JustTesting

Don't know about the second point, but on the first, there's a online newspaper here that does it pretty well. It's like 240$ a year, but with the option to pay however little/much you want. the articles can be shared freely (no paywall, though i think since a year ago you need to enter your email to read, used to be completely free to share), but can't be discovered/found unless you're subscibed. it's split into two legal entities, the newspaper that employs the journalists and a second non-profit that actually collects the payments and that every subscriber is allowed to vote in, elect leadership for etc. that works out guidelines for the newspaper part to follow.

has been working pretty well for several years now and it's one of the last few places of quality, independent journalism in my country

Ah but don't worry, there's also skills for scanning skills for security risks, so all good /s

They also have a 'skill' sharing page (a skill is just a text document with instructions) and depending on config, the bot can search for and 'install' new skills on its own. and agyone can upload a skill. So supply chain attacks are an option, too.

I got mine from kultofathena.com 20 years ago for 40 bucks (though with fancier blade), but just checked and don't think they sell it anymore.

You can have it if you want, it's just laying in my basement.

I'm sorry, that came off very passive-aggressive, I really shouldn't post at 3 am when I can sleep.

The whole dark ages, and golden ages thing is just very annoying, made up during the renaissance, in part as a useful tool to go "look how shit everything is, I will make it great and amazing like it was before", still a favorite to use by populists (in reference to whatever time is most suitable) and it's been repeated so much, it actually works, everyone kinda just accepted it. But then when you dig into it, the middle ages weren't really worse in terms of invention/art/etc. than the renaissance, nor was there this big stagnation after the decline of the roman empire, and people always made art, new inventions and great achievements, along with cruelty, bloodshed and other awful things. But then this has been a relatively recent shift in historical research, so not that well known

In other news, dark ages are a myth disproven by science.

OS: Arch DM: Niri Terminal: Kitty Editor: Helix

A big issue is that this works for bots that announce themselves as such, but there's lots that pretend to be regular users, with fake user agents and ips selected from a random pool with each ip only sending like 1-3 request/day, but overall many thousands of requests. In my experience a lot of them are from huawei and tencent cloud/ASN

I don't actually know how nostr deals with messages if you're offline, if at all, not that familiar with the protocol. But your idea sounds workable.

I tend to come at it from the other side, I like the federated model, but think the "supernodes" could behave more like dedicated relays. Like, a lemmy server right now does a lot of things, like serve a frontend, do expensive database queries to show a sorted feed, etc. and a lot of that does not scale very well. So having different kinds of nodes with more specialization, while still following a federated model makes sense to me. Right now if one of my users subscribes to some community, that community's instance will start spamming my instance with updates nonstop, even though that user might not be active or might not even read that community anymore. It would be nicer if there was some kind of beefy instance I could request this data from if necessary, without getting each and every update even though 90% of it might never be viewed. But keeping individual instances that could have their own community and themes, or just be hosted for you and your friends to reduce the burden on non-techies having to self-host something.

Or put another way, instead of making the relays more instance-y, embrace the super instances and make them more relay-y, but tailor made for that job and still hostable by anyone, if they want to spend on the hardware. But I'm still not clear on where you'd draw the line/how exactly you'd split the responsibility. For lemmy, instead of sending 100's of requests in parallel for each thing that happens, a super-instance could just consolidate all the events and send them as single big requests/batches to sub-instances and maybe that's a good place to draw the line?

it's iocaine not Locaine, tripped me up at first as well.

SBPlaysGames, super tiny lets play channel, but has been consistently uploading for 10 years and she picks some really good indie games (as well as board games) that i would otherwise never would have heard of. Plus pretty good analysis of the games, though of course the lets play format means it's pretty spread out across episodes. And by analysis i don't mean reviews, but more like movie analysis level. Though I'd love it if she'd lean into that part a bit more.

and i specifically picked her because it's one thing to consistently produce good content when you have millions of views (and dollars?), but doing so with 28k subs and maybe 100-200 views, for over 10 years, that takes real dedication.

Oh and on the topic of video game channels, AnyAustin is amazing. Fucking weird but amazing. He also does video game analysis but not how you'd think…

this article and the accompanying discussion from lobsters is very relevant. Though the article itself is a bit one sided in favor of nostr, it doesn't do a great job arguing why a relay really is better