I would highly recommend The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. There’s an excellent audio book version available for free on Archive.org.

It’s very well written classic sci-fi.

I’d also suggest Fahrenheit 451 if you haven’t read it yet, fantastic book.

I would suggest that it is as complex as you wish to know.

My explanation above is not truly required to effectively use a federated platform, in the same way that most email users don’t actually know how precisely email works, and would find an in-depth explanation of it very complex.

All someone needs to know about email is that they must login to their email host provider, and that every user they might send email to has a unique name, and possibly a different host name after the @ symbol.

In the same way, the only thing someone needs to know about this platform, is they must login to the same place they signed up to (their host provider). They can then use it in a similar way to reddit. They might wonder why usernames or communities have different names after the @, but it doesn’t actually impede using the platform to not understand.

If anything, that might make it easier to use than email.

They each use a different backend, and their web UI’s are designed with their own unique backend in mind.

There is Photon, a third-party web UI/client that may someday be compatible with both Lemmy and Piefed, but currently only properly supports lemmy.

As far as I know, Piefed, Lemmy, and Mbin essentially are just displaying the data made available from ActivityPub in different ways, like the comment aggregation for crossposts.

Lemmy is a software that people can host on their computer, and many people doing that form what is essentially a bunch of mini-reddits that can talk to each other to create one big platform.

Piefed is trying to fulfill the same goals as Lemmy, and is even fully compatible with Lemmy, so someone hosting a piefed server on their computer can join in with all the Lemmy servers, and to the Lemmy people, it appears to them like any other Lemmy server.

But underneath everything, the code base is entirely different. The commonality they share, along with mastodon, is they all use ActivityPub, which is the standard that allows them to all communicate and be compatible with each other, just like there’s an email standard.

Kbin (now Mbin) is yet another Lemmy compatible software that you can host on your computer, but it also tried to implement features that make it more like mastodon (twitter-like), so it can act both like reddit, with threads and comments and communities around single subjects, or be like mastodon and work with hashtags and following individuals instead of communities, like a microblogging website.

They also use different interfaces, but it’s only visible to people who directly use that server; to others who access it from their home server, it’ll adopt the look of the software their home server is using.

So as an example, you are using Lemmy since your home server is Lemmy.ml. if you visit a community hosted on a piefed server from within your Lemmy, like !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social, it’ll look like any other Lemmy community.

But if you directly go to that piefed server by going to https://piefed.social/c/fullmoviesonyoutube you’ll see it from the piefed interface, since you’re accessing that piefed server directly.

All of three of the different federated Reddit-like softwares are intercompatible, so they all make up one big network.

I’m not German, but I would know better than to praise a pick from the AfD.

The Proton CEO thought that the party taking bribe after bribe from oil companies to Tech-bros, and which removed the FTC chairwoman that was bringing anti-trust cases against amazon and publicly criticized Google’s monopoly, would somehow install a good, pro-competitive and consumer rights advocate?

If he genuinely believed that, then he’s either wildly out of the loop in one of his company’s largest markets (which I’ll grant as possible, CEOs can be pretty out of touch with reality), or a fool.

This praise is, itself, ass-kissing the orange, likely in the hopes of getting in the good graces of the administration.

This article shows what happened: https://techstory.in/proton-mail-faces-backlash-over-claims-of-political-neutrality-amid-ceos-praise-for-republican-party/

Unless something has changed, I believe Windscribe also allows port forwarding.

AirVPN does as well, but as they are based in Italy, I think they may have to comply with the new Italian VPN anti-piracy law enacted there.

Quite damning of Proton, but unfortunately isn’t too surprising after the CEO’s pro-trump comments.

I would say they have proven themselves untrustworthy and mostly concerned with profit-seeking, and would suggest moving to alternatives if you use their services.

Mullvad is a solid VPN (Tor is better), and Posteo, Tuta, or Disroot are good email providers (don’t use email for anything sensitive, private providers only give protection against survailence capitalism).

EDIT: With more context provided by @artyom@piefed.social, this recent action by them was, perhaps, not as cut and dry as it seemed. (Though I still am skeptical of their integrity, personally)

We have some known factors we can work with here:

1. Climate change is happening, and it will have devastating effects.
2. The richest people/corporations polluting the most don’t care if you sacrifice or not, they often don’t care about climate change at all, or acknowledge that it exists.
3. The biggest polluters will not stop polluting unless the profit incentive for them is removed, or they are forceably stopped.
4. Reducing emissions by any means possible is crucial in the time window that we have.
5. There are methods that regular people can do in their personal lives to help reduce the total emissions being emitted, but require some sacrifice.

With these known factors, does it make sense to collectively not try to reduce our own emissions just because the biggest emitters won’t start first? I would think if the goal is lower emissions to reduce the horrific and deadly effects happening globally, than we should do what we can to minimize them.

It would be amazing if all the big polluters lowered their emissions along with us, but we know that won’t happen, so if we wait to lower our own emissions until they do, it will never be done and could very well reach a point of no return.

