With respect for your writing, I couldn’t understand the argument against meeting people where they’re at. The wife approval factor is the tongue in cheek official benchmark for acceptance. It’s gentle wisdom that can be applied to all potential users, and I understand it to mean compromise is always needed unless your partner is also a FOSS advocate.

I love free software, but I come to it almost purely from a privacy perspective. And if privacy is the main goal, there is commercial software that doesn’t care about vacuuming up consumer data. So for some, including me, it’s only a question of risk - tolerance, appetite, and mitigation.

Admittedly I think I don’t yet understand the free software movement. My journey began with docker and self hosting some alternatives to big commercial software. There’s probably more need to explore why meeting users where they’re at is a good rule. Me as an example, I may have overlapping interests with free software but my motivations are different. Therefore the fundamental need for me to use a libre alternative to discord just isn’t there. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be able to appreciate libre more as I interacted with the software and community (regardless of the platform theyre talking on).

Actually went to a theatre to see it. I like my films to be open to interpretation, not barely intelligible. Didn’t have a lot to talk about on the way home from that screening.

I believe in the boundless depths of the self. Beyond that I’m not sure.

Understanding why and how we’re even conscious entities, assuming I believe you guys even exist, is the question that still needs to be answered regardless of aliens becoming known to us.

I think another big difference is Lemmy still feels like it is inviting at least a small amount of conversation. Whereas Reddit increasingly feels to me like it collectively prefers to upvote only one correct answer, and stamp down everything else.

I think with federation in general we have more of a chance to preserve what we value in each instance. Whether that is constructive conversation, or cited responses, or memes only/ no memes…

I look forward to being a part of multiple, quite different feeling networks of communities.

Companies capitalizing on convenience is not new. If you want to go to the ultimate end of the spectrum where you don’t need to give up any info to a third party, open source applications have you covered. Firefly iii, Actual Budget to name two with existing bank integrations.

It comes down to your personal risk tolerance and appetite. If you have no tolerance, don’t take the risk and stick with your convictions instead of grumbling that you had to give your bank statements to download a scammy Tetris app.

I have very little faith in some random tech limited liability to be able to pay up if something bad happens. That’s not to say I’m super confident in the banks either, just that they have way more money, are pressed hard to do infosec and have government backing if and when shit hits the fan.

Agreed, peering behind the veil of any organization will probably result in a loss of confidence. And to be fair, I do have concerns about this ultimately being 100% private and secure, but I’m mindful that perfection shouldnt be the enemy of progress. I have confidence that there is a relatively safe way to implement this. We’re not the first in the world to do it, and thankfully we can look to other jurisdictions to see where the risks are.

Now that I think about it, I bet the big five have probably made sure the conditions are as onerous as possible in order to reduce any actual competition as much as possible. :D

They’ll undoubtedly speak with banks when the legislation passes and regulations are being drafted, and a part of me hopes that the big dinosaur institutions we have realize deep down that they need to enter the modern world.

Banks are competition in the sense that they have competing interests, but not in the sense that are offering a comparable product. If my bank was actually interested in building an app that would help me wrangle and take control of my spending habits, they would have already built it with a couple devs like all these other apps popping up.

The regulation is the IIROC Dealer Member Rule (DMR) 3200 A. 1.(b) (i) which prohibits IIROC registrants (brokerages) from allowing their clients to use their own automated order systems to generate orders. So just clarifying that its not illegal because it’s unsafe, just that they dont want us to give an app our credentials that does algorithmic trading on our behalf. Their reasons, i dont know.

The problem is Plaid et al are forced to scrape webpages because banks dont offer an alternative. Banks currently hold the user liable for sharing their password if theres a breach, but this new open banking legislation will shift that liability to plaid/third parties.

I get that this doesnt matter for a lot of people, but i specifically chose my bank because it had close ties with Plaid (API aggregator) - the closest we currently have to open banking. To me, it just seems so fundamentally simple to be able to offer a way to export your own transaction information to whoever you agree to share it with. Boggles my mind that we dont have this already.

In Canada, the thing that makes people hesitate when giving financial data to an app is where liability sits when sharing your account details. Right now, because i’m sharing my credentials with Plaid some banks would refuse to reimburse you if you were subsequently hacked - regardless of the leak source. When open banking legislation comes into effect, this liability will be shifted to the data brokers (plaid), and potentially also the thrid party applications that do things with your financial data.

CloudFlared is the application you run on your server, and CloudFlare tunnels are what it connects with. You get the same outcome as a ddns but it functions differently under the hood. You also need a domain name for this I think.

DuckDNS might be a good option to start out with.

Op was subliminated

As others have pointed out, maybe look for a hobby.

Take baby steps towards becoming more involved in the things that youre passionate about. Housing affordability, the climate, and other things are on everyone’s mind these days, and maybe there’s something there that you have some strong feelings about. Look for virtual municipality or state/province public consultations about those things (e.g. new housing development consultations), and lend your voice to it. Meet new people with the same ideas.

Tldr, Try to make some of your free time into something self-directed, constructive and fulfilling (instead of passive algorithm surfing).

Many of us have indigenous ancestry but don’t identify as indigenous. It seems to me that the Indian Act made it black and white for a lot of people - you’re either Status Indian or not indigenous at all. This story is so damaging to people who might want to reconnect and learn about their ancestry. If I had a real choice to embrace indigenous culture as my own growing up, I would have in a heartbeat.

Embrace the dark side expressing yourself without the perfection filter of spellcheck. Those squiggly red lines want you to be someone youre not. Punctuation prevents you from being you. Spell things your own way. Make up your own words.

Slashdot still gets the job done for tech and science news.

It’s been about two years since I did my last one, but I wrote a few things down at one point for reference:

1. Eat carb rich breakfast on the day of, and aim to eat a small snack every hour after this
2. Try to drink a bottle per hour. I have one kidney and this worked well for me. I normally throw in some electrolyte powder every few bottles or bring banana or two.
3. Start standing out of saddle to stretch early and often
4. Change hand positions often
5. I start to stiffen up if breaking for more than 10 minutes at a time

Have fun 😊

Somewhat related is the concept of ontological shock. Most recently saw a post on Reddit about it, linked below. I can relate to the idea of my brain building a running narrative of how the world works, and fitting information into that framework on the fly. When I come across things that don’t fit into that framework it’s easy to dismiss the information and run towards people that share that worldview. Ontological shock happens when you reexamine the core of your worldview based on irrefutable new information, and realize that your existing framework of predicting and understanding things in the world no longer works. Facsinating stuff, and it truly shows that we can absolutely be living in completely different realities than our neighbours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/145kwhw/ontological_shock_is_real_and_you_should_treat_it/

Question: if I got myself banned from the NSFW instance, would it still show up in my feed, and just prevent me from posting there?

I’ve resorted to turning off NSFW in my profile as well. I’m not anti-porn, I just don’t like it saturating my social newsfeed.

Happy that user based instance blocking is being worked on. I’m sure it would be controversial to unfederate with NSFW instances totally.

I didn’t know I was allowed! I’ll go with my partner next time she goes in. Exciting!