Lots of things like pinch-to-zoom, auto-switching the phone from portrait to landscape mode depending on how it was rotated, basically the actually-usable-as-a-browser features that are part of every modern touchscreen, were originally popularized by Apple. They were the first to make a touchscreen UI that rivaled a desktop computer instead of a pretty substandard WAP interface.

I’m going to start the Confederation of Lemmy Instances, and post a lot of invective about how the confederation is a better approach and people need to leave the United Instances of Lemmy and join the confederation instead. I’ll also try to make sure the discussion spills out into as many instances and communities as possible that aren’t affiliated with either one of us.

At a bare minimum you need a complex database structure to support products, stocks, orders plus the pages for browsing, searching, shopping, ordering, tracking, then you need user accounts, integrations with payments and shipping, a transactional email service etc.

Well, sure. You’ll also need a filesystem to run it all on, cache memory with LRU replacement, a router, power and air conditioning, and lots of other stuff. The question was, what’s an easy way to do all that that’s ready to run. I’ve set up a couple different e-commerce sites on Wordpress and it’s easy and flexible; everything you listed does need to happen, but it’s behind the scenes of the plugin installation. I genuinely don’t know of a turnkey solution that’s easier, although I’m happy to hear about them.

I mean, Wordpress started as a blog. Linux started as a terminal emulator. The question is how well does its current state fit the current task at hand.

There are WordPress plugins that attempt it

Why do you say “attempt”?

it’s usually more for people who use it mainly as a blog/CMS and want to sell a couple of things on the side

So, I run a dedicated site that sells a few thousand items based on Wordpress+Woocommerce; it’s basically a hobby, but if I wanted to be serious about driving sales one of the most important things would be the ability to customize landing pages, test out different layouts, make changes, etc… basically, the ability for the software to function as a CMS would be key to what I would want. Being “primarily” a CMS product with selling products as secondary, for me, works better than the other way around (primarily a product-listing-and-selling software with editing pages and layouts as secondary).

I wouldn’t use them for a large shop.

Depends what you mean by “large.” Performance is probably the biggest issue that would make me hesitate to go for Wordpress+Woocommerce beyond a certain scale, but as I say I’m running a moderate-scale e-commerce site on Wordpress right now and I’ve generally been very happy with its tradeoff of “ease of setup” vs “customizability and extensibility for fancy stuff” vs cost.

Wordpress is the most beginner-friendly solution I know of in terms of fitting together nicely and smoothly. If you’re doing it on your own server, you will have to do the Wordpress install yes, but that’s true of any solution you pursue, and once the base is in it’s very easy to add e-commerce functionality. There are a ton of Youtube tutorials that show the process in varying levels of detail, but this one shows a streamlined way to actually install and set up the Woocommerce plugin. You will have to enter products and etc, but actually installing the plugin is literally about a 30-second process.

I generally like to talk it up just because Wordpress is generally my go-to for easy setup of a new web site, whether or not it involves e-commerce; it’s easy and well-supported and dedicated Wordpress hosting is probably some of the cheapest types of hosting you’ll be able to find on the internet. That tutorial I linked about likes Bluehost; personally I prefer Tigertech but the point is there are easy and cheap options.

I’m happy to answer questions or help; I’ve set up a few different little amateur-mode e-commerce sites on Wordpress and I don’t know of any easier solution.

Why “similar to” Wordpress? Wordpress deploys on your own server and it’s open source.

I for-real forgot that new reddit existed. I’ve stopped posting there but still read “all” periodically, and “old.reddit.com” is so ingrained that I was a little confused when they started talking about a new look, since I haven’t noticed anything…

• Wireshark
• GIMP
• screen
• ssh -X
• Electricsheep
• strace
• valgrind

Hm, yeah, I would just start up a Mastodon page in parallel with the Meta page. Pick the right “home” server to join; that’s critically important for Mastodon in a way that it’s not for Meta. Put in charge of the page someone who’s genuinely excited about participating in Mastodon, and would be engaged with the gaming community there whether or not they were in charge of the page. I don’t think I would recommend spending anything on ad promotion of the Mastodon page, but like I say I’m not convinced of the utility of spending money on Meta promotion either. YMMV

Anyway like I say my level of knowledge about it is pretty minimal but I’m happy to talk more in depth on details of my experience also if you like.

I have some small amount of experience with this, but based on the little I know, here’s what I can say. First question is what is your goal? To get customers, or to create a community? Below is general advice but it’s hard to say just talking about it in the abstract.

If you want a community, I would probably advise to just treat it as one more channel, have separate pages in Meta / X / Fediverse / Pinterest or whatever as separate communities, since in a lot of cases there won’t be overlap between them. I wouldn’t recommend abandoning your existing Meta or X pages to set up a Fediverse page instead, although making a contingency plan for the slow motion demise of Meta as a platform for the long term seems like a good idea.

If you want to drive sales, then for me Google Ads always worked better than buying advertising on Meta or X or etc anyway. Have you measured conversion numbers from Meta? They make it easy to spend money definitely, but I always found the ROI in terms of pure paid sales to be pretty bad from them.

Can I have a cliffs notes? I’m genuinely interested in what this guy has to say but not an hour and 17 minutes interested. I also watched it for a certain length of time and I’m not sure he’s familiar with a lot of good stuff that’s been done outside of Windows GUI development – I’ve used a ton of different UIs from various OSs and read about some other more experimental ones, and I have some thoughts on it, but I’m a little worried that it might be just him explaining why Windows’s UI is bad which I already know.

Individual privacy and security is national security.

