Yeah, that’s all it is. Calibre Portable. In a folder on Nextcloud.

Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you’re hardcore for some reason) and you’re basically off to the races.

All the choices for “ebook stores” and ereader ecosystems are proprietary vendor-locked services with no self-hosting options. While Calibre is primarily a “local” tool it is a true alternative to all these proprietary services and I think it’s at least in the spirit of self hosting, if not strictly the letter.

For what it’s worth, I self-host a Calibre Portable library on Nextcloud, which enables me to access all my ebooks anywhere, and to upload new ones to my ereader from anywhere, as long as I have access to my Nextcloud. And I also share the same library through Calibre Web for when I don’t. I retain control of all my books, I remove all the DRM and convert them to epub. Calibre isn’t a hosted service on its own, but it fits nicely into the self-hosting ecosystem, and for that I am grateful.

China is nobody’s friend. They are an advanced authoritarian autocracy with significant territorial ambitions on this planet and in space. We made the mistake of relatively freely trading with them for decades, which helped destroy our manufacturing base while providing them funds to buy significant parts of our country in return, while they supported terrorist regimes like North Korea and bullied all their other neighbors in Asia. They are not friends, no matter how much they smile at us.

I agree, making a Faustian bargain with one evil authoritarian regime because we’re afraid of the prices of the evil authoritarian regime on our border is just trading one problem for another problem. Both these countries are happy to destroy our economy, destroy the environment we live in, destroy their own people, and to destroy us if they can get away with it.

EVs are going to be expensive if they are made responsibly by people who are paid fairly. Life is going to be expensive. This is the cost of living responsibly on this planet and having a future for ourselves and our children, and it is not negotiable and cannot be dodged, hidden, offset, or rejected. Deal with it. Be prepared to change your way of life. We will manage. We are tough, resilient people, and we will lead the way into a future that, while it might not be the utopian ideal we wished it to be, will perhaps at least be a future where we can continue to breathe air and not wildfire smoke.

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

Keep in mind that “those games” also have decades of content added through expansions and mods, it’s very difficult to separate the true base games from what they have become today, in fact a lot of them were relatively simplistic and shallow in their very first releases too. Go play the first version of one of the Sims games with no expansions and tell me if you’re having a good experience with deep and interesting mechanics for your Sims, knowing what you know now of what the Sims are capable of.

We are comparing a game in its infancy to an established giant, of course it will pale in comparison… for now, and for quite some time. The question is whether it will catch up, because if it does, it’s going to become something very, very big. Yes that’s a big if, but it’s an if worth waiting for.

Nextcloud AIO via docker is super simple and has clear instructions.

Install docker through whatever tools Fedora has to install packages/rpms/whatever. Then follow steps 2, 3 and 4 at least. 5 if you need it.

The only way we’re ever really going to get a healthy democracy back is if people show up to VOTE. Doesn’t matter if your candidate will definitely win, doesn’t matter if your candidate will definitely lose. We need HIGH TURNOUT to show ALL politicians Canadians are upset and we mean business and signal that we will hold them accountable, an engaged electorate terrifies them. They love the apathy, they love the status quo, they love how it lets them rely on the special interest groups who always vote. But those special interests don’t represent us, and the more they rely on them for votes the less they care about the rest of us. We need to scare them to get them to actually listen to us and keep them on their best behavior.

If you don’t vote you’re not keeping your vote away from them – you’re giving it to them. Decline your ballot if you don’t want to actually vote. But you have to show up to be counted.

As Canadians, we’re happy to help out where we can, and glad we have an alternative source from the US too. Trump has changed everything. We can’t control what he’s done. But where one door closes another opens, and every problem is an opportunity in disguise. It’s up to us to make sure this change is change for the better, for all of us, and hopefully for the world too if we can.

“Local outlets” you say? Pray tell, which ones? I thought they were all dead or absorbed by the media conglomerates already. I must have been misinformed! Are there real local news outlets still producing quality journalism? I would love to know about them and where you found them.

… oh, wait, let me guess, you mean local outlets like the Russian-funded propaganda and disinformation outlet The Grimsby Independent News I’ll bet, don’t you? That’s the kind of quality independent local journalism that’s going to be telling your story, won’t it? I’m sure outlets like that are going to do a very well-funded job right across the whole country, plastered on every social media site they can find. Boy oh boy this is going to be a fun election.

“I used to think the complete breakdown of laws, government and society was just funny when was only happening on TV! I never thought it would happen in my town! This is outrageous!” --Person outraged about 50 years too late.

They … rejected … anti-DEI … making them … pro-DEI … and anti-Trump? Am I getting that right? Sorry, there are just getting to be a lot of double-negatives these days it’s hard to keep track.

Given the current state of the world, it’s easiest to just assume that literally anything anyone is saying about anything DEI related is probably just pure fucking falsehoods, like everything else spewing out of MAGA.

Even in the unlikely event you do accidentally dismiss one slight half-truth in the mountain of lies, you can rest assured that it probably wasn’t as meaningful or widespread as they are trying to make it seem.

You are being lied to. The lies are repeated and relentless to batter you until you accept them. They’re still lies though.

Discord is a completely proprietary walled-garden that bans third-party clients to maintain full control AND (soon) has Wall-Street-ownership.

Jitsi is open-source built with multiple open protocols BUT has Wall-Street-ownership.

Neither is great, but these are two distinctly different situations.

You misspelled “Swastikars”, it’s okay though I still understood what you meant.

Personally I find the complete opposite, I’ve !selfhosted@lemmy.world everything I can with open source services, to keep control of my personal data but access it from anywhere. I know where all my critical data is and I know nobody is selling it out behind the scenes.

On my local machine, I have no concerns about running proprietary software because I can easily sandbox it and make sure it’s not going to touch anything it’s not supposed to or phone home with things I don’t want it to. Running shit like discord doesn’t really bother me because I’ve got it sandboxed away from anything valuable.

I suppose the reason we’ve probably had such different experiences is I suspect we have different strategies for where to keep our most precious “crown jewels”. For me, I want everything on SAAS, but because I’m putting my most valuable data there it has to be MY SAAS and thus open-source and heavily secured. I suspect you on the other hand probably minimize your data’s exposure to SAAS providers which you view as potentially suspect, and keep everything valuable strictly local if you possibly can. I don’t think one way is necessarily better than the other, and I’ve definitely made my choice, but this would explain our different perspectives at least.

Those are good ideas, thanks. Like I said he’s got lots of good people around him, the university is awesome, they’ve been having workshops for the foreign students to kind of keep everyone up to date and supported. That part is great. But I really don’t like where this is going.

Maybe it’s just their way of restricting the beta, but I really hope they’re not moving towards an enshittified open-source business model, “we’re still technically open source if you use the *retch* community version… but it’s out of date, difficult to use, broken, has no useful features, and we’re only adding new stuff to the paid version, so just pay us already.”

My brother is a post-grad scholarship student at an extremely prestigious and extremely left-leaning university in the US. He is terrified. I am terrified for him. He wants to come home, but doesn’t want to throw away everything he’s worked his whole academic life to achieve. He is in a safe place, surrounded by sensible people, but we all know they will become targets of this fascist regime probably sooner rather than later and I can’t stop picturing how I think that is probably going to go.