I don't actually want to do this right now, but I do want to know if it's really decentralized yet. Completely looks like it means each of:

• A client ✅
• A personal data server ✅
• A relay ❓
• Labelers ✅
• Feed generators ✅

It looks like the relay might be the bottleneck. If I'm understanding the protocol correctly, a relay could consume less than the whole network so it doesn't have to be ridiculously expensive to operate, but I'm not finding examples of people doing it.

I fear if I carry anything else today, I'll lose it or cut myself with it.

• Old leather wallet
• Flashlight (Skilhunt H150)
• Knife (Spyderco UKPK)
• Pepper spray (Sabre Red, with a pocket clip from a random flashlight)
• Phone (Pixel 4A)
• Keys, and another flashlight (Skilhunt EK1)
• Flash drive (Sandisk 128gb)
• 1.38€

I've been self-hosting email with Maddy for a bit, but haven't shared any of the addresses widely yet in part because I haven't set up a spam filter. I'm pleased with Maddy; there's much less to learn to get a server up and running with sane default behavior than with the email software of old.

Ideally, I'd like to go beyond just spam filtering and have something with arbitrary categories like newsletters and password resets. I would prefer that it learn categories when I move messages to IMAP folders from a mail client. Maddy can feed messages into arbitrary programs and pick a destination folder based on their output.

Web searches turn up a ton of classification programs, most of which seem to be more interested in playing accuracy golf with well-known corpora than expanding functionality beyond simple spam filtering.

I often use a commercial VPN service, which I suspect is not rare among Lemmy users. Most of the time, I'm able to post to lemmy.world, but on occasion I am not. The default web UI provides zero feedback, just a spinning submit button forever, but if I look in the browser dev tools, I can see it's being blocked.

I understand that some limitations are necessary to prevent spam and other abuse, however this is a very blunt instrument. The fact that I have a 10 month old account with consistent activity should outweigh any IP address reputation issues.

Perhaps the VPN limitations could be narrowed in scope to cover only account creation and posts from young accounts.

If I want to quickly pitch "you should follow X, Y, and Z using RSS because [problems with social media]" to people who have never heard of RSS, what readers should I recommend?

I want at least web (not self-hosted), Android, and iOS options. Native apps for Mac and Windows would be nice as well. Linux users probably already know what RSS is.

There absolutely must be a free option good for at least 25 feeds because unfamiliar tech is a hard enough sell without having to pay. I'll grudgingly accept ads if that's the tradeoff for something beginner-friendly.

When I attempt to upload images to lemmy.world via the desktop web UI, I get the following error message:

SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

Looking at network traffic in dev tools, I see that I'm getting a 403 page from Cloudflare saying:

Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access lemmy.world Why have I been blocked? This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks....

I also get error messages when trying to upload images using Connect and Sync on an Android device. I successfully uploaded images in the past.

We just hit 2000 subscribers! I’d like to thank everyone for showing up here to create a new community, and what better way than giving stuff away?

I’m giving away the Nitecore MH10 v2 I reviewed. I can ship it anywhere in the USA or EU, but EU winners will have to wait until mid September. This is a basic, beginner-friendly flashlight that can accept almost all 18650 and 21700 batteries.

To enter, leave a top-level comment on this post before midnight UTC on Sunday, August 27, 2023. Only accounts that have posted or commented on /c/flashlight prior to this being posted are eligible to win.