So lemme see if I understood right:

These companies did not want to participate in the driver solutions for users, so when Wacom did, it left them in the dust. They now whine that Wacom uses up all the “branding space” despite the term “wacom” having been first genericided into (like “kleenex” or “coke”) then essentially blown away from the graphic tablets driver space, and even if they wanted to contribute they whine that the literally usable information they give to the user so the device is usable (like, coordinates and the like) is a corporate secret???

NGL, from here it sounds like they just don’t want to do any of the work and want some FOSS peasant in Laos to do it all free for them instead.

ich_iel carries like one whole third of my lemmy experience and I don’t even know German.

we can vibecode one together!

Why Matrix when XMPP exists? Much less of a pain to setup on hosted as well as to self-maintain.

If more than one of expenditure, storage or service continuity are a concern, I’d strongly recommend against Matrix, at least a self-hosted one. It’s one of those nu-protocols that’s quite resource intensive compared to perfectly serviceable alternatives from the '90s or '00s. I’d instead recommend something based on XMPP, such as a Prosody / Snikket server (with the advice that you’ll have to configure some more stuff for privacy). Client apps on Android and web at least are also readily available.

Ooof… right that’s a very complicated position. You’d need a forum or microblogging platform that can be hosted to convenience (cheap price / gratis; ideally away from Nine Eyes and from Iran eyes). As for the media storage requirement, if your community is going to be media-heavy, that’s a lot more damage on the long term: either you host the media and run the risk of delivering a lot of private info when caught (most media uploads are not sanitized for privacy, nor people know how to do that), or you don’t host the media yourself and count on the users uploading it to somewhere else that you’ll have to “moderately” depend on.

If I were you, I’d think hard and long whether media (especially heavy media, such as videos) is that much important as to have to do the hosting by yourself or whichever group you are organizing. Any way you can find of getting out of that hurdle will be good for costs, for mental health (moderation etc) and for security (as I mentioned above, as well as other factors). Torrenting heavy media files or going Cuban aka.: distribute through a physical network of hidden flash drive caches, might be available options.

Having the tags? Sure.

Making them mandatory? Only if we have 1.- an actual process to determine whether a tag is incorrectly applied (up to a respectable level of confidence) and 2.- an adequate, *enforceable+ punishment for infringers.

If you want a community that is, at its foundational level, private, then you don’t want it to be in the Fediverse. I don’t mean it in an empathetic level but rather on a technical level. There are far better tools such as forum services for small communities, and you would be not wasting the second most distinctive feature of fediverse software (that of federation).

As for where can you have such a community, that is better split in two questions: 1.- what software to use and 2.- where to host it.

Question 1 suggests the use of any of a myriad of forum solutions, suchas phpBB or Discourse, that can be hosted or even self-hosted; as well as suggest the use of some goof practices such as having a back-channel communication system between high-level collaborators that uses a different medium/platform (say, Signal).

Question 2 highly involves your threat model if you want to do something that might put you and other people’s lives at risk, but does not really mandate or prescribe which solutions you’d pick for question 1 otherwise. As I have not followed your conversations that closely, the most I can do is to suggestlow-tier VPS platforms that offer wide-range services (everything from forums to videoconference to blogs) so that there is less of a chance that it gets blocked; or otherwise use some sort of local net mesh (eg.: radio).

Back in the time when I disliked it and, to a lesser extent, AppArmor, the reason was pretty simple:

It forces services to lie to me / It gets in the way of software doing what I tell it to do.

The examples would be rather simple. Need to spin up a second instance of a database server, sure, just set up the given config file with datadir=/mount/point/second/disk/var/lib/database. Should work… Nope. Database errors out despite the directory existing and being writable and all permissions being right. Insists it’s “file permissions”. Try to look around, to no end. Then it turns out there is some secret NSA Cabal infiltrated in my server already that… for some weird reason, forces databases to be installed on /var/lib even though when that is almost full and I mounted a second disk to have more room. And thus the service lies to me, says file permissions, well I checked them several times and they were alright.

Stupid NSA cabal thing stupidly getting in the way of configuring things and adding more entrypoints you have to edit and services you have to configure just to start up a program. I want to start a database, not set up a DEFCON 1 line! Those days I was beginning to miss SQLite already…

Similar issues I had with webservers, network share servers, joysticks and gamepads, and even audio devices. Never got a clear idea of what it was, software says something like “permission error” or “not a device file” but I checked and those are alright. A long sigh, remember than when you install a new computer you have to disable SELinux and AppArmor and reboot, boom, done, everything magically works.

Fortunately things have improved a long way since, but back in the day, they were one of the most grating obstacles to me for getting friends, let alone clients, to adopt Linux.

I knew that lemmy having the issue of instance identity being tied to DNS was going to eventually bite it in the ass.

It if weren’t for that, it’d be as easy as migrating the instance to a different jurisdiction. Which, speaking of, is a whack-a-mole game; what we need is to set up shop in some sort of international waters jurisdiction or something that has enough soverengity and amicability that assures say the UK can’t legally threaten it anymore than they can threaten a random online-delivery donut shop in Laos.

Sounds cute, but it has to be implemented without the current trend of Eurofaszionazism.

Whether you make a platform out of Mastodon, AP, Peertube, XMPP, whatever, they are no longer useful if you slap espionage, ChatControl, forced Israeli apologia or anysuch stupidity on them.

Two very great points, especially the point that Fediverse platforms should not each try do everything. That’s (one of many ways) how developers and users go to die.

I’ve already went on on why merging communities is Bad for the Fediverse (and only really helps the big corpos that get into the Fediverse), so it’s good that the badness of that “solution” is acknowledged.

As for #2: multicommunities: I seem to recall Kbin already does that, so it should work. As for sub-issue 1, "To create a multi-community, you would have to know where each community is and add it to your list. ", well that’s what webrings are for! Let’s bring them back from the '90s. Basically get’s give the power of “static search” back to the users.

Numero 3 Electric Boogaloo: Making communities follow communities, is not much of a bad idea, but I’m wary fo the issues already mentioned in it. I’m mostly concerned also about it making it harder to maintain smaller Lemmy instances due to the extra communication overhead.