That doesn’t sound reasonable for a lot of reasons. The idea that each family can host their own instance (which still has costs, and as you reasonably pointed out can’t generally be done with a server in the basement because of broadband laws preventing that kind of usage, is kind of ludicrous. That would lead to an internet where only people with money would be able to host a website of any kind. And even then, public services (video hosting, cloud storage, news, any kind of public service or so on) wouldn’t get anything out of the deal so why would they let you connect to them and mirror their content?

Also, if we keep things small scale, social networks die because new people aren’t coming in to replace dead accounts as people leave. So what happens then? Those social networks die. Social network sites like Lemmy and mastodon and so on need people. Without people to post content and people to consume it the site is basically just an empty husk of random 1’s and 0’s.

Keep things responsible? How do we do that? You’ve given me an outline of an idea you have but it’s all broad strokes and no details.

I’m not sure what you’re expecting me to do with this. I wasn’t using sync as an example of a foss Lemmy app exactly. I was pointing out that sync doesn’t have that many users and its developer offers a free tier but to give the service that people want it has to be developed and maintained which costs time and time is money.

I wasn’t claiming it as a foss app. I was pointing out that lists of Lemmy users use apps like it (if not that particular one).

No, I’m not wrong. I’m telling you that there is a threshold beyond which a service cannot support the number of users it has without additional funding and that ads right now provide that additional funding, and always have. And now that we’ve gotten to this point with billions of online users using services daily, we’re to the point where in order to provide a service to that many people bills must be paid and to do that one of two things needs to happen. Ad aggregation, or subscription.

The only reason most of the fediverse survives as it stands now is that it has a small userbase or daily users. When it grows too big to sustain in that regard (given that most of its users now do not actually donate to it), it will die or move to a model that pays the bills. That doesn’t have to be ads. But it absolutely could be, in the same way that it could be subscription service.

Grayjay is an example of a competing service that is subscription based. So was floatplane. Both of these service compete with YouTube. Both of them cost money to run. Each of the examples I have been given that don’t run on ads or subs can be supported currently by the user base because the user base is small and people are providing what it needs out of a labor of love because it doesn’t cause them a hardship to do so. That will not remain the case as the user base grows.

The ones like bittorent and such offload the bandwidth cost to the users but that’s only one facet of what we’re talking about here.

Lemmy only survives today because people donate, which I did talk about in my subsequent comments which is exactly my point. It’s not ad supported now (most instances aren’t at any rate) but there are absolutely ad supported fediverse services, and if it gets bigger, it likely will run ads because more users means more content, more bandwidth, more electricity etc. The alternative is possible small scale, when you don’t have billions of users per day. There’s a threshold where the number of users far exceed a what even a group of people can put into a project like Lemmy without needing additional funding.

So either the majority of Lemmy users pays to use the service through subs or donations, or this won’t last either.

Yeah but the web has been this way since the mid 90’s. It’s been funded by ads the way that things that came before it were. Broadcast television is a good example. People switched to cable because of less ads and more channels with the expectation that there would be better content. That didn’t last. Then we had tivo and DVRs and so many other products to get around ads. But the root of the problem is that people won’t buy things they don’t know about, won’t use services they don’t know about, will have a hard time looking for goods and services that they do want without some form of advertisement. Word of mouth is advertisment too when you get right down to it. The ads were often less intrusive but became more so over time because it’s such a hotly contested area that pretty much every company small and large is throwing money at.

What’s worthless garbage to some may be useful in a pinch to others. The point is that combating ads means taking away a source of revenue not just for ad aggregators and ad companies but for business full stop. I hate billboards. I’d be perfectly happy to never see a billboard again in my life. That being said, they have been effective ads for a long time, and have been used for good purposes occasionally (missing persons, unsolved crimes etc come to mind).

I’m not saying ads aren’t more often than not intrusive, annoying, or lost on me. I actually do find them intrusive, run a pihole and a private DNS etc. But I also recognize that really laws to curtain what ads can do is a major problem, and that services have bills to pay.

