This hits close for me in a slightly different way.

I kept up with very few high school friends past college, but one was my best friend who, to my knowledge, is straight. We regularly exchanged messages, and even though we were geographically challenged (he moves around the country/world a lot), I fell harder for him year after year.

About 18 months ago (14 years we graduated from HS) I finally expressed my feelings, shortly after we got together in our hometown for the first time in a while. I received no response and haven't heard from him since. He's not homophobic and the worst I expected was some temporary awkwardness, so I was totally unprepared for that.

While the crush has mostly worn off because of this, I'm still devastated that I seem to have lost my longest and best friend. So mine isn't so much a story about one who got away as it is being spurned by one I trusted. I'm a bit bitter right now but I do hope to reconnect with him some day.

+1 for Fastmail.

I've been using it for about 3 years. I'm on the Standard plan (middle tier). It's $4.20/mo. per user when prepaying for 3 years and ranges up to $5.40/mo. for monthly billing.

Not sure if there's a (practical) limit on domains or aliases, but I have 7 domains and a few aliases plus a wildcard. Includes 30GB of storage per user.

I read "server" as computer server and was really confused...

I really like the lighting in the second photo.

While I love the first two for their almost psychedelic quality, I don't know that they fit here for a banner. But I'd love to see them...somewhere. They have almost a gamer quality to them.

I like this , but I see what you're saying about the backgrounds. I think it would look great with transparent backgrounds so they'd blend in with the theme.

I haven't read it, but thank you for sharing. I've placed a hold for the e-book with my library.

The "collapse" of the government in a parliamentary system means the government no longer commands the confidence of a majority of the (typically) lower house, in this case the House of Representatives. Nothing immediate happens, although the prime minister may (or may not) resign, a "caretaker" government takes over until a new elections are held.

Here, it sounds like one of the four coalition parties has pulled out due to disagreeemnt over immigration, which the coalition parties had never agreed on.

I like having storage on a dedicated box. I've been using TrueNAS/FreeNAS for about ten years and I'm happy with it. In my case, when I was first building the storage box, I wasn't really looking for a hypervisor like PVE for running other services so FreeNAS made sense. I used jails for a while before acquiring the NUC I have PVE running on now and migrated everything from jails to containers, and I'm now deliberate about not running anything on the TrueNAS box that isn't directly related to storage.

Yeah I have the same problem. I've been testing both Mlem and Memmy and I was in the latter when I first saw your post. Switched over to Mlem and the image doesn't preload and I don't see a way to open it.

And messages

That feels like my day.

There's a new /c/oneorangebraincell community that would love to see this guy.

You, as a mod, can appoint other users as mods. This is noted in the Moderation page of the documentation (second section, which includes a screenshot).

I'm willing to volunteer.

Thanks, that's good info. If I do go forward, I was planning on going the Ansible route, though I've never used it before.

I've read that it can take a bit of time to sync when you first federate, but that after some period of time it gets closer to real-time with posts and comments.

According to the lemmy.world Instances page, lemmygrad.ml is linked, not blocked. I know it's blocked on a number of other instances.

I'm glad that worked. I'm considering launching a personal self-hosted instance of my own, so I may be in your shoes soon enough.

How did you find the process? Did you use Docker or Ansible?

Have you tried searching for the communities first? As I understand it from some other posts, if you try to access a remote community via URL through your home instance before it "knows" about it, you'll get the 404 error. Someone (you) on your instance has to make your instance "aware" of the remote community by searching for it first. Then, after your instance is aware of the community and federating it, you can access it via URL as you posted above.

You're right that historically there has been one dominant player at a time, and that it is typically in a period of stagnation or complacency when something new comes along to initiate the shift to the next player.

Social networks are great examples of natural monopolies, largely due to the aforementioned network effect. Without a large, diverse user base they tend to become echo chambers.

But you helpfully point out that there are other new players in the market, to the point that a successful reddit may not be necessary to spur competition for the next great thing.

I agree that's a plausible scenario, and maybe even most likely given the pattern of history. And I understand and appreciate that you're not hoping or advocating for that outcome, but highlighting its likelihood.

I also agree with your sentiment that the fediverse seems like a game-changer, particularly in the area of free speech.

I don't necessarily want reddit to die, or even see its user base devolve into dregs. I view competition as a positive. Lemmy and the broader fediverse is competition for reddit and vice versa. Both existing and thriving may make each better over time.

Perhaps one reason we got to this point is that reddit has control over the market on this format, or at least has the dominant network effect. Many seem view this as a zero-sum game, where for one player to advance another must fall away, but I find that perspective short-sighted.

I respect (and share, to a certain extent) the opinions and frustrations of recent defectors, but urge everyone to take a long-term view.