Proton shilling on Lemmy is huge business. I have nothing to say one way or the other on the products but it really puts me off.

Agreed. My employer was fined $200MM last year for not doing enough to enforce a ban on using personal channels like WhatsApp for conducting business, purely because they're not auditable. What really needs to end is the complete lack of accountability in government for completely flagrant rulebreaking and corruption. No, we won't have an inquiry followed by a slap on the wrist two years after they've left office. We'll have an immediate enquiry followed by a by-election if rulebreaking was found to have deliberately occurred.

I still see plenty of people I went to school with, and I'm 45 and live across the country. Maybe you don't see anyone from school because they all remember you as the kid who stinks?

The term for subs on Lemmy is burrows, since that's where lemmings live.

Absolutely not.

The other big one that usually requires downtime is network. You may not be touching your game servers all that often but if you need to do a major OS upgrade on a load balancer or switch, that's going to mean everything behind it loses connectivity - and unless you're talking one of the big hitters like WoW, they're probably not funding redundant dual network paths to allow you to take it down without downtime

You say you can easily work remotely, but that is not the same thing as working from another country. Tax implications, cross border data transfer, work residency rules - absolutely speak to your HR before assuming that if you're remote it doesn't matter where you are

You are. It's just as easy now to host your own mail server as it was thirty years ago

My reading of that isn't that Google killed XMPP, it's that they thought XMPP would be useful for the userbase they brought in, they realised it wasn't, and they ditched it. There's no indication that XMPP had the userbase and lost it to Google, or even that XMPP had features that were stolen by Google

Unpopular opinion but defederating Meta is a terrible idea. What are people thinking will happen? Allow them to federate and you'll have mastodon users able to view and interact with posts from Threads without needing to be concerned about ads or tracking, without giving over any more control of privacy than they would to any other fediverse instance, and without needing to possess accounts homed within the Meta infrastructure.

Defederate them, and anyone who wants to interact with anyone on threads will most likely need to maintain a presence on both and handover more personal data to Meta than they otherwise would.

Defederating is actively hostile to fediverse users.

I have a chrome plugin to strip any Pinterest results from searches, it's the absolute worst

The corporate web may be dying/reinventing itself. Everyone talks about FOSS and having a user driven experience.

You say that, but I would politely suggest that your use of 'everyone' is narrow to your personal experience, at a guess with a focus on those who are either IT professionals or enthusiastic amateurs.

90+ of the world don't care in the least. They want the functionality to access and share information and connect with either their friends or a wider audience. They want reliable and simple functionality. Those people don't really care if they're playing in a corporate walled garden.

FOSS projects with user ownership are a brilliant part of the modern tech landscape but don't be deluded into thinking they're a vast global paradigm shift

Howard completely ignores the profit motive though. Public ownership doesn't have to mean subsidised.

Under public ownership what the customer pays covers operating costs plus long term maintenance. What we've seen is that under private ownership what the customer pays covers operating costs plus profits/dividends, and long term maintenance is ignored until a bailout is called for.