*to the tune of Redesign Your Logo*

reinstall your system
everything is broken
maybe try manjaro
distro-hop forever

my university email webapp's automatic correction makes a cowsay blush

hm I’m starting to have this feeling of “okay, I could learn this language, but I can’t really do anything cool with it can I? just a bunch of stuff that I can already do much more easily in Python”

so maybe learning new languages isn’t fun per se, and my next tech project could be learning to use the Löve engine or something like that

I’m actually kinda considering learning to do NES dev things, because I’ve been wanting to learn how to use 6502 assembly ever since it was in RedPower. and it would give me an excuse to learn C and use it for something cool instead of, y’know, the same things that I can use Python for except it feels like I have both hands tied behind my back and I’m worried about corrupting or deadlocking my OS or something

That’s right!

It goes in the HTTP protocol

@CIMB4 aw well you can still access it for now if that helps! (link is NSFW) and I’m talking to a friend about possibly hosting it on their server instead of the VPS, so I might be able to keep it running for free on there instead

I also just think that once you’re immersed in a FOSS project, it becomes hard to understand which parts are confusing or unclear to new users, or which parts of the documentation need clarification or rewriting, or even which jargon should be avoided for the sake of clarity. the illusion of transparency becomes a real problem

so I think it might be helpful to have new users do the software equivalent of playtesting where they record themselves setting everything up for the first time so that the devs can see which aspects of that first experience are smooth and which aspects are problematic

I shouldn’t be laughing this hard at this but I am

I have a suspicion that one of the reasons why FOSS tends to be Like That (user-unfriendly, often command-line only, difficult to set up and use, very picky about the environment it runs in) is because there’s a misalignment between the features that are most helpful and the features that are most fun to work on. like you know what’s really unfun to work on in a codebase?

• UI stuff
• UX stuff
• making sure the default behaviors are sane and work well on most people’s computers
• addressing new user pain-points
• fixing environment-specific problems when “it works on my computer”
• writing documentation and tutorials
• finding ways to minimize the tinkering necessary to get the software to work

but you know what is fun?

• adding new features
• increasing the complexity and depth of the system
• devs optimizing their own workflows
• making the system more robust or flexible for highly technical users
• fragmenting the ecosystem in various ways

and in my experience that first list is all things that FOSS tends to be bad at, and the second list is all things that FOSS very often does

I’m glad that a lot of FOSS has gotten very accessible at this point (GIMP and LibreOffice are great examples), but we definitely have a long way to go before FOSS adoption reaches a critical mass (year of the Linux desktop blah blah) and this might be part of the reason why

"Well that wouldn't have happened to you if you used (my pet products or software or services)" is about the same as saying "well it's all your fault for falling for this scam".

I'm once again begging people to stop blaming the victims of shitty techbro nonsense. Switching cost is never zero.

Spicy take:

Normal people shouldn't self host.

From an energy use perspective, the users per watt are WAY higher in a data center.

People are already awful at running patches and doing security updates.

OMG are people awful at doing backups.

From an ewaste POV, consumer electronics just don't have a very long lifespan, fail more frequently, are rarely upgradable, and easily broken. Enterprise grade servers in a data center are better.

Hosted services actually have a SOC to monitor what the fuck is going on and investigate unusual things. An individual normal user would never notice their self hosted server being popped for forever, and we already have far too many zombies.

Sure, megacorps aren't trustworthy stewards of key internet services like email either. But telling everyone they need yet another home appliance, but one you're going to have to fuck with several hours per month to keep running.

Dynamic DNS suck balls, IPv4 is running out, hosting shit being a NAT and reverse proxies and shch is its own thing, and lots and lots of people don't have very good home internet links.

Up front cost - yes, I know people "pay" for their social media and email with their privacy and advertising. But that means that saying they need to spend several hundred on a whole new computer and find a place to put it or rent a VPS or ...

Fact of the matter is, some sort of SaaS setup for web services IS the right solution for 97% of users. Scolding people for being abused by unregulated tech companies isn't solving anything. The right solution is to make people become more aware of the intentional and malicious enshittified bullshit techbros are cramming down their throat, and lobby the government to strengthen regulations.

@tempest ooh yes please! I’d love that if you don’t mind - I’m curious what it is and what it’s like

@desea omg interesting so the idea is that everyone playing on the server is also making mods for the server as part of playing?

@subG ooh omg Warp Drive sounds amazing - I’m going to look that up later. it sounds like exactly the kind of thing that I’d want