The “nation” in anything resembling a democracy is made up of individual private people with their own motivations, and their own sometimes considerable power, whose security is protected even when it doesn’t line up with the interests of whoever happens to be in charge of the government. Those nations can become extremely powerful, much more so than “secure” states, because they have within them powerful people who give good faith to the systems of government that can organize and wield state power. It has to be that way. Any government that betrays that relationship will collapse into something akin to modern-day Russia. Certain policies might be bad for “individual privacy” in the short run, and good for “national security” in the short run, but there’s a reason why the nations of Nazi Germany or the USSR who prioritized state security so high above that of individuals, weren’t at all secure in practice. On an individual or a national level.

In the absolute middle of World War 2, when Britain was fighting literally for its life against the literal Nazis, and losing, the government had to deal with paying rent to the sometimes disagreeable landlords for their military intelligence offices, and they had to face angry questions from civilians in government about firebombing in German cities and how it was inhumane. They weren’t allowed to just get on with whatever they decided they wanted to do. There was no question about “well this is a government matter so I don’t care what you think, as a private person, and I don’t have to.” That’s not how a democracy works. Some people might disagree, but in my opinion that’s why the side that Britain was part of ultimately won the war: Because the British people knew their rights as individuals would be respected, and so they in turn felt comfortable giving wholehearted support back to the government when the government needed it.

Anyone who describes “national security” as a thing that has to be balanced against the rights of the people who in actual reality make up the nation, is probably talking about something more akin to “state security” in the USSR or Nazi sense. Not the security of the actual nation, but the safety and convenience of policymakers and their friends, sometimes specifically their safety from the nation (i.e. the people).

Your language in the comments are also very divisive for someone claiming to want to break idealogical lines.

Yeah, probably so. That’s how I feel about it though. I literally just posted it because I thought it was a really insightful and important message and one I wanted to share. It’s like a celebration of these victories that working people have been able to achieve recently, and an important insight into reasons it was able to happen and how to keep it going. Then I got this swell of disapproval about it. I interpreted that as stemming from people being addicted to their divisiveness and unsympathetic to the victories of anyone who doesn’t perfectly agree with them ideologically. So yeah I got sort of embittered about it with my response.

I think you’re right and I apologize about being combative about it, that’s probably not productive, you’re right. But it’s hard for me to be apologetic about the reasons for the reaction.

If everyone’s agreeing with you, you might just be in an echo chamber.

I actually kind of enjoy when most people disagree with me, that’s why I’m over here commenting instead of in /c/workersrightsoverpolitics. I do definitely have the feeling that there’s an echo chamber effect going on, yes.

The exact kind of person I’m whining about would instead be going here and demanding to know what each person trying to upvote thought about trans rights, or policing in the United States, before they were willing to accept the upvote.

I think anyone who can watch this video and have a negative reaction to it has something severely wrong with their thought processes. If that’s whining, you better call the whaaaaambulance for me because I feel extremely whiny about it.

I welcome your downvotes, you short sighted fucks.

I tried to find this to send a picture of it, but I couldn’t, so I’ll describe it: There are some panels in “The Cartoon History of the World” showing some revolutionary movement, where the revolutionaries spent all their energy arguing amongst one another over factional issues, and it shows them getting led off at gunpoint still arguing their issues amongst one another, and then their little feet hanging from the gallows up above the frame, with speech bubbles still coming down from above showing them arguing with each other. And that’s the end of that revolution.

That’s you guys, apparently. Good luck.

The point I’m trying to make is, you don’t even have to do that.

There are already laws against revenge porn and realistic child porn. You don’t have to “prevent” this stuff from happening. That is, as he accurately points out, more or less impossible. But, if it happens you can absolutely do an investigation, and if you can find out who did it, you can put them in jail. That to me sounds like a pretty good solution and I’m still waiting to hear what his issue is with it.

What the hell is this guy?

“Here’s a case where people made and shared fake nudes of real underage girls, doing harm to the girls”

“But what the hell, that’s kind of hard to stop. Oh also here’s this guy who went to prison for it because it’s already illegal.”

“Really the obvious solution everyone’s missing is: If you’re a girl in the world, just keep images of yourself off the internet”

“Problem solved. Right?”

I’m only slightly exaggerating.

I think some of the old stuff was good because it had a spark. It wasn’t that it had elves, it was that it was something genuinely unique that the author was driven to create regardless of anything else.

A lot of current-day fantasy is just elves. There’s no spark. Even Harry Potter to me is, basically, just some pretty competently written fiction with magic in it. It’s not the real deal.

I don’t really know you, but to me it’s possible that you want the real deal. If that’s true you might want to check out:

• “The Cyberiad” by Stanislaw Lem
• “The Last Defender of Camelot” by Roger Zelazny
• “Skeleton Crew” by Stephen King
• “Lord of Light” also by Roger Zelazny
• “The Last Unicorn” by Peter Beagle

They may or may not have fantasy elements, although most of them aren’t set in the real world. But they have the real deal.

Yeah, email is unsafe, agreed. I addressed that below, saying I thought they just wanted to separate their real-world identity from their un-private emails. If you’re trying to use Proton to keep your un-private emails private, you’re gonna have a bad time and you should use some good end-to-end solution that isn’t email instead.

Ah makes sense, I read only the title, my bad

Librewolf?

I’ve been using that for a while since I ditched Chrome, and anecdotally it seems like it hits a pretty good sweet spot of “privacy-protecting to such an extent that I notice little annoyances as I browse the web, but they’re all trivial and easily bearable, which probably means it’s doing quite a lot to try to protect me.”