But it still means there are people potentially joining us that could be really cool, really interesting, really nice to have as part of our circle.
And when they are ready to explore, those people can use the many available tools not built by shitty corporations with shitty intentions and many, many, many shitty users.
are people and don’t deserve to be presumed guilty of Crimes Against The Fediverse for exploring it with any particular tool.
If they would like to explore, they are free to use any of the many tools not built by a shitty company with shitty intentions and many, many, many shitty users.
If you block all of Meta just because they’re Meta, not only do you punish countless potential valued contributors who have done no wrong,
Bullshit. There's no "punishment" whatsoever. Those users are free to open accounts on fediverse servers at any time.
you also embolden Meta to engage with the Fediverse in less legitimate, more underhanded ways.
You mean like anointing a few heads of big instances as representatives of fedi and trying to get them to sign NDAs? Shit like that?
Let’s focus on building affirmatively and consciously the community we want
This is literally the point of pre-emptive blocking. Meta is an existential threat to the quality of this place, period point blank.
People, individual people, built Fedi out of nothing. It's our party, we quite like it, and we can pre-disinvite entities with an enormous track record of shitty behavior whenever we want.
If you want to interact with such entities and the typical user that comes with, by all means, find servers that federate. It will drive a netsplit, and that sucks, but it's also working as intended.
I just hope SDF is on the right side of the split. Fuck Facebook and every single thing they stand for.
Remember, Facebook literally facilitated ethnic cleansing as a result of their techbro "move fast and break things" philosophy and their disinterest in paying for content mods with knowledge of local languages.
Meta doesn't give a fuck about anyone here or anything we've built. Mark Zuckerberg wants power and money and to push his weird bloodless McDonalds-ized vision of what the Internet should be on every single person on this planet.
Fuck that, and fuck any sort of cooperation with it.
I made the decision to leave shitty corporate platforms for a reason. The people I'd like to follow or interact with who still only use such platforms can come to their decision in their own time.
I am not interested in selling out my values, nor am I interested in enduring a tsunami of bottom-of-the-barrel interaction with average Meta users, in the name of interoperability. Meta made the choice to be a shitty entity with shitty values that builds shitty things. I don't feel like being covered in shit.
No. I don't want anything to do with anything Mark Zuckerberg touches, and I don't want to have to wade thru an ocean of drivel from the type of users his services attract in order to socialize online.
As somebody who's been on the microblogging side of fedi for nearly 6 years, and who dicks around running a couple tiny instances and is chummy with a couple other sysops - I am 100% aboard the "will never federate with Meta, and may defederate with others who do, depending on how this goes" train.
Netsplits suck. But Meta is pure cancer, and sometimes amputation is necessary.
For people who don't like cloudflare, it's also possible to self-host your reverse proxy, using e.g. nginx on the front end, and rathole or frp for the reverse tunnel. I use ssh if I need a forward proxy too (so outbound requests don't come from my "real" IP) and that's not super ideal, but it works.
This is of course considerably more difficult than something that's point-and-click, but for me, using Cloudflare defeats the purpose of self-hosting.
I have built & rebuilt such a setup several times now and it gets better documented every time, soon I'll release a step by step HOWTO.
The lower you go in price, in general the more problems you'll have with overselling, poor management, poor support, etc.
After coming back to this thread and reading some more comments, it sure looks like I could save up to $3 a month over what I pay for cheap VPS at Ramnode, but in all my years of being a Ramnode customer, they haven't pissed me off, and their support has always been excellent. I have no desire to move, and I'm somebody who has very little money, so cheaper hosting would make a difference.
I've had really good experiences with Ramnode for years. I run VPN endpoints, reverse proxies, and various web apps in a couple of their data centers and have had about as close to zero problems as possible, plus their support is quite competent when something does break. Performance is what I expect 99% of the time.
Before that, Linode was good for me as well, and I still have friends who like it.
It really kind of depends on your luck with the hardware. I've used laptops as servers for durations of several months at various points in the past and had no particular problems, just make sure cooling is adequate.
You might consider setting up a Proxmox node if you're interested in virtualization at the machine level (i.e. having several virtual machines running on one physical machine, which can reduce maintenance headaches and make experimentation easier as VMs can be snapshotted, cloned, and easily replaced)
Recent comments from the CEO confirm it. Bloodless money-grubbing techbro shitbag.