You’re right to be frustrated. Mine is the same way. It’s ok to be passionate about that, and to value punishing greedy ISPs by not paying extra for a business account. (In many cases you could even need both, if you might worry about occasional denial of service attacks and need to be sure attackers can’t also knock out your ability to work from home, for example.)

I think there’s a compelling argument in favor of protecting diversity of hosting and preventing a monoculture or a monopoly. It’s not super compelling, but it’s out there.

We also need more individuals paying for “business” Internet connections at home. We need self-hosters to be able to feel comfortable running public services from their homes. And so we need a set of practices and recipes to follow, so a self-hoster can feel confident that, if one thing gets broken into, the other few dozen things they’re hosting will stay safe.

The “family nerd” hosting things for the family needs to be a thing again. Sorry, friends, I know family tech support sucks. It’ll suck so much more when it’s a web site down and nobody can reach their kid’s softball team page, and there’s a game next weekend, etc. But we’ve seen what happens when we abdicate our responsibilities and let for-profit companies handle it for us.

(I wish so hard that I had a solution ready, a corporate LAN in a box, that someone can just install and use. I’m working on something, but I’m pretty sure I over-complicated it. It doesn’t need to be Fort Knox, it just needs to be pretty good. And I suck at ops stuff.)

Agreed. I feel like I’m in one, and the things that make us thrive are being tested like an immune system, against what feels like a deliberate Maek Number Go Up infection. It’s stressful and I can only try to trust that it’s necessary. I guess we have to keep that stock number up or else we get bought and destroyed by a competitor.

Not a fan of this whole system sometimes.

Yes, I host my own with mspencer.net. Feel free to look at whois info. Your registrar should offer something similar.

There’s this problem we have with self hosting standard public services. Everything that could be used by a business seems like it’s either a full time job-sized hobby to maintain it or you have to pay a bunch of money to a service provider for them to handle it for you. Nobody takes the time to create an easy recipe for people to follow.

Luckily, though email was a difficult setup, it’s run worry free since. My emails are delivered because I did the security stuff: opendkim, dnssec, tls, all that. And I get zero spam (apart from exactly two cases where they abused a legitimate sender - whose abuse department responded and handled it) so it’s been lovely. I don’t seem to have time to maintain this so I’m lucky it’s been running well hands-free.

It’s a project but I would recommend it. Don’t let the big tech companies own all email, too. We have to protect that ability by exercising it.

Ohhh I get you then. Instead of checking against an author’s key, and building a distributed web of trust between trusted authors, you build a system that requires everyone collaborate on one shared chain of signatures.

Friend, PGP signed messages were around in the 90s. Key signing parties. Web of trust.

This is one of those “technically true but functionally useless” arguments, and I hate arguing the other side here… Valve always has the option to stop using Visa and, I don’t know, have customers write out and physically mail checks or money orders.

Obviously the number of customers who would do this is microscopic. It’s not a real thing anytime would ever do. But because the option exists, they aren’t technically making the content impossible to sell.

Suppose a person owns an apartment building. What’s the process they should follow to behave as a good person should?

Ok yeah that makes sense. Thanks.

There’s no karma here. No automated mechanism gives the submitter any benefit for a popular submission.

Right?

Devs make mistakes. We want to put up guardrails so mistakes don’t hurt us so much.

Please don’t deliberately line the guardrails with barbed wire.

I got flamed pretty hard for pointing out that this sample size really needs to be in the title, but it needs to be said. Thank you. Sixteen people is basically a forum thread, and not a very popular one.

It’s still useful information and a good read, but a lot of people don’t click through to the article, they just remember the title and move on.

There’s a kernel of something positive in decentralization, though. Me pointing this out feels a little bit like someone saying how good COVID lockdown was for the environment, but I still feel like it’s an important point.

An internet made of lots of small sites is better at resisting censorship and centralized control. People should remain accustomed to using a bunch of individual sites, not JUST the biggest sites on the internet, and amateur sysadmins should maintain their “host a public web server from an at-home business internet connection” chops.

There being lots of small porn sites makes it harder for anyone to apply pressure and make certain kinds of affirming content disappear.

That’s … just about everything positive I could say about this idea. Not a fan.

Omaha resident. I don’t drive through Nebraska from end to end. I just live here.

Dungeons of Daggorath. I had a Color Computer 2 growing up, while we lived in a trailer park. I was still a little afraid of the dark, and the hallways and first person view with jump-scare monsters were a bit intense for me. I’d have to run from one end of the hallway to the other, to get to the bathroom and back.

The impressive event queue system in that game felt like magic to me, like I wondered what happened to the monsters when you turn the computer off.

I was a “smart kid” but I don’t think I was a smart kid.

(Something something original author, something something signed copy of the original source code on my github)

As a BBS era kid, I know you’re not trying to simulate the whole thing right now in the comments section. I’d say: you would have done fine, in any era. People talk, they share methods, and you would’ve picked up whatever you needed.

I think it’s just a common sort of nightmare, worrying about being unprepared, dealing with the consequences of lack of preparation.

I recommend the first few minutes of Jason Scott’s The BBS Documentary, for an overview of how people communicated in the pre-internet days. Especially if you imagine yourself a telegraph operator chatting with neighboring stations in the 19th century or something.

Are people dying right now? That’s an immediate need, if so.

Are they in power right now? Campaigning for reelection right now? That’s an immediate need if so.

Please don’t demonize “let’s focus on immediate needs” as I feel that’s a reasonable thing to want.

Notice the distraction, pulling you away from a current harm and looking instead at an opportunity to blame for a past mistake.

Let’s reopen this criticism of these past mistakes later ok?

I feel like there should be a third box with Wall Street raider types, for scrapers that use Selenium browser automation.

I don’t think it’s entirely unblockable - adsense seems to know to only serve unmonetized PSA ads - but I think it’s very difficult to discriminate between “this is a real browser controlled by an end user” and “this is a real browser being controlled by automated test software”.

Marco! Polo!

CW (continuous wave / Morse code) over RF in the 1900s.

Walkie talkies and car phones in the 1940s.

AMPS cell phones in the 1980s.

Mostly though they’re right. When you used telecommunications systems you were largely communicating with a location or a known station, not a personal identity. Fascinating to think about.