It does say, prominently, “Who you vote for is secret.”

Immich is better if you can host it.

Isn’t that a serious federal crime? How did they not get caught doing that?

There’s absolutely no way I’ll donate after they announced shutting down mozilla.social in favor of flushing their money down the AI path.

On the other hand, it’s the absolute least intrusive marketing, you can turn it off permanently, and it supports Mozilla who are one of the main bulwarks defending privacy.

Backups. You should be taking regular backups whether it’s you hosting or Google. If you are, there’s really very little risk.

You’ll also have the images on the phone, which should remain long enough for the images automatically stored to get into backup storage. Personally, all my images upload from my phone automatically after I’m on WiFi for 10 minutes.

I’ve been running mine for a year or two and don’t really mess with it at all. I think I remember those breaking changes maybe 18 months ago? Was not difficult to update, and it’s been running smooth as butter since.

But… Immich does this just fine, and is pretty great at it.

Especially on mobile.

Its Ubuntu 24.04. When I started it, it took quite awhile and then said “there as a problem, please log out”.

Now that I’ve got it started (where I’m posting from now), it still refuses to arrange my monitors. And I have no idea what this 5th, 13.3" monitor is supposed to be.

It looks like my issues are related to this hardware. I guess that’s understandable. I thought this hardware would be transparent to the OS, and apparently it’s not.

If I hit apply here, it will fail and put them back in a line. I’ll also get around 4 fps and no cursor on the additional monitors.

I installed a fresh copy of, I believe, Debian. Wayland, for some reason, couldn’t handle 4 monitors, with one above the other three.

Not the issue I expected on a fresh install. Oh, and the biggest issue I had with Windows was copied straight into Linux. I want my (single) taskbar on a monitor that isn’t my primary.

I’m currently back to Windows. It was already going to be a rough transition, and missing the ideas I was looking for while also adding complications just hasn’t made it worth it.

Mumble is another strong, open source, self-hosted option.

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You can get a RaspPi instead, and after a year or two you’ll have saved enough electricity to have paid for itself.

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It certainly isn’t when you’re spending more than that just to get exclusives.

You’re right. Hosting files is more difficult than creating art for the game. Steam deserves a bigger cut than artists.

Game files and updates need to be distributed

You also recognize that 30% of each game sale applies to each game sale, right?

Do you really think 30% of developing a game is hosting not just the original game, but also the updates and the save files? CDNs only make it cheaper.

Steam is able to charge 30% because they effectively have a walled garden on PC games. Very few publishers are well known enough to successfully sell their game outside of Steam.

It’s not as egregious as the Apple or Google stores, but they’re basically all in this together. It’s like the old mob families where they split territory.

most are quite happy with the services they get back from that 30% cut.

I agree with most of that, but this part just isn’t true. 30% is highway robbery. It’s a scam. But PC gamers are trained that Steam is where the games are, with few exceptions. If you don’t pay steam their cut, your game doesn’t sell at all.

Consider all that goes into development of a game and compare that to the effort/infrastructure to host a download and display a webpage. Is Steam really providing 30% of the game experience?

I think Steam could be profitable at less than a 10% cut.