If I was you I’d start now. Spend some time dual booting or using Linux on a side machine.There is a learning curve.

Coolidge it with the puns.

Cats don’t tend to trap themselves by squishing into a hole they can’t squish back out of.

What a cat will do is stick his head in a tissue box and then lacks the dexterity to pull it off.

To the guy in here going “UX != UI!!!” Sure, but you can’t design UX, especially for the unwashed masses. “Tried cutting toenails with lawnmower; severed foot. 0/10 bad user experience.”

Lemmy has a “have our cake and eat it too” problem. It offers two mutually exclusive promises:

• Each instance is its own independent self-contained little Reddit with their own communities, culture, code of conduct etc. so that individuals can find a place that suits them or make one if none is available, and

• All the servers are part of one great big federated system where all users have access to content on all instances so it doesn’t matter which instance you sign up for, you can access it all.

In practice, the former is more or less true, the latter really isn’t.

First there’s the obvious topic of defederation, which makes the “join one server, access all of them” an outright lie. On the one hand, I think everyone here will agree this platform requires defederation to function so that we can kick out instances like lolli.rape or whatever, which thank you admins and mods for dealing with. But what about Hexbear, or Truth Social (which as I understand it is running on Mastodon software). The only honest answer to “where do we draw that line?” is “somewhere in the middle of that slap fight over there.”

It is intellectually dishonest to say that Lemmy has this problem and Reddit doesn’t. Post in r/mensrights and an automod bans you from r/twoxchromosomes. Do basically anything anywhere on the platform and get banned from r/conservative. They managed to implement “It’s a different platform depending on who you are” on a monolithic service.

All that crap aside, the average user has a more limited perspective on the rest of the fediverse than his home instance. Often, the UI defaults to viewing only local posts, you have to tell it to give you a global feed. You can browse a list of your local communities, you can browse a list of global communities, you can’t browse a list of communities on a given foreign instance. ‘Show me everything on lemmy.sports’ or indeed ‘show me a list of communities on lemmy.nsfw.’ You cannot create (or moderate?) communities on instances you aren’t a member of. It is, if only slightly, easier to participate on your home instance than elsewhere.

Either your choice of server does matter, or it doesn’t.

If it does matter, we shouldn’t have so many general purpose instances, it should be lemmy.music and lemmy.art and lemmy.uk. Then newcomers are presented a meaningful choice. Are you mostly interested in discussions pertaining to your country? Your hobby? Your career? Sign up here to mostly participate in that, and no matter which you pick you can visit the rest of the Lemmyverse, too."

If it doesn’t matter, then design it such that instances are entirely transparent to users; eliminate the possibility of !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@lemmy.ml coexisting, and make all instances lemmy1.world lemmy2.world, issue credentials centrally and then just spread the load in the background.

I don’t think you can have both at the same time.

So is a large part of lemmy.world cached on sh.itjust.works’ server? Does Pixelfed, Loops or Peertube work the same way? I could see images or video being more of a burden to serve like that. Or does AP sync the metadata like thumbnail, video title, description, comments etc. and the video itself is torrented straight from the host server?

I’ve gone on this diatribe about PIxelfed’s onboarding process, where they have a website that says “This page will help find the perfect server for you” and then is designed to present as little meaningful information about each server as possible. Looking at join-lemmy.org, it’s marginally better. “You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which you choose” 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn’t matter why make the choice?

Here’s a question I have, because I’m honestly not sure: Let’s say most of the communities I’m personally interested in are on example.lol. But my account is on sh.itjust.works. How much am I burdening sh.itjust.works by mostly reading and posting to example.lol? Would I be decreasing people’s operating costs if I just opened an account on example.lol so most of my interaction was on my home instance?

Personally I’d prefer it if they spent all four years renaming things to Mount Hitler or whatever instead of doing anything actual.

Did Amerigo Vespucci migrate to North America or did he just pass through?

If you have an “old laptop” or something like that kicking around, I recommend installing Linux on that and trying to use that for as many of your work/school/productivity/whatever tasks as you can while you still have a Windows machine.

There will be a transition period, Linux is not Windows and Libreoffice isn’t MS Office. I spent about two years occasionally running into variations of this scenario:

• I need to do a thing.

• This is a simple thing I do regularly. I can do it in seconds on Windows.

• It’s not done the way I’m used to on Linux; the button for it isn’t where I’d think to find it.

• What do you even call this thing? How do I google how to do it?

• Dang it I’m wasting so much time on this. I need to turn this in soon, it’s eating up too much time.

• I’m getting frustrated because I don’t have the time at this moment to learn how to do this, I just need it done.

It helped me to be able to stop, boot into Windows, get it done so I could move on, and when the pressure of a deadline is off, suddenly it’s easier to learn how to do it in Linux. Then you know how and you don’t have to boot into Windows for that thing. It prevents those FUCK THIS I"M GONG BACK TO WINDOWS I DON"T CARE ANYMORE !!!1!! moments.

My old desktop, a Ryzen 3600/GTX-1080 mini-ITX build. After using a Pi 4 with Kodi for awhile it’s nice to have a media machine that can run Crysis.

So why run an instance in the first place then?

But federating with other instances IS links to content, not hosting content.

Would that mean you need an account name to be Die4Ever and your channel identifier might be Die4Ever_Games?

That would actually solve a problem I had on Youtube, where, I’ll use Linus Media Group as an example, Tech Linked and Mac Address were different unrelated Youtube channels. Youtube has no concept of “Shows”

Do we need to start over? Like fork PeerTube and fix all the “We choose to do this wrong because our parents didn’t hug us as children” problems?

My understanding is raspberrypi.com is hosted on raspberry pis. It’s a Linux computer; it can do anything a Linux computer can do.

What’s going to stop them?

I’m trying to think of the last food item I’ve eaten that was made in Europe, without success.

preemptive cat tax. I like your style.

Which, in the words of Michael Swaim, is less of a sandwich and more of a wad.