The problem is that I want it to work as smoothly as a commercial chat service on a shoe string budget, on a Raspberry pi sipping 2W. That and the fact that I’m bloody minded enough to work on it until it does, beyond the point of sanity.

You’ve summed up the entire glory and insanity of this sub in two meager sentences. Compression is over 9000.

Your end goal, friend, is noble, and I don’t mean to discourage you or gatekeep. And yet I must strongly advise you to slow your horses before you squander what I’d call your “social capital”, i.e. the willingness of the people close to you to follow your recommendations and try out new things. If they find their user experience greatly lagging behind what they’re used to, not only will they return to the services they were using prior to your suggestion: they will also be less likely to listen to you in the future and meet alternatives with skepticism, if not hostility. (“I’ve tried it and all this other stuff doesn’t work…”)

Thus, you need to make sure that they have an excellent first experience with whatever you throw their way. As a tinkerer, tech enthusiast, privacy advocate, or whatever you want to call yourself, you’re likely willing to accept a great amount of jankiness, pain, and lack of feature parity because you feel you get something more valuable in return. But that is not how most people use computers. Most people do not care about privacy, digital independence or any of the things you may cherish; they want things to “just work”.

And, to put it brutally bluntly (sorry!),

Like I think I’d need tailscale and docker (still dont get what docker really is)

this part alone tells me your solution is unlikely to “just work” for them. These are some basic skills to have if you want to try and compete with a billion-Dollar company and the convenience it provides to your friends.

So, my advice is this: don’t aim for “perfect”, aim for “better”. And basically anything is better than using FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord or whatever they may be using. Either go for one of the large public Matrix nodes (Matrix.org is unlikely to go down any time soon…) or move your comms to Signal messenger. Both may not be fully under your control (Signal is centralised, and Matrix nodes might be closed or defederated), but they’re e2ee and so professionally managed that your friends might actually enjoy them, use them on a day-to-day basis, and even pull other people over. That way, you’re also building social capital, so that once you’ve obtained the skill to run your own and get it to the level of polish it needs to have, they’ll be willing to follow you there too.

(If this posting sounds like I’ve learnt this the hard way, that’s because I have. Things are fine now, though: almost my entire social graph is reachable via Signal, and I’m preparing to self-host my own comms.)

Like the others have already said, it’s only an outage and it will return.

That said, what we’re seeing is precisely what privacy and software freedom advocates have been warning of for years now: the world’s overreliance on the centralised, proprietary infrastructure of a handful of US-based oligopolies have made people, companies and entire nations heavily dependent and vulnerable to blackmail, espionage and other forms of exploitation. Everything ugly we’re seeing out there, from the enshittification of services to mass surveillance, from the digital dispossession of users to the exploitation of software for political leverage, is a direct function of this overreliance. And it’s about time to break this cycle.

The alternatives and solutions are out there. Use the energy of your anger to make the switch; it’s going to bear fruit quickly! The go-to subs for digital independence are /c/degoogle@lemmy.ml, /c/privacy@lemmy.ml, /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world and /c/linux@lemmy.ml.

Came for this, left satisfied.

but if message are not encrypted during transit it’s bad.

I did not say that. ;) If you’ve secured your connection via SSL (which Nextcloud AIO forces you to do anyway), messages are encrypted in transit.

I said they’re not end-to-end encrypted, i.e. they’re stored on the server without encryption. To be fair, in theory, this is less of an issue if you’re the one hosting the service.

Strangely, on complain I received about signal was that they found it hard to save the pictures and videos shared on it

That is somewhat true. Messengers like Telegram (yuck!) and (correct me if I’m wrong!) even Meta’s Whatsapp (doubleyuck!) do or at least can store all media unencrypted on the device in a folder. Signal does not do this. Every single pic/vid/whatever needs to explicitly be stored in device memory in encrypted form (there’s even a nag screen every time you do this). Also Signal does no appear to have an option so it will store media in encrypted format to the device storage. (Just looked, didn’t find anything of that kind.)

With nextcloud talk, I would expect all the shared files to be available on the cloud drive.

That might be correct. When you install it, Talk stubbornly creates a “Talk” folder in your NC files, which is likely to hold all media shared via Talk.

[x] Doubt

It’s a nice story to tell, but this is definitely not the result of the prompt: “Recreate Pong”.

I have also tried to set that up. However:

• it’s not e2ee. Encryption is “experimental” for now, and didn’t work for me.
• it also requires a TURN server for cross-network calls and had some very weird issues on my degoogled devices (i.e. no notifications for messages or incoming calls).

That’s why I ditched it for now.

I would recommend that you use what the people around you use

That’s not what I have in mind. I’m playing trailblazer here: at least for the people closest to me, I want an alternative means of communication that will be ready in a minor shit-hits-the-fan scenario (i.e. one where Signal for instance goes tits up, like it already has once).

I’ve come across it, and I love the concept of making communication even more robust by making it independent even of the infrastructure of the internet. That said, I assumed that it would come with a lot more friction than the userbase I have in mind would tolerate. For now, my plan is to first seek an equally accessible, yet more decentralised alternative to Signal, and reserve digging into mesh networks for later.

Any recommendations?

Thank you so much for your offer! I’ve actually set it up last night and it’s running fine so far. It’s just that it won’t relay any calls if either of the devices is not on my network. Tunneling back into the network via VPN might be an option, but make it more cumbersome to use for some of the less techy folks around me.

What’s your primary reason to self-host Synapse? And who do you use it with?

Parents are liable for the actions of their children to a certain age.

First off, a technicality: At least in the jurisdictions I’m familiar with, “parents are liable for the actions of their children” is a popular misconception. The full story is: Parents are liable for the actions of their children only if it can be proven that they neglected their duty to supervise their children.

Also, I doubt AI companies would forego the chance to offload responsibility for their creations. Nothing in the article suggests they’d want AI to be treated like their children, but more like an entity separate from them.

No. Put a Minecraft server inside the same compose file. Allow ICMP/ping, but firewall off all other kinds of access. Let it know it’s there, but it cannot play. Let. It. Suffer.

HP WiFi network printer owner here. It sits on my main network, but I’ve assigned it a fixed network IP (based on its MAC) and cut off internet access in my router. That seemed enough for me. I’m open to comments why that isn’t true. ;)

“Putting non-deterministic hallucination machines in charge of critical systems? What could possibly go wrong?” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Humanity’s famous last words

Oh, he was supposed to read it? Too bad. That part wasn’t in the AI summary of the book…

You misspelt “thrusting”.

Not just that. If you assume an LLM has agency, you - the company making it - can conveniently waive all responsibility for its “actions”. “We didn’t cause this. The AI chose do to it.” This may become increasingly relevant the more idiots deciders allow these systems to access, if not entirely control vital systems. Think: power grid, water supplies, food production and related logistics, communications, military applications.

Takeaway: America failed at information control because Jensen failed to control his Huang