And all that is to also say that worth is subjective.

That sounds wonderful. But I’ve been using the web a long time. I remember the time you’re talking about when we first got web browsers etc. And let me tell you, the windows 95/98 time frame before Google and ask Jeeves etc was not a golden age. Ads were still on web pages, and while people with the right technical knowledge and access to a computer could create a server and a website and so on, they still had to get that website in front of people’s eyes.

We had visitor counters and web rings and a rush to buy up domain names before everyone else, and so on. That still costs money though. The electric to run a server. The time to upkeep a website (even in html), and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.

Google and even Jeeves and Alta Vista came at a time when we badly needed to connect the internet together in a way that the average new user would be able to find usable and.intuitive enough to get away from books and papers.

Search engines that ran on ads became one of the few good ways to do this. And a lot of the way the business of ad aggregation and web search have developed to make it easier to find what you’re looking for for on the web makes sense when you give it any thought. But people spent a good couple of decades completing ignoring that to the point that now it’s gotten out of hand and Google basically has a monopoly on search, and half the internet doesn’t seem to even know they’re not a search company but an ad aggregation company doing what makes them money.

I don’t honestly care if you agree with what Google is doing or not. But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.

I’m not talking about “someone must make profits” that’s disingenuous. What I’m saying is that services that you consume for free cost money to run. Someone somewhere has to provide if nothing else the computer/server, and electricity to run it the fediverse runs on donations and ads literally the sync app I’m using runs on ads, paid tier, etc. because it costs time and money to upkeep.

Your personal problems with tech in general and your disability don’t have anything to do with that. People are talking on the tech community about how Google is taking out competing front ends for YouTube and what this means for an ad free experience, and while I agree that Google is obviously the bad guy for being the mutli-trillion dollar company it is, I also recognize that they have always been an ad company and the thing about Google is that before it existed as a free to use service we relied really heavily on an open web that was pretty empty by comparison and very disjoined. Finding things was a problem. Web rings may give people nostalgia for a “better time”, but they weren’t efficient ways to find information.

I can understand being angry but paying for the things you use is the one way to create alternatives to these services that are literally taking advantage of their users for profit as you put it. Lots of web services that are big “gotta make money” companies started out offering us free or inexpensive alternatives to the companies that were overcharging us and gouging us.

The fact that they’ve got too big is an issue with capitalism not the concept that people shouldn’t have to pay for the things they use.

The Internet is full of ads because ads pay bills and keep the lights on.

Ads = revenue that keep sites and services running. What can you do about it? Pay.

I doubt it specifically because when joining a new instance you’re making a new account.

Twitter is still influencing the rest of the web (look at its influence on reddit since Musk bought Twitter, and Spez started wanting to live in his skin). I don’t think we can just take the good without the bad and assume a net positive.

There’s lots of technology channels on YouTube and it’s competition that do tech news that I feel are pretty relevant (gamerz nexus for sure). I wouldn’t want people to lose that just because some of us (myself included) prefer written formats to videos.

Time to start posting nothing but chat gpt answers on Facebook. Because that’s probably what people will do.

I have one of these https://webcat.cornwelltools.com/JP213123-Cornwell®-Cordless-Soldering-Iron-p371692246 as well as a traditional wired soldering iron. While I like the cordless soldering iron’s portability and it’s fine for solder cups or solder splicing wire, it’s not adaptable enough for me to use on a PCB or for micro solder and if I’m honest I’d want a micro solder setup for that anyway. I’ve owned expensive soldering irons and cheap ones (my current corded model I believe is one of ifixit’s), the general problem is that I have too many random tips lying around that I don’t know which iron they go to. Some are junk (because the iron broke etc). Some probably could be used interchangeably.

At least with the cordless one the tips are replaceable, and pretty unique in appearance so I know exactly which iron they go to.

