I like to ask a variety of questions, sometimes silly, serious, and/or strange. Never asking in an attempt to pester or “just asking questions” stuff.

I’m generally curious and/or trying to get a sense of people’s views.

  • 6 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider.

    By this do you mean official forums? If so I think this is kind of missing some of the independent forums for software (whether games or media players or the like) or other media, which some sorta-everyday people set up in the past. Many have migrated to Discord not only because it’s easy but, I think, because it’s simply more cost-effective.

    Forums don’t seem to be cheap. Discourse’s own managed hosting goes for $50 a month, from one of their partners it’s $20, and looks like somewhere in-between if you try to spin it up yourself (e.g. Digital Ocean droplet runs $4 a month, then add in domain, and mail-provider (~$20-35)). Looking at that, it’s little wonder so many either opt for official forums, unofficial subreddits, Lemmy/Kbin communities, or Discord servers instead now.

    Maybe if I dug around some more I could find some options for managed hosting (which makes more sense for regular people, I think, to deal with technical maintenance) for Discourse or the like that are cheaper, but I can’t imagine one may find much that beats free. Unless there is something, unfortunately I guess we’re kind of stuck with the situation as-is barring some pleasant exceptions.


  • While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

    I’m pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.


  • Have you tried/looked into Joplin yet? If I understand right, I think the one box it doesn’t tick unfortunately is the first (at least in the Android app), as it supports markdown which is only rendered after leaving edit mode.

    However, it does have checkboxes and the whole note doesn’t have to be a checklist. You can write a description, add your checklist, add a horizontal separator line, another description, another checklist, all in the same note. It’s also FOSS and actively updated. Bonus as well is that it can be used with Syncthing to sync notes to your other devices, and there’s a desktop version which has some more flexibility over the Android app.



  • Data will surely degrade over time, and large chunks will get lost as people stop copying things they think are no longer important, but I feel pretty confident in the idea that enough pieces will make it that far that these scientists (techno-archeologists?) won’t be starting from scratch

    Right, that’s what I was trying to refer to in my reply, not a damage to this new storage media itself, but surrounding data/storage media that would provide help in reverse engineering it. Sorry I wasn’t clearer about that! I was thinking like if you didn’t have, say, a Rosetta Stone kind of artifact (or artifacts) to help in translating/reconstructing/reverse engineering.

    That’s why I wrote that I think it’s really unlikely, like yourself, but it’s interesting to consider.


  • We’ve reconstructed archaic languages that no living person speaks from fragments of written records, I find it unlikely that we’ll be completely unable to reverse engineer an ancient file system architecture - especially since the most likely course for someone actually reading one of these 1000’s of years in the future is for the reader to be from a more technologically advanced civilization.

    I saw another reply mention similar, and I see where you’re both coming from, but seeing another reply in this vein has encouraged me to ask the question the other reply inspired which is: what if you lack the fragments needed to reverse engineer/reconstruct a means to access the information?

    Chances are slim, and to be clear here, I’m by no means knocking this development, as I find it really exciting, but I also enjoy thinking through some of the different potential points of failure. Not from a cynical/pessimistic perspective, but because it’s a compelling challenge and puzzle. How much else alongside this specific media may need to survive so that it may remain accessible, directly or indirectly, y’know?

    That’s as cool and fun to consider as the new storage media itself to me! Come to think of it, maybe I really should look into some kind of archival/museum jobs considering that…


  • From the article:

    As intriguing as the idea is, we have to admit it smacks of a publicity stunt more than an earnest act of preservation. Even if the data is secure, are the robots the new points of failure? What’s to protect them from fires, floods, EMPs, and all the other threats? What about the readers, which are delicate lasers driven by algorithms? In all likelihood, any explorers in the year 12,000 that might stumble onto the remains of the Global Music Vault would just display it in a museum as a collection of crystal coasters.

    I was asking myself similar questions to these, alongside even more basic details like, “What if the future computer systems simply aren’t compatible with the old filesystems, thus indicating nothing as being present on the storage media (if it’s even recognized as storage media to test)?” It’s the deeply fascinating problem all long-term information storage/transmission faces regarding future comprehensibility.