I wanted to avoid water propping it because of the tough transition back to soil (and because it would be quite a long cutting, I was worried it might drop leaves). That’s why I wanted to try air layering :)

I see, so a community with asshole leaders would still suffer the same problem in my vision, but they wouldn’t be able to hold other members hostage as in your case since it’s self-hostable - people who do not feel represented or who are not happy with the moderation can start their own community in the same neighbourhood

Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and experience!

I can see the problem with getting people to use something different too, my hope is that providing a sufficiently good alternative and making it very local could help - once the platform is mature enough, I would advertise it by physically throwing a letter in the mailbox of every person on my street. That’s when I would find out whether anybody cares or not - getting everyone on at once seems to be the best chance for starting a community from nothing since there would be initial exploratory activity by people who are interested.

I think making it as easy and useful as possible is especially critical here or there will simply be no interest. It has to be better at what it’s doing than established platforms, which is not an easy task.

On the broader topic of positive and negative experiences, as well as toxic behaviour, I share your thoughts and experiences. I think a federated or at minimum self-hosted community has better chances of avoiding the fate of big sites like Nextdoor - I reckon that people who are into self-hosting and community/sharing largely do not hold ultraconservative values. There is the “abuse is free speech” crowd in the fediverse too, but at least anyone could create a different community in the same area.

Effective and transparent moderation tools should be high on the list of priorities though, just as high as other ways to avoid abuse.

Banned by who? How was moderation done on Nextdoor? I am curious if a non-centralized network could do better in terms of building communities that uphold different values. Of course nothing would stop a group of extreme conservatives from coming together and making an instance for being horrible, that’s a more broad problem though in my eyes.

Thanks, will have a look at that :)

I can see that it would be an issue if your neighbours are toxic people, unfortunately technology can’t solve that. Is there something that could have remedied this or do you see this as a matter of luck?

What was your experience with it? Is there something that could have remedied the problems you had? It would be good to learn from things that didn’t work.

Thanks, wasn’t aware of that!

Have to agree, it’s a funny story but charging someone a stupidity rate for nonexistent work isn’t justified by that person being stupid and a pain in your ass. Unless your circumstances force you, you can always just refuse work from customers like this. So many people downvoting this is disappointing.

I wouldn’t say “need”, but there are possible improvements to ergonomics and safety that wouldn’t make the language itself more complex or high level. I think it does its job quite well though and will be here for decades to come.

Its cross-platform support (not just for using but also for building it) is not there yet, and it is quite huge and unstandardized with only one full implementation. I’d agree the last part will change with age, but given the frequent large changes and feature additions I am afraid it will be harder and harder and it is simply too complex and fast-moving for many low-level applications. It is closer to C++ than C in my eyes. I’d be happy seeing it replace C++ though for its memory safety benefits!

C is old, ubiquitous and still does not have a good replacement for its low-level cross-platform usecases, so I’ll believe it when I see it 😄