I love the top gear reference, but surely May would have been the obvious choice, Hammond is just asking for a crash!

I’d sign up to Titter.

The Back to the Future trilogy is good for a re-view.

The first 90% of the task takes 90% of the time.
The last 10% of the task takes the other 90% of the time.

I mean yes, but that’s not a federation problem.

To completely strawman AND slippery slope what you’re saying:

As a car safety pro, who primarily deals with car crashes:

STOP

TOWING

TRAILERS

Agreed, dangerous, I don’t want numpties doing it.
But it’s a large part of why I have a car.

I want to be clear, that I disagree with his “federation is stupid” point, but email has problems right now.

Theoretically it’s federated, theoretically you can spin up your own mail server and self host.

But even if you do that absolutely perfectly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc), you can falsely end up on spam list, that effectively block delivery of your email to large segments of the network for days if not weeks.

Whilst theoretically federated, email falls under the broad dominion of google, microsoft and a couple of other large players.

I also use this.
Have had to update it in tiny ways in the last ~ 7 years?

https://lemmy.world/comment/206680

The issue was the owners choice of not federating with anything nsfw.

By moving to lemmy.world I could still post as much as I wanted to !australia@aussie.zone AND upvote boobs.

The stated reason is that there’s too many bad actors coming from here, so it’s too hard to moderate:

https://beehaw.org/post/567170

Hopefully (as they state in their post), federation will resume once things settle into a new norm.

Or I forsee beehaw losing relevance as it continues to pursue an isolationist policy.

I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷‍♂️

I don’t want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it’s beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.

Absolutely possible.
The key to simple self hosting is to have a dns record that points to your externally accessible IP, whether that be your real one or an external one hosted at a VPN provider.
If that IP changes, you’ll need to update it dynamically.

It’s becoming increasibly common to be a requirement to do so as CGNat becomes more widespread.

One of the newer ways to do that is with a Cloudflare Tunnel, which whilst technically is only for web traffic, they ignore low throughput usage for other things like SSH.