer, ideally with a light operating system (for example, Linux in text only mode).

HOWEVER: desktops are designed for far higher computational loads than needed by a NAS, plus things like graphical user interfaces and direct connection of user peripherals such as mice, so even when idle they consume a lot more power than the kind of hardware used in a typical NAS.

Also the hardware in a good NAS will have things like extra higher speed connectors for HDDs/SDDs (such as SATA) rather than you having to use slower stuff like USB.

So keep in mind that a desktop as NAS will consume significantly more power than a dedicated NAS (as the latter will probably be running on something like an ARM and have a power source dimensioned for a couple of HDDs, not to run a dedicate graphics card like a desktop has) and probably won’t fit as many disks.

If you’re ok with having most disks be accessed a bit slower and USB3 work for you (and, for example, if your NAS is on 100 Mbit Ethernet, it’s the network that’s the slowest thing, not USB3) then it’s usually better to use an old notebook rather than desktop because notebooks were designed for running of batteries hence consume significantly less power.

Frankly I would advise against using an old desktop as NAS mainly because in a year or two of continued use you’ll have paid enough in extra electricity costs vs using a NAS to pay for a simple but decent dedicated NAS.

When it comes to Corporates it very much is like the Nazi Bar allegory: you let one Nazi stay because he’s beheaving rasonably and not being nasty, and sooner or later the place is going to be full of his friends and turned into a Nazi Bar.

It’s the same dynamic only with corporate logos, advertising, hypercommercialism and eventual enshitiffication instead of swasticas, racist messaging and violence.

Certainly in my eperience of it since the 90s, the Internet changed very much this from its early days and spirit as commercial interests from their original foothold almost entirelly subverted it to serve their interests.

It doesn’t really solve the problem of having a road junction - that’s still in the center and cars even come at worse angles than before- it just adds fluff around it.

On the other hand, it would probably turn into a tourist attraction and unique experience.

It’s the lovemaking kind of love…

Is this counting the complex sugar which is the starch (from the flour) in the donuts?

Because that stuff quickly transforms into simple sugar when ingested (for starters human saliva has an enzyme that breaks starch up into glucosis, which is the simplest form of sugar and can be directly absorbed into the bloodstream already through the mouth wall).

To put things simply: if you count all carbohydrates (so, not just stuff that is ingested as sugar but also the stuff the human digestive system easilly turns into sugar), then things like, say, eating a plate of spaghetti bollognese, are nutritionally equivalent to eating many spoonfulls of sugar.

What’s liked by the general population is a good metric for providing general stuff to the general population and that’s what we’re talking about in All.

That average can however deviate a lot from the sweet spot for some people, quite possibly a large minority (even the majority depending on how concentrated or not people’s tastes are around it).

Something that looks at your previous choices (or even generally stated choices in the form of communities you subscribe to or block) similarly to what some search engines and some social media sites will do, can shift that toward more your own specific tastes, but that’s computationally more expensive and requires more users and more user data to get better results (basically it’s finding certain kinds of users and local minima which are more satisfactory to them).

I suspect something like an AI solution (not LLM, just a much simpler neural network) running on your own device that tries to predict what you’re going to click on and learns with what you do (or not) is the only way for a personalized “no fluff on my feed” solution, but that’s for apps running on top of Lemmy, not the Lemmy engine.

The thing is, a 10% upvoted post on a 10,000 people community is more popular than a 90% upvoted post on a 1000 people community - those 10,000 people in the former community are 10,000 people interested enough in that kind of thing to subscribe, whilst only 1000 people are interested enough in the other kind of thing.

So it does make sense to put the former higher up in the global page when sorted by popularity because globally that post was more popular.

However I do think there should be someway to as a user push down posts from certain communities without outright blocking the whole thing: maybe som throttling-down based on the rate of posts per time (i.e. the upvote threshold for posts from a community to come out in All depends on the number of otherwise qualifying posts in the last X days/hours, thus explicitly targetting the “flooding with posts” itself) rather than the straight count of upvotes or the proportion of upvotes that you suggest.

That said in the meanwhile I’m really tempted to block the more generic meme communities.

