Andreas

No, it’s 100% economics. Why do you think that having “careers, lives and travel” (as if having a family is not having a life?) is more appealing to modern first worlders? Because it doesn’t impact their finances severely. Having more children in impoverished countries is a financial gain because children are free labor and lottery tickets to get the entire family out of poverty. In wealthy countries, children are only a financial loss.

I brought up the social system because you can see that everyone in this thread arguing against you is saying that your “excellent welfare system” is the reason why your income is lower than the corresponding American programmer’s. The massive taxation is obviously a big factor to your reduced income, but let’s look away from that for a bit and just focus on the American companies.

American companies in America pay more because the costs of doing business in America are much lower and there is a greater availability of loans and funding.

American companies in Europe pay more because they have the advantages listed above that local European companies don’t have and they have the resources to invest in a global expansion.

That’s it. That’s the answer.

I don’t think that you, me and OP have different values on this issue, actually? We all agree that the state is supposed to provide us with a structure to live in that we couldn’t have on our own, and as payment for this safety net, we contribute taxes. My and OP’s argument is that with the current projection of the economy and population growth, the state cannot provide the current generation of tax payers with the structures and support that we will eventually need, and therefore many of us would rather pay lower taxes and lose the benefits, because we won’t be getting them anyway. We know what’s coming and we don’t want to be the ones “holding the bag” when the system collapses.

I’m trying to explain OP’s point to the Americans in this thread who don’t understand that European social security systems are currently under severe strain and are on the road to collapse, and how OP feels to have to sacrifice so much of his potential income to support a failing system. The 80s stereotypes of reliable, high-quality social security no longer hold true in Europe in 2023.

That’s why I suggested Revanced with “disable recommendations” patches. It’s still Youtube and there is no new platform to learn.

I think it’s sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.

The algorithm doesn’t actually care that it’s promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people’s eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using “not interested” and “block this channel” buttons doesn’t make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you’re teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!

The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP’s mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). “Youtube with no ads!” is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.

Using Piped/Invidious/NewPipe/insert your preferred alternative frontend or patched client here (Youtube legal threats are empty, these are still operational) helps even more to show you only the content you have opted in to.

Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit

Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don’t like “magazine” for a community)

Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin

Why do you have to use NGINX? Caddy does the proxying to the Lemmy containers for you. That docker-compose.yml file is my entire deployment, there is no hidden NGINX container or config file that needs to be added. Just remove your broken Lemmy deployment with docker compose down and delete the containers, then docker compose up my docker-compose.yml (after you edit the postgres variables) with config.hjson in the same folder.

Oh shit, I forgot that your Caddy would be running on a bridge network by default because mine is on the host network where all ports are already exposed to it! (It’s generally a bad idea to use the host network, so don’t do this if you’re only using Caddy with containers on the same network) I edited the Gist to expose 80 and 443 for HTTP/S on that container, the updated file uses the same Github link. Really sorry about that!

Ugh, that one is a problem with indentation because pasting the config into a Lemmy comment destroys the formatting. I uploaded it on Github to preserve the correct indentation.

Yeah, the config file on the documentation sucks. I had to poke through several discussions on /c/selfhosting to find a config that wasn’t the extremely minimal one linked in the documentation. Your config.hjson is fine from what I can tell, although I’m not sure why you censored the hostname there as it’s supposed to be lemmy.emphisia.nl and not anything confidential.

Honestly, I don’t have enough understanding of NGINX to debug its config, so I’ll just share my docker-compose.yml for leddit.danmark.party which worked correctly and federated out of the box, with a few adjustments to match your deployment. Note that you’ll have to tear down your existing deployment if you want to use this docker-compose.yml because they use the same ports.

version: "3.9"
x-logging:
  &default-logging
  options:
    max-size: '10m'
  driver: json-file

services:
  caddy:
    image: caddy:2
    volumes:
      - ./volumes/caddy:/data
      - ./volumes/caddy:/config
    # See Caddy's documentation for customizing this line
    # https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy
    command:
      - /bin/sh
      - -c
      - |
        cat <<EOF > /etc/caddy/Caddyfile && caddy run --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
        
        {
          debug
        }
        
        (common) {
        	encode gzip
        	header {
        		-Server
        		Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; include-subdomains;"
        		X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block"
        		X-Frame-Options "DENY"
        		X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
        		Referrer-Policy no-referrer-when-downgrade
        		X-Robots-Tag "none"
        	}
        }       
        
