Yeah I know people say “Syncthing is not a file backup tool!” but when I am dealing with 99% text files and I can slam the “keep X amount of previous versions of file” up to 30 well… I mean it still isn’t the way Syncthing was meant to be used but it works, it is minimal and it is simple and that is LITERALLY a lifesaver for me given how much I struggle with executive function.

I hope the people that work on these tools understand that for some they literally have a lifesaving potential, organization is a massive struggle for me and my society provides no social safety net for just being bad at focusing no matter how much people claim to be accomodating and accepting of severe ADHD. I don’t mean this to place undue burden or weight on the developers but to emphasize the work they contribute is real and directly impacts people’s lives for the better in a way they should be proud as fuck about.

Most people who obsess about organizational tools, project management systems and thinking tools have no problem switching from one system to the next, it is almost a hobby for people into this kind of thing. Not me, I find it desperately hard to get myself to commit to even a single system longterm and not just randomly drop the habit and never go back. Critical for my quality of life are open source softwares like Syncthing that just do what they do with no company to become bankrupt and shut down the tool, enshittify the tool, require an account login, have all my organization locked in a proprietary format on cloud servers or any number of other things corporations attach to software tools that make them useless for my condition.

In the software development world “friction” is the thing you introduce to compel people towards your monetization scheme and “attention” is a resource to be harvested, meanwhile I try to use these tools while drowning in internal friction from task switching difficulties and constantly having my attention ripped away by my ADHD from the important things I am trying to get done. This is what I mean when I say open source tools like Syncthing are literally lifesaving for me.

Even other hobbiest DIY filesyncing tools like Nextcloud are mostly useless for me as they require a complex annoying fiddly maintenance of a central server that is a single point of failure, and the idea I will keep that fiddly and fragile of a system going longterm is downright laughable even though I think those tools are cool. With Syncthing I am able to just keep leapfrogging my important files from device to device, there is no central server I have to maintain with focus I don’t have even for the thing I am trying to use the organizational tool to help myself get done in the first place.

<3 devs of Syncthing!!!

edit I would like to add a personal “burn in hell” to the people who run Google Drive and Microsoft Onedrive. The entire setup of these services encourages you to get lost creating and uploading a bunch of files, run out of cloud space and then be so totally overwhelmed in trying to manage all the files you have created and uploaded that you just acquiesce and purchase the premium subscription to get more space instead. From my perspective this kind of monetization architecture is blatantly predatory and hurtful and is one of the reasons I see these corporations as enemies trying to hurt and entrap me for profit.

Obsidian seems great and the company seems genuinely very decent. I appreciate that the file format isn’t locked down and that it retains a plaint text philosophy. Do you use Syncthing for sharing Obsidian notes between devices?

Emacs Org mode (or Logseq) and Syncthing together are probably the only system I have found that works for my chaos, I am very thankful for how these softwares have allowed me to structure my organizational system in a way that is simple and I have direct control over.

Also, it takes years for me to integrate habits deeply into my life with many many many repetitions necessary to lock the habit in, so being able to organize things in plaintext gives me much needed assurance that I won’t have the rug pulled out from under me by the company behind the product enshittifying or going out of business.

Syncthing is critical to my organizational systems because it makes the sharing of notes between devices agnostic of the specific notes system I am using. Syncthing shares a folder and it has some text files in it… those could be .org emacs org mode files or logseq files… it doesn’t matter I can change my notes system and retain the same sharing mechanism.

From the bottom of my heart thank you to everyone who has worked on these tools, I plan to keep donating to and supporting these projects in the future!

Bluesky theoretically has the capacity to be decentralized. I am sure people will show up in this comment thread and provide a whole lot of technical specifications about mostly proof of concept features that demonstrate that Bluesky is in some sense technically decentralized. Maybe not anymore? That seems a bit less common these days it seems.