To survive as a species, we will ultimately have to deal with capitalism and those big polluters by more forceful means, which in itself will require collective, mass effort on a global scale.

We don’t know when that mass global effort will take place. It could be in 3 years, or a decade, or even two. In the meantime, the climate continues to get worse. The best thing we can do is give us a little bit more time by collectively reducing our emissions, which requires far less effort and sacrifice than it will to fully solve the problem.

If someone from a more affected poor country who lost family members to climate change (wildfire, drought, famine, etc) asked why someone decided to wait so long before joining in to lower their emissions, do you think they would find “I didn’t want to sacrifice until the billionaires did” a compelling response?

We simply do not have the luxury of time to wait until things are fair. It is unfair, but any and all action is direly needed now. I would plead with you to help regardless of how fair it may be, if only to give us a little more time to get our collective shit together so that our species may live long enough for things to become more fair in the future.

Admittedly I hadn’t actually read stuff on the link before commenting, and I assumed it was going to suggest the sorts of things I did.

Having gone through the little questionnaire, it suggested that I do all of the milktoast things like write to my congress members, vote, and join political campaigning and lobbying groups, which have all proven mostly ineffective (not that I advocate not voting, it’s still useful as harm reduction). for the second part, the ‘rolemodel’ suggestions, it has a few of the things I suggested, along with joining local protests and activist groups, which I do see as helpful to establish connections with others.

I didn’t get the investor, consumer, or professional paths, but I can imagine the investor path would indeed suggest something like you mentioned.

So yeah, I get why you’d be down on it, and share your sentiment.

To be fair, Windows 10 has some meaningful upgrades compared to 7.

1. Windows 10 can handle radical new hardware (such as swapping a drive to a totally different PC) much more gracefully, where as Windows 7 could sometimes freak out and crash or not boot.
2. Windows updates were ungodly slow to install on Windows 7, but were much quicker on Windows 10.
3. Windows 10’s ability to automatically download drivers was very convenient, bringing it more in-line with the experience of Linux, which generally has drivers out of the box.
4. Windows 10 was generally quite stable, even more stable than 7, in my experience.

But with all those advantages, came many downsides as well:

1. Windows 10’s system settings interface is an absolute clusterfuck, making changing simple things like the refresh rate of a monitor difficult to change or find due to being buried behind so many sub-menus. The Windows 10 settings are usually a dumbed down version, with a small easy to miss hyperlink somewhere on the page to bring up the older Windows XP/7 era settings panel that actually adjusted the thing you needed.
2. Windows 10 has a lot of annoying pop-ups for features that barely anyone uses or wants, but likely helps monetize the OS.
3. Windows 10 incorporated ads into the start menu. Fucking ads!
4. Windows 10 was a privacy nightmare compared to 7, and the privacy settings were in a constant state of flux after an update
5. Windows 10’s automatic driver installer had a downside, in that it would automatically download an outdated version of your GPU driver automatically before you could beat it to the punch with the proper up-to-date one from the GPU vendor’s website.

Your part isn’t being undone by a private jet, you prevented your own emissions to compound with the jet’s, the factory’s, and the deforestation’s emissions.

It is abundantly clear that few meaningful laws will ever be enacted, as most governments are corporate captured. That effectively just leaves collective individual actions on the table, which are still very beneficial in giving us more time for society to organize against the powers that be. Every 0.1% of a degree we can mitigate helps the survival rate of populations most effected.

Tossing aside our collective action because our ineffectual governments continue to be ineffectual is giving up one of our most actionable tools, short of revolution.

I think it can be hard to stick with it because no one wants to feel like they’re depriving themselves while others continue, but at large scale, it really does help massively for each of us to use less energy for heating/cooling where possible, eat less meat (red meat especially. Impossible Meat is an incredible plant-based alternative), drive as little as possible (e-bikes and public transport are excellent alternatives if your area is conducive to them).

Also @SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world

Gemini Rue is a great point’n’click with a wonderfully somber and dark atmosphere, and a tremendously good story.

I’d also recommend Night in the Woods, and Sally Face.

The first two Thief games are also very dark (literally), and are some of the finest stealth games ever made, with good stories to boot.

I’ve found that True Lemon/Orange/Lime/Grapefruit packets combined with Nutrisweet (saccharine) tablets is cheaper than store bought drinks, have no health downsides, and taste better since I can dial-in the sweetness to be less sweet than store bought drinks.

That also works for tea purchased in bulk, which can be re-brewed (even cold) multiple times from the same batch to save money.

Seconding the piefed recommendation. It’s much lighter to host than Lemmy, and has some nice user facing features that Lemmy lacks, which you can read more about here (scroll down to comments):

https://slrpnk.net/post/24141955/16757434

Yes. It should be enough to simply be a person of integrity.

I think they may have misspelled it. Try !smolweb@slrpnk.net

Reminds me of the intro to space quest 2.