It means you can basically run even more Windows programs on Linux than you already can, and that’s wonderful. At the rate it’s going, soon Wine and Linux will be more compatible with Windows software than Windows itself is. Especially older stuff.

User’s post history offers some clues that it may not be worth engaging with them.

Me too. At least with Temu and Wish I know the majority of my money is going directly to some crook in China and not to Bezos. Cut out the extra middleman. Same low quality of goods, direct from the drop-shipper lying about them or perhaps even the factory counterfeiting them. It’s a substantial improvement in supply chain honesty and legitimacy, you’re left with no illusions about the products and all the reviews are fake, so it’s deeply refreshing to not have to try to figure any of it out. It’s always 100% consistent. You know exactly what to expect, with no worry you’re accidentally going to overpay for something you think is genuine and receive a box full of rocks that’s obviously been opened, stolen and returned, nah not on these sites. You’ll get exactly what’s pictured (not to scale necessarily, though). Way more reliable than Amazon.

Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but I want to emphasize that whether you mean it that way or not, it’s true. Each person helping and participating makes the work a little easier and success a little closer. A movement requires leaders and builders, certainly, and those people are often doing a lot of heavy lifting. But it also simply requires members, and numbers, and people just showing up. Your support, simply just being here, means more than you might know.

The AI designed this test plan and gave a bullet pointed list of reasons it’s completely safe. What could possibly go wrong?

It is a perfectly valid approach, and there are also many other perfectly valid approaches. “Better” requires a definition of what you want to be better. If there’s something that’s making you uncomfortable about the process, let us know what concern or issue you’re seeing with it and maybe we can guide you to a better way for you. But there’s nothing wrong with the way they’re doing it. Others may have different preferences (including you, YOU might have different preferences!) but they’re just preferences. It’s not right or wrong, even if some people argue that it is, they’re always going to have some preferences embedded in that judgement. There’s always more than one way to do it. That’s the joy of it, really, and sometimes you’ll have to experiment yourself to find out what ways YOU like the best, that make sense to you, that are comfortable for you, or that do things the way you want to do them.

It’s your own self-hosting setup, you get to make the choices. Sometimes the number of choices can be intimidating and lead to analysis paralysis but the only way out of that is to realize that there really is no way of finding the “best” until you’ve tried many different ways and figured out the “best” yourself. That’s why the only real advice I can give you is to just go through the tutorial you’ve found and do it the way they do it for now. You can change later, as you learn more, when not if you decide you want to do something differently. Because you will. We all do. It’s part of the process.

I agree that the open source package dependency situation in many popular languages and ecosystems has gotten way out of hand. Well, at least my addiction to reinventing almost every wheel myself and self-hosting my own cobbled together infrastructure which has permanently afflicted me with chronic not-invented-here syndrome aren’t feeling like such a crippling disability anymore. Maybe it’s not always such a bad thing in every situation.

When the antichrists leading the formerly-free-world attempt to crucify Gaming Jesus we’ll know the end times have truly arrived.

I think it’s generous helpings of both.

Why would you conclude that a subscription based model makes them immune from corrupt financial incentives? Quite the opposite. That’s my whole point.

Up-selling and cross-selling. It’s just business. Who’s ever going to pay $25/month if the $5/month plan does everything anyone ever possibly needs? Their lowest level pricing model relies on making you anxious about running out of searches eventually, not finding everything you need within that window each month, and not having effective enough tools to find what you need at the basic level. You may personally reject that you need anything more than the basic plan, but the company’s financial incentive is to convince you of the opposite, and don’t think for a second that they’re not eventually going to try to convince you that you need to upgrade. It may seem like $5/month and $25/month are not that far apart, but multiply that across some arbitrary number of users, say, 100,000, and you’re talking about $2 million dollars PER MONTH of potential revenue on the table. And there’s no guarantee they’re not going to eventually start pushing even more expensive products and plans.

They have partnerships with other businesses too, and while those seem like nice enough businesses on the surface, they’re still businesses and they are going to have motivation to find ways to drive traffic and prime you to get subscriptions to them too. The problem is not that these partnerships exist or that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s that they’re another corrupting influence when money is involved and changing hands.

To be clear, I’m not saying anyone involved is evil, that they’re actively doing this now, that they are even necessarily moving in this direction, or that they’re even slightly corrupt at all… yet, but they’re swimming in the corrupting waters of subscription-based dark patterns and they can’t help but be influenced by them. The lust for profits will inevitably drive them mad. It always does. Enshittification does not make exceptions for good intentions.

No, it’s just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn’t something that should be controlled by anyone who’s in it for a profit.

What if we compromise on fractional thousandths of a kilodog?

Journalism is dead. Capitalism killed it, because they did not want any reliable witnesses to or records of what they are going to do to humanity and the planet. History is written by the victors, and they have already crafted their own narrative of technological enlightenment. And we’re not in that story. At least not in any way we’ll recognize ourselves.

Solution in search of a problem in my opinion. I don’t see any problem. Lemmy’s perfectly fine the way it is right now. If there becomes some problem eventually, we can figure out how to solve it when it happens with a more clear understanding of what the problem actually is.

I’m a meat popsicle.

Eventually people might learn why they should not just prefer to have, but actually require open systems for all the computers in their lives, even the ones hidden inside of their appliances, instead of buying these locked down, pre-programmed, remote-updated internet-of-shit devices.

If you can’t get root and boot access on your device, decide what you’re updating it with and when, you don’t own it or control it in the first place. You’re just letting some shitty company (and maybe anyone at all with the amount of security flaws these devices have) directly into your home and network to decide what you can or can’t do with your product (and when and how much it’s going to cost), while they take advantage of every opportunity they can think of to spy on you and extract money from you. Any device with microchips in it isn’t just an appliance anymore, it’s a trojan horse full of gross and creepy salesmen and they’re going to be there forever, watching you and figuring out ways to get more of your money.

Forgejo also has significantly more active development. Feature-wise, I believe they’re currently working on adding federation via ActivityPub as one of the main goals. I also think they have a much better designed and documented system for workers and actions at least at the time I went to spin one up. I switched to Forgejo and haven’t really looked back.

No socks specifically but they do sell plenty of other merch if you want to both financially support and represent them at the same time

You’re talking to a guy who has a Gopher page. He may say it’s “the webstore for his personal business” but he’s clearly living the hobby project life. And to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, we should all aspire to be able to find success like this.