Er I didn’t know what to expect and trans-related is the last thing I would have thought of. I had been thinking of using that name for an instance or community with per-thread anonymity, mostly to make it harder to build user profiles by scraping.

I’ve been using porkbun and they never asked my ID. Maybe it’s specific to the .xyz TLD? That surprises me but the domain you wanted are super cheap, so maybe they attract spammers. .xyz is somewhat disreputable anyway.

This is actually the first time I had heard of the 6-9 digit .xyz domains being discounted (.99/year). That was not mentioned on porkbun’s .xyz page, but web search found info. For those unaware, those domains register and renew at $0.99/year at some registrars, though $1.24 at porkbun.

And lol, almost everything I could think of related to mathematical constants were unavailable, e.g. 61803399.xyz. Some random ones were available and maybe I’ll try to buy one just to see what happens.

I wonder if porkbun suddenly requires ID for all domain purchases? That would be annoying. It’s been a while since I last bought from them.

Added: ok, this might help: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/225-why-porkbun-id-verification

There’s an HN thread about this and yes it sounds like the guy is being stupid and/or there was a communications error. He submitted a PR for a potentially breaking change and it was closed as “needs discussion”. That is, instead of clicking “open PR”, he was advised to instead click “open discussion” and talk about the proposed change and its potential downstream effects. He instead got pissy and started spamming forums.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941590

I don’t use most of the software you mention, but converting FLAC to other formats is pretty easy. E.g. with ffmpeg you’d say

ffmpeg -i somesong.flac -o somesong.mp3

or similarly for other formats. There are more options to control the output bit rates and that sort of thing.

I was making a joke about one of the Smalltalk pioneers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldberg_(computer_scientist) .

Adele Codeberg? She was one of the designers of Smalltalk, I thought. So I’m surprised to hear that about PHP.

Unified Push if you want to use the internet, though for important stuff I prefer to use SMS texts. For that you need a gateway. I’m still on vitelity.net and it’s ok, but I’d look at alternatives if I were doing it again. Twilio has lately gotten all weird though.

Nice but doesn’t sound self hosted.

What is going on with you? Anyway, if you want to try self-hosting on a VPS, make an account on lowendspirit.com and hang out there for a while. There are lots of offers for free or ridiculously cheap VPS there. Like this starts at 25 cents per month ($3 per year):

https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/10636/tierhive-256mb-ram-3gb-disk-3-p-year-hourly-vps-kvm-big-project-updates-more-ports-ipv6

Open a thread there saying what you’re trying to do, and ask for hosting and for technical help if you need that.

Just use a text editor. I use Emacs org files but that’s just me.

I guess I don’t understand the issues you think you’re facing with straightforward approaches. You probably don’t want it on an internet server, right? Maybe just scrounge an old laptop with no internet connection and set it up with an encrypted disk. Then use it as your journalling box. So you’re fairly safe from network attacks. You might have to worry about someone snagging the laptop itself and recovering the key somehow. Yes there are approaches you can take to mitigate that. I don’t know of any super simple ready made methods though.

Maybe you could try a prepaid credit card from a store.

You’re asking a support question for a provider that most of us here have never heard of. I’d wait a day or two and then maybe open a ticket with the provider.

Maybe also look here: https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/10104/free-vps-for-open-source-developers-with-fossvps

I remember having to puzzle over the borg documentation a little when I started using it, but I don’t use any tools. I just have a couple of aliases in my .bashrc and that seems like enough.

I don’t understand, what’s wrong with Borg?

I don’t see a plus. It says “FreeOTP version 2.0.6 (48) © 2013-2023 - Red Hat Inc, et al”. But I think I’ve gotten updates more recently than 2023.

I’m using FreeOTP from F-droid and imho it suffices if you’re going to use a phone app at all. The ability to back up OTP keys in principle defeats the concept of 2FA but it’s hard to live without, once you have enough keys. The thing about retain last N backups is hard to enforce without special arrangements in your backup scheme.

There are some Lemmy instances without downvoting, but none without upvoting. That affects what gets posted. Also it doesn’t matter much what an individual instance does, since a lively community has users from lots of instances contributing. That’s the point of federation, I thought.

For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO. Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.

I would say scrutability in itself doesn’t automatically make an algorithm good. “Demote everything that doesn’t support Trump” is perfectly scrutable but leads to a skewed discussion.

In fact I would say any content boosting algorithm at all leads to skew and what you call sycophancy. That includes upvotes/downvotes that affect what posts users see first. So I would get rid of all that stuff and just show purely chronologically.

I haven’t noticed much difference between instances either, though I haven’t been on many. I moved from lemmy.world to lemmy.ml because .ml has a bit less censorship (e.g. .ml lets me subscribe to !covid@hexbear.net). They are otherwise about the same, as far as I can tell.

What are you saying here? Lemmy has algorithms too, and while it has some good points, it’s disappointing in lots of ways too.

Added: the article is mostly about Mastodon which is more pleasant than Twitter because it lets you listen to just your own selected coterie, also not entirely good.