• 11 Posts
  • 131 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2024

help-circle










  • I moved a lot during my life, living in the 4th country now, stayed in each one for about 15 years. Therefore I had to find friends from outside of school.

    Here is a list of how I found them:

    20’s:
    - through my cousin, he was a coworker with my future best friend
    - started a band with a friend and his cousin, then we kicked out the friend and got a better drummer. Through the band we met a ton of other musicians while playing life and became friends with them
    - I joined a IRC channel about writing HTML and CSS, once a year we met in real life. Over time I became closer friends with some of them and we visited each other semi regularly. We still hang in the same chatroom, over 20 years ago. Half of us moved abroad, so we can’t meet IRL that often anymore, but we are still friends
    - after moving countries I made a house warming party and asked my (now ex) wife’s brother to invite his friends, I brought 50 liters of beer from Germany to this party in Sweden. This group became my core group of friends even after the divorce

    30’s:
    - work, I became very good friend with one of my coworkers, we even started a new company together because I was the only one who wasn’t afried to try it
    - university, yeah normal
    - one uni friend pulled me in to the company he worked for where there were very many super cool guys and I became friends with many of them. Even now like 7 years after we don’t work together we still meet regularly for grill parties, etc.

    40’s:
    - after another move, to South Korea, this one is tough because I still don’t speak the language, but after we got our son, my fiancé opened a public group on the Internet for couples who have a small child and one of the parents is a foreigner. Many of them don’t quite fit me as friends but we still meet some of them for play dates and so on so our friendship is growing
    - I was on the playground and there was another foreigner dad and we started talking about the kids and everything else, then we exchanges phone numbers and are meeting regularly and it’s fun because conversations are easy, so he is the clothest thing to a friend I have here. But I have no idea how it would go if I need help in some bad situation, etc. because we didn’t have any yet.

    So yeah, this is kind of where I found my friends outside of school. Perhaps it can be some inspiration for you.





  • It’s probably 15 years ago I used XMPP the last time. Back then there were many compatibility problems between the apps and especially on the mobile phone with push notifications, etc. There were problems sending media and VOIP calls were non existent outside of the Google clients.

    My guess is that some of those things improved but I have not heard anyone in my circles using it, especially since Matrix became a bit more popular, most of the Open Source projects on IRC also moved to Matrix.




  • I started on /kbin (MBin’s predecessor) because I liked the UI and the philosophy. But then I wanted to host it myself and it being written in PHP I really didn’t want to host it myself, I’ve been burned by PHP software too many times in the past.

    Therefor I switched to Lemmy which was a nightmare to setup in the beginning because there was no documentation on how to do it. I still got it working after some time and was fairly happy with it. It was reasonably fast, the UI is good enough and it had a lot of 3rd party apps working with it so I could choose some other frontend on the phone for example. But over the last year every update made it more and more heavy to run as a single user instance. And then the current update made it so I couldn’t run it on my small VPS anymore because it would create such a load that all the other services I’m running on it (Mastodon, some Websites, PeerTube, Matrix, etc.) would go down because of it.

    So I switched to PieFed. So far it has been amazing for me. It’s written in Python so it’s super easy for me to understand and to fix things which I don’t like. It has a simple theme engine which made it very easy for me to adapt a theme to how I want to have it. But the biggest advantage is that it’s so easy on the resources, I can run it as a single user instance and it does not affect any of my other services running on the same server.

    So there you have it, if you don’t have too many resources available on your server I would go with PieFed. The developer is very approachable and aligns with my values more than the Lemmy devs.