Buelldozer

Nope, that’s a user created account and a user created note. 😊

What context are you asking for? Seems like Draconic has explained why that account exists and even put in a note explaining.

You can also install ad guard home as an add on INSIDE Home Assistant. Works great!

Too many people thought that Twitters Blue Checkmark meant you were special. That attitude carries over to Bluesky and being verified.

Cloudflare has a ton of services in their “free” tier and there’s a lot of confusion in here because people toss around “Cloudflare” without specifying which service they are actually talking about.

If you are using Cloudflared (notice the d) with your own LE Cert then you are probably fine.

The term VPN is pure marketing bs. What is called VPN today used to be called Proxy Server.

Perhaps if you are only talking about the consumer level stuff advertised on TV. Otherwise I can assure you that “Virtual Private Networks” are a real thing that have absolutely nothing to do with Proxy Servers.

On down the comment chain you mention "…our computers would not see each other and would not be able to connect to each other via that service. " as some kind of test of whether a thing is a VPN or Proxy Service but what you’re missing is that this is a completely common and advisable configuration for companies. In fact Zero Trust essentially demands configurations like this. When Bob from Marketing fires up his VPN to the Corporate Office he doesn’t need access to every server and desktop there nor does his laptop need to be able to access the laptops of other VPN users. They get access to what they need and nothing more.

Hell the ability to access the internet via the tunnel, called Split Tunneling, is also controllable.

It’s that ability to control where the tunnel terminates that allows consumer VPNs, like Proton, to be used the way they are.

So while private individuals absolutely do use VPNs as an ersatz replacement for Proxy Servers they are nowhere near the whole use case for VPNs.

Same here.

For example, I’ve noticed that some websites start throwing captchas at me or even just straight-up refuse to load with 403: unauthorized errors because I have my router set up to load-balance across two Internet connections. (At least, that’s my guess as to why it’s happening.)

I maintain several multi-wan commercial setups and they don’t have this problem. I obviously don’t know what your setup is but I’d guess something is wrong with how its handling flows / connections. Once a connection is established between your edge and an internet resource that flow should remain “stuck” to whatever wan port it started with and it sounds like that isn’t happening.

The same tailscale that announced last week that they are going to start charging?

https://tailscale.com/kb/1251/pricing-faq

I went over and looked at the peertube FAQ and nope, there’s no monetization plan. Their reasoning for that is consistent with their goals but it is a hurdle to creators moving to the platform.

When are they moving all to freetube or something?

Unless I’m missing something Freetube is a client. So it wouldn’t be Jeff moving to freetube it would be you using freetube to watch his content on YT.

I’m guessing you meant peertube instead of freetube and your answer there is “When they can get paid.” Making content takes time and costs money and YT pays creators like Jeff for doing it.

I dislike YT alot but there’s financial decisions at play here that can’t really be argued with.

f the reason EE is shutting down due to lack of staff why would anyone go to a smaller one/one run by a single person?

Small instances can have far less drama and workload. Just because an instance isn’t popular and has a small admin team doesn’t mean it’s in danger of folding up. 😀

If you are looking for a small and stable instance you should evaluate lemmy.today. It’s hosted in the U.S. (Pacific North West) and has a high degree of federation.

XenoForo is a bit spendy but they’re providing the software, hosting and data storage. IIRC the forum I’m talking about is on the “Business” plan due to how busy it is.

there’s no persistence or community.

That’s it right there, that’s what you are missing. The older forum communities were small enough that you could keep track of whose who, something that isn’t possible when the user counts are in the tens of thousands to tens of millions. I think a lot of us olds would like to go back to that but its impossible; our monkey brains can’t handle communities of that size.

To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed.

In the forum days those users would get attacked and / or blocked by other users. If they caused enough havoc for long enough then the mods / admins would step in. The expectation NOW is that the mods / admins will actively monitor every post and comment in order to remove disagreeable content before it can be seen. That’s quite the change over the last 20 years!

The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.

“Mirror” is probably more apt than you realize. IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave. I’m not blaming you or saying that you’re wrong, I’m just pointing out the difference.

I agree that all forums require some level of moderation in order to keep from turning into total troll-fests however there’s a wide chasm between moderating someone because they won’t stop posting racial slurs and moderating someone because they’re going against the grain / hivemind.

Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model

Hmmm, you’re probably on to something there. I think Lemmy could do that but no one cares to set it up.

and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).

I’m honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I’m in a hurry to get back to that!

One of my favorite forums has been around since 1999 and is currently running on XenoForo which is very phpBB-esque. Anytime I get a nostalgia hankering I drop in for a few minutes. It’s not always as good as you may remember. :)

The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad.

Many people, including a large chunk of Lemmy, are perfectly fine with censored discussions. They honestly want it that way…as long as the discussion is censored such that it agrees with their opinion.

I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.

It’s extremely difficult to free people from things that they want.

What are we going to do about it?

Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they’ve showed up starting in the early 90s. They don’t want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.

If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there’s enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.

The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don’t fit into a box. It’s that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can’t hold the castle once it’s being assaulted by the normies.

So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It’s for the best.

As to what we do about it?

Nothing. We do nothing about it. I’ve literally watched this happen over and over and over and over since the early 90s. $Place on the internet gets popular and is then ruined by the hordes of normies and the commercialization they attract. It’s even worse now with rise of influencers, troll farms, online advertising agencies, and power users.

The normie users add almost nothing to the online experience and they take so very much.

So the wisest move is to do nothing and let the flotsam and turds of the internet wash up in harbors like Reddit.