Are there reasonably okay options to paying digitally without the surveillance part (or at least less of it as compared to credit cards?) Blockchain is a nonstarter due to the practical limitations in sustaining proof of work and stake.

What a great thing it is, to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it.

The UCI has not yet responded to a request for comment, but a Home Office spokesperson said: “We do not routinely comment on individual cases. All visa applications are carefully considered on their individual merits in line with the immigration rules,” adding: “We have been working closely with organisers to ensure that participants of this event are clear on the visa application process and timelines.”

Give them Visas on arrival. They sure will cycle/arrive early. That is if they need visas.

A perspective about NSO that I find important but not usually covered is how their success is related to centralized mobile phone operating software. One vulnerability exposes billions of devices. Perhaps if we had FOSS mobile OS options as mainstream installations, it would not be as easy for these companies to hack almost anybody at once.

For now, paying for a VPS is relatively affordable. But as was noted elsewhere, moderation is the real cost. Last week’s terrible antisemitism and racist trolling and spam is a case in point. It led me to raise signup effort (registration application etc). That has kind of eliminated local-instance spam by 99% and the random ones are from existing users, who we kick out as they post spam stuff.

The main problem now is in federating with instances that can be hijacked by such trolls and have their content propagated all over. Nothing we can do about that in so far as we want to maintain existing federation bonds. The moderation cost is still significant as we have to take them down manually.

In the end, I think this is an ideal set up for our instance. We are not after numbers. In fact, we want to have a small number of users as a sustainable path, and hopefully support other individuals and organizations spin up their instances.

After upgrading to 0.15.1, I activated the signup form. I haven’t had to deal with the daily trolls. Not ideal but it helps.

Question 1 - yes, ansible is run on your local machine.

Kate + RStudio.

I spend a lot of time working in R so RStudio is a practical choice. It could be better in many ways though, which is why I use Kate for general editing tasks.

Lemmy. Fairly obvious why.

Very interesting read. Supplement this with James Scott’s State Simplifications: Nature, Space and People

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9760.1995.tb00035.x

Real name policy (goverment issued ID and such stuff).

Real name policy (goverment issued ID and such stuff).

Don’t forget the whole idea of federation is that an instance with 10 members is not limited to those members only on content sources. I like it when more instances interlink and therefore reduce the centralization risks while keeping network benefits.

Nope! I would rather deal with spam than everyday surveillance.

I have a very tough time decoupling these lists from their market-led and sponsored base.

As someone who grew up in an African country and spent sometime in North America, I would say there are various reasons one can point to [language, economic conditions, nature of available technology etc]. Most conversations in my growing up were ephemeral + oral. Mobile phones started changing the landscape. Facebook and Messaging apps like Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp changed a lot of conversations from peer-to-peer to ‘mediated’ ones. I would say that most African-based folks are every social and active in discussions. They are just not in the platforms Westerns frequent, and increasingly so with closed-messaging platforms like WhatsApp groups.