Because you are the product, not the client. You are only catered to enough so that you may be coralled. You are basically cattle to these corporations.
As for why this is happening now:
The economy is in a downswing right now so we are going to see cost cutting and belt tightening.
Entrenched proprietary social media platforms are basically monopolies. You cannot choose to use an alternative because these are walled gardens and leaving means losing your ability to communicate with large groups of people. The larger and more entrenched these big firms get, coupled with lack of regulation means they can do whatever the fuck they want. You have no power and no choice (except for the Fediverse, a one-time pain to migrate to).
They wish it’s this easy to keep people. If businesses knew how to monopolize the market forever, they wouldn’t have been so desperate to set up these walls.
I dropped cable for Netflix years ago with a shrug, and as Netflix and all the streaming services are turning into cable I dropped them too and will wait for the next thing. If talking to some large group of faceless masses becomes annoying and spam filled, I’ll keep my resources for other things I can turn my attention to.
It’s weird to me to see these artificial structures treated as though they’re some real solid thing with no alternatives. That’s literally these companies’ PR to make us believe it
not entirely. while steam does auto approve refunds for games that are both owned less than 14 days & played less than 2 hours (not sure if this part is automated or if they train staff to just glance at the playtime & click refund in their ticket system), they still have a refund department to vet & process refunds that fall outside of that category. they’ll send you an email if what you’re refunding doesn’t fit the criteria for automatic approval:
if you played the game for over 2 hours, even if it’s just by one minute, your request is gonna be in limbo for a while until a support team member gets to it. i’ve had it happen a few times over the years & in my experience it takes anywhere from like 1 or 2 days to as many as 5, depending on how busy it is (steam sales seem to slow them down). i’ve also heard from some on the steam community that even when a refund is auto approved it can sometimes still get stuck in the system for a few days.
yeah, i’d contact steam if it’s really bothering you but otherwise just wait. steam support is one of the chillest cs teams i’ve ever dealt with so you shouldn’t have any problem either way. also keep in mind a few popular games are on sale atm so they might just be processing some more than usual
Yep, it was 100% a ‘bigger’ game, so I’m sure I’m just stuck somewhere in the mix. Everything I click in the support pages just takes me back to my already requested request for a refund, so can’t even reach any live chat support.
My main take-away is to just be patient (it’s so not in my nature!)
IIRC, I’ve read comments elsewhere that pictrs caches for 6 months, but I can’t independently verify. I hope this gets a broader answer because I’m still on the fence about getting an instance set up for myself and some small communities.
These companies are overvalued. Currently we’re operating in supply side economics where the wealthy have all the money and companies do everything they can to attract those big investment dollars.
But the truth is social media companies (despite being household names) don’t really make the revenue that warrants their high valuation by investors. Investors are starting to figure this out, and now they’re desperately throwing shit at the wall to try to keep from losing those big supply side dollars.
Social media companies can break even and employ a lot of people while doing so. They could have a good user experience, and it would be all fine. But they wouldn’t have sky rocketing share prices doing that. The leadership wouldn’t get fat bonuses. So they implement all these crazy schemes so they can make projections about future revenue.
It doesn’t matter if these schemes actually will make money or not. They just need to show X number of users multiplied by Y additional revenue per user and that’s enough to attract investment. And it doesn’t matter if it destroys the company either, the people at the top will get their bonuses.
Tailscale and Netmaker use wireguard under the hood, so as long as you manage to establish the connections, they should be just as fast! If you need to use relaying, however, that will introduce additional overhead.
Sorry to steal your post but I am looking to set up the same thing and I am wondering if Hetzner is good for this? They have a VERY attractive 20tb network traffic allowance for only ~£4/month
I ended up using racknerd. Used the same script and it worked perfect. It was $14 total for a year and 4tb a month which is all I need. There was a few dollar extra options for my network space. Once I bought it I got it all setup in like 20 mins and that includes activation for the vps
You can order a Canadian server with fairly low latency. I have one but I also have a couple of machines at home. I don’t like buying used and I care about wattage so I usually get beelinks mini PC from Amazon. They often have deals where you can have good specs for <$150, including 128gb SSDs, 8 or 16gb of ram and a 4 cores 15w CPU
I’ve been a fan of both Mullvad and ProtonVPN for years. I ultimately went with ProtonVPN since it is included in my Visionary plan anyways. I did like Private Internet Access until they got bought by an adware company.
Anyways, ProtonVPN supports P2P and still has port forwarding. I’ve never had issues with the paid plan, but have heard of problems on the free tier.
Do you know if ProtonVPN supports port forwarding on Linux or via Wireguard? I have read it only works on windows. It’s between that and IVPN to replace Mullvad since they dropped port forwarding.
That’s pretty new too, it was made within the last week, the biggest I’ve seen is Beehaw’s then Lemmy.ml’s technology communities. However, new communities are always going to be smaller at the beginning than ones that have been around for a month or a year, but that changes when people learn that they exist!
E-mail was the first “thing” that got me off of Google (to Proton & then currently Tutanota) but is really the last remaining service I not have self hosted.
I have always read about how difficult and time consuimg it was to run your own mail server, but I felt like I needed to experience it myself. So I purchased another domain and followed the instructions on mailinabox.email.
I am using a small VPS on Hetzner and I have to say the experience has been almost flawless so far. I did need to have my new domain taken off the Domain Block List, but Hetzner gave me a clean IP and defaults to blocking port 25 outbound to prevent spam (simple ticket to open, once account is 30 days old and paid).
I know I’m still early into this journey so far, but it has been really simple and I plan to test this secondary domain for a few months before moving onto it full time.
As an avid self hosted of literally everything else, I can say it has been a lot of fun learning so far!
Hell yes, I love the enthusiasm! I just got a domain, which is giving me 3 months of email, so that is great. I feel like Tutanota is the most honest email service when it comes to advertising privacy, and they do some stuff that Proton definitely does not, like make recovery impossible without a key, and use no other method.
My next step is to get a VPS, and Hetzner is the name I have seen pop up the most. I will use that.
Yes I haven’t had any real issues with Tutanota, but it seems like the common trend is that they, and everyone else, is raising prices for things I dont really need. But at the same time, the things I do need, I.e. accounts with enough storage for my family, will start costing more than the price of renting a VPS alone. So for me, its partially privacy, but also ownership of my data and cost benefit analysis where I am now trying to make CERTAIN that my self hosted email is worth the cost savings.
That is the thing, I am willing to pay for email, because then the incentives are real to the provider to follow best practices for privacy and quality of life, but the pricing blows up too quickly due to to features I will never use. I need something more granular.
I am also looking at Disroot and Posteo, which I like because the have hardened ethical principles driving their services, and that is worth supporting.
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