Yeah, that too.

I reckon that many people’s expectation and even desire for what’s familiar (a natural human preference for the known and familiar which is often confused with actually liking it) that ends up as a desire expressed in these comments for a BIGGER Fediverse is due to the their constant exposure to big and crowded situations again and again, which in turn is because Capitalism tends to create those in all kinds of context (virtual or otherwise) as they’re more profitable.

Do we really need 10s of millions of people here???!

Having gone through the time when AOL first allowed its members access to the Internet, the impression I ended up with was that it was exactly having the sub-culture of the time overwhelmed by the vastly larger culture of the AOL members that mainly screwed things up.

I think the desire for massive crowds is just a reflection of what we’ve become used to in the last couple of decades rather than the conclusion of thinking it through.

Mind you, I’m not saying that I have the answer, I’m trying to throw out there the idea that maybe in a forum of forums system “the more” aren’t “the merrier” because the sweet spot of participation to make a forum pleasant is somewhere in the middle rather than more always being better.

It’s like reaching an oasis after decades of crossing a seemingly endless intellectually dry desert of people concerned above all with indulging their lowest most immature and selfish petty emotional needs, riddled with “statues” to peak Dunning-Krugger all invariably labelled “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”.

Mind you, some of the most ridiculous attempts at creating silly memes here do show that a lot of the “look at me” and “desperate to join a group, any group” types did come along to the Fediverse, though I think they’re more of a subculture here than the dominant culture.

Mind you, we all have those characteristics in some level (as can be noticed by the people trying desperatelly to signal their “in-crowd” status by using the word “normie” to describe some vague “out-crowd”), but I like to think that in most of the ones over here now (at least the ones commenting) it’s not quite at the level of mindless and desperate as it was in one’s more younger and less mature years and with those who are far too concerned with what others will think of them and even securing some narcissitic supply.

Mainstream parties, which are pretty much ideology-free (or as their top people often call it: “pragmatic”) also relly heavilly on clubism, so I think cultivating fans not partners it’s a much more widespread strategy than merely only for the “standardized political slogan packs” which are ideologies (failed or otherwise).

All the well spoken amoral greedy fuckers know exactly where to go to maximize their personal upsides from those “skills” in a system where power alternates between only two political parties.

Power Duopolies created through mathematical rigging of representative allocation systems are better than outright One Party systems but not by much and certainly not Democratic or in any way close to representative of the entire interests and beliefs of millions of human beings.

I’ve actually lived in countries with FPTP and with Proportional Vote and the way the latter countries are managed is vastly better than the former and even public discourse a lot more produtive.

After over 3 decades of voting, across 3 countries, even having held beliefs all the way from what I though was “communism” (when I was little more than a kid) through neoliberalism and finally settling down to a sort of social democracy (shaped by and subservient to my principles) and having even been involved in a supposedly thinking leftwing party around here I would stay that mindless tribalism is exactly what almost the entirety of politics is nowadays.

The whole “building your on political beliefs starting from your core principles upwards, and always keeping them in mind” thing is very unusually: normally (even in that supposedly “thinking” people party) it’s all about choosing sides, growing an emotional bond with your side and then just blindly waving the team’s flag and unskeptically take in and parrot whatever your side’s celebrities says as if they’re unchallangeable truths delivered down all the way from the gods.

In fact I’m pretty pissed from discovering that most people in even that party of supposedly thinking people are little more than clubist political parrots. It does however explain why so many measures people parrot as the right thing to do are actually one-sided and in practice not anchored in the principles we’re told they’re suppose to promote, sometime even de facto going against them: when people are unskeptical unthinking fans of the team, they’re really easy to lead by the nose by womever captures the leadership positions on that team, an sometimes said leaders aren’t even purposefully manipulative, they’re just nowere as bright as their small-pond celebrity status makes them think and generally have ridiculously narrow life experience and hence don’t really know much about how the World works outside their tiny tiny bubble.

Having been on the Internet through the period when AOL connected to it, I’m a little skeptic of the idea that linking a behemoth to the fediverse won’t totally fuck up the culture of the latter.