Might be potentially gay?! Idk, a man having romantic sex with another man is pretty much the definition of gay, if you ask me. Doesn’t get much gayer.

Sorry if I came across as condescending, I assumed you genuinely didn’t know. Part of the reason why those services never caught on is precisely that barely anyone knows them.

I disagree that more federalized always means better, because it has serious issues:

1. What if you are offline? I’d like it if messages would eventually find me even when my computer is off, or I am in a remote area, a basement… even worse for file sharing.

2. Power. Modern always-on devices like smartphones are so power efficient because they mostly are sleeping in a standby mode. Every now and then, they wake up, check if something important happened, and immediately go back to sleep. If you want to serve data from a phone, you need a way worse running / asleep ratio, meaning a lot more battery drain. A central-ish server can efficiently do the small bits of work from many people in a place with plenty of electricity and on hardware that is suited for it.

3. Discovery is a hard problem. Having one or more central sources of information simplifies things a lot.

4. Management/admin effort. Instead of hundreds of slightly different installations, you have one, maintained by a few people who know what they are doing. Much more efficient.

But for example, all of the things I mentioned can be self-hosted. Granted, some like IRC are not federated in the modern sense of the word, but I would argue that “any single group of friends can set up their own server with a raspberry pi in someone’s closet” is already pretty good. Especially if your goal is to avoid the corporate surveillance state or censorship.

It is not perfect guaranteed 100% success for everyone, sadly. The doctor told me some people are practically cured, some have a mild improvement, and some none.

I fall in the middle ground category. Exposure therapy for 1-2 years managed to get it from being a pain in the ass to manageable. Maybe getting older also played a role, on my father’s side, people seem to get less allergic in their 20s and 30s. Also, if I take a little care of what I eat, I practically have zero issues with eczema any more, while as a kid I was an itching, bloody mess if I even thought of the wrong food. So maybe it is just growing up.

Now, I can ignore most symptoms with one or even just a half ceterizine pill in summer. Generic versions are pretty cheap now.

Loratidine somehow knocks me out and makes my mood go down for 1-2 days, so I avoid it.

I’d say if you cannot open knots or cut the ropes safely, they were drunk drunk. And way too drunk to play with ropes.

People do, and have done for a long time. Before Lemmy was Friendika/Diaspora, before Mastodon were WordPress blogs, before Matrix it was Xmpp and before that, IRC. File sharing happens a lot through many Nextcloud and Seafile instances. There are/were countless projects to simplify selfhosting for individuals and small businesses. Every month I hear of a new small social network, “old internet” style thing, federated platform or self-hosting project.

It is all out there. It is not a technical problem.

There is just one glaring issue: you have never heard of any of these instances, because they don’t have billions of as budgets and don’t crave paying customers.

Why should a friends-only Nextcloud instance put ads in the newspaper of a foreign continent? And therefore, nobody hears of them outside the company / friend group / soccer club. Plus, with small networks there are no billionaire owners bribing officials to push out small competitiora and spreading propaganda that everyone without a WhatsApp account is weird and potentially suspicious.

Fine, I’ll bite the bait.

because it works perfectly fine if you’re not a helpless moron, that’s why.

Counter-point: lots of people are helpless morons at some point in their life. I certainly was. I was lucky enough to have family and friends and skills that were in demand at the time. Others are less fortunate. Fuck’em, I got mine, I guess?

lots of people start their careers through temp job training programs and become permanent hires.

Temp agencies are not there to help you, not even there to make the economy better or society fairer. They are there to fill temporary positions for as little money as possible, period. Sometimes, their and your interests overlap partly. Plus, they help avoid hiring people long-term. Fear of joblessness every few months is a great motivation to work more for less. I’ve seen it plenty of times, and while there are degrees of hell, all of them suck.

i have what they call ‘real life experience’ in these matters

Me too. I was on welfare for half a year and not having to worry about my immediate survival gave me the time I needed to hunt for a half-decent job and convince myself to go to college. Now, a decade later, I have an engineering master degree and get to work on some cool stuff. Without government support, I’d probably have jumped at the first shitty job I got and would be stuck there. What’s your life experience? Pulled yourself up by your bootstraps while walking uphill both ways?

clearly the ‘answer’ to problems like this is to daydream about a socialist/communist utopia and be angry it doesn’t exist and also wish violence upon those who point out to you that it’s never going to exist.

As someone from a not-yet-a-total-shithole country, those things exist over here, and while they are as bad at their job as one expects, at least they are there. A cynic public officer half-heartedly trying to get you to become a tax-paying citizen is leagues better than nothing. It’s not a day dream when it clearly exists outside of dystopian ex-first-world countries like the US. Everyone benefits if people get off the street and/or their couch and do something “useful”. I’m happily paying taxes that support welfare, education and coaching, and I’d much prefer it, both from an ethical and an economical point of view, if the government started properly collecting taxes from billionaires and big companies than go after that mystical welfare freeloader.