IMHO, yes, but you have to bring proof of having voted the next work day for it to count. And the State should respond to mail-in ballots with “I Voted” stickers - mail in ballots have deadlines, so maybe It’d be enough time for a round trip. Or if you drop off the ballot at a post office, postal workers can hand you a sticker. More money for the USPS; it’s a win-win. Change the I voted sticker each year; counterfeiting would be more work than it’s worth.

There’d be forgeries, lax enforcement, whatever; the point isn’t to have a hard enforcement, like money, but just to encourage people to vote.

We’ll never be a country that mandates voting, like some do, but anything that encourages people to vote is a good thing.

P.S. if we can’t convert to a 4-day work week country, I think we should slowly create more federal holidays that fall on specific week days, until we have 52 of them.

Love the idea, but good luck. Federation has some downsides, one of them being it will be literally impossible to get consensus on this from all servers.

… because you couldn’t find the cursor?

It’s worse than that. Apple charges application developers just to put their apps on the app store. This is a big contributor as to why there are so few OSS iOS projects: I’m happy to share, for free, the app I wrote for myself, but I’m not going to pay someone money to do it.

Oooo! Oooo! Do Apple next!

but for downloading / leeching I wouldn’t be as worried because very generally speaking people aren’t harassed for downloading

Comcast and Verizon will threaten to shut off your account if you’re caught pirating; I think they don’t even wait for a DCMA request, they just look at your traffic and if you’re doing piratey stuff, you get a nastigram email. I don’t know how many strikes you get before they enforce it, but the point is they do pursue downloaders.

I don’t know anything about the Zero Trust network you’re working with, but this is essentially the same as what I’m doing with Home Assistant. It runs on the LAN, because it’s controlling everything in my house. The server is on a battery backup, most of my devices are z-wave, and several are battery powered. I can lose internet and power to the house, and still disarm the alarm and unlock the front door, at least until the UPS runs out, which is several hours.

Since HA is on my LAN, accessing it while traveling requires exposing my server to the internet, which terrifies me. I do have VPSes, though, and I have one locked down s.t. it’s only accessible via VPN. It’s not exposing any ports to the WAN except the Wireguard ports. To get to my HA, I connect to that one VPS via the VPN, which is on a VPN subnet with my home server.

The downside is that it is not possible to access my LAN (and, therefore, my HA server) without a pre-configured client. If I don’t have my laptop or phone, I can’t get to my LAN. If my VPS went down, I couldn’t get to my LAN. And, obviously, if my home internet goes down, I can’t get to my LAN. I’d rather be safe than sorry, though.

Hedley! Hed-ley!

It was a joke. Like, it’s turtles all the way down.

Because DuckDNS means you don’t have to buy your own domain. I don’t know their product offerings; they might offer VPN services, like Mullvad.

Wireguard doesn’t provide you with a DNS entry. Without a domain name, you’ll have to always either edit your hosts file on every computer you use, or access your services via IP (https://65.147.69.34:8080/), whether or not you have Wireguard. DuckDNS lets you create http://pafha.duck.dns (or whatever). Using subdomains also helps with reverse proxying, because routing rules are usually configured by host name. For example, your proxy server can route pafha.duck.dns requests to port 8124, which is where your Home Assistant is listening; while pafmympd.duck.dns proxies to port 8091 which is where your MyMPD server is listening. If you own your own domain, you don’t need DuckDNS. If you don’t, it’s very useful.

Wireguard gives you a VPN. It’s for creating encrypted subnetworks. Security, and privacy. It doesn’t solve the DNS problem.

The emojis are something everybody in the family loves, and uses a lot. I don’t know that it’s a complete deal-breaker 🤷‍♂️

I think largely we are aligned on what we are looking for in a platform. The private blog idea is interesting. I normally consider blogs as public, are there private blog platforms?

Sure. If nothing else, you could proxy it through an authenticated endpoint, requiring people to log on to view it. But I don’t know the blogging software space very well - there are probably projects with built-in support for this. I’ve started looking around; I suspect the ideal platform isn’t so much a blogging platform, but it’s designed more around a blog design.

If you come across one, please let me know! I’ll keep updating that CryptoPad document. I also started a spreadsheet, which is better suited to the data than a document table, but CryptoPad doesn’t have the ability to embed assets from other documents (other than images), so I’m just doing the table manually.

On the other hand, projects die when the maintainers lose interest.

Absolutely. Good projects attract multiple maintainers; there’s a bit of Darwinism there. When one project I used was archived, I offered to take over maintainership; the author didn’t want to hand it over to me, so I hard forked it and worked with distributions to replace the no-longer-maintained version with mine. It’s the OSS lifecycle, right? And the best thing about OSS - if the maintained loses interest, someone else can simply take over. And if no-one does, maybe it isn’t worth maintaining.

