Half-expecting it to become closed source ‘to prevent people from hacking it so easily’ as a result of the embarrassment of this sort of thing.

For sure, but in all those access tiers, they would presumably need to verify MY age as well to be sure of which tier I fit into, right? The only reason I can see that I wouldn’t need to use this app is if I’m on a site that isn’t age gated, I think.

Edit: sorry, I didn’t even respond to your second point. I think you’re exactly right about the issue being with them being harmful to begin with. Fixing those issues should absolutely be the first priority.

And I wanna be clear, the idea of a zero proof system is the best I’ve heard of so far in all of these concepts. At least with that there aren’t some insane security issues being overlooked. I’m just wary of the surveillance state future everyone seems to be pushing for.

This is being pitched as a thing for kids, but kids aren’t champing at the bit to prove they’re children. So, presumably this just means that any time you access a service, you’re gonna have to use this to prove your age, as an adult, right?

This is so absurdly funny

I’m fairly certain the RAM is soldered and capped, but it has 16gb, so more than I could reasonably touch anyway. It has a 500gb soldered SSD, but I know there’s a slot for another. The only reason I wanna ‘start’ by getting a rack and hard drives is because I watched my friend lose his mind one weekend while he migrated multiple terabytes of data and he has since repeatedly recommended keeping the storage separate and plug and play, haha.

I’m 100% down to give all this a shot, though. As soon as I upgrade, this laptop is immediately getting recycled into the first step server (and very probably the final step unless something drastic changes in my life).

The unfortunate reality is ‘what I’ve got’ is a 6 year old laptop that represents 60% of my net worth. 😅 Hopefully soon that will change, but for now, I’m taking the free/borrowed friend’s setup.

My game plan in the future is just to turn this laptop and a couple hard drives, though. I think comments like yours and a couple others have convinced me I really don’t need to invest all that much to get started, or really finished with the setup.nif you’re running all that on 8gb of RAM, I think the only thing I’m missing is the storage.

My friend shook me of any notion that I needed all that much, haha. I made a joke about getting a room set up for this and he shamed me by showing my resource use versus his. 🤣

Realistically, I think the only thing I’d ever end up needing is a ton of hard drives. That’s like… the biggest physical thing I need and as someone else in the thread pointed out there are some pretty solid smaller racks for that. My “starter” setup is going to be my current laptop when I upgrade in a year or so.

Edit: Whoa, that sounds like an incredible setup! All that is running fine on 16gb of RAM? Man, I really just need to do more reading about this so I can get a better sense of how all this works.

Hahaha, my friend said the exact same thing. He was debating downsizing and then moved into a house. Once he got situated, he was like, “Fuck it. This is the server room now.” It worked out because it heats that side of the house during winter. 🤣

Ooh, thanks for the tip and the link, I’ll join that community as well! As far as I can tell, just based on what my friend has taught and what I’ve read, these smaller racks are basically all I’d ever need. I’m just a weeb who likes to read… and maybe host a PDS. Possibly a Lemmy instance. And you know, it would be nice to handle my own password manager… (I promise I’ll stop).

I built one myself a year ago. I have a small pcengine APU Box for OpnSense firewall, two Lenovo tiny boxes as Proxmox hosts that run as a high available cluster, and a Mini PC with a JBOD as NAS.

I understand some of these things now! :D (Also, that is such a cool setup. That’s exactly what I wanna end up with!)

His use-case also went up over time, too. I’m in no way qualified to explain, but he trains neural nets for his PhD and does some remote work stuff for some people on his team. As insane as that thing sounds, he’s one of the most frugal people I know and this is like the one thing he really splurges on, and as far as I can tell, he’s not quite using all of it but it’s close.

I definitely don’t see myself ever getting quite that crazy with it, but I definitely want a slice of that capability for myself. If just to host all my tentacle porn. 😔

casually searches for the catgirl distro to completely upend my life for a weekend

Huh, okay. I guess I’ll avoid going over that way. I’m hesitant to outright mute anything that I don’t immediately have a huge issue with in case it becomes a source I learn of something through.