        # Lemmy instance
        lemmy.emphisia.nl {
          log
          import common
          reverse_proxy http://lemmy-ui:1234 # lemmy-ui
          
          @lemmy {
        		path /api/*
        		path /pictrs/*
        		path /feeds/*
        		path /nodeinfo/*
        		path /.well-known/*
        	}
         
         	@lemmy-hdr {
        		header Accept application/*
        	}
          
          handle @lemmy {
            reverse_proxy http://lemmy:8085 # lemmy
          }
          
          handle @lemmy-hdr {
            reverse_proxy http://lemmy:8085
          }
          
          @lemmy-post {
        		method POST
        	}
        
        	handle @lemmy-post {
        		reverse_proxy http://lemmy:8085
        	}
        }
        EOF
    lemmy:
      image: dessalines/lemmy:0.18.1-rc.9
      ports:
        - 8085:8536
      volumes:
        - ./lemmy.hjson:/config/config.hjson
      depends_on:
        - postgres
        - pictrs
      restart: always
      logging: *default-logging
      
    lemmy-ui:
      image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.18.1-rc.9
      ports:
       - 1234:1234
      environment:
        - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=lemmy:8085
        - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=localhost:1236
      depends_on:
        - lemmy
      volumes:
        - ./volumes/lemmy-ui/extra_themes:/app/extra_themes
      restart: always
      logging: *default-logging
   
    postgres:
      image: postgres:15-alpine
      ports:
        - 5432:5432
      environment:
        - POSTGRES_USER=MyPostgresUser
        - POSTGRES_DB=MyPostgresDb
        - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=MyPostgresPassword
      volumes:
        - ./volumes/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data
      restart: always
      logging: *default-logging
      
    pictrs:
      image: asonix/pictrs:0.4.0-rc.7
      user: 991:991
      hostname: pictrs
      environment:
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__VIDEO_CODEC=vp9
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_WIDTH=256
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_HEIGHT=256
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_AREA=65536
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_FRAME_COUNT=400
      volumes:
        - ./volumes/pictrs:/mnt
      restart: always
      logging: *default-logging
	  
    postfix:
      image: mwader/postfix-relay
      environment:
       - POSTFIX_myhostname=lemmy.emphisia.nl
      restart: "always"
      logging: *default-logging

I don’t use NGINX as my proxy server, but it’s a bit strange that you would need two configs for this while mine runs perfectly with one config and two open ports (:8536 for Lemmy-BE and :1234 for Lemmy-UI). And why are you using different versions of Lemmy-BE (18.1-rc9) and Lemmy-UI (18.1-rc4)?

If you are using the default docker-compose.yml on the Lemmy repo, that part of the NGINX config uses https:// + the name of the Docker containers. And you always give NGINX the external port (the number on the right side of the colon defined in ports:, like 1234 in 1234:5678). The port on the left is only known to the container the port is defined for.

If it’s still broken after you correct the NGINX config, what are your docker-compose.yml and config.hjson like? There’s several versions of them floating around and you might have combined incompatible versions with each other.

You’re right that healthy, young working adults without children have very little to gain from socialized systems. I’m going to assume that OP, like me, is an early Gen Z who fits this description, and is about to enter the job market or has just entered it. For our generation, this statement

The state is not here to rob you, but to provide you with a structure to live in that you couldn’t have in the same way on your own.

does not check out mathematically. The taxes we pay today don’t get locked away in a box to be spent when we are sick or elderly and need them. They are spent on the sick and elderly we have right now. This means that at the age that we start needing benefits more than we contribute to them, it’s not going to be us, but our children’s and grandchildren’s generation who are footing the bill. But the birth rates across Europe are below replacement level and none of our countries have come up with a system that either raises birth rates above replacement level or successfully introduces foreigners who will be net tax contributors for all their lives. That means that despite paying high taxes and receiving miserable salaries (compared to American salaries) today, we won’t even be able to enjoy benefits from the state in the future because there won’t be enough tax contributors by the time we need these benefits.

It absolutely feels like getting robbed.

It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.

That, and for Lemmy specifically, its history of being a tankie forum. Without the Reddit refugee migration, if you joined Lemmy as a single user, you would be alone among communists and eventually get bullied into leaving. Already in 2020-2021, Fediverse users knew about Lemmy, but they avoided promoting it because of its userbase. This Reddit situation provided the push to get many normal users over to Lemmy at once to drown out the communist users.

A lot of VPS providers block port 25 (and other email ports) because they don’t want people to set up bot spam mail servers on their services. Could that be the issue?