Dustin Wilson @dustin@dustinwilson.com

Apparently something happened on some TV show tonight that a lot of people didn't like.

XMPP, Mastodon, etc. aside the Web became centralized largely because we who built for the Web let it happen. The Web used to be a lot more decentralized where we, the people who built stuff for the Web, wrote in our blogs and helped each other learn this thing we were at the same time developing standards for to improve. This all ended when almost all of us converged on Twitter.

The problem with all of these decentralization-is-bad write-ups is that they miss the forest for the trees -- including the ones that point out that non-technical people can't run their own servers. If it's a fallacy to attempt to re-decentralize the Internet then we might as well just give up and stop using it then. Let's surrender absolutely everything we do on the Internet to these big companies. A technological democracy cannot exist without decentralization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2M_2LxN5Cw

Sadly the only open source thing I can find concerning a smart thermostat is this smart hub thing that uses a raspberry pi and works-with-Nest-but-actually-no-longer-will-oops.

I bought a 2nd gen Nest thermostat several years ago. It paid for itself within two months and some change especially considering I installed it during the summer here. I'd put off getting something else after Google bought Nest because they at least kept the company separate. I knew eventually they'd fold it in and start collecting information they don't have a right to have. Guess that's happening now.

I do find it funny when Europeans rant about price tags in the US (and Canada) not including tax. It’s an inconsequential thing to rant about first of all, but we do have one major purchase that is tax-included and that’s gas (petrol). As a result almost no one knows how much they pay in tax to fill up their tank, and in a few places in the US taxes on it are egregiously high. On the other hand when buying say... art supplies I’m always faced with how much I pay in tax.

Was wondering what was going on last night. This is something Firefox sure didn’t need. Queue monoculture asshats in 3... 2... 1...

I’ve been a fan of Purism’s products, but it kind of looks like they’re shitting the bed here with Librem One, hmm?

Probably the most complex thing I have running on my server is Mastodon. It consumes a ridiculous amount of resources, but what it does not consume a lot of is maintenance time. That crown goes to acmetool followed closely by XMPP.

I disabled ipv6 a while back because my host had some issues with it for an extended period of time. I forgot to turn it back on. I rebooted tonight and noticed redis wasn't working because of it. Oops. Oh well. Updated mastodon while I was at it, too.