Yeah I’m finding the clients hard to navigate. I can do it for myself, but to recommend to people, I’m unable to decide which to pick.

Edit: What did you mean by can’t recommend the switch?

Thank you! Also, what do you use for messaging?

As the other person who responded to you mentioned, things can get bad. At some level, trust is always going to be a factor with these things.

1. Matrix.org is still the most popular server - if I just tell people to download Element, they’re going to pick matrix.org. Automatically, this builds a sort of lock in with the “default instance”. Even if I host my own server, that’s not something I can recommedn to everyone, nor do I have the resources to make it a public server.

2. Already there’s trouble with hosting your own Matrix server due to how heavy the software is apparently. This coupled with point 1, things concentrating into the hands of the foundation is not a good thing.

3. Following from that, for example, what if they suddenly decide there’s too many people with “radical” ideologies that are against their masters, the imperial powers? They have metadata (even if not content, because encryption) through the public servers they host that they can use to surveil.

The issue is not just that it’s built by people with poor ideological rigour. It’s that it’s both a fragile structure that depends on trust and the people we’re trusting have poor ideological rigour. That seems like a bad combo to me.

Imagine if they just wrote and worked on the protocol. That’s it. No official apps, no official public servers. Then I wouldn’t care coz it doesn’t matter. People can check the protocol for suspicious stuff but that’s it. Nothing else is in these organizations’ control.

Yeah as soon as I read the sanctions bit I knew they must be using some shitty Cold War list from somewhere.

Which company involved is Israeli? That’s the first I’m hearing of that.

Edited to correct typo

I’m concerned about the software again playing into capitalist, imperialist spirals like we’ve seen with everything else so far. I am also concerned about supporting such an organization/company by doing “marketing” for them through my circles. The whole reason I started this was as part of the BDS movement and it doesn’t make sense to just jump from one highly problematic ecosystem to another.

And if you’re okay with “lesser evils”, sure. I’m not. I believe continually choosing lesser evils instead of building good things is why we’re in this mess in the first place.

That’s great, thank you

Thank you! That’s pretty reassuring.

Thank you so much for the detailed response! I might be able to stretch out to 4GB RAM on the Pi

I’ve been finding it a bit difficult to understand the hardware part of things. For example, the hubzilla FAQ you shared says 512M and not MB. Does that not refer to RAM?

And I’ve also not been able to find any guides about the “levels” in hardware. If not the Pi, then what? How do I decide? How do I explore?

Thank you. That does sound annoying but .com is both boring and more expensive.

Ohh, I maybe should clarify. I don’t intend to use my own server. I have a provider - disroot.

Thank you! Also, if I want different domains for different Hubzilla accounts within the same server, would that be possible? Like the server itself is a.hub, but an account in the hub wants to use b. space as it’s domain, like username@b.space, would I be able to allow that?

Caste endogamous marriages are still the norm, the jobs and positions are still barely spread out in some cases, not at all in a lot of fields, good education is still a pipe dream for the majority because only the oppressor castes can just purely focus on education with no other care and keep sending their kids to coaching centers to get through the national entrance examinations for the premier public institutions.

They don’t need to be set up at the top. They already are. Some of them will call themselves “middle class”, but that just doesn’t exist. In India, anyone earning living above Rs. 25k a month is already in the top 1℅. Their only point of comparison or aspiration is the billionaires themselves, so, bootlicking is just as common here.

Just like with white supremacists, they are at the top of the social hierarchy already, but also have a victim complex with them being supposedly “threatened” by the minorities. In the US it’s DEI and Critical Race Theory that fascists are against, in India it’s the caste-based reservation system (affirmative action for the oppressed castes and tribes) and whatever small tidbits that are done for women in the name of the government being feminist (but barely) and progressive (like free public buses for women in some cities).

I don’t know who to attribute the quote to but it’s just the classic “resistance feels like oppression for those who’ve been long in the oppressor’s shoes”.

Edit: Also, the caste system doesn’t need to be reimplemented. It never went away. Again I’m drawing the comparison to western politics in case this is someone from the west that’s trying to understand. Slavery was abolished doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways to practice forced labour and keeping people at the bottom of the hierarchy, right? It’s quite similar here too. There are laws that say untouchability is not supposed to be practiced, but people still use different utensils to serve water for the domestic workers for example. Manual scavenging (the labour of mostly Dalit men cleaning sewers with nil protective equipment) is banned. But it still happens. Every week we see news that a few more people died from the toxic fumes or complications after.

Yeah I am not going to host my own email. I have a provider who I’m going to ask to attach the custom domain. Only the WordPress/Hubzilla instance I might host on my own.

Great! As a follow up question, for example I want to let a friend use my hubzilla server to host their hub. Can I “allow” them to bring their own domain name and let them use it?

Edit to add one more question: Is there a restriction on what top level domain can be used for what purpose (fedi, email, website) or anything goes?

Sort of. I feel like I need to know my own priorities better because I’m not sure what I want wrt hosting. Because of general trust and privacy issues, of course self-hosting (at home) is the ultimate best option, but I think that might only be a long term thing and I can’t do it now. So I’m wondering what to prioritize right now - cost, reputation, or simplicity - because I’ve found quite a few options that differ in these aspects.

Writefreely is simple and can be free, but I can’t find very many public instances and have no way of verifying reputation.

Similarly, wordpress.com has been under fire for a lot of things and I’m not sure how I feel about hosting with them &- free or otherwise.

Everything else like random VPS providers feels like a gamble because I know nothing about them and it seems like a black box. And obviously, cost increases for what is essentially going to be a bunch of writings from one person.

WriteFreely looks pretty good!

Would you recommend WordPress as a hosting service? I’m not able to understand the structure of it all to figure out if it:'s ethical and what with the recent fights with WP Engine and stuff, I’m unsure how it all actually works.

Makes sense if that’s something you’re worried about. I just meant that it seems to me like people immediately jump to cloud storage without even considering use cases and options. I wish I’d known about this setup that I’m using now a long time ago so I thought it’d be good to put the option out there.

You can use Thunderbird with Mailbox and I think Posteo too? Does disroot even have an app? Even their official pages directed me to other clients like Thunderbird