They both agreed with each other but were arguing with a strawman. One said

their precious smartphones might be problematic.

The other said

maybe smartphones play a role

Which mean the same thing.

monkrus.ws idk how it works but it’s even easier than installing the legit way.

Yes, even for them, the information they can get through a phone is lifesaving. They can learn how to build water supply and sanitation systems and shelter. They can learn how to farm and forage for food. They can find the best way to cross international borders and become a refugee. And so on, they can improve every aspect of their lives. Information is power, and with a smartphone they have access to the entire world, rather than just word of mouth knowledge in their local community.

Obviously, places without any form of electricity are screwed, but satellite internet is rapidly becoming cheaper and more accessible so soon they won’t even need cell coverage.

2. Those in extreme poverty need access to more important things than access to these gadgets.

We’re going down a sidetrack here but this is just false. A smartphone these days is a ticket to many things required to live. Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.

2FA is entirely offline. So it’s not really the same service and there’s nothing to breach.

Don’t buy a Windows key. If Windows was installed initially it should remember your hardware and activate. If it doesn’t, there’s numerous ways to pirate Windows.

Debian. The basic install is very bare bones.

I liked Quora as recently as a few years ago, it had some nice explanations that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Obviously you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but you have to do that anywhere on the internet.

Further evidence for this is ChromeOS. It’s just a Linux distro, but worse. It does little more than run Chrome. Yet it’s popular. Anyone that tolerates ChromeOS would have an even better time on most of the standard distros if they had someone to set it up for them.

I haven’t had any issues with Nextcloud yet. But any torrent client refuses to work. I’ve tried various qbittorrent containers, transmission, deluge briefly, they all work for a while but eventual refuse to do anything.

OSMand tends to choose a much more intuitive route.

The same thing is true here. A novice shouldn’t be hosting their own instance, heck a experienced user shouldn’t host their own instance unless they want a hobby.

Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that’s the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as “self hosted social media”, I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.

We’re not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they’re the people that are most likely to stick around.

In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That suggests it’s about right.

Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.

I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.

Email is the only federated social platform that every normal person is familiar with. It doesn’t matter that the technical specifications are completely different. The metaphor goes as far as “in the fediverse anyone signed up with any instance can communicate with anyone on any other instance, like email”. For that purpose, it’s a good metaphor.

The same could be said for K-9. What more could you want from an email app.

That sounds like a great outcome for the original company

Corporate welfare is a problem in all capitalist countries

There’s a nice explanation of how caddy reverse proxies work here. https://caddy.community/t/using-caddy-as-a-reverse-proxy-in-a-home-network/9427

Essentially you setup your router to port forward any new incoming connections to Caddy, which then decides what to do with them according to the configuration (Caddyfile).

Even simpler: Your local network is like a castle, inside is a safe and secure place where your devices communicate freely. Your router is a firewall around the castle, by default it blocks incoming connections. This is good because the internet is scary. By port forwarding you allow a door in the firewall which leads to Caddy, which is like a guard. Caddy asks them what they want, and if they say e.g. jellyfin.example.com, then it sets up an encrypted connection with https to your local jellyfin server. If they want anything else they aren’t allowed in.

I guess so. Your question was

Would anyone be interested in something like that?

Which most of us have answered with a clear “no”. So I guess we’re done here.