mbirth

I'm on macOS and iOS and love News Explorer. It syncs my reading progress to all other devices and also has a nice reader mode that pulls the article from the website in full. Apart from that it's pretty bare-bones, but does exactly what I want.

What’s next? Do they maybe also want landlords to cancel renting agreements over this? Supermarkets to not sell to these people?

Reminds me of the CardPuter.

Instead of the full-blown Mastodon, you should also look at #GoToSocial which is compatible and pretty light-weight. (Doesn’t come with a web UI, so you need to use client apps.)

EDIT: Here's my docker-compose file.

Pretty much, I think. I have it running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with docker-compose:

version: '3'

services:
  gotosocial:
    image: superseriousbusiness/gotosocial:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - traefik-public
    environment:
      TZ: Europe/London
      GTS_HOST: xyz.example.com
      GTS_CONFIG_PATH: /gotosocial/storage/config.yaml
      GTS_DB_TYPE: sqlite
      GTS_DB_ADDRESS: /gotosocial/storage/sqlite.db
      GTS_LETSENCRYPT_ENABLED: "false"
      GTS_LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL_ADDRESS: ""
    volumes:
      - smb-gotosocial-data:/gotosocial/storage
    labels:
      traefik.enable: "true"
      traefik.http.routers.gotosocial.rule: Host(`xyz.example.com`)
      traefik.http.routers.gotosocial.entrypoints: websecure
      traefik.http.routers.gotosocial.tls: "true"
      traefik.http.routers.gotosocial.tls.certresolver: le
      traefik.http.services.gotosocial.loadbalancer.server.port: "8080"

volumes:
  smb-gotosocial-data:
    driver_opts:
      type: "smb3"
      device: "//mynas/docker/gotosocial/data"
      # Use nobrl to mitigate SQLite3 byte range locking issue on CIFS/SMB mounts
      o: "rw,nobrl,vers=3.1.1,addr=172.16.254.1,username=xxx,password=xxx,cache=loose,iocharset=utf8,noperm,hard"

networks:
  traefik-public:
    external: true

Is your entire argument about homeless people only about sticky puddles?

It's about incentivising bad habits, e.g. homeless people sifting through rubbish bins. People leaving empty bottles out in the street where they get blown around from the wind. Or arguments like "pensioners can just go and collect empty bottles if they want more money".

Because sorting like that is very inefficient, expensive, imperfect.

The attitude of wanting to just throw everything in one pile and want someone else to deal with it, is so early 20th century.

It's 2024. Automatic trash sorting machines are a thing - and they have a very high efficiency of up to 99.99%. Making people pay an extra deposit for plastic bottles (even just simple water) and forcing them to keep the empty bottle full of air until it is returned to a machine where it is then shredded to pieces is so late 20th century. (On a sidenote: In Germany alone, the companies producing these bottles "earn" 180M Euros every year just from bottles that got lost/weren't brought back to a machine - or not accepted (unreadable/missing label, deformed bottle, etc.).)

I mean, nobody is stopping you from e.g. separating used teabags into organic materials, metal staple and paper label, if you are into these kind of things. But please don't force other people to do the same.

People like you are the reason deposits exist at all. If everyone could be trusted to their part there would be no need for a deposit.

In the same way I could say that people like me are the reason rubbish sorting facilities exist and people there have jobs? If everyone could be trusted to their part, there would be no need for these jobs. ¯\(ツ)/¯

It's not like anyone gets hurt by a homeless person that looks down a bin. Does it matter if someone empties a bottle on the pavement? It's a few centilitres at max and it's better than throwing the bottles in the bin.

It’s sad that this is necessary and assumed “normal”. And I don't know about you, but I don’t like to step into some sticky puddle of something the second I take my eyes off the pavement.

Aren't your machines printing out coupons with unique barcodes? If not, that's incredibly stupid.

They do! But in several shops the return machines were added without being connected to their payment system. Probably because of incompatibility. And people figured out how the barcodes are encoded.

The point of the system is primarily to stop people from throwing the bottles and cans in the trash. So that's where all the bottles are in London.

The trash can be sorted. So why not make it a problem of the rubbish companies to properly sort the plastics and getting them recycled?

I’m living in the UK for a year now and I totally love the fact that I can just buy a bottle to drink somewhere and once finished get rid of it without wasting 25p or carrying that empty bottle around all day. Or that I can squish bottles at home before they go into the recycling bin outside.

As somebody that only shops for groceries every few weeks, I absolutely hated the several bags of empty plastic bottles we had to find room for, drive to the supermarket and then spend 20 minutes queuing for and feeding them one by one into the machine.

The deposit scheme in Germany is a huge cash cow as people pay for the deposit but then never return the container or the container gets destroyed, label comes off and gets rejected by the machine, etc.

And as you said, people leave empty bottles around public bins for homeless people to collect. However, this slowly became an accepted method of “income” for them and you see them checking every rubbish bin for empty bottles. (If a bottle isn’t quite empty, they’ll empty it onto the pavement.) And there are even territorial fights.

Also, lots of fraud with fake deposit coupons (you deposit the bottles in a machine, machine prints a coupon and you take that coupon to the till where you get your money - people now find someone with a label printer and print fake coupons to cash in).

And I loathe having to carry an empty plastic bottle around all day when I’m not near any place to return it. You can’t even squish it as then the machine won’t accept it. Which also means you’re taking huge bags of air to the store every few weeks.

I don’t see any issues with empty bottles and cans around London. Definitely not more than in Berlin. So I can only assume this scheme was proposed so that a few people can fill their pockets with the expected money. As always.

At least in Germany, many of these copyright claims have no real legal grounds and wouldn't hold up in an actual trial. All cases I've read into so far ended with a settlement - as the private person was too afraid of even more legal fees. Or were dropped completely after a while (full of empty threats) if the people never engaged with the other party.

DMCA is only valid in the US. Those other countries obeying it are usually just doing it to avoid trouble, but there's no real legal obligation. (But if ignored, it is pretty safe to assume that any bigger company would look into local laws and try to find a different way.) But from what I've heard, hosters don't just close your account because of some DMCA. They will actually look into it and work with you to solve it.

And in the end, you could simply host it on a Raspberry Pi at your home. The ISP can't be held responsible for the data you transfer, so they won't just shut down your Internet connection. And if you get a strongly worded letter from some company, you can send it directly to the recycling bin.

But they can’t just DMCA it under false premises. GitHub and others just don’t want to risk anything and are pretty quick with taking down repos without checking anything.

Also there are still a few countries that don’t bow before the US-invention that is the DMCA.

So far nothing bad has happened and the company was founded so they can sell support hours to businesses. Just like lots of other companies behind Open Source projects do it. 🤷‍♂️