I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.

I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.

Here’s a reminder that packing the 5th circuit court of appeals with batshit conservative judges was a key step in the Southern Strategy. There’s also a county in Texas that only has enough of a population for two judges, and they made sure both of those are also batshit conservative. So any time they want to get a batshit conservative ruling, they just file it in that one specific county in Texas. And then Texas appeals go to the 5th circuit. And any circuit rulings are applied nationally (due to lower courts using precedent to set cases) unless it goes all the way to the SCOTUS. And with the current SCOTUS, they can simply refuse to see the case, and the 5th circuit ruling will stand.

Lots of times, the court cases are obviously staged. There have been cases where a plaintiff didn’t even realize they were named in a case that ruled for/against them, because the PAC that actually filed the case simply used their name to be able to file it in that county.

Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.

You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. WebRTC (like voice/video calling) tends to throw a fit without some sort of TURN functionality. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.

Edit: I looked it up. Cloudflare offers TURN servers, with the first 1000GB for free each month, but then it charges for use after that. But that does mean a server that gets used for video calls more than a few hours per month could end up incurring costs. Because that TURN server would be handling all of the video streaming data, so it will quickly eat that 1000GB limit. It also means true self-hosting is prohibitively difficult, as you’d be tying yourself to an external provider unless you go out of your way to host your own TURN server.

Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.

I’m currently researching Matrix Synapse, to see if it would be worth the hassle to self-host a server.

And this is why generic EULAs should be heavily regulated, and allowed to be negotiated like any other contract. Allow me to pencil in a “you’ll allow me to uniquely watermark the scan of my ID so it can be traced back to this specific request, and agree to pay me $500M if that scan is ever included in a data breach or sold to additional third-party vendors” clause.

Oh, Discord doesn’t want to agree to that? Gee, if the company is deleting everything immediately and there’s no risk of a leak/intentional sale, what’s the harm in including it? How’s the saying go? Something about “if you have nothing to hide”?

Yup. Privatize profits, socialize losses. It’s the way the capitalist machine is able to keep grinding up orphans for the 1%.

Yeah. Sort of like holding two ends of a chain and dragging it back and forth. Even if the chain isn’t traveling the full length, it’s still moving and you could still extract power from the system if you attached something to the middle of the chain.

More Epstein stuff. A document mentioned he was going to get his wife to start taking antibiotics because of an STI he picked up. The joke is that he wouldn’t want to tell her it was an STI, so he’d have to find some other way to justify the antibiotics.

My big concern right now is actually the fact that the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis. I suspect it will quickly fall prey to the Nazi Bar Problem. I gave the app a fair shot. Opened it up, and the very first post was a “the Jews are secretly running the world” post from an account named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews. It had a caricature of a Jew (big nose, long sideburns, and yarmulka) reaching out of a TV to steal a watcher’s brain.

Okay, not a great first impression, but that’s inevitable on a free speech app. Let’s keep scrolling. Three or four more posts down, and I was met with a “Hitler was right about the jews” post. Yikes. The fact that those were up front and center (on the default “Ranked” sort) for my brand new account was… Not a great sign.

Time will tell. I do hope it succeeds, because TikTok is clearly an awful choice. But it needs to succeed for the right reasons, and not just become a Nazi cesspit.

Edit: I just opened the app again after posting this comment, and the second post on my feed was a white pride “they’re trying to replace us/white genocide” (common white power talking point to recruit new members) post:

Edit 2: Looking at the account’s follower list, it looks like users are largely using the Palestinian genocide to justify Nazi imagery. Equating Israel’s actions with Jews in general. There are a few straight up Hitler glorification accounts on the follower list, which have “the Jews are genociding Palestine” types of posts right alongside 1488 posts, swastikas, and Nazi salutes. Here is a quick screenshot of some of the followers:

And here is a screenshot of how those followers are using the Palestinian genocide to justify the holocaust:

The upper post is a bunch of dead Palestinian kids and babies lined up in a row. The lower post is obvious. Both (re)posted by the same @HitlerTheHero account.

I mean, it’s charted #1 on social media on the app stores. It’s an explosive rise in popularity, but that’s not unheard of. If anything, I suspect that the popularity is manufactured. It’s likely some company running an astroturf campaign to capitalize on the fact that people are tired of TikTok’s censorship BS.

Yeah, I gave it a shot. I opened the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews are secretly ruling the world” conspiracy theory post from a user named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews… Okay, maybe a fluke. Not a great first impression, but let’s see what else the app has to offer. Then a few posts later there was a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post.

So yeah, it has definitely fallen prey to the Nazi Bar problem.

Saw “no censorship” in the description, and had suspicions because it’s a common dogwhistle for “we’ll allow the most vile people as long as they’re not technically breaking the law”. Got the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews secretly run the world” post followed shortly by a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post. Yeah, the problem with “no censorship” is that it inevitably falls prey to the Nazi bar problem.

Make it more than they earned, plus a large percentage, and factor in how likely they were to get caught. At the size of Google, companies are essentially just big statistics machines, doing risk/reward calculations. Imagine you have an illegal business opportunity that could make you $100M in profit per week. Your risk of getting caught is estimated at ~25% per week. And your fine for getting caught is $150M per week. Even though the fine is higher than the expected profit, your net profit per week averages out to +$62.5M.

That is the original $100M, minus the $150M*25% (or $37.5M total). Yes, some weeks will be a loss. But if the numbers stay consistent, you’ll make more in the long term simply due to the fact that you don’t get caught every time. As long as you manage to avoid getting caught for at least two weeks, (which shouldn’t be difficult, considering the 25% estimated chance of regulators catching on) you’ve already made enough money to cover the fine.

Of course the company will do the illegal thing, because the math says it will likely be profitable. And even if they’re caught, it was just the price of doing business. As long as they made more than the expected fine over the given time period, they have profited.

And what does publishing something do? Does it make it widely available to the public?

The more I read, the more this sounds like toxic productivity. It’s okay to have downtime. It’s okay to just relax. It’s okay to have hobbies that aren’t entirely focused on health or mental wellbeing. It’s okay to occasionally indulge hedonic tendencies like porn. Hell, most doctors say that jorkin it a few times a week helps keep things healthy.

Maintaining this kind of lifestyle will likely result in burnout sooner or later.

It’s probably because TLS uses your system clock to validate certificates. If your clock doesn’t match the server you’re connecting to, TLS fails and you get an “https failed/connection is insecure” error. And Windows likely uses https in the store to ensure MITM attacks can’t replace valid downloads with malicious ones.

Microsoft: “Let’s fire our QA teams. We’ll force our dev team to use AI in coding. Then we’ll have the public test it.”
Also Microsoft:

Yeah, mods on proton get weird sometimes, especially if they require things like Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable packages/runtimes. I think ProtonTricks allows you to install those directly in the prefix, but I personally haven’t had any success with that. Every time I try something that involves stuff like that, I end up getting white screens, black screens, or just full CTDs.

Yeah, the sad reality is that there are some critical pieces of software that just outright refuse to support other OSes. Personally, I’m forced to use Macs at work because QLab is the industry standard for my line of work, and that software is only available on Mac.