• 63 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.

    I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.

    So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.

    Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.



  • To the first point: no. There is no wide-spread hunger yet. People on the very low end of the income scale are suffering and many are homeless, but that’s not what the majority of the people experience. The middle class currently mostly takes hits to their savings or to their comfort, but they still have a roof over their heads and they still don’t suffer hunger.

    To the second point, I can only speculate. I think the EU has a rather stable system. Individual countries might shift to the left or right, but the whole system of the EU is made to prevent anything really bad. Secession from the EU is something that no current member state of the EU can afford and after Brexit not even rightwing extremists want to seriously leave the EU.

    The USA isn’t setup nearly as stable, since they are still running one of the earliest democratic systems in the world. I see two (not mutually exclusive) options there.

    • A republican dictatorship, which is not too difficult for them, because all you really need is the president and the surpreme court being corrupt enough to want that power.
    • Secession of multipe states. Texas is testing the waters, and if they actually seceede, other states might follow. This might either lead to a new edition of the civil war, or multiple rogue nations with nukes. Either way, the USA’s status as an economic and military superpower would be gone. This again would destabilize Europe, since the EU currently doesn’t have the military power to defend itself without NATO. What will happen from there on is anyone’s guess.









  • All of these happened in the wake of major crises.

    Apartheit in South Africa ended, because of massive protests in the country (including violence), massive international pressure (the UN labelled apartheit as crime against humanity and lots of countries banned imports from South Africa), and the South African economy was collapsing due the price of gold dropping a lot.

    East Germany collapsed because of massive economic problems. Storming the border crossings was just the last push. If that would have happened 10 years earlier, the police would just have shot the first row of people trying to cross the border and the rest would have fled. The DDR was already collapsing at that point. And the press conference that caused the storm on the border crossing was actually about East Germany opening the border in a month’s time. So even without the storm on the border crossings, the same thing would have happend, just a month later.

    The Sovjet Union, again, collapsed due to economic problems. Their economiy completely collapsed and with it their power over all the different SSRs. Russia, being the largest and most powerful SSR, being able declaring itself independent of all these other countries that really didn’t want to be part of the USSR without having to use violence is really not surprising.

    It’s kinda as if Great Brittain declared itself independent of the Brittish Empire.

    All these situations you mentioned where already under way for a decade or so, before the events you mentioned did the last push. And all of them where only possible to massive crises.





  • Sorry, no condescension intended.

    Your post read like one written by someone with very minimal knowledge about the subject, which might have been a misunderstanding on my part. So I tried to cover the basics before talking about the rest.

    There is really no shame in asking questions about something where you don’t have experience. There are far more topics I have no idea about than there are topics where I do have a deep understanding.

    So to get on the same page, I’ll summarize what I understood, please correct me if you mean something different.

    • You don’t like ActivityPub, you want a new protocol
    • The system should make it easy to create new, small instances
    • The instances should share sessions with the other instances (=single sign on) based on trusting them
    • You prefer a centralized system?
    • You want the system to not use a single protocol (ActivityPub), but use multiple protocols?
    • ActivityPub based services have bad UX due to the complexity of the protocol

    Is this correct?

    We have a few contradictions here.

    You cannot have a system where anyone can easily create servers and at the same time have shared sessions based on trust. These two requirements conflict with each other.

    Either servers only work with servers they trust, and then you can’t just create a new small server and interact with the network.

    Or anyone can easily create a new small server, but then you can’t do anything based on trust, since you never know if that server was created with malicious intent.

    Regarding centralized/decentralized you have to differentiate between implementation and management.

    All major social networks run distributed systems. If you want to serve billions of users, you need to run millions of servers. These servers are distributed around the globe to give fast access to users everywhere. Chances are pretty high that your ISP has a few racks of Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and Tiktok servers.

    Their distributed system is orders of magnitude more complex than everything running ActivityPub combined.

    But their system works, because they have tens of thousands of highly paid specialists to make them work.

    ActivityPub based services on the other hand have almost no funding and manpower.

    Mastodon is the best in this respect. They have 6 people who are actually working on the system.

    Lemmy has two developers who earn close to minimum wages.

    Kbin has a single guy developing it.

    That’s the real reason why the UX is crap.

    If anything, ActivityPub and the services running on them are extremely underengineered and underdeveloped.

    Btw, there is something rather close to what you seem to want: online forums with Google single sign on.

    The forums are not interacting at all with other forums. No federation or anything at all. There are enough commercial solutions that work really well. And with Google Single Sign On you also don’t have to register for each forum.