Oh wow, I’d forgotten all about geek code.

Are you being human trafficked?

Short stories is the answer. They do seem to mainly the province of horror and sci-fi but even if that’s not a favoured genre(s) it’s a way back in. Try Night Shift or Skeleton Crew by Stephen King (give The Mist a miss though, it’s not really a ‘short’ short story). Take it a page at a time, stop reading the minute you start to lose interest, try again 15mins later. Remember it’s fun activity not a competitive sport, take all the time you need, the books you want to read are going nowhere :)

You really need to re-read that book, but without the preconceived rightwing slant.

Are you trying to compare OP with Galileo?

If I’m referring people to a book I always use a link to its OpenLibrary entry. If I’m discussing a book, I do it on the Bookwyrm instance I’m on.

In short - use both :)

Thank you, I’ll look into that.

That’s a good point. My thinking was to try and avoid high VPS costs. Anything more than €10 is out of my price range really and this seemed a way of running via a high spec machine without a high price.

Except I don’t browse via my server, I browse behind a VPN client on my PC/phone etc. The server on the other hand is not behind a VPN client as most providers don’t offer a fixed IP or allow port forwarding. Therefore if anyone knows my domain name, they can get my ISP provided IP which resolves my location far too accurately for my liking.

A VPN service isn’t for illegal stuff. It can be used that way but for me its usefulness is in providing a layer of privacy between me, my ISP and online services I use.

F. is no longer true. They recently removed support for this after lots of people abused the feature.

Does docker need to be already installed on my local machine and my VPS?

Forum packages have been around for at least 20 years. I’m terms of forum like features the only difference is federation.

They have recently removed support for port forwarding. That won’t stop a user being able to torrent but it will stop seeding and will affect discoverability and speed somewhat.

Has no negative impact on their privacy features

Another vote for Mullvad. You can pay by cash, vouchers (in some countries) or Monero for total privacy.

Well, the issue is that although both an instance that uses Mastodon and an instance that uses Lemmy communicate using ActivityPub, the way the might choose to display the passed info is different. Lemmy for example can have longer posts than Mastodon (a micro blogging service) can handle.

There does need to be a way to handle that but I don’t think its really in place yet. Let’s not forget the fediverse is a very young thing, not all the issues are resolved yet.

After installing the wallet from getmonero, I went to localmonero.co and located a reputable seller in my country who accepted Amazon gift cards bought with cash.

I then bought an Amazon gift card using cash and kept the reciepts.

I then, as per requirements of the seller, took photos of the gift card number and the receipts to demonstrate the date and the fact I’d paid with cash. After sending these images to my PC I edited them in gimp to remove store identifying info from the receipts image, ran both images through a metadata removal tool and initiated the trade with the seller with the images. They accepted the trade and approx 20mins later the XMR was in my wallet

Your best bet is https://lemmy.ml/c/selfhost but your options are either self host at home or a VPS. Hetzner are a decent VPS provider, some people are using them with 4gb ram/60gb space which is about £6 a month. I’m going to go for 8gb RAM/80gb space.

You can either use Ansible, Docker, Yunohost or do it all manually.

Its convenience. 99% don’t care about anything apart from getting what they need. The blackout caused them inconvenience so its therefore annoying. Its the same attitude that can appear when workers take strike action.

‘Better’ is relative. To me its better because no one person or group owns or controls the software. There’s no central authority. Don’t like the instance you’re on? Just move to another. Cant find an instance you like? Host your own. Don’t like the path the developers are taking? Fork the code. As long as the very core remains standard (ActivityPub), all possibilities are on.

There needs to be a return to being patient. Most fedi software is not beyond beta yet. They will develop and they will mature but right now the fediverse is a toddler learning to walk. There are issues but with time they’ll get addressed. We’ve all got so addicted to shiny cool apps and services we’ve become prepared to sacrifice our privacy, our choices and our reason at the altar of a quick dopamine hit.

There’s no big money to throw at these issues and therefore no dedicated team. This means solutions come slower. But they will come and they will be motivated by usefulness not profit. The people developing these things have lives and day jobs. Give them time.