Do you have a credit card?

If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.

You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.

And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that’s no reason to not take free shit from them.

(And to the next group of people: I’m closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven’t banned me, so I’m inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than “nothing”.)

The only way you could make that worse is if Palantir bought them all first.

The New York Times, a daily puzzle site with a side business in bad opinion pieces

LMFAO, just, LOL.

fax the FBI their plans

Opsec is not the fediverse’s strenth, no. Anything you post here is going right to the FBI, courtesy of Palantir and Peter Thiel.

Anything you post online ANYWHERE is likely to end up there: if it’s not e2e encrypted, then you just told the FBI, and even if it is, you probably shouldn’t trust that it’s actually secure unless there’s public audits showing that it is, and you’re using a reproducible build from verified source.

…also, unrelated rant: stop taking pictures of people at protests and posting it online. Why is everyone doing state security’s job for them?

Look, if you can post your way out of this, then we should have been able to post our way into not having to.

But, judging from the outcomes of all THAT posting, I strongly doubt there’s a single thing anyone can post anywhere that’ll suddenly make people decide to wake up one day and go ‘Oh my! What a mess, I should throw away my entire world view and do ________!’ because that’s very much not how people actually work.

Best case, there’s enough pain and blood to nudge the lazy fucks into doing something in 2 years, but really, that doesn’t do anyone any good for the next 2 years and also very much isn’t assured: at least some of the lazies are actually in favor of this and the facists have a pretty good grip on the media and social network effects, so you can’t make a toot and expect it’ll do shit.

We’re past the polite letters to the editor stage, and in the misery and violence phase, even if it’s still being mostly coated in decorum.

I’m not a huge fan of the email analogy, because nobody knows how email works who isn’t a tech nerd anyways.

See: people who ask what your gmail is, not what your email is.

I’ve started explaining it as picking a user and server name you like, and then that’s how and where you login to the ‘fediverse’.

Less tech people have seemed to follow that at least, since it’s a much simpler thing they can understand: they get what a username is, they get what logging in is, and they get that a username and a login lets you access something.

And before everyone comes in with why that’s a horrible explanation, I know. It’s terrible, but it’s terrible enough that I’ve got family members who can’t keep left and right clicking sorted out to understand what I’m trying to say and how all these things are related.

Oh, maybe I wasn’t clear: this isn’t the usual mods doing mods, they were such bad posters the admins banned their entire sub.

Getting banned from a subreddit is easy, getting the admins to kick you, your friends, and your community off the site requires exquisite and well-developed shitposting skills beyond those of most mortals.

Hexbear is the big instance of people who are so fucked they tend to get banned even from there.

No, no. They’re a group of posters so awful they got banned from Reddit.

And let’s be honest, you can be pretty much the worst person on earth and survive in your own little bubble on Reddit, but, for whatever reason, they couldn’t.

Insert oh-no-well-anyway meme here.

It’s both horrible discovery and a limited number of creators.

But, for discoverability, https://sepiasearch.org/ might help you find things to watch, since it’s the only good multi-server search I’ve seen. (And run by the peertube devs.)

No no, he’ll just change it so that all posts must be 14 words. Much less obvious.

As someone who’s had the misfortune of having to use Salesforce professionally, this might actually improve the quality of their slop.

Mine? Mine? Mine? Mine mine mine mine.

The biggest thing I’ve started not doing (stopped doing? whatever) that’s helped me is spending any time using search engines to find things.

If I’m looking for something I try to find some sort of forum, or irc channel, or discord group, usenet group, or message echo or whatever and just ask what’s (probably) still an actual person.

Maybe google would be faster but holy crap has my quality of shit-i’ve-found online gone way the hell up once I stopped asking a computer to send me to something obscure or old or odd, because every search engine has basically decided to go all slop, all the time now.

The only drawback is if I’m asking someone a question about OS/2 on an echo, it might take me a couple of days until some greybeard comes back with an answer, but so far it’s been 100% accurate shit, rather than either nothing useful, or incorrect slop.

It also fixes that weird thing where the internet feels like nothing but bots and AI slop generators, because you’re in a situation where you can almost 100% be certain the person you’re talking to is still actually a human and it also leads to lovely conversations about other shit, and really brings back the feel of the “old” internet before it got infested with big tech who capitalism-ed it into a pile of garbage.

A generative AI company ripping everyone off? Say it ain’t so!

AI slop? On my website full of mostly garbage articles? Well I never.

“As you can see, the computer clearly indicates I’m the winner of this discussion. Once you’ve talked to the AI and understand your failures, we can talk.”

Sounds like he’s a lot of fun.

The crossovers are mostly meh,

Good news! They announced today that fully half the printed cards going forward are going to be crossovers! This has been met with uh, less than overwhelming enthusiasm and support.

Genuine question: is the fact that banned cards skew towards the newest sets a new phenomenon in Magic?

Not really.

If the card is stupidly powerful it gets banned not too long after it’s printed, because, well, that’s when someone figures out how to break it. So, ultimately, you don’t end up with a lot of old cards being banned because if they’re not broken as fuck when new, they’re probably not going to suddenly* become broken as fuck in 10 years.

*Something new could be printed that makes them broken, but that’s not especially common.

The issue is that this is a boiled frog situation: things have slowly gotten worse, and people have grumbled the whole way down, but it’s at the point where WotC is adding the garnish and seasoning to the soup and everyone is suddenly realizing that they’re also the boiled frog, not just people who play insert-format-they-don’t-play-here.

Modern players rolled their eyes as standard got shittified to the point it’s essentially a dead format in paper, and then commander players rolled their eyes as WotC printed super powerful cards into modern and it also shittified to the point that it’s also mostly dead in paper format.

Commander players are now freaking the hell out because they realized they’re absolutely next up on the shit-train to crapsville, but their response was to scream death threats to the one and only independent entity that could have made ANY sort of difference, resulting in said entity giving up and handing over full control to WotC.

As someone who’s been playing this stupid game since 1993, I’m a little sad because it’s both obviously clear that it’s time to sell all my cards, and never think about MTG again because there’s absolutely no way back to what the game was since Hasbro has to milk this cow until dust is coming out the udders because they literally have nothing else of value left to squeeze.