Sure. It’s in our nature to surround ourselves with like-minded people. Back in the old days, people would subscribe to a newspaper, watch TV and listen to radio stations, or go to pubs with folks they felt comfortable with, and that would often lead to gruopthink. There is only so much we can do about it with different platforms. The rest is up to us, individually and collectively. Being polite, open minded, thoughtful and critical takes effort. But it’s also in our nature.

What you wrote is probably true, but it’s not the end of the story. Ownership model of corporate social media creates incentives to polarize and divide people. It drives engagement and creates moats. Also, billionaire owners of those media have their own political goals, and are happy to use the platforms they own to advance them.

Technically? Not very much, but I’m handy with NixOS. The hardest part was the configuration of a mail server. I should probably blog about the setup process. But of course the real work is attracting people and keeping them engaged.

Recently I’ve created a private forum and so far I’m very happy with it. It’s nice that our discussions are private, keeping data gobblers, programmatic advertisers, grifters and other schmucks like this out in the cold.

https://tad-lispy.com/club/

To be clear, I’m advertising the idea, not membership.

One feature that is missing that I like to use is curly brace expansion to produce multiple arguments. For example,

$ mv *.{jpg,jpeg}

Maybe this will work for expansion: https://github.com/nushell/nu_scripts/blob/main/modules/filesystem/expand.nu

It’s in the “filesystem” section, but I think it works on any string, not only paths. See the ugly duck example. I didn’t try it myself yet.

BTW the nu_scripts goodies are available in Nixpkgs, so since you are using Home Manager, it’s easy to integrate. Take a look at my config for starters: https://gitlab.com/tad-lispy/nixos-configuration/-/blob/bb614ae3639a504912db167f5bd7e6651d28f604/tad.nix#L39-47