I’ve been working on getting Matrix Synapse running on my NAS, and the CLI hasn’t been my problem. I’m a programmer, and CLI doesn’t scare me; but the other issues you mention are all new to me, and getting a web service set up so people outside my local network can access it but without leaving me open to bad actors is wicked stressful.

The biggest problems end up being that I need to work with the soup of technologies, and there’s no one place to do all the things. I’ve got TWO routers (because my internet comes through one, and I run my LAN and wifi off one I trust better) which means I’m double-NATed, which is apparently the root of all evil; I can use Cloudflare to tunnel to my NAS, but I can’t accept simple (CNAME) redirects from a family member’s domain to one of my subdomains without paying Cloudflare $200/month, so that means I’m back to dealing with the double-NAT, and then I have to learn setting up TLS, which sounds like it’s simple, but still it’s jimmy way another thing to screw around with and another thing I could screw up on accident.

I could pay for a VPS, but that to me defeats a lot of the point of “host your own” federation when some company could be subpoenaed for copies of all their hosted accounts or something. (Yes, I could get subpoenaed for my data just as easily, but it takes more work to subpoena a thousand people than one company for a thousand people’s accounts.)

Anyway, I’d love to see things evolve to where it’s easy for newbies to host their own private instances of everything.

Personally, I’d love a drop-in tool that runs more like a temporary server while it’s running, syncing federated data you missed while your device was off; and only serving your data when it’s on. Likely with some kind of redirect service/NAT punchthrough so other clients can find you…

…but I think we’re a long way off from being able to do that.

I do, but I’m not running anything super important through them; but I’ve been considering jumping ship to Cloudflare, as cloudflare seems to be doing a good job with providing encryption and traffic protection with their free management accounts.

The only good outcome of the merger IMO is hopefully getting rid of Bobby Kotick. The fine devs across the company deserve better leadership and a safer working environment than they’ve had over the years under his frat boy reign.

But do I think Microsoft will eternally play fair with the acquisition? Not by a long shot.

I went through the same phase several years back when my child was born, and you’re right—games where you can pause any time are the only kind worth playing for several years after a new child.

I was VERY confused about Counter-Strike 2 having any kind of urban planning at all… and then I saw the screenshot better and worked it out. 😅

The issue, I imagine, is that there’s a community online who pays attention and cares about it, and we’re almost completely separate on the Venn diagram from a huge swathe of gamers out there who do all the preordering. 😩

Among my personal friends, probably the same ratio of men and women are into Souls games. So like… yeah, women play games. And not just “lady-friendly” fare. As a non-woman, I freaking love Animal Crossing; meanwhile my wife has beaten most of the Souls games and I’ve given up on all of them. Anecdotal, but like… gamers like gaming, and I feel like these days trying to say anything about game preference and gender is just not really helpful.

/cries in iOS

Meta is in it for profit. So you have to ask what they’re stand to gain by offering a federated service (presumably for free). Do they think they can get free data, perhaps? I have no idea, but it’s tempting to want to block them just in case. Costing ActivityPub maintainers money so you can steal user data to sell for money isn’t exactly ethical…

I’m trying to think generously, but struggle to imagine other ways they might be able to profit off the Fediverse.

My wife and I bought it and we don’t regret the purchase; but also we’re doing well enough this year that is not a huge burden for us. So B like… it’s worth it generally IMO, but if it’s a burden, I can’t say that any game is worth it.

Diablo 4, Elden Ring, and setting up a matrix chat homeserver on my NAS

Hopefully, hosting costs could be handled by a reasonable number of users donating a small amount regularly. It I agree, it’s not a guarantee; and it’s one of the reasons I’m looking into setting up my own hosting—both for owning my own content and for better understanding what it takes so I can have better ideas how to help when bigger servers grow and cost more.

I absolutely love raytracing… and on my 3080 it just doesn’t look good enough yet to justify turning it on for most games. Maybe they just haven’t implemented it well yet, but the reduced framerate in most games just isn’t worth it, and I’ve hated effects like screen-space reflections since more or less they came out.

I think by the time we have a 50X0 or a 60X0 that raytracing will finally be fast enough to have it look good AND perform well. But for now it’s mostly just a gimmick I turn on to appreciate, and then turn back off so I can actually play the game smoothly.