To all of those responses theoretical or prophesized lol I ask in turn -why then has the CEO of Bluesky not ruled out serving ads to users as a way of monetizing the currently unprofitable nascient social network?

This isn’t a conversation about details no matter how much people will try to steer it there with an air of expert authority. This is a conversation about values and how we embue them in the structures of our communities.

Bluesky is a for-profit business with investors who will seek a return on their investment. Until proven otherwise we must assume they will monetize similarly to the way every other social media company has so far. The words that people who work for Bluesky are less important than this basic economic reality.

If you listen to any of this long rant, please ask yourself this question. Why are massive social media companies, with so much cash on hand they might as well be small countries, only putting serious effort into creating decentralized social media technology and building out the infrastructure NOW after the path forward was already blazed? Where were they when the fediverse was still just mostly a cute idea without practical infrastructure built out and standards agreed to?

When talking about whether a specific corporate social media platform is decentralized or not you cannot ignore this context, these foundations had already been laid and fairly well built up by a small rag tag team of developers working almost entirely as volunteers funded on a yearly budget so small it wouldn’t cover a single dinner check for the executives of Meta.

An aside… also consider the implications of the massive amount of computation that the architecture of Bluesky is set up to require for moderation of channels with the claims they are making about needing channels to processed by servers to be fed back to nodes in turn. Consider the difference in power/leverage between small nodes and massive communities in a situation where moderation is done by humans doing moderation (with automated screening tools to help maybe, but ultimately human) vs when moderation is done by applying a prohibitively expensive amount of computing power to the raw firehose of conversation. The difference is who gets to moderate public spaces and who doesn’t.

Reddit is a for profit website owned by rightwing idiots pretending to be a community space rather than a volunteer effort to help rich reddit chuds train their AI crap… so the problem isn’t inherently about the popularity here.

Regardless though, I want more people here based on the principle that when good things happen to me it is better if they happen to others and I should endeavor to destroy any barrier to seeing a fluid relationship between my wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around me.

Bluesky is a for profit venture with a marketing budget it uses to sell the idea the platform is decentralized.

Bluesky is not decentralized and there is no realistic business plan proposed for how to lucratively monetize a truly decentralized network. Bluesky MUST turn a profit, this isn’t an inconvenient detail, it is a crisis the company is on the clock to solve like any heavily speculative venture capital funded startup is.

The only way this works is if actual meaningful decentralization is always “on the horizon” for Bluesky as something the for profit company can periodically point to and say “look how close we are!” while never taking meaningful steps closer.

Bluesky silicon valley techbros will point to their cool blogpost about how they set up a hobbyist project on Bluesky outside of the central network and it will remain a pipedream or like the end of a rainbow for 99.9% of us, an impossible promise that flies away as fast away as we chase it.

This is a genocide not a war.

You cannot trust Microsoft to consistently provide your organization a foundation to get things done on anymore.

-paywalled-

Wait though, virtually all actually useful forms of work are making a comeback? That is amazing news!

Not here

How? This article claims Meta has proved you can make your stock price go up by talking about AI and offering large salaries, that only indicates something to me I already know, the stock market is willingly delusional about AI to a horrifying degree. What does Meta actually do with their AI to make a profit?

gotta sustain that bubble!

I am so turned on in a SFW way like my skin is tingling this is awesome news!!! Very Fucking Cool.

HEADPHONE JACK - I scream into the void

But, they’ll have to make something that more people like than the AI.

No, it does not have to be better than the AI image to be preferable.

I agree

The tricopter build always seemed so cool to me.

Competitive team video games as a way of having fun while getting to know yourself and others better.

The ultimate reason is that developers by and large were successfully convinced by the ruling class that they didn’t need unions to advocate for their quality of life as it pertains to their career.

This is what the tiny part of a massive iceberg of consequences poking above the surface look like.

Why should we believe them when they say they will stop? This is meta’s only real solid business model meta/facebook has found so far so I doubt laws factor into their thinking much.