Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@qoto.org

LIDAR shader:

Hey folks. If you haven't played "Suzerain", you need to give it a shot. #game #review

It's a political game where you run a fictional country, but it's the best political simulator I've ever played. You really get to try to form the country into the image you want... and the other people in that country will hate you for it.

I tried to build a democratic-socialist utopia. I made voting easier. I passed civil rights laws. I reformed the constitution to impose more limits on my own office to balance the branches of government. Where I went wrong was my insistence on running the ultra-rich out of town. They took the whole economy with them and then had me assassinated.
That was a week of text-based gameplay and I still can't wait to dive in again.

Seriously, though. 10/10. And it's only $15.

@lawfare Two months ago? That's a typo, right?

@Mabande Maybe you and I have different definitions of "impossible".

Yes, if people want turnkey solutions that they need to put no effort into whatsoever that work exactly how they want, they're going to go with commercial solutions, of course.

There's a barrier to entry in self-hosting anything tech related; even the simplest website. But those barriers are hardly insurmountable, and they're extremely well documented, and any group that both knows and cares about the difference between self-hosting and service-hosting should be willing to put in the minimal resources necessary to do the thing right.

It's not effortless. It's not for everyone. But it's nowhere near "impossible".

And the IPv4 thing is less "technical debt" and more "ISPs are too cheap to upgrade switches".

@Mabande The former is because IT departments are grossly neglected in most educational institutions because of underfunding. It's the same reasons school teachers have to hold fundraisers to get basic school supplies.

The latter is ultimately due to our failure to switch over to IPv6. While we remain on IPv4, multiple mail servers on cheaper hosts must share an IP address, so if one gets compromised or rented by a bad actor, the others get punished too until the problem is resolved. But even then, most hosts these days have procedures in place to deal with that rather swiftly.

It'll be interesting when there's only one company left making AAA games.

@Mabande That's totally to be expected. The self-hosted option is the most basic option. It's good for small groups, not complex organizations.

Larger organizations that need additional services (like calendar, document collaboration, tiered administration) integrated into their email will of course end up choosing the commercial offerings designed to service those needs. But they don't have to. I was CTO of a medium-sized food service business and we hosted our own email because the company was willing to invest in a competent, well-run IT department. Many companies simply prefer to farm that out, and that's a fine choice too. With email's federated nature, they have either option.

I expect Mastodon will remain similar. The small not-for-profit instances just won't have all the fancy features and interconnectivity of the commercial sect.

@Mabande @DataDrivenMD That's just simply not true. I host my own email. Hosted cPanel servers are cheap and easy to maintain. I spend maybe an hour a year troubleshooting email issues. That's it. And I have no problem communicating with any of those big email systems.
My primary email address has been self-hosted for more than ten years now.

@DataDrivenMD Why? Email is a federated service in a similar manner to ActivityPub and has widespread adoption. Why don't you think that parallel applies here?