I didn’t tho.

You’re confusing my homelab with my dads OMV NAS that is running kopia as its only non-standard service because I wanted to use it as my off-site target.

I wasn’t presenting OMV as the solution to all of OPs examples, I literally just commented to point out “hey this is kinda like hexos but foss”.

To which you responded “lol no, there is no comparison”. Which is both untrue, and a rude way to go about saying anything.

I don’t use docker via a GUI. And I don’t run docker at all on the NAS running OMV.

My backup solution is Kopia. Two servers, each running an instance that backs up local storage to the other.

OP isn’t talking about a full homelab. If all you need is a home VPN and some network storage via SMB, OMV is fine.

For my homelab, OMV would be clunky af. For the NAS at my dad’s end, it’s ideal.

For a free foss alternative, look at OMV (OpenMediaVault).

Most of what a user might need is fairly simple to set up in the webUI, and if you know what you are doing, you can still go into the underlying debian system and do whatever you like.

Not a shitpost+dodgy link, and it’s your first lemmy post?

Well, yes.

The air doesn’t actually harm the cat, and if one realizes that or doesn’t care, the effect stops.

The point is to set up something that punishes the cat without your involvement. Another example is the way I set a metal measuring cup atop the toilet paper roll, for it to fall down whenever my cat went to rip it up. It only worked because the sound of metal hitting the tile floor scared the shit out of my boy. It took about a week for him to stop touching the tp, after thay he’s never heard the sound again.

If you have a fearless beast, then this stuff isn’t gonna work. But if you DO notice something that your cat avoids or doesn’t like, find a way to use it (without harming your cat, ofc).

That depends on how you trained them.

If you stopped them from jumping up on the coubter, the cat will just wait for you to not be around.

What I did was set a motion activated can of pressurized air up on the counter. Now the cat get’s “punished” for going up there whether I’m there or not.

A couple weeks of this was enough to not have him jump up there for years. In fact he seems to avoid ALL kitchen counters, because he doesn’t jump onto them when visiting relatives or friends, either.

He still climbs all over everything else, just not kitchen counters.

So he’s still doing it?

You’re confusing my use of the word community in its literal meaning, with its meaning as a term in the context of lemmy as a piece of software.

I do not think that sorting people online by where they are from would help.

In fact I think sorting people online by where they are from could even be harmful, and potentially dangerous.

That the change you would make is small, does not change my opinion that it would be for the worse, nor that your reasoning for wanting to make it, as I understand it, seems faulty.

My proposal concerns servers, not communities.

What’s the difference? Servers are communities.

encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues

There’s that false dichotomy again. I think what instance someone is on has very little effect on what content they engage with. And if it does, this change would be detrimental rather than beneficial.

Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.

We must be using different corporate social media. Of course facebook, twitter and tiktok show different content depending on every factor there is. The thing is, they wont confront you with people from your town that have a different opinion. They are tuned towards NOT changing whatever opinion you already have, unless you’re pre-disposed to going down dopamine-laced rabbit holes.

Meanwhile, the fediverse does confront people with differing opinions. That it doesn’t necessarily do so locally, is a feature, not a bug.

I don’t agree.

You present two things as if they are mutually exclusive, when they are not.

The very starting point of your argument seems to be that current niche communities can only exist at the expense of local geographic communities.

As such, you seem to suggest sacrificing existing communities in favor of hypothetical “better” communities based on physical proximity.

Such communities are useful in terms of political mobilization, but they aren’t very fun. People don’t bond over tax rates, they bond over tabletop rpgs, cats, music, movies, etc. And you can’t engage in those bonding activities in local communities until they themselves are big enough to contain such niches within them.

And all of these things can exist simultaneously. In fact I completely reject your view that niche online communities do more harm than good.

Boiled down, your view seems to equate to seeing a bunch of people having fun, and telling them to go do something useful, while completely dismissing that it doesn’t matter whether I learn empathy from my neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world.

What you’re asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.

