As has been mentioned before, Meta can scrape most data from the Fediverse already as it is publicly available.

One strategy could be to default to publish to followers only, and not public? It would be a great loss for the open web, but it might be a necessary one to make sure blocked instances do not get access to most of our data.

Another solution could be to publish all posts under a Non-Commercial Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I assume would legally block Meta from using our content in any context as they earn piles of cash on mixing user generated content with ads. Not sure if they would respect it, but it might give us an option for a class lawsuite in the EU?

We should avoid making blanket demands like this to the fediverse as a whole. I happen to support your position, but we should take into account the diverse nature of the social web.

Instead of making demands, explain your reasoning and leave each community to make up their own mind. This is the beautiful nature of the social web; we have broken decision making down into many smaller units instead of one mega instance/corporation.

Find a community that resonates with your own thinking on this issue, and over time a thousand different servers will gather experiences and a picture will start to form; was federation with Meta a good or a bad thing?

I use Navidrome, it's a single binary and gives you your own Spotify, kinda. It can be use with many other apps, in addition to the web interface, as it supports the subsonic protocol.

I have been running this for a year on my old HP EliteDesk 800 SFF (G2) with 64GB RAM, and it performes great on the smallest models (up til 8B) only on CPU. I run Ollama and OpenWebUI in containers/LXC in Proxmox. It's not as smart as ChatGPT, but it can be suprisingly capable for everyday tasks!

I host my own instance and use the Creative Commons Non-Commerical license on my content. The idea is that this makes federation with other non-commercial instances no problem, but as soon as an instance mixes in ads in the feed, they (technically) can't show my posts alongside it.

I know Pixelfed has a license field for every post/picture so you get fine grained control, but I don't believe this is the case for the Mastodon API yet, so I have added the license information in my bio. It would be nice to attach license information to individual posts, and to assign a default license.

My hope is that this will make it more difficult for Meta and the like to mix in ads with my content. Time will tell if it works 😆

Yeah, I would use a bot like this on Telegram. Could hook it up to a tiny LLM (The Phi for example) and give it instructions to play along and then block after some time.

Podman is great, but a lot of confusion arise from the rapid development the last ~year and the fact that different distros have relatively old versions in their repos.

I recommend using the latest Fedora Server and defining your containers as quadlets. Also, on Fedora, yoi can install Cockpit (and cockpit-podman) and get a decent webgui to manage your host and container.

I should just write a blog post about this instead of typing this up on my phone in bed 😆

If it's a personal server for yourself and maybe some friends and family, I would rather use GoToSocial, as it is much more lightweight and is less complex to set up and maintain.

Yes! Well, kinda. You can skip Docker and go straight to Podman, which is an open source and more integrated solution. I configure my containers as systemd services (as quadlets).

Nice! It can also connect to a remote instance of ollama 👍

I have a couple of these (only the G2 and G3 SFF) and they consume between 6-10w when not under load, and they max out at 35w (or 65w depending on CPU). I run proxmox with 64gb ram and they are surprisingly efficient.

The DSA isn't a one size fits all. It uses a tiered system where the most intense rules—like mandatory age verification—are aimed at the Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs). The law was clearly designed with Big Tech monoliths in mind, so it doesn't really fit the decentralized nature of the Fediverse. Small instances largely gets a free pass; the focus is on targeting the platforms that actually have the scale to cause systemic risk. I think the limit is drawn at 45 million users. No instance in the EU will (hopefully) become that big!

I have been thinking about this for a while. I want an online community that encourages meet-ups and face-to-face time. No so much twitter-esq, but more event based. Maybe with a feed that shows small announcements, news and reports in a magazine style?

It would be super cool if many towns and cities have their own online meeting place, that can also interact with neighbouring places!

I haven't look to much into it, but maybe @bonfire@indieweb.social can provide this?

EDIT: Their webpage: https://bonfirenetworks.org/

I use Fedora with GNOME for my parents and other family members. Some have used Windows prior, some have not used computers at all really, only iPads. They all get along very well on GNOME!

I have started using Silverblue the last year, which simplify things even further. Combined with the excellent remote controll functionality, it has been a really pleasant experience both for me and them.

This looks great! Solid Pods is Tim Berners-Lee's attempt at solving selfhosting and decentralization, but it has struggled to gain traction. Connecting it to the fediverse is a very good move.

There are still edge cases, but things have improved rapidly the last year or two, to the point that most docker-compose.yaml files can be run unmodified with podman-compose.

I have however moved away from compose in favor of running containers and pods as systemd services, which I really like. If you want to try it, make sure your distro has a reasonably new version of Podman, at least v4.4 ot newer. Debian stable has an older version, so I had to use the testing repos to get quadlets working.

And Qwant is really great! Have been using og for a couple of years, and have no need to fall back to Google, DDG etc.

I use TrueNAS, which supports TimeMachine out of the box and I have set up Samba-shares to make it simple for family members to drop files in a shared folder. Some of them also have a personal folder. This works on Linux, Windows and MacOS. I also use Wireguard to make sure they always have access to the share.

TrueNAS has a learning curve, but it is reasonably well documented and if you spend some time up front, it pays of.

I use an HP EliteDesk 800 Mini with two boot disks for redundancy and several disks connected trough USB3. Using USB disks are discouraged by TrueNAS but it has worked fine for several years for my low budget setup.

In that case, I can recommend minicomputer's like HP EliteDesk G2 800 Mini. You can get them with a variety of intel CPUs, they can take up to 32GB RAM, they have slot for M.2 disks and a regular 2.5" SSD – and they hardly use any power when idle, between 5 to 10 watts, depending on the CPU and CPU governor settings. They are sold used for ~€50 and if you buy newer generations you'll get even more umpfh for a bit more cash.

In other words, very competetive with the Pi's, only more available, cheaper and about the same power consumption!

If you can find a secound hand Fujitsu R727, they are great linux tablets! But they are not as common, in my experience.