I get where you are coming from, however it’s important to remember that big players are not equal - they have really, really different people in the leadership. Elmo is just a too-big-to-fall clown with insane ego, spez is a manchild who took VC money like there’s no tomorrow and in the end had no idea how to provide ROI, but youtube is ran by very competent people with solid track record and deep pockets.

Maybe they are not too innovative business-wise recently… but they are good at catching up (except live streaming - screen layout is dogshit and nobody wants to get hyped in their tiny chatbox from a fucking google account with family photo as an avatar) and at leveraging what they already have, which is quite a lot, tbh.

Yt makes a series of bad decisions

It’s not like it’s making any bad decisions right now. Pretty calculated, I’d say - they feel safe market-wise, so they can increase amount of ads/fight ad-blockers/push people to buy subscription.

MAC address

nope

the funny thing is actual ability to pay is varying from business to business. AAA development with in-house engine is simply inferior as a business compared to mobile gamedev or producing shitty battle royale clones with Unity. If some business can’t compete with big tech or low-effort money grabbers, does it mean it has to go?

Just because you’re paid well doesn’t mean others are not being mistreated

FTFY
without unions there could be a huge salary disparity between devs in the same role, in the same company, even in the same project. I’ve personally witnessed more than 2x, heard about even more.

Sometimes it’s more than justified with individual’s performance and impact, sometimes it’s not. Some people are just better skill-wise, some people are better at applying pressure on their employer, holding business-critical knowledge hostage or simply negotiating.

Point here is - while unionizing might make things better on average, there would be a very real pushback from people who are benefitting from current system and this is not necessarily management. For management in some cases it would be even a net benefit, since they don’t have to deal with primadonnas and someone tying things to themselves just for leverage.

Turns out many middle eastern toilets can’t handle toilet paper.

It’s more about toilet paper than plumbing. Toilet paper has to easily dissolve in water, otherwise you can clog any toilet, be it western or eastern.

10% is too low. Usually they won’t be against paying you the same they are paying your current employer for your services, so you can safely do 20% raise ( your employer charges more, of course, but there are other costs involved to set up and run the operation).

I run flood together with qbittorrent, looks great everywhere.

you need to set up port forwarding not only with your vpn provider, but also with gluetun:

https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/advanced/vpn-port-forwarding.md

It’s not even about gui.
If you want to self host you get yourself a pile of software of community-level quality (i.e “it works good until it doesn’t” is the best outcome) you need to care about. This means constantly being involved - updating, maintaining, learning something, etc, and honestly it’s time-consuming even for experienced sysadmins.

Generated wireguard config with nat-pmp enabled in ProtonVPN panel, put keys and endpoints to my vpn client (gluetun docker image), used https://github.com/soxfor/qbittorrent-natmap image to interactively update port from qbittorrent settings on proton through natpmpc.

https://github.com/soxfor/qbittorrent-natmap/issues/13 - I’ve set up my docker-compose pretty much by this example (ignore “unreliability” feedback, OP probably has some issues upstream - image itself is working). If you are using this, remove all upnp/nat-pmp checkboxes from qbittorrent, this image is your nat-pmp client.

Speaking of clients: this setup is for sure extremely ugly, but native implementation of nat-pmp in libtorrent for some reason is not doing what’s needed, maybe because qbittorrent tries to use upnp/nat-pmp simultaneously. What I see is an error message from upnp client (“no router found” - understandable) and complete silence from nat-pmp.

They are now refunding past their 30-day money back period if you didn’t use cash. Just got a refund for a top-up made in February.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/21703
I ended up buying ProtonVPN. Port forwarding required a bit of trickery with natpmpc image to set up in my case (headless wireguard gateway for dockerized services), however now it’s fine and working.

Speeds are at least 800Mbps download (which is maxing out my uplink, vpn is likely to be capable for more), didn’t have a chance to test upload.

They are claiming ProtonVPN port forwarding only works with Windows, however this is only relevant if you are using protonvpn app.

You can still generate wireguard config with nat-pmp support.
https://protonvpn.com/support/port-forwarding-manual-setup/

I’m not interested in their app at all since it’s going to run as headless docker gateway for qbittorrent/radarr/sonarr/other shit anyway, but - it seems like they support proper NAT-PMP which is massive.
https://protonvpn.com/support/port-forwarding-manual-setup/

Wow wtf I didn’t know this.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports/
They already disabled the possibility to add new port forwards and will remove any existing ones completely on 1st of July.

Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?

almost. It’s actually worse than that - when you subscribe to a community from your server it will fetch like 20 posts and that’s it, you’ll get only new stuff after that, so there’s no possibility to do a full mirror of selfhosted, for example, if you started your instance today and didn’t fetch posts and comments manually.

ActivityPub per se is just a spec on s2s/s2c communication, which is not a great thing since in many cases it assumes single source of truth, which potentially puts huge load on more popular instances.

I think a quick and dirty hack to this could be the following - each linked instance may maintain cache of announces (so there would be benefit of just forwarding original http signed requests w/o being afraid of malicious actor), which your instance could pull, this way you could populate your mirror without overloading the original source.
Distributed activities propagation though… Let’s say there are some design steps involved to make this truly distributed, however I feel like it’s possible.