Yeah, honestly, companies that aren’t publicly traded and just do their own thing tend to be fine to okay-ish. I like Valve. Their software works for me, they were fine to work with, and I like some of the projects they’ve helped advance.

I hesitate to say that they ‘get a free pass’. I don’t think any company should get that unless they like… cured aging and gave it away for free or something, but for the time being, they’re decent.

I’d also suggest the folks at GoG are pretty good, too.

I hear a lot of negative talk about those instances, but rarely any specifics. What’s the deal with them?

I see Linux being more and more widely adopted in Europe, for one. I imagine there will be an ‘EU standardized’ distro forked to prevent any issues of interoperability between government systems. Hopefully, such a widespread adoption for PCs encourages more development for Linux from software devs.

The latter part of your points is what really scares me as well. It’s only a matter of time until “protecting the children” becomes “defining what adult content is” and policing gender, sexuality, and politically inconvenient ideas under the guise of morality.

Call me a cynic, but I absolutely do not believe that companies “know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end”. I don’t believe they give a fuck at all. In fact, if somehow a case made it to court and the court laid the blame at the foot of, say, Facebook, or whatever company, for a child being harmed, they still wouldn’t care because the money they make simply existing as is so wildly outstrips any fine they could possibly be levied that it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything differently.

There is real damage being done now and no one seems to care enough to stop it. Why go through all this negative PR about privacy violations if you can just keep doing the same thing?

Now, I can’t claim to know what the “real reason” these laws are being passed is, but if I had to hazard a guess, it would be because it gives more accurate data on users to sell and it is cheaper to advertise to your users when they directly tell you their age. Now, you can freely show pornographic ads, gambling ads, whatever, to your adults without ever having to worry about buying user data to know who will receive it. If a kid sees porn, well, you shouldn’t have let them on an adult account.

Exactly! On the a.roomy.place there’s a good, non-technical breakdown on what makes the concept good and what flaws it has, but the core of it is the concept of owning your own identity. The idea of “login with Google/Facebook” significantly reduces internet freedom, this gives you a way to “login as yourself”, beyond the ownership of a company. That’s the big boon here. With the IETF lending some credence to it now, it’s a good sign that self-hosted identity for your public presence will be adopted into the mainstream and a less locked-down internet is on the horizon.

/over-enthusiastic optimism

The thing that I love about it is that you can host your own account. So if Bluesky decides that they are huge fans of fascism, you can take your account and move to a competitor, Redsky, and not lose your posts, messages, follows, etc (assuming those people also move to the new platform)

So, your account can be the same between any number of platforms, you just have to let the platform add it to their list so their crawlers can show your activity.

And, like Lemmy, you can host your own “node” (I forget what they call it. A box that can whitelist, crawl, and display accounts that people want to be visible there, similar to an instance) but you can also just host your “account” and you can bring it to whatever platform you want and people can be confident they’ve found the same person.

Projects like https://a.roomy.space/ are also super interesting. It’s sort of like how Lemmy uses and reformats the content you might see on Mastodon into a traditional forum, except Roomy can use the AT Protocol to format it into a sort of Discord concept. It’s public, but they also are working on private, self-hosted ‘rooms’ as well. There are also other projects that reportedly have managed E2E encryption for private messaging. (Edit: on this topic, ATP is very pointed at public content. Any encrypted messaging solution isn’t likely using ATP for the messaging, just for your web identity. The major thing here is having a consistent presence and login that you and your friends can follow to various platforms without issue and can’t be controlled by another entity).

I’m super not a technical nerd, so I’d have to go reread documents to give you any specifics about it as a whole. And even then, I can only really understand them to the extent that I’m not actually a developer on the protocol, so I don’t have a first-hand understanding of how it works, but the concept of it and what it seems to enable is just really exciting to me.

Oh that’s so amazing! I’ve been smitten with AT Protocol since I learned about it from their paper. I have such high hopes it gets more widespread.