Olives @olives@qoto.org

Apparently, the DOJ has an ongoing anti-trust lawsuit against Visa.

Apparently, some of the bugs on this instance (from the previous update) might be fixed soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology) This is what countering authoritarianism feels like to me.

I've already looked at a dozen or so potential hosts (for self-hosting).

I put a maybe down about what kind it might be but I'm also not ruling anything out per se (unless it's somewhere like the U.K... even if it might work for this purpose, I don't think I want to buy services from businesses in a country* which hates the Internet).

* The government has historically been troublesome.

Maybe, not in a high profile way, but if you've been following things for a year or so, you might have seen them try.

This is response to speculation about what the U.S. will do.

The U.S. was already pushing the E.U. to stop bothering U.S. tech companies.

The U.S. was already pushing the E.U. to stop bothering U.S. tech companies.

Generally speaking, there isn't really a good reason to put age in a bio. There are reasons not to.

A power the government gets is a power a future government might abuse.

"An E.U. led NATO"
"It is time for a stronger, more capable, and fully independent Europe."
Meanwhile, Germany is so scared of the AfD Party that they're backing away from that idea.

Also, while I already ruled out Wordpress entirely, I remember that the hosted service openly bragged on the site about how you get poor customer service (I think it was something like "you can use our forum and another random user like you might answer your questions" and one with a slow response time) unless you pay for a much more premium tier.

By the way, "sub-standard" is still giving them far too much credit. You might send off a query, or request, and no one will ever bother to get back to you (not even an automated message).

I always had doubts about using a hosted service for a blog, and it was more to give it a try, and see whether that worked well.

I was initially going to get a blog going faster, then I decided that it wasn't worth too much of a rush, particularly with the politics going on. I can spend a bit more time figuring out what works and what doesn't.

Further, hosted services don't seem to work that well with VPNs (or going by what I've seen so far), and I don't want anyone to encounter difficulties in accessing the blog.

In addition, when looking into it, there were a lot of questions to be had about whether the customer service on such services are any good.

Typically, hosted services tend to take customers for granted, and both charge customers excessively, and provide sub-standard customer service.

Something which my blog experiment turned up is how hosted services seem to *hate* it if you have lots of links.

Frankly, if I was going to write something relatively shorter, I could just do it with social media. Anyway, I'll continue looking into it.

Self-hosted is winning out so far.

"crazy person"
Someone might not like me using that term in a derogatory fashion but it gets the point across on a social network like this (I avoid using it a lot of the time, the point of it is for emphasis). I don't use it to address a *specific person*, I use it mainly to emphasize some phenomenon.

I followed the internal politics there a bit, because I like the idea of third parties, and it led the other third parties in one election (although, still like one or two percent of the vote).