yes, and. lets not forget this discussion is happening on lemmy. this place is just autistic as fuck. even those of us autist around here who are straight tend to be the ones who find most other straight people obnoxious. we’ve self sorted into an audiance that, as another comment hilariously points out. most of us probably know a genx neckbeard linux user who used to be really gumpy. but she’s pretty chill and happy now.
the article ends on a pitch for an ai bot making your paid posts. it’s trash. the article itself is the kind of lazy trash you get when you start leaning into monitization. you’re right, the fediverse isnt a monolith, not even inside distinct cultural regions.
for me at least. the answer to more media like this article appearing. so we grow an have more content and grow more. will be finding somewhere else to be. thats just the social media cycle. something cool gets made. a community starts forming. someone says “look at those idiots. dont they know how money works? a few of them could be making so much of it. i’ll show them how and make some myself too”. the rough edges of the space get smoothed out because if you want to make the site sucessful it should look more like how the sucessful spaces look. and a bunch of people move on to make something new again while bots have arguments with bots.
creators are welcome to post in the fediverse and tag their paid platform so long as they respect the rules of whatever community they post in. everyone has to eat. turning the fediverse into a tansactional platform is just coporate social media with extra steps. the articles getting downvoted because its one step shy of a linkedin ad disguised as a post. if i wanted to read posts about the beauty of the grind or some other nonsese, i’d be on fucking twitter or facebook. this place exists specifically to not be those places.
I’m in the same spot and 95% settled on moving to debian.
xubuntu has been good to me the last 10yrs. But its been about xfce, ubuntu got be part of the relationship because it was easy when i knew very little about linux. that and it can run well on a potato with a bunch of computer parts just duct taped randomly onto it. which is basically what my dumpster dived laptop was 10 yes ago.
thats just a short term fixes too though. the ads will get more intrusive and annoying. and at some point pro ads will just turning themselves back on. because this is a company and it wants to sell things.
About two years ago my set up had gotten out of control, as it will. Closet full of crap all running vms all poorly managed by chef. Different linux flavors everywhere.
Now its one big physical ubuntu box. Everything gets its own ubuntu VM. These days if I can’t do it in shell scripts and xml I’m annoyed. Anything fancier than that i’d better be getting paid. I document in markdown as i go and rsync the important stuff from each VM to an external every night. Something goes wrong i just burn the vm, copy paste it back together in a new one from the mkdocs site. Then get on with my day.
If you just want a server with a very small footprint and good specs there are far better options. If you like using macOS and will occaionally use it like a desktop while also having some hosted services running in VM full time. Then yeah the minis are great little systems and fairly indestructable. If i went back to daily driving macOS outside work, i’d just buy a mini. But i’d only pay out for a mini if i’m actually gonna use macOS.