I would like a platform that I know is going to stick around.

This is so important! Especially for this purpose. Getting several people to join a platform and then put content on it introduces a lot of technical inertia. That’s why it’s important for me to reduce the odds of the project changing their terms of use; increasing costs; moving popular, free features to the “paid” column; and other shenanigans.

On the other hand, something like Zusam, if the maintainer loses interest it will likely also die.

See, I don’t believe this. It’s possible the project would die, but so often have popular projects lost their maintainers, and new people step in. They fork it, or have a peaceful transition of ownership, but the project carries on. Yes, some just disappear into obscurity, but the popular ones tend to keep going, sometimes under other names. X11 to XOrg; OpenOffice to LibreOffice; OwnCloud to NextCloud; so on and so forth. And increasingly, many projects add data migration paths from other projects, especially if they’re popular. Many ActivityPub servers can import Mastodon account data, for instance.

I do have reservations about HumHub, but it’s the first platform I’ve seen that even comes close to being a familiar feel for users.

It does look pretty close to ideal for what we’ve been discussing; I need to install it and try it out, because so far all other options have failed in some way. There’s another forest of options in the blogging style, so I’m still optimistic, but I may try HumHub anyway.

I’m considering the other idea of using Dokuwiki as well, which I guess comes in as being more similar to your blogging idea.

Yeah, that was an interesting avenue; I suspect the user client experience will be where that fails for me. It can’t require any technical expertise.

Fair enough. I’m leery of easy comparisons, because in my mind, they’re such radically different things. It’s like saying a Wiener Schnitzel is basically like American fried chicken. I mean, I guess? They’re both meat, they’re both battered and fried. But they’re drastically different foods.

Shit, I’ll go further: my pet peeve is crème brûlée. It’s egg yolk, heavy cream, sugar and vanilla. That’s it. But every chef at every restaurant has this compulsion to fuck with the recipe; their crème brûlée has lemon, or strawberry, or sage or cayenne or some shit… just leave the fucking recipe alone! Stop trying to be edgy or special! They always have to fuck with the recipe, and it drives me nuts, because it invariably ruins an already perfect recipe. You add shit to a perfect recipe and it can only get less perfect. So, IMO, my crème brûlée, is not like the crème brûlée at that restaurant: not because I’m some awesome chef, but because crème brûlée is a stupid easy recipe that’s almost impossible to screw up… unless you add fucking jalepeño or some such crap.

Uncle Dan’s Classic Ranch Dip

Ingredients 1 packet Original Southern Ranch Dressing 2 cups sour cream 2 cups mayonnaise

Uncle Dan’s Classic Ranch Dressing

Ingredients 1 packet of Uncle Dan’s Classic Ranch 2 Cups Buttermilk 2 Cups Mayonnaise

And if you don’t agree that Uncle Dan’s is the pinnacle of ranch dressing, here’s the first search result recipe for homemade ranch dressing; there are 11 ingredients, but the first three are:

Ingredients ▢ 1/2 cup mayonnaise ▢ 1/2 cup sour cream ▢ 1/2 cup buttermilk or regular milk

That’s an unfair comparison.

For grandparent:

Ranch is mayonnaise-based, but is savory, with seasonings and plenty of umami. There’s a lot of variation, and IMO the best version is Uncle Dan’s (Amazon).

It’s a cream dressing, so plenty heavy. Often used for dipping stuff. With Uncle Dan’s (which comes as a powder), you mix it with buttermilk and mayo for a dressing; or you mix it with Greek yoghurt (or sour cream) and mayo for a dip.

She’s an ally in this issue. She’s demonstrating some backbone; many Republicans oppose Trump, but few are willing to speak out for fear of their jobs. That’s what this article is about: the cowardice of the many, and the bravery of a few.

Nobody is saying Liz is a progressive, or any kind of liberal, just that she’s standing up against a bully.

Absolutists are at the core of what’s wrong with American politics today.

Your’s do. Mine work by assembling bits through a stochistic matrix. Same process, I’m just killing the planet a lot faster.

Apples and oranges.

Wireguard is a VPN technology. DuckDNS is a service that lets you create a subdomain on the duckdns TLD and point it at your server. They do completely different things.

You would use DuckDNS if you don’t want to rent your own domain (“rent” because it’s a recurring payment for something over which you have only nominal control). It provides no security, no access control, and it creates no network. It’s just a pointer in the global DNS DB.

Wireguard is a VPN technology, for creating private networks.

