Speaking as someone who managed to quit smoking, but still uses a vape, who is focusing on doing daily PT after being maimed a while back...

A step in the right direction is a step in the right direction, and taking one step at a time is better than none.

Lemmy ain't corporate like Reddit, it ain't parasocial, only a very small number of users actually directly link their real identity to their psuedonym, and it doesn't have a worldclass datamining/profiling algo perfecting what content to feed to specifically you, to make you angry or insecure enough to keep you engaged.

Perfect?

No.

Leagues better than every alternative?

Far as I can tell, yes.

It blocks anyone not using one of its preferred browsers, among other things. It's become the gatekeeper for a large fraction of the Internet.

Fundamentally, the brain still receives "bite-size-chocolate" dopamine hits from Lemmy by receiving positive affirmations from upvotes, cortisol from downvotes, and lends to dark behavior patterns like any forum. Adrenaline dumps when engaged in "online arguments".

The nature of both anonymous or personally identifiable online forums' neurochemical stimulation of our over-sized and over-active (but evolutionarily necessary for our ancestors' survival) amygdala fosters social media addiction.

People like Lemmy for many reasons. Some of them are good. However, let's not pretend that it's "all of the good with none of the bad." It's healthy to be skeptical of Lemmy instances too. Screen time is the enemy.

Scrumlords I love it

And when I went there, it said Google, Cloudflare, and Frank's Dildo Emporium all down, like of all the random sites, why pick FDE?

Erotic resource planning

I've migrated about half of my services off of cloudflare DNS proxy. Guess which half still worked this afternoon. (Self hosting pangolin with CrowdSec as replacement). I wasn't even using the cloudflare tunnel. Just their proxy for some bot mitigation.

Another reason to self host

Owhooo your virtual girl friend is offline!

We just should not use cloudflare. Why is everybody still trying to use cloudflare.

It drives me nuts. The default answer on all network problems: why don't you just use cloudflare? No! No no.

Still a very important service for many people who are alone.

Ai? Or a catch headline

We just should not use cloudflare. Why is everybody still trying to use cloudflare.

Counterpoint: I find networking challenging, and I'm not particularly accountable for the natural consequences of not knowing how stuff works.

This could end fine for everyone? Maybe an AI will understand it for me. (This is sarcasm. I agree with you.)

great article, and I had no idea that happened to Brian Krebs, of all people! o.O

I do think the EFF makes a good point though, and I think personally I tend to be biased towards content neutrality over moderation (at least, more strongly the larger the platform is, and Cloudflare is very large). Not to the point of Xitter, obviously, but I think there's at least a reasonable argument for Cloudflare in this case.

that said, after some searching, I did find the following two articles, and I find their arguments against Cloudflare very compelling:

• https://www.devever.net/~hl/cloudflare
• http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/07/14/cloudflare-we-have-a-problem/

Fortunately I'm already using end-to-end SSL certs via Caddy, but now I'm considering just moving off Cloudflare entirely and instead providing regular backups to Internet Archive--most of the stuff I host is entirely static and very lightweight.

still hard. most projects still CDN online instead of packaging into a single application.

it's one of the most infuriating things about self-hosting. so I made my own self-hosted CDN and have rewrite rules that replace most public cdb domains and reroute them to my own local.

it would be great if I could just have something in the middle that would download once and cache locally on request, but it's effort that would be taken from my time afk.

Yeah, a great part of Lemmy's fundamental design is that it gives the user so much ability to block specific toxic users and communities and even entire instances from being seen by that user.

A user who is interested in self regulating or limiting that potential adrenaline overload ... is aided by Lemmy in doing so.

This is significantly different from how its nearest equivalent, reddit, operated untill about 2 years ago, when they finally added an actual block user ability.

Still don't think you can block the entire user group of subreddit communities, the way you can block an an entire Lemmy instance, if you want to.

(At least not without some third party script or software... which are probably all broken by now given how hard reddit is cracking down on its API?)

Also, moderation and admin logs are significantly less opague than on reddit.

To the best of my knowledge, on lemmy, you can't admin edit the post of someone you are arguing with to frame them, basically, and then turn them into a strawman of themselves, and then win that argument with them, and then ban them... as has happened on reddit.

Also Also, ... lemmy at least not yet does not appear to have a problem with a massive flood of ai bots posting god knows what % of the actual content.

...

Not saying Lemmy is perfect.

I'm saying its better.

And I guess I'm also saying there's a difference between being an alcoholic and enjoying an occasional drink from time to time.

Generally: Yes, of course, approach any online messsge board or social media with caution and skepticism... but different platforms can be significantly more conducive to generating negative mental health outcomes than others...

... short form video platforms collapse your attention span, anything that allows advertisements or 'influencers' who are basically just walking talking brand ambassadors lie to you to sell you all kinds of bs...

Thats not present on lemmy, at least not that I've seen... so in those ways, lemmy is the marijuana to say Tiktok's fentanyl.

That's how I read it too at first- and as bad as 'erotic role play' with a LLM chatbot sounds, the other one is so much horribly worse.

Jokes on you, my virtual girlfriend runs locally!

Cloudflare tries to enforce pretty strong vendor lock in by requiring you use their nameservers.

Also subdelegate domains are an "enterprise" feature, so no luck there.

Basically the CDN market sucks, not a shocker Netflix, Google, Valve, and many others operate their own.