LiamMayfair

Ah, good suggestion that! $6/mo sounds way more affordable than self-hosting from scratch for sure. I fully agree the really difficult (and valuable) part is the people you bring in and keep, not the tech.

That's a fair point about the portability of their protocol. And yeah, you're right that they don't encrypt everything. I'd meant to say "they encrypt everything you can encrypt without making the email undeliverable" but my fingers decided to type something else.

I've been using Tuta Mail for a few years now. No complaints. Most of the features you would expect. Lack of IMAP support is kinda disappointing but survivable. Their email security is very strong though — they encrypt every part of your email, including subject (some providers only encrypt the body). They're also rolling out post-quantum encryption of email data at rest, which tickles my crypto nerd side.

They've still a loong way to go to match Proton's product suite though, as they only offer Email, Contacts and Calendar for now. They're working on Drive storage next, which is the main reason I currently use Proton.

Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.

Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn't be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.

Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.

Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.

I'm not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn't have its shortcomings, of course. I'm just saying I'd happily take that over the current state of the web.

https://opentofu.org/

If you do, you wouldn't need to stray too far.

https://opentofu.org/

Bring them back! I for one would rather use a forum over a fucking Discord server any day of the week. At least forums are open, searchable and discoverable. Good luck finding the answer to a question you have that some poor sod like you may have also asked in a Discord server months or years ago.

I'd say genuine. Genuine experiences. Sharing shit for sharing's sake. Not for better SEO. Not for profit. Just unadulterated human expression.

That's how I envision using the internet for entertainment in the near future. I'll still use the shitty corporate sites when I must, for transactional browsing. I'm not going to pretend I can push Amazon, Microsoft, Google, online banking, etc. out of my life just like that.

But I will actively seek authentic spaces. They will be a tad smaller than your average social network, Reddit, and whatnot. But I'm certain they're out there and more people will join me in this search and populate these small spaces as time goes on.

Lemmy, Mastodon, the IndieWeb movement. The first steps. I hope to find more!

Yes. Molotov, the URSS Commissar for Foreign Affairs, did try to engage France and Britain to form a defensive tripartite pact, which the Western powers ignored.

The Soviets didn't exactly throw themselves at the German's arms at first. Stalin was very wary of the Nazis, in fact.

But Hitler practically begged Stalin to buddy up with the Nazis, dangling Poland, Finland, etc. as the proverbial carrot in front of them. The Nazi's insistence paid off.

It could very much be true, according to this meta-analysis study that showed up at the top of my results after spending 2 seconds looking this up

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7442038/

I had heard about the causal link between marijuana use and onset of schizophrenia in people predisposed to suffer this illness (i.e. cannabis may be a trigger but these people could've developed the illness anyway later in life).

I didn't know it could cause psychosis too but there you go. How much truth or risk there is in all this, I can't say, but I personally am not willing to risk it.

Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.

Not that there's anything wrong with people wanting to learn mandarin but I wonder whether this uptick in engagement with the Chinese world will just be a blip and soon people will get bored of it and look for more "Western" platforms again.

Like, when the enshittification of reddit and Twitter took root, you would also see very big numbers of users flocking to alternative platforms like Lemmy (like yours truly!) or Mastodon but in the end, after the initial novelty wore off, how many of those people actually ended up sticking around or moved on to something else after a short while?

My point is that it is still way too early to judge whether RedNote will become the next TikTok in the US, or whether this could be the start of a mass grassroots movement for American and Chinese people to get closer.