Yeah, that fits to the general experience, although maybe worth mentioning that you really need SSD space or otherwise Synapse will be super slow. Also don’t cheap out on RAM, as Synapse will easily take 1-2GB just for itself.

It has certainly gotten better, but I still wonder if it is worth it in the end. A XMPP server with similar functionality takes 10-100 times less resources (i.e. happily runs on a 5€/month VPS) and is pretty much maintenance free after setting it up. But of course the bridging situation is a bit better Matrix side right now and joining Matrix rooms through xmpp is not the best experience either (but there is a fork of the official xmpp<->matrix bridge that is improving a lot lately).

A basic VPS will only work for a while as they are usually SSD space limited and Matrix likes to blow up it’s database size. Of course it depends on the usage and what rooms your users join, and there are some ways to partially scrub the database, but all in all Matrix server costs tend to increase over time.

Family owned small businesses.

Yes, but these things are mostly hidden to tourists/visitors, so I don’t think this is the relevant factor here.

There is an interesting young fiction book called “The Book of Heroes” by Miyuki Miyabe that has an interesting (Japanese) take on this topic. But I don’t want to spoiler too much.

Why do you think this is directly related to the accumulation of capital in the hands of few and / or libertarian ideals of economic freedom?

In pretty much all societies there are some people going to extreme lengths to fit to some sort of ideal of fame and often subsequently relative wealth. This happened in Soviet states as well with sports and other performance “stars”.

I also don’t think people striving for fame would be unimaginable in an Anarchist society, even if accumulating excessive wealth is going to be difficult in such.

Highly biased source, but it explains why: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-bans-medvedchuk-party/31906479.html

You are probably running a 32bit Rasbian OS on it, which artificially cripples the fully ARMv8 and 64bit capable CPU of the RPi4. But I think there is a 64bit Rasbian version now?

I think you are romatizising local neighborhood connections. I am old enough to remember time before smartphone and even internet in general, and people did not have deep meaningful relationships with their neighbors back then either.

With rare exceptions people don’t chose their place of living based on common interests with their future neighbors, so usually such relationship were and are very shallow (drinking beer and doing barbeque or something centered around the kids).

There are exceptions like communal housing with a common vision, but those are a different beast all together and internet rather helps establishing something like that.

So I don’t think it is helpful to yearn for a past that never actually existed outside the rose tinted glasses of some elderly people that don’t like internet and smartphone 😉

Why not both? I don’t think those two things are dimetrally opposed and before internet and TV people read newspapers and books (or went to bed early because no lights).

In the end people are usually just not very interested in what they see as their everyday boring surroundings.

Hmm, wouldn’t it make more sense to first implement federation between Gitea instances? I see little point in following an Gitea account from Mastodon and the PRs and issues would probably get spammy really fast.

Look for an older used device with LinageOS support and replace the battery if needed. The originally higher priced devices from 2-3 generations ago still easily beat the cheap new ones.

If you think about it a bit, I think you can see that the bad effects of what is often called globalization also happens on a smaller scale inside countries, often with homegrown organizations/companies being the culprits. IMHO the underlaying problem is not globalization per se but rather that large monopolistic companies can use the power imbalance to take over local & foreign markets and push their one-size-fits-all products and cultural marketing onto people regardless of their wishes.

In a sense these large conglomerates are only piggybacking on a generally good trend of global economic interconnectivity that has brought a lot of positive development in the last decades.

Some of the less human voices sound pretty good, and the others are workable if you don’t expect polish from a hobby project that would have no voice acting at all otherwise.

I wonder what the license of the models is and what possible copyright implication might be when using a generated voice based on game voice actor 🤔

Health and retirement social security payments and income tax together can be 40%, but not sure for Canada.

Obviously the gplay version is more convenient and also updated more quickly, however the F-Droid version is compiled by a trustworthy 3rd party, so you can be pretty sure that what you get is really based on the officially available source code and does not include any hidden modifications. Depending on you “paranoia” level that might be relevant to you or not 😅

The economist answer is “opportunity costs”: Both for you and usually also your employer it is expensive to switch jobs or train a replacement. So in theory it would be better for both to keep you satisfied.

The problem is that from the employers perspective the threat of firing someone is about the only real “stick” they have to keep people in line and wages low, so they are willing to damage themselves just to keep others afraid. So this is an externality as it is about other employees, not you strictly speaking.

Which is why worker solidarity is so important. So if the boss is threatening to fire workers (for example for refusing to return to the office fulltime), the ones not directly effected also need to go on strike as it is really about keeping them in line as well and only sticking together works as a response from the employees perspective.

Yeah, hard to answer your question as it is a bit like “Do you know some good email sites?”

Anyways, for a list of different fediverse software see: https://www.fediverse.party/

Exactly! Which is also why XMPP never really aimed to replaced IRC for public chat rooms and is strongest in 1:1 and private groups (and has an excellent gateway to join IRC channels).

I never really understood why Matrix made “everything” a group chat and basically started out as a glorified IRC bouncer. If those people behind old Freenode/Libera.chat were not so stuck in the past and held back IRC development a lot, then people would have definilty kept using modern IRC instead of switching to the buggy mess that is Matrix.