I suppose lack of RTL support would be show stopping, so I’d have to wait for that first. Thanks for the hard work!

Yeah I was familiar with that one and spoke with the creator. Unfortunately they had trouble with adoption because r/Arabs refused to let them advertise. They also were not federated.

It’s not. I think you misread what I said, and I already explained to you that it isn’t. It’s to have an Internet space for Arabs. My mention of the Palestinian cause is using it to motivate people to move over to Lemmy, in light of the censorship against Arabs.

This is not meant to be an anti Israel lemmy. It is an Arab lemmy.

I don’t think it is harmful to give people the option to spaces primarily speaking about local matters and concerns, and primarily occupied by local people. It does not take away the other spaces.

We are already in an age where it is almost impossible to undo globalization, and nothing I do will prevent those who frequent mixed and international spaces (or more accurately Western dominated spaces) from doing this. It is only giving them a place that didn’t exist before for content they couldn’t post or read elsewhere.

Most of the world already has this. I don’t think Arabs having it will be harmful.

I think you misunderstand my intentions. An Arabic lemmy instance is not aimed at isolation. People will be able to ineract with us without issue, and we will interact with them (federation will be open). The only purpose is to have a space where we are free of corporate censorship, and a space where you (whether an Arab or not) will find many other arabs, rather than most of the internet that is English-speaking, and most of the remainder speaking a west european language.

If anything, this would de-isolate Arabs. The primary Arabic speaking spaces on the internet are networks of friends on Facebook, isolated from the rest of the world. At least this way you can find us, and see that we are normal human beings (as unfortunately some racists in the western world are surprised to find that out) and you can talk with us.

The small existing Arab spaces that are accessible to the outside world is cringy, unserious, terminally online memers that ruin our image and do not represent us. Probably many of them are 4chan-ers

I don’t think there’s any significant downsides. I suppose you are dependent on their infrastructure and uptime. If they ever go down, or for any reason stop offering their services, then you’re out of luck. But yeah that’s not significant.

The reason I want to do this is it gives me more control over the setup in case I ever wanted to customize it or the wireguard config, and also teaches me more in general, which will enable me to better debug.

This reads like the author liked the old Twitter, which I think was also very cringe. Bluesky is not promising or much better.

Unfortunately Twitter celebrities seem so starved for an alternative, that I think they’re willing to sweep their anti-zuckerberg-ism under the rug in favor of getting back that social media engagement hit. I’ve already seen it in my circles and I doubt it’s unique.

Unfortunately, I really do think threads will succeed. It is filling a void much desired by many, even if done poorly. And chances are, they’ll make it better (or at least more attractive or addicting).

I always redo it lol, which is kind of a waste but I enjoy it.

Maybe a related question is what I wish I could do if I had the time (which I will do eventually. Some I plan to do very soon):

• self host wireguard instead of using tailscale
• self host a ACME-like setup for self signed certificates for TLS and HTTPS
• self host encrypted git server for private stuff
• setup a file watcher on clients to sync my notes on-save automatically using rsync (yes I know I can use syncthing. Don’t wanna!)

I hate defederation for things like this. This should be a user’s choice, not imposed by the instance itself. I hate how the fediverse forces the moderation choices on you.

I dont care that instagram uses activityPub. As long as I can use activityPub myself, thats enough for me. Most people will always stick with big social media, and I would rather be able to interact with them vs. not