𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Good luck!

You rule.

I stay away from Usenet because I’m particularly susceptible to it as a time sink. It’s worse than Lemmy, than Mastodon; I can spend hours in Usenet, and I’m really incapable of not doing that when I have access to it.

But I’m really glad it’s still active.

It really depends on your needs, like most things.

What are you trying to achieve? Just set up a place for folks to chat about a topic?

I’m inclined to suggest that if you’re moving from Discord, then I suggest you pick a public server and create your room there. You already aren’t self-hosting or getting bridging, so no loss. A public Mjolnir used to be on matrix.org but isn’t anymore, so you have to be alert to spammers; if you have enough people you’re willing to make mods, this is manageable. Matrix spammers tend to pop in, drop some fishing or advertisement; if you have someone watching 24/7 they can ban-and-remove the spam pretty quickly. Otherwise, you clean things up whenever you’re in there; it’s annoying, but not arduous. If you’re a small room, you won’t attract the spammers as much; if you’re larger, I’d hope you have enough folks who can help mod.

I would not try to self-host out of the gate. If you do, start with a beefy server; you’ll need a bunch of disk space - maybe not immediately, but as soon as one of your users joins a big room on a different server. I’ve only tried Synapse; you might try one of the other servers, but they’ll all have the same disk space issue: it’s a result is the design of the protocol.

Matrix is probably the closest; it’s federated, there are a dozen more-or-less actively developed clients, for just about every platform. You can self-host your own server. It has a lot of features.

It’s not perfect; it has a lot of flaws, but there’s slow progress. Things to be aware of:

• Despite it being “open”, there’s really only one server that supports everything, and that’s Synapse. It’s where all of the new features are tested and land first. All other (half-dozen) servers lag Synapse. And - IMHO - Synapse is an awful piece of software. It’s a giant mess of Python, and it lumbers along like a bloated, arthritic hippopotamus.
• The way federation is done makes it very expensive to self-host. Everything’s fine until one of your users joins - even briefly - a popular room, and suddenly your server’s downloading 9GB of history and binary blobs. This can be managed, but you may as well quit your job and become a full-time admin, because
• moderation tools suck. Aside from the most basic banning, all mod tools are external servers you have to set up and configure and run in parallel. And the most essential tool - mjolnir, a “this account is a troll spam bot, so ban it site-wide” is still very beta-ish and it’s nearly impossible to get any help with setting up or using it.
• It’s really a rather heavy protocol. Lots of network traffic.
• bridging is better in theory than practice. Most bridging requires you to run your own server, and few major hosts provide anything more than IRC bridging, and even then you can’t actually bridge to most of the biggest IRC networks because it’s blocked by the IRC providers, because Matrix bridges are a major source of spam grief for the IRC rooms. And setting up a bridge between a Matrix and an (e.g.) Discord room is a fairly significant PITA, requiring a Discord mod to perform several steps.
• It does hand e2e encryption for DMs, but it’s honestly pretty bad at it. It’s a better Discord than a, say, Signal. Key management is a minor nightmare and it is both prone to breakage, and complex, with a lot of fairly obscure terminology needed to understand any but the most basic operations. Like, when it’s working, it’s fine, but as soon as anything goes wrong, you’re in a world of pain. I came count the number of times I’ve lost entire chat histories with people.

And to throw up a challenge before anyone disagrees about that last point: try changing clients several times, across devices, and on the same client. Delete your client and reconnect (as if you lost your phone). See how long you can go before you hit a point where you can’t get to your chat history.

It’s a good alternative to Discord; it’s categorically better than Discord. If you’re not hosting the server, it’s better than IRC; the user experience is simply undebatably better. It’s a crappy IM platform. It needs far better mod tools, and some competitor to Synapse has to get out of Beta.

But if all you’re looking for is an alternative to Discord and you ate fine with using a public service, it’s a good choice.

TELL EVERYONE ABOUT USENET

Yeah, there was, and probably still is, a bunch of warez trading on Usenet. But everything that was good and holy was also on Usenet.

Anyway, plebes won’t show up there anymore because nobody runs free nodes anymore, and the worst of us are so used to being products the idea of paying for a service is a foreign concept.

Usenet existed long before the Eternal September. It survived that and the subsequent decades; it’s never been some sort of secret haven - it’s been a haven only because it wasn’t trivial to use, web interfaces for it never caught on, it started costing money to be on, and these are deal breakers for the people you don’t want on Usenet.

Agreed, SQLite 💗. It does have limitations when you need to scale with remote connections and concurrency; then you have to start bringing in layers, and it’s really not designed for that. For those jobs, it’s just better IMO to reach to something designed for that use case to begin with.

You make my heart hurt, you’re so right. It’s getting harder and harder to find RSS or Atom links on sites. The more people rediscover these technologies, the more chance there is that site developers will continue to provide them.

It would be fantastic if more people would rediscover Usenet, and IRC, and ditch the shitty knock-offs like Discord. There’s a pretty big contingent advocating for Jabber, which I’m ambivalent about, having been there when it started and when it (effectively) died and being very conscious of its flaws and limitations… but, still, these are all open standards and old-school internet - sometimes pre-web! - and they’re often still better than the commoditized successors.

Embrace and encourage the new infusion of youth! Gate keeping is a very post-eternal-September behavior.

Sure. I mean, it’s doing the right thing for the wrong reason, but you do reduce the taxes you pay by contributing to charities.

I like PSQL far more than Maria DB, but it is the most stupid software for upgrades. It is the reason that, whenever I can’t use SQLite, I use a NoSQL DB like Mongo - any single executable NoSQL that contains the entire DB to a single directory seems to be the common factor. Sometimes you might hit an API change, but I think the number of times I’ve had a production application break because of a NoSQL DB server software upgrade is still at 0.

My cat loves those big moths. He gets irrationally excited when one shows up, which is, like once every two years; I have no idea where they come from. But he’ll spend hours hunting them and when he catches them, he eats them. Totally gross.

The funniest thing is that, for days after, he’ll hang out where he first noticed the last one, desperately hoping another will magically appear.

I guess I should feel bad for the moths, but he’s an indoor cat; it’s all he gets to hunt, and he dispatches them pretty quickly when he catches them, so… I can live with that.

Sort of; I object only to the way you presented it, not the facts.

You’re donating to a cause, which I assume you believe in, which reduces the value used to calculate your taxes. If you make $10, and you donate $1 to a charity, you get taxed as if you made $9. This applies to all income taxes, since state taxes are based largely on your taxable federal income. So OP could try to do something like do their fed taxes and instead of copying “$9” put "$10” where their state forms say to use the federal value, but that’s likely to raise a flag somewhere.

My main issue is the portrayal that donations are “spending money.” You could probably successfully argue that “donating” satisfies the definition of “spending money”, but that does a disservice to charity.

Also, just as an aside, OP would never save $0.45 on a dollar donation. No income tax bracket is that high except for the very rich, and they have many other ways to avoid paying taxes that in no way benefit charities.

Is there an alternative to LinkedIn?

I guess, in a way it’s a good thing, since it’s a sort of zoo for corporate bootlickers, but the career-related social connections are useful. It’s just so caustically pro-business. I guess anything work-centric will inevitably become that way, regardless of how it starts.

The fact that Github and LinkedIn are both owned by Microsoft rustles my jimmies, though.

That’s a whoosh for me. The first one for which I haven’t gotten the reference.