I run my own instance that has just two users. I Federate with who I want (including most instances you named). I subscribe to low drama instances like startrek.website and mander.xyz. I subscribe to communities from MOST of the instances you mentioned, but not a single one has drama (for example, no one on the lemmy.ml cybersecurity or selfhosting communities argues about politics… they just post and talk about those things).

I experience almost no drama. Two years ago, it was different, but I left those communities (but not even those instances) and just avoid engaging with those users (and it was honestly only a few very vocal users).

In my daily life, I’m involved with a number of protest and mutual aid organizations and I can tell you, the whole left is full of very vocal “my leftism is better than your leftism” people. But MOST people aren’t actually like that… just the loud ones. If you challenge them in their spaces, not only will you end up on the receiving end, they’ll turn you into one of them (I have been down that road a couple times). Not that they’ll convert your politics, necessarily, but they’ll convert your behavior. They create and feed off drama triangles and “I escalate, you double down, you escalate, I double down” feedback loops. This isn’t unique to Lemmy. You can experience the same thing in your local hacker space co-op (ask me how I know).

Historically, leftist political and social discourse has always been like this, for all of history. It’s not something special about Lemmy, it’s in the nature of collective groups of humans interested in free expression, positive social change and social justice. We’re angry, we’re trapped in an abusive relationship with the Right and we all think we have the answers. The Left’s greatest strengths and values (diversity, creativity, expression) are its greatest weaknesses. Same is true of the Right (conformity, hierarchy, rigidity).

The most dad joke thing about this is how no one under 35 will get it.

For many years I’ve had at least one Windows machine and at least one OSX machine (and then everything else runs linux). As MS started pushing this (and as Proton and Lutris got good enough to support almost any Windows software I would need to run, mostly games) I finally made the jump to zero Windows machines about a year and a half ago. Don’t miss it.

Everything works fine. It’s super handy having such fine control over my router.

OpenWRT.

Second Forgejo. Easiest deploy I’ve ever done.

Australians soon engaging in wider spread adoption of VPN and tor usage.

We would have gone extinct before we discovered fire.

systemd’s networkd has a built-in DHCP server; check option ‘DHCPServer’ and section ‘DHCPServer’ for that (same man page as above).

Is that true in Debian? If so, cool. I did not know that.

I’m happy to answer specific questions as you dig into it. :) Good luck.

This is extremely possible and I have done a lot of stuff like it (I set up my first home built Linux firewall over 20 years ago). You do want to get some kind of multiport network card (or multiple network cards… usb -> ethernet adapters can do OK filling in in a pinch). It also gives you a lot of power if you want to do specific stuff with specific connections (sub netting, isolation of specific hosts, etc).

There’s a lot of ways to do it, but the one I’m most familiar with is just to use IP tables.

The very first thing you want to do is open up /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward and change the 0 to a 1 to turn on network forwarding.

You want to install bridge-utils and isc-dhcp-server (or some other DHCP server). Google or get help from an LLM to configure them, because they’re powerful and there’s a lot of configs. Ditto if you want it to handle DNS. But basically what you’re going to do (why you need bridge-utils) is you’re going to set up a virtual bridge interface and then add all the various NICs you want on your LAN side into it (or you can make multiple bridges or whatever… lots of possibilities).

Your basic iptables rule is going to be something like

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o enp1s0 -j MASQUERADE, but again there’s lots of possible IP tables rules so read up on those.

Even if they did, you can run VPNs over https, or make Tor disguise itself as other kinds of web traffic.

Why would it be a bad idea?

That reputation has entirely been created by the media frenzy over busting the worst kinds of criminals.

Oh they’re all using the same technology? Yeah of course they are, because that’s the technology that works the best. It has so many fucking use cases.

Funny that the media frenzy is hitting a fever pitch just as we most desperately need powerful tools for opposing fascism. Almost like that’s not really a coincidence.

I feel like there’s probably a way I could do the same thing without Comcrap as a middleman. Anyone written libraries for doing this kind of thing with an openwrt box and a bunch of Linux machines?

And yes, reading through Xfinity’s privacy policy indicates they do monitor the WiFi motion data, and will share it with law enforcement or other third parties without notifying you.

🙁

Use Duckduckgo over tor.

Use tor browser, Brave or Librewolf.

Many of my self hosted solutions are just DIY cludges. I was talking to a friend of a friend on Saturday about media streaming and he told me all about his Jellyfin setup and then asked about mine and I was just like “I just store MP4s on an SSHFS drive and play them in VLC on my TV (which runs Linux Mint).” When the survey asked about the various types of software I was like “No… I don’t use anything like that… wait… yes I do! I just don’t use a prebuilt solution!”

Because Lemmy is like social media and Matrix is like Slack and Discord and they both followed the conventions of their predecessors. You’re welcome to go take it up with the devs on Lemmy.ml.

Neither my wife or my ex (my son’s mom) thought this joke was funny.

But my son laughed at it.