Thank you for writing this. I liked the opinions on the books I was already familiar with, and it’s given me some ideas for future reads.

The invisible pink unicorn is the traditional atheist approach.

Zeronet worked pretty similarly to how op describes. It was really clunky and barely usable when I checked out out, years ago. I thought it been abandoned. It turns out, relying on household grade internet upload speeds and having data spread across hundreds of peers that needs to be hashed and added to as people post is kind of inefficient.

I’ve had this issue before. My limited understanding is that your home server fetches copies of communities somebody on your server is subbed to. But if you’re the first person, it can take it a few hours to federate (took mine a day.)

I understand those concerns, but I’m not sure if this really improved the security of mastodon, an inherently very insecure software, and it definitely deprived us of a useful tool. Defederation works at stopping spam, but I don’t think it really helps much when it comes to preventing people from seeing things you post. It stops a single server, but bad actors can just migrate to a new one, or spin up a new hostname.

I hated the backlash the bridgy dev received. His project was genuinely useful, helped to solve one of people’s most common criticisms of the fediverse. And after he was browbeat into giving it up, everything still got hoovered up by bots and fed into AI models anyway.

I think Debian unstable works great on laptops, and it’s hard to beat for stability.

The books Walkaway (Cory Doctorow) and Accelerando (Charles Stross) both give me nostalgia for a time when the future seemed like an exciting challenge instead of an unbearable one.

This might be a stupid question, but I’m only so-so at wireguard. Do you experience that kind of loss using WG at home, on wifi, between your phone and server?