hendrik

Sure. I think that’s a valid use case. Maybe use one of the community fine-tunes for that… 😆

Maybe it’s your pronunciation? I’d just make the ‘d’ a bit softer and put emphasis on the vowels. But then I don’t really know, my first language isn’t English and though we have the same word for “fetish”, it has a lot more harshness to the ‘t’ and especially the ‘sh’ so I’ve never seen anyone jump from one to the other when I said it out loud.

Agreed, I’ve had lots of cheesecake like this, too. They’re not supposed to be pale. I mean OP’s oven seems to bake a bit uneven. The right side is a bit on the darker side. Still okay, but it won’t get better if you bake it longer than that.

The lemmy.ml user count seems to have dropped by 50k in May/June 2024. After that, it’s just the monthly active users. But the number is right, as reported by https://lemmy.ml/nodeinfo/2.1

I don’t know if the counting method has changed in the past. Because lots of Lemmy instances use very old versions of the software. Lemmy.world for example uses a software version that predates that drop on lemmy.ml

But I think fedidb is a bit all over the place. They don’t make it very clear which numbers go into what calculation and if it’s monthly active users or total, and they sometimes mislabel growth rate vs absolute numbers. They also have hidden instances that might or might not show up in some number. I think it’s alright for a rough overview. But you’d need to pay attention if you’re interested in exact numbers.

Also Soundcloud, T-Mobile, yes Spotify … A lot of open source projects are based in Europe: Gitlab, Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon, a few Linux distributions, LibreOffice… I think at least the Free Software and libre culture world is pretty active, here.

Plus aside from consumer facing software, the tech sector also exports a lot of engineering. There is German wielded train tracks all around the world, car parts, Airbus (planes), tools, logistics software and robotics, companies like SAP do lots of behind the scenes stuff…

(And half the internet giants weren’t even founded in arbitrary places in the USA, but more or less just in California (Google, Apple, eBay, PayPal) the other half is more spread over the country, like Microsoft: New Mexico, Amazon: Washington, Facebook: Massachusetts if I’m not mistaken.)

Instruct it to be your dungeon master and do some roleplay.

It depends on your exact requirements and your definition of “secure”. Lots of people like software like Tailscale. And it’s relatively secure as it doesn’t expose the services to the public but instead is an VPN. I personally don’t like Cloudflare at all, but that’s also a popular solution to get services exposed to the public internet. What I do is just use NGinx or NginxProxyManager, open up a port in my firewall and be done with it. No extra tunnel providers required and no Cloudflare that could be able to snoop on my connections. It also opens up connections to everyone else, so your software needs to be properly protected with passwords. But yeah, I can see how you get a bazillion different recommendations. I’d say if you prioritize security and it’s just your devices connecting, and they can all install a special client, go for something like Tailscale.

As far as I know some German states have started tinkering with the Fediverse and invest money in independant and souvereign solutions. At the same time some funds that were previously allocated to open source project funding have been re-allocated to AI and the future of funds like NLnet is uncertain. I see both demand and people trying things. But not a good and coordinated strategy. And it’s been that way for some time now. We’ve seen efforts to move away from Microsoft, closed solutions… Opposition, technical failures and lobbying from big tech (who got money to advertise for their solutions). It’s been a mixed bag. But in some niches it’s become better. And things happen. I think in the near future we’ll see some payoff from already started smaller projects. I don’t really see a big change witing one year, but you never know. Plus we still need to find out where the situation with Bluesky and Elon Musk leads, that certainly got things rolling within a short timeframe.

I doubt venture capital is going to take interest, though. I don’t think there’s money to be made with the Fediverse. I mean it kind of goes against the business model. Unless you lock in people to your website, you can’t display ads to your users. And it goes without saying, that all new platforms are shiny and welcoming at first. They might even advertise with freedom and federation to attract users. Still, they’re free to not follow up with their promises, or add enshittification later on. And it’s a different question whether platforms like Bluesky stay like that in the long term. Usually once venture capital gets involved, they add stuff that goes against the interests of their users and switch to acommodate for the advertisers.

Uh, that’s definitely too much technobabble about funghi. Can you dumb that down a bit for me and describe it from a user’s perspective? How do I use this? How do I get my favorite music in? And in what form does it return recommendations to me? Do I need friends to make this useful?

Sure, they’re being regulated in other countries. I guess in the EU for example, it’s the Digital Services Act and other legislation which mandate moderation, cutting down on hate and disinformation. They’d need to be sanctioned if they don’t comply. Or leave the market if they don’t like the law…