TikTok is even worse about it. The one time I gave it a chance, it was 90% content local to me. But it was mindless trash. At worst, it was xenophobic rhetoric. Local, doesn’t mean meaningful, or good.

You saw it on reddit all the time, how people from the US often didn’t even realize they were talking to people across the world. Because it’s a foreign concept to them. Say what you will but it is the one corporate platform that doesn’t care where you are from. Everyone discussing something gets pooled into the same communities and threads, regardless of age, sex, or even timezone.

That is a good thing. We need more of that, not less. Because online and real-world communities DO overlap. But you seem to be asking them to match. That would isolate them, not empower them.

Online communities today are the one way that authentically bridges communities of people across the world. If online communities matched offline communities, why would I ever develop a desire to understand not just my neighbor, but also people across the world?

How would I ever go and find out for myself, how people across the world think and feel? Whether my government speaks true about the threats around us, or if there is more to it?

If you overlap a bunch of circles, they all become connected. If you match them, you get bubbles.

That is how corporate social media has been functioning for over a decade, and it needs to be stopped, not propagated. If we sort people into only one group (like where they are from), you isolate them.

But when you sort each person into least two groups or more, you connect everyone to everyone, by virtue of almost every group having members in common with every other group.

That issue being two years, I’m not sure what the current state of things is.

But servers did move towards EU to combat the problem, and haven’t moved back for what I know.

It wasn’t just a problem. It was literally impossible for them to keep up.

Re-locating the server was the only option, as opposed to skipping events or shutting down until the problem was fixed.

Please do not condescend.

I know it doesn’t have to work that way, but for a time, it did.

Here is one of the github issues on the problem.

And yes. It led to instance relocations.

It was either don’t federate, and wait for an update with unknown eta, or move closer to the big instances.

Here is one of the github issues on the problem.

Was not aware of the latency issue. But that’s something that can surely be overcome.

I haven’t checked. I may have been already.

As a support structure providing more open communication, the fediverse might help with that. It in itself is not, and is not supposed to be, democratic. It’s its own wierd mix of dictatorship with the option for the community at large to wrest control away from current leaders, should they want to.

As of now, preferring “going local” would hinder more than help with irl democracy. There just aren’t enough users. If you divided them you’d end up with a ton of tiny inactive communities, rather than a bigish pretty lively one.

And it’s not an either or. Or you can have big communities AND small local ones.

Smaller communities are also something that happens naturally, and is already happening naturally. The reddit exodus was the spark for a ton of new niches on lemmy hitting critical mass.

There is also plenty of non-english, more local activity already. You just might not be seeing it due to your language settings.

Agreed. And it’s not a zero-sum game.

The fact I’m on english speaking fediverse doesn’t mean I’m not on the finnish speaking fediverse.

And what instance I’m on has absolutely no bearing on which one I spend my time.

There currently aren’t many of those.

Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.

Basically, every federated event needs to propagate, but the next one can’t be sent out before the last one is received and an aknowledgement comes back.

That means a higher latency makes an instance federate at a lower rate, causing it to fall behind. Eventually, some instances were having activity from .world show up with days of delay due to being on the other side of the world.

But since your point is mostly ideological/cultural, that doesn’t really matter. You’re talking about identity, not infrastructure.

Which kinda defeats your point. Geography doesn’t matter. You can set up a finnish community on a swedish instance and vice versa.

And I’m not sure what you mean by “reviving democracy”.

The fediverse is explicitly NOT democratic. It’s run by a large group of benevolent dictators (admins and mods) who maintain the environment they and the users of their respective instances and communities desire.

They are kept in line not by votes, but by the fact that any one of them can be defederated by the rest, and they can all be supplanted by any one user with the desire to set up their own instance or community.

The reason Lemmy doesn’t have local communities, is not structural. It’s size.

There are some finnish communities that can just barely be considered active. But if you further divided that down to cities, you’d have maybe one post a year.

Me, with massive lung capacity: Sluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrp

They’re literally using rainbow coloring and sparklies to try and catch your attention.

That should tell you everything you need to know.