The US: “We can ignore shooting a puppy in the face, but being a woman is a step too far.”

I’m sure they’re banking on international consumers having as short of memories as US consumers.

Remember “Freedom Fries” and rejecting Heinz ketchup for them because John Kerry was married to an heiress of the Heinz fortune and he had the audacity to run against Bush in 2004?

Yeah, most people completely forgot, especially the people who claimed that the would boycott Heinz forever.

Trump has done damage with specific partners like Canada, but I don’t think people in the UAE, South Africa, India, or Brazil are going to sneer too much at taking products from people in the USA who used to act superior to them.

I don’t know if you’re ready to hear this, but international trust in US news was in the shitter before 9/11 and got flushed after 9/11.

Or did everyone forget the lies about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction repeated breathlessly by US media without question?

I can’t believe I have to say this, but… USA isn’t the only country with a viable middle class to sell shit to anymore. There’s Canada, most of Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea, China… Other countries may not have as large of middle class citizens to pull from, but they exist as well in places like Brazil, India, Egypt, Israel, Iran, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates as well as others.

Sometimes I am dumbfounded by my fellow US citizens still somehow thinking we’re the center of the fucking world when all that good will from the rest of the world was flushed down the shitter after 9/11. Trump is just the final stages of no one giving a flying fuck what happens to our middle class anymore.

300 million people in the USA are the bottom 90%, that’s a fucking drop in the bucket of the worldwide population. Do you really think that they’re gonna be hurting by not selling to just us anymore? Just, christ, USA’s economy doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

The goal is to reduce the quality of life of the average US citizen to match the low quality of life in poor countries so our labor can “compete” in the market by vastly reducing our pay and purchasing power.

It’s part of why Trump is pushing the “return to manufacturing” angle so hard. He doesn’t want people in other countries being paid pennies a day to put together $300 Nike shoes, he wants people in the US being paid pennies a day to put together $300 Nike shoes.

I mean, it’s a long time coming. The wealthy have clearly thought for a long time that US workers are too coddled and demand too much and deserve far far less.

You’re very lucky. I lived 60 miles south of Seattle, 30 miles southwest of Tacoma, and was able to get a single channel with an antenna because my city was in a valley surrounded by mountainous terrain and so the broadcast signals from the TV towers were all blocked by the terrain. No local stations, no local towers. Seattle actually has plenty of stations, but unless you’re in the right areas, they’re nearly impossible to access.

I also worked in local television for a long time in the early 2000s and 3 out of 4 of the stations I worked at no longer exist and there are fewer and fewer rural stations, so unless you live in the big city or unless you’re in a very flat area where the big city signal can get to you, you’re shit out of luck.

Yes, a matrix server is an “instance” of matrix on the larger federated service.

Discord calling their different channels “servers” was really unhelpful because they were never servers to begin with.

Thought it was pretty clear. Matrix sucks.

LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL

I mean I wouldn’t say the original message was clear at all that you as an individual have had bad experiences. There are also people who may have things to say from a development standpoint beyond just “I have personally had bad experiences with it.” So, sorry you had bad experiences, but to be perfectly clear “LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL” doesn’t actually tell anyone anything at all. Thanks, however, for the clarification. I haven’t had issues like that with Matrix in a long time now, but I’ve been using it off-and-on since 2018-ish.

LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL

Compelling argument.

That’s really not something to be proud of.

I suppose XMPP’s 27 years of development is embarrassing as well?

Or are you just shitposting without any concrete arguments for what you’re saying? I won’t argue well thought out arguments, but this shit is just childish. You can do better, artyom.

Personal opinion, Discord was already enshittifying before they did an IPO, like at least 6 years ago or more. The IPO just gave them an excuse to speed up the process.

Exactly this, that’s a client quirk, probably Element in this case.

Exactly, this isn’t even a new problem… it just keeps happening.

As someone who has been advocating for the use of the federated Matrix protocol for a long, long time now, the proliferation of new, competing options actually is frustrating to me. Technically Matrix is actually already fleshed out very well, has several different clients, and even has Thunderbird support so if you’re already using Thunderbird you don’t even need a separate client.

The beginnings of Matrix go back as far as 2014 so it honest has at this point 12 years of development behind it. I know Matrix has it’s issues, but it’s by far the most secure combined with being able to communicate with large groups of people via federation. There’s definitely slightly more secure options, because they lack federation (and thus don’t leak metadata), but I personally am ambivalent about them because some of them have a kind of crypto-bro feel to the companies behind them and I’m skeptical they won’t go down a path similar to Discord while Matrix on the other hand has been slowly but surely leveraging itself into a position of secure government communications all over Europe. So, to me, Matrix already has a game plan for staying relevant and staying solvent, while things like SimpleX or Stoat I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the enshittification to begin

Open source bona-fides are great and all, but for a lot of these messengers, I absolutely think not enough discussion is made regarding their financial plans to stay afloat whereas the reality is that while Matrix doesn’t exactly have money coming out their ears, they have a slow, steady gameplan that is working out so far.

The whole reason everyone moved to Discord was because it was a centralized place and since Discord needed to pay for it’s servers, it had to find a way to finance that, and enshittification naturally happened. I think it would be foolish to pretend that can’t happen again with several of the current alternatives.

(see: A/C chargers, character encoding, instant messaging, etc.)

I’d actually love a reason to try Ansible and get used to it. So if it’s well documented, maybe a good starter project.

I have actually looked at this one before but the main reason I hadn’t done it is no experience with Ansible. Would you say Ansible is easy enough to pick up just for rolling this out? I have a lot of networking experience, building docker compose files from scratch for projects, and am used to editing json and yml files. I have only set up a reverse proxy with caddy once and have never tried nginx although it seems more fully featured. Any thoughts would be appreciated. I also knoe of some good Ansible security hardening playbooks but once again just haven’t used Ansible so never rolled them out

I used to roll on the main matrix server, but I’ve been toying with the idea of rolling out a server for just myself here at home for a while now, since I can federate with other servers. Just disable making new accounts after I set up my own account and roll out.

Most underrated Coen Brothers film.

I don’t know if Verizon of AT&T offer these but T-Mobile used to have small cellular sites you could basically rent them to plug into your wired internet and it would piggyback off your internet to make a small cellular hotspot to give you good cell signal. I had one when I lived out in the boonies for a while.

EDIT: Looks like the ones T-Mobile used to offer are all End-of-Life and they don’t even want them back from customers because they were for 3G/4G and they’re moving all services to 5G.

https://tmo.report/2025/04/t-mobiles-infamous-cellspot-coverage-devices-are-now-end-of-life/

EDIT II: Looks like AT&T may offer some still though:

https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1452148/