Old School RuneScape potentially fits this description

I’m not blind, but … there seems to be quite a bit of progress in this area to the point where (at least on the surface) your claim seems outdated.

https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/

Don’t count standard notes out just yet!

They offer discounted plans upon request!

https://standardnotes.com/help/56/what-if-i-can-t-afford-the-price-of-extended

lol

You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain – DC Comics

(I hope they do find a way to make this “for the best” – maybe reviving Scroll like technology + private advertising + actually checking to make sure advertisers are legitimate so you can pay to turn ads off on lots of websites and the ads aren’t leading to malware – but it’s very concerning in general)

Yup… It looked like a really bad attempt at photo realism in 2024. At this point you either need to use cartoon-like graphics or some sort or actually pull off the photo realism.

It was pretty obvious that game was never going to reach either of those marks.

I was definitely excited for the prospect of a Sim’s competitor, but this wasn’t going to be it… I think they did the right thing pulling the plug.

I’m surprised, I was pretty sure anything with Battleye flat out rejected virtualization.

I thought Destiny used Battleye but I must be mistaken on one of these points.

Man I remember cutting myself on some of those toy and electronics boxes growing up … All for a ban here

Proton because I get it basically for free under my existing Proton plan and because of Proton’s stellar reputation.

That’s not to say the apps aren’t a bit buggy or missing (Linux doesn’t have one) though.

Best for what requirements?

Lots of space? Ease of use? What devices? Web access? Etc

I strongly disagree, email is a train wreck for secure communication.

Proton has done a pretty good job of making an implementation that’s actually secure but PGP email has fundamental flaws like the subject line and recipient being clear text on the message, user error/key management complexity, and it’s also just a high-friction means of communication vs “texting” or “IRC”-like approaches.

No idea what that means, but I do know the devs of this game also made War for The Overworld and they did a fantastic job of making and maintaining it.

I’d highly recommend their studio… and if this is the type of game you’re interested in, you should definitely check it out!

My hot take: hostile reads are in pore taste. It’s unique to the internet, and we need less of that.

Yeah… Probably eventually knowing them, sadly not yet

Yes, though it’s increasingly rare because most game developers would rather just integrate with Steam than setup their own account and payment systems … and I can hardly blame them.

A prime example is Andrew Gower’s new game. The dude started Jagex and RuneScape he surely could make a new account system, billing system, etc for Brighter Shores … he has all the experience necessary at a scale few developers have the experience with. He’s just opting not to and it’s surely because Steam’s offering in terms of game promotion and ease of access is unparalleled.

Something with 1-click installs like TrueNAS can help quite a bit. It’s still something that requires active involvement from the operator to do well though. If you’re self hosting, it’s like DIY construction, if something falls down … you can’t sue your contractor/nobody’s going to make you whole again except yourself.

There’s also the networking side of things. I just wrote up some thoughts on that as well… https://alexandrite.app/social.packetloss.gg/comment/1821545

Things like ZeroTier/TailScale/Nebula can make this monumentally more approachable and safer. It’s still far from for everyone though.

Yes, WireGuard was designed to fix a lot of these issues. It does change the equation quite a bit. I agree with you on that (I kind of hinted at it but didn’t spell that out I suppose).

That said, WireGuard AFAIK still only works well with static IPs/becomes a PITA once dynamic IPs are in play. I think some of that is mitigated if the device being connected to has a static IP (even if the device being connected from doesn’t). However, that doesn’t cover a lot of self hosting use cases.

Tailscale/ZeroTier/Nebula etc do transfer some control (Nebula can actually be used with fully internal control and ZeroTier can also be used that way as well though you’re going to have to put more work in with ZeroTier … I don’t know about TailScale’s offering here).

Though doing things yourself also (in most cases) means transferring some level of control to a cloud/traditional server hosting provider anyways (e.g, AWS, DigitalOcean, NFO, etc).

Using something like ZeroTier can cutout a cloud provider/VPS entirely in favor of a professionally managed SAS for a lot of folks.

A lot of this just depends on who you trust – yourself or the team running the service(s) you’re relying on – more and how much time you have to practically devote to maintenance. There’s not a “one size fits all answer” but … I think most people are better off doing SAS to form an internal mesh network and running whatever services they’re interested in running inside of that network. It’s a nice tradeoff.

You can still setup device firewalls, SSH key-only authorization, fail2ban, and things of that ilk as a precaution in case their networks do get compromised. These are all things you should do if you’re self hosting … but hobbyist/novices will probably stumble through them/get it wrong, which IMO is more okay in the SAS case because you’ve got a professional security team keeping an eye on things.

The company Tailscale is a giant target and has a much higher risk in getting compromised than my VPN or even accessible services.

One must be careful about this mindset. A bunch of smart lightbulbs that are individually operated aren’t a particularly appealing target either. However, in aggregate… If someone can write a script that abuses security flaws in them or their default configuration … even though you’re not part of a big centralized target, you are part of a class that can be targeted automatically at scale.

Self hosting only yields better security when you are willing to take steps to adequately secure your self hosted services and implement a disaster recovery strategy.

The thing about something like TailScale or ZeroTier or Nebula is that it’s dynamic. These all behave similar to a multiplayer game … a use case every residential firewall should “just get.”

The ports that are “opened” can change regularly, they’re not some standard port that can just be checked to see if it’s open (typically).

Compare that to the average novice opening port 51822 for wireguard or 22 for SSH and you start to see the difference. With those ports, you’ve got a pretty good idea what’s on the other side and it might even be willing to talk to you and give you error messages or TCP ACK packets to confirm it’s there (e.g. SSH).

This advice is as you can probably imagine more relevant to things like OpenVPN that are notoriously hard to correctly configure or application protocols like SSH or HTTP.

With these mesh VPNs you also don’t have to worry about your home dynamic IP changing and breaking your connection at inopportune times… And that’s a huge benefit (IMO). It’s also very easy to tie in new devices to the network.

A lot of it is about outsourcing labor to programs that know how to set up a VPN and make management of it easy. That ties into security because … a LOT of security issues boil down to misconfiguration.

It could become independent with sufficient funding. I think that’s part of the idea.

Though, being able to use other indexes is likely still helpful.