One is like a mailing address. The other is like a strongbox. You could give the strongbox to a friend to deliver it to someone who has the key (Wireguard). Or you could write a message on a postcard and mail it (DuckDNS). Or you could put the address on the strongbox and mail it (DuckDNS + Wireguard). The point is, they serve completely different functions.

The two could be used together.

All is dog whistle. Especially patterns.

Patterns are a government psyop.

I agree with you on how core emoji reactions are. … It’s clear I’m going to have to settle in some respect.

So, in thinking about this in more concrete terms (as opposed to vague dissatisfaction), I suspect what we really want is a blogging platform with robust authenticated reader interaction tools.

The issue with AP, and therefore most of these servers, is that (a) it’s expected to be public by default (the privacy point you mention), but almost more fundamentally (b) they’re aggregators. People either to a bunch of people and get a feed of a bunch of posts by different people (Mastodon/X); or they join a community and see a bunch of posts by different people (Lemmy/Reddit).

I think what we want is blogging software, with an endless stream of content posted by a single user, but with reactions and threaded conversations per post. I’ve been thinking how this could be achieved on various AP platforms, but while you can almost get there with groups/channels/communities, the sticking point is that they are all ultimately designed around any member being able to post top-level content. I haven’t seen any system yet that (easily) allows restricting posting by individual accounts.

I need to look at pump.io clients, because I think pump.io started as more of a blogging protocol. And the more I think about it, the more I believe a private blogo is a better foundational model.

Is federation or similar mandatory for you?

No. In fact, I suspect it may work against the privacy requirement. I expect that, even if one of the federated servers met all of the requirements, federation would have to be disabled to prevent leakage. Although, at least one server supports authenticated pull (one of the Misskey forks), I’m guessing it’s not likely that federation will be needed.

As in, do you want something that allows your users to interact with users that are not part of your family and not on your platform, eventually able to completely replace the mainstream social media?

For me, no. I want my SIL to be able to easily post pictures and videos of my toddler niece, and all the family members to be able to oooh and aaaah, and react with little heart and exploding brain emojis, and comment on how the fact that she climbed a jungle gym is a sign she’s sure to be an Olympic athlete. The parents absolutely do not want those videos showing up in TikTok.

Or is a completely closed platform ok, in terms of it’s only your family and friends, and people have to go elsewhere (e.g. back to facebook) to interact with others?

Ideally, it’d support ActivityPub. I’m not sure how; perhaps through the user creating channels and setting a federation flag, or marking it as public. I think the expectation that people will understand that inviting someone from another platform effectively makes all of that content public, might be bit much to assume. So I think having private and public channels, where public channels are federate-able would be fine. But I’d rather not have federation than have a system where people are prone to make privacy mistakes. Is there an option I’m missing?

I use Nextcloud, developed by a company,

Yeessss; I think that’s a little different, because NextCloud was forked off of the completely open source OwnCloud, which was well-established and license protected long before NextCloud came along. If NextCloud tried any shenanigans, they’d be eviscerated. HumHub is a bespoke solution, right? So they can’t be accused of stealing an OpenSource project’s s code.

I use Photoprism, which the base edition is FOSS but they have proprietary extras that you pay for (like HumHub).

Yeah, this is a good example. I use it, too, although I admit I’ve considered, and regularly revisit, alternatives purely because of this quasi-free nature. So much of PhotoPrism is built on free libraries; the project uses something like 120 OSS libraries. How much of their income do you think they contribute to those projects who’s work their taking advantage of?

I use Home Assistant, though I think they recently transitioned to a non-profit

I’ve been using it for two or three years myself; it’s always been OSS & free software, AFAIK.

they charge for a cloud connected component.

That’s a service. I have no issue with charging for a service, because it’s an ongoing cost to the hoster.

Actually, I don’t have any issue with anyone charging for their software, either; it’s just that I won’t use it, and I don’t trust quasi-free projects. That’s just from experience. Most end badly, either by being bought out and going totally commercial, or just slow enshittification for the non-paying customers.

I write software for myself, and give it away free because it costs me nothing to do so. And I’ve written software libraries that I know, for a fact, are being used as backbone code for a not insignificant chunk of the internet. I’ve never been paid by any commercial company taking advantage of my work, and have little sympathy for people charging for software that’s 90% other people’s freely given code. Which is most software today. You write the entire stack from scratch, including the compiler, like Excel once was? Hell yeah, you deserve to charge for it. Otherwise, you’re just profiting off other people’s work.

HumHub have been around 10 years, so they aren’t exactly new. Plus as it’s extendable, perhaps one day a gfycat or emoji reaction plugin will be added (or if you have the skills, maybe you could make one).

Huh. Never heard of them before a week or so ago. I wouldn’t completely discount them because of the semi-free model; I just am putting them down on the list.