Look at the Steam Deck as an example:

• Linux is preinstalled
• Integrated hardware and software
• Immutable OS that is very hard to bork
• UI is Windows-like which is familiar to the target market
• Good value for the price
• Offered by a well-known and well-liked brand
• Marketed and advertised to the target market

We need more Linux devices like this to gain market share.

Fedi client app developers need to design fedi client apps in a holistic way to include a custom server (as with Mammoth’s moth.social) or create an account for the user on one of a curated selection of other servers, without forcing the user to choose one.

It’s a severe problem with trying to grow fedi that general users are expected to understand how servers work and make an informed decision about which one to join. General users don’t care about this topic and will quickly turn away when it is forced upon them. That’s why the client app needs to handle this for the user without making a fuss about it.

These apps also need good discovery features and feeds with posts that are trending generally and for specific topics. Then devs need to make money with those apps somehow, then they need to market those apps (at this point, it goes beyond just “devs” and expands into an organization with a marketing department, etc.).

Then, hopefully fedi’s inherent advantages of interoperability and resilience will naturally cause people to choose these user-friendly, effectively marketed fedi client apps over things like Instagram, Tiktok, etc. After all, if it can’t compete on its own merits with all other factors being equal, there’s no point to it for most people.

It’s a hard user experience design problem to create an interface that presents all possible types of posts, content and interactions in a sensible way. This “kitchen sink” approach is kind of what Facebook does and as a result its interface is messy and cluttered. That’s not to say it’s impossible or wrong to do things that way, just difficult and unpopular.

On the technical side, it’s really hard to make a client app that works with multiple server softwares, because they all have different sets of features.

In the current world of fedi software development, it would be a single dev or a small, likely unpaid team that would have to make the equivalent of several different client apps combined into one. I don’t anticipate such a large and complicated project being completed until the devs can make a decent living doing the work.

I think it should be really clear to everyone now that the Steam Deck is exactly the kind of thing that Linux needs: nice hardware with a well-integrated OS that is designed to be user-friendly and has some guardrails to prevent you from breaking it.

Some of my fav quotes:

“Ads in an operating system that you’ve paid for from a company that owns ridiculous amounts of money is so offensive.”

“data, it’s like the new gold to people”

“I got the confidence to really jump into Linux after the Steam Deck.”

[regarding the terminal] “You just see text going across the screen, they’re working at lightning speeds.”

“I’m kissing convenience goodbye, I just want control.”

Which features are most important to you? Search/discovery, categorization, tagging, sharing…?

These days I usually just search the web for images and save them to folders on my computer. I have the folders synced to my cloud storage, so I can access them from any computer if I want to.

Nextcloud may be a bit overkill for your use case, but it does have a very good video chat function. It’s also pretty easy to deploy as a snap package or with the AIO docker image. A downside is that the other person has to have an account on your instance and log into it to join a call. However this is not necessarily difficult to arrange.

I’ll quote Vaxry from his blog:

“Obviously, the fact that I am banned from contributing to Freedesktop - and by extension wlroots, is another big factor, and probably the one that finally tipped the scales, because I am no longer allowed to participate in discussion or contribute code to wlroots.”

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-wlrootsRewrite

“I definitely am not a fan of how seemingly weak people online, especially teenagers, have become. Words are just words. Someone calling another person a “retard” shouldn’t really be a big deal.”

"I said:

if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server

that is inclusivity

Which I definitely stand by."

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists

Fair enough

In other words, Vaxry is so unwilling to compromise or learn from others that he would rather isolate his project from the broader FOSS community. That says a lot about him and the people who support him, especially since this conflict with freedesktop.org started over Vaxry condoning hateful trolling of trans people within the Hyprland community.

This is a problem for me as a Hyprland user because if I share some rice I made or make suggestions for other users, I’m leading people into a community that may be actively hateful towards them. It utterly extinguishes any enthusiasm I have for the project. I like the software but I’d rather be part of a project and a community that I can feel good and excited about. Maybe time to find a new tiling Wayland compositor.

Thank you, I wasn’t sure if that video was re: Traefik or VPN. I appreciate the suggestion.

How did you set up a VPN to securely connect to your services over the internet? I have looked for guides to do this and haven’t had much luck. I would really like to implement this in my setup.

I self host jellyfin, nextcloud, owncast, tandoor, komga, photoprism and searxng. I use nginx proxy manager for a reverse proxy and SSL cert automation. Works great for me but I would like to get into traefik sometime.

I self host for privacy reasons, also it’s fun, it’s a learning opportunity and sometimes self-hosted services are functionally better than the other options out there.

Jellyfin is ideal for privately sharing music. Plex is similar but not FOSS.

That’s funny, my phone is kinda small so I had to scroll that horizontal menu with the download button, over to the right to access that button 😆 Thanks for the screenshot

I also ran into that issue the other day. Did you file a feature request for that? If you didn’t I will. In general though I really like Moshidon. The video player functionality I want is not available in any mastodon client app except for Fedilab technically, but its implementation is still very primitive for now.

That’s awesome, nice work! I just tried out Tesseract and it seems to work quite well. Feel free to leave some links where people can try it or contribute to the project, if you like.

True. A lot of things could be improved with the design, this is really just to visualize the core concept. I was also thinking a play/pause button on the pinned player would be good.

Getting fancier, maybe double tap on the right of the pinned player to skip forward 15 seconds would be sweet for skipping ad spots, and when you go the original post, the video could be fixed to the top of the page while you scroll into the replies.

I think participating in communities which are centered around discussion of open source software is the ideal solution. That could be on Lemmy, Mastodon, GitHub, Reddit, Discord, wherever devs and users congregate (and, whatever platforms you find tolerable). I think the information you are seeking is too varied and in some cases subjective to be captured and parsed by an automated tool. And it would be great if you could help others by posting in those communities about changes that you are unhappy with, so others can make informed decisions.

Agree, if you are running containers on a casual or “just for fun” basis then automatic updates are fine. But the more you or others depend on the service running, the more it makes sense to perform an update manually, when you have time to troubleshoot any problems that may arise. Or, even update on a test setup first to identify issues and then update on your production setup.