But what if I just like the taste?

I love piracy like I love electricity - it makes my life easier, and I will extoll the virtues when asked. It doesn’t rise to a core political belief for me, though.

My issue is that it’s an inefficient use of human resources because it clutters the interface. If you’re looking for the answer to a question, you have to post in multiple places and/or search/review multiple communities to see if the question has already been answered. For low-traffic communities the replies get split, suppressing topic participation. For high traffic communities, stories/links that get posted to the “same” community on multiple instances clog up personal home pages and - in the case of large participation - clog up the top feed.

Again, imho, there should be a way for communities to aggregate or sync across instances and be shown as a single feed, like a symlink to multiple folders that is treated as a single location for end users. I realize this causes moderation concerns. I still think its better for the participants.

Oh no, a new discussion board is neither as robust nor as polished as one with over a decade of use and revision.

Most of the complaints are just whining that Lemmy isn’t a perfect drop-in replacement for his love of endless, constant time wasting on Reddit. OTOH, the issue of multiple, nominally identical communities on Lemmy is a true weakness of the platform (imho, of course).

IMO they look pretty ugly and visually mar the landscape. They do so less than power plants and pollution and are a necessary evil for modern society to function. They look cool because of what they stand for and because they are novel (and because they’re new and clean, generally).

I do worry about what will happen when they are decommissioned, as there are currently no ways to recycle the blades due to the way they are manufactured.

You guys are using apps?

-posted from my browser

Oh, the high seas are very, very busy these days. Still a bit difficult for the non technical user, but there is buried treasure out there.

There’s still a core of easily offended people who ended up here on Lemmy. Kinda sad, but that’s humanity.

For:
Use Firefox in private mode only with VPN, Firefox Focus on mobile for non-routine browsing
Mobile device apps, outside of the big three noted above, have no non-connectivity related permissions outside of their sandbox
Use a password manager for all logins which generates a new, random 20 character mixed password for every site

Against:
Have Google Apps for most services, browse on Chrome
Have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and several other social media accounts
Almost never change my passwords
Carry around a device which transmits my exact location to no less than three major US corporations
Let people know what my privacy protection schemes are on a public internet forum

I’m still figuring out the controls for Lemmy. How do you delete someone else’s post?

Roses are red Groot is neat His suit too big For his got dam feet

If I live to 100 I probably won’t work through that backlog.

Gotta save this one for Father’s Day next year.

IKR? For what they wanted I could get a faster full size machine with better expandability. I get the value in a small box, but unless you had some commercial application or wanted some special architectural aesthetic in your home that required that size, it was a waste of money.

That’s sort of how I do mine. I put all my data onto dropbox/onedrive. I’ve got a $100 HP USFF hooked up in my office that is a 100% online mirror for those cloud accounts, and it backs up to an 8TB external each week. I rotate that drive with a spare each month (give or take), putting the “offline” one in a firesafe. It means I have a live copy (my pc), a cloud copy (OD/DB), a second hot copy (USFF PC), a near-line backup no more than 7 days old that isn’t “live” and a cold storage copy that is no more than a month old (aka less than Apple’s deleted-pictures and Dropbox’s previous version storage time). It cost me two external drives and the mini-pc. And if all those fail I’ll probably be roaming the radioactive wasteland looking for food and losing that data won’t matter.

Oh, and that little box also runs a small FTP server and my Torrents for my Linux distro collection.

It’s more than that, though - it’s used to setup custom sheet widths as well as enter new server and login details for sending scans via FTP to a server. If I’m doing billable work, I’m charging $225/hr. If I’m snooping the network, which isn’t my field and I do almost never so it takes me several times longer than an expert, I’m making nothing. With an annual value on the machine’s services at less than $500 (more than half of which would become reimbursable if I didn’t have it), there’s no actual value in “fixing” it by creating a different work around. 🤷‍♂️

I’m also describing the machine in my office that runs my $20,000 laser plotter/large format scanner. The software in the machine uses (Java?) over a web interface which was deprecated and removed from all browsers around 2012-14, iirc. The machine isn’t supported anymore and the only way to clear an error or update where it sends scans is using that interface. I have a XPSP2 machine running the internal IE6 browser which will still display the interface. Since I’m now a one-person office, and I use the scanner about 6 times a year, I keep that machine around in case I need to turn it on to update the scanner or clear a print error. Buying a new plotter isn’t worth the time/money - when it dies I’ll just farm out the work to a 3rd party vendor; but while it does work it’s convenient to have in-house.

Security by obscurity is the best policy I always say 😉

SCNNER HALT:LOAD YELLOW INK TO RESUME

What OP didn’t tell you is that, due to its age, it’s running on an unpatched WinXP SP2 install and patching, upgrading to SP3, or to any newer Windows OS will break the software calls that version of Pascal relies upon.