The problem with the cordless one is the heat it can generate and the fact that it’s not adjustable. The problem with the corded one is that I have to lug a 50’ extension cord up to every plane to use it, and often there’s not a safe place to put it down while it’s hot so I have to prep every solder cup, joint, splice etc and then plug it in and turn it on. I’ve got stands galore and none of them is the safest.

I’d be willing to try this out just for the sake of the added protections it provides.

I’ve got 37 other reasons and they’re all recalls. Seriously, that’s just this year. They’ve had the most recalls of any manufacturer like 4 years running. At this point my whole family likes to joke that my brother’s got job security out the whazoo.

Fucked Or Running. Depends.

In it’s current iteration, either you run a local model which has limitations that I think would prevent it from being used to this end (I don’t know that for sure, and am happy to find out if anyone does know), or you use a corporate one. Unfortunately corps seem largely to want to use AI to make money and one of the best ways to make money in the age of information is ads. There’s a reason they have become more and more prevalent despite the fact that so many people hate them.

The idea that AI would be used to prevent companies from making money seems a bit far fetched to me.

They shouldn’t have made the claim that op could bring and use a router if it directly contradicts the guidelines or their wifi use in the dorms.

Tesla’s had the EV market majority for awhile now. They’re the poster child of more tech in cars, especially when all the other EV’s on the market are following suit to try to play catch-up. Although I agree with you that paywall of car tech that we have had for decades absolutely is not an EV thing, more sensors and cameras specifically is. The other stuff is just terrible marketing firms trying to force subscription services into things that didn’t ever have them before.

Tesla in particular has spearheaded this movement with the self driving car angle and it’s been Ford trying to catch up ever since. All kinds of correlatations between the Ford Mach E and the Tesla models to start with, and that stuff has absolutely followed in the electric Escapes and F105 lightnings. The larger screens, the 360 cameras, the mountains of sensors and LIDAR, Ford’s Blue Cruise nonsense.

Ford wasn’t putting random 15" screens in the dash of their cars before Tesla did it and I’d hazard that most other car companies weren’t either. It’s gotten to the point where it seems like the whole EV industry is trying to imitate Tesla and as far as Ford is concerned I can’t say I’m surprised that they came up with the ads nonsense specifically because that’s par for the course for a company that’s been plagued by the most recalls of any automaker 3 years running or more.

If I’m honest it’s gotten to the point where I’ll pay to fix my decade and a half or more old ice vehicle before I’ll buy any EV. Mini’s got problems with their batteries now, from what my brother tells me a lot of EV’s go through tires and brakes at an accelerated rate and at his dealer it costs something like $500-700 per axle for brake pads and machined rotors. This is on top of the number of electric vehicles being marketed today that have significabt problems that require whole modules or internal battery components to be replaced which is great under warranty but isn’t likely to lead to these vehicles lasting 50-70 years.

I hear about this stuff all the time from the people who fix these cars and a lot of what I hear just makes me not want anything to do with any cars. Unfortunately I don’t have another reliable mode of transportation that I can afford and will allow me to have free time so there’s that.

Ford has an abundance of EV’s and has been making EV’s for a couple of decades now. Automakers track all types of information about drivers, and it’s exhausting and all the new EV’s have all kinds of new tech specifically to track drivers just like ICE vehicles. The push for EV’s is pretty strong right now, and that’s the point of my comment. There’s a lot of media telling people that if they’re gonna buy a new car it should be an EV. Teslas are apparently being towed so that law enforcement can use the sensors and cameras to collect information and evidence of crimes. Then this news hits, coupled with an article a couple of weeks ago about how they’ve also patented a way for cop cars to more accurately determine who’s speeding and this whole present is a dystopian nightmare.

You may only want to think about the good that EV’s do, but not all of us are so blindly optimistic. EV’s are one place where Automakers in particular are making new strives to add more tech to vehicles. Yes in a lot of cases more so than ICE vehicles.

Somehow you took “no new cars for me” to mean just EV’s and that makes me question some things about you.