This has always been my reason to avoid StartOS for running a Bitcoin node. When you're dealing with contentious forks (like we are right now) it's helpful to be able to get as low level as you want without realizing that things have all been hidden from you.

That said it depends on exactly what you're doing. Their server having a jitsi server that just works is nothing to shake a stick at. Nor is Start Tunnel making the server accessible over the Internet without any port forwarding required to the casual user.

I'm just not certain I'm their target userbase.

As far as Popes go, Leo's probably upset more catholics than any in recent history. Which is saying something, given that the guy before the last one was a literal Nazi.

The best miners are doing so with near free electricity, either with things like subsidized solar, or energy acquired from things like nat gas that'd otherwise get flared, or hydroelectric power that exists too far from civilization to have a demand otherwise.

If your miner is plugged into the grid, you're probably doing it wrong.

But yes, it's definitely small islands in a sea of spam or just dead groups.

Not the one you were replying to, but this is free for anyone for text based Usenet (no binaries).

Coldcard, Passport, DIY, or GTFO.

Looks like you can still hook up to it using a Synchronet BBS anyway using the steps available here: https://wiki.synchro.net/howto:fidonet

The homepage for FIDONet itself is here: https://www.fidonet.org/

And the Zone 1 Hub, Dark Realms (a Renegade BBS since 1994) is here: https://www.darkrealms.ca/ It has node lists available if you're looking for systems to connect from.

The Fediverse is to Nostr what the legacy telephone system was to the Internet.

If I've got a profile on let's say, mastodon.social, and I have a following, and people I follow across other servers, and then mastodon.social decides that due to a few people over on outrageousposts.social, I can no longer access their content, nor they mine, I am left with exactly two choices: write that portion of my network off as a complete loss, or create a completely new profile on a new instance, and build up a new network from scratch.

That anyone puts up with this state of affairs suggests to me that people just don't know Nostr solved this problem 3 years ago.

I get that compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc, Mastodon does seem like an improvement even with this state of affairs -- after all, you at least CAN just create a new profile rather than getting booted off of the network entirely. It was handy for a few years. But a better alternative has been created, and I for one won't be looking back.

Which has always been the drawback of the Fediverse.

Nostr has delivered what I had hoped to get from the Fediverse: actually decentralized, censorship proof social media (and then some), wherein you actually maintain full ownership of your own identity (as it's a keypair, not an account). Where if you get banned from one relay or other, you just move to a new one, and everything comes with you. Where if nobody wants to platform you, you can literally run your own relay on your PHONE and stay connected to the network.

And yea, there is at least one bridge between Nostr and Mastodon (Mostr), so you don't even have to give up on talking to your Mastodon buddies.

That it also does so much more than social media is icing on the cake. Really leverages its existence as a protocol rather than a platform to use the Internet as it was always meant to be.

Lowering the cost of necessary education is important, though in many cases the methods attempted just serve to make matters worse (much like how corporate average fleet economy regulations, in attempting to improve fuel efficiency, just made vehicles bigger). The structure of college itself (and schooling up until that point) is something I think we could stand to seriously reconsider, given how much of it really formed amid the industrial revolution and was modeled off of the ubiquitous factory models. I don't have some ready made model to address this, but do think there's room for an open conversation.

I don't care THAT much about abortion so much as the system that incentivizes it -- that is, the one that makes it particularly unaffordable to have children, and drives debaucherous, nihilistic behavior. In other words, the monetary system. Fix that, and see if a lot of this other stuff even needs to be fixed or resolves on its own.

Background checks, not licensing, I don't see a strong reason to oppose. I don't have a strong reason to back it, but not a total non-starter.

America first doesn't just mean cutting Israel's influence -- more importantly, it means cutting the influence of international bankers who bought our nation out from under us by printing OUR currency through the Eurodollar system. We've started to address this by leaving LIBOR for SOFR, but it's not a done deal, and there are decades of damage to undo.

Strong on crime needs to come with it sanity of enforcement. Another area I suspect fixing money can help, because I'm not convinced there isn't a fair bit of funded agitation to disrupt the social fabric that has law enforcement at its wit's end. That said, police killing people in the street is not a good look.

As for DEI, no argument.

But hey, if the goal is to bring war to the doorstep of the occupiers,there are probably worse goals to have.

Most of them are unbearably boring, and they need to resort to alcohol and professional sports just to have anything to talk about in the first place.

Bring up ECDSA and suddenly you may as well have just beamed down from a spaceship.

Just do yourself a favor and run Slackware.

For the other 80% of the planet though, it's a game changer. Rough estimate, but feels fair, as outside the US most people can't have one without substantial access to capital.

At the end of the day, it's just another IOU, much like a bank deposit, except instead of getting the 0.1% yield and FDIC (IF you're in the US), you get the ability to transact 24/7 across borders in a much faster manner than even bank wires, let alone ACH payments.