What percentage of those are bots?

You’ll never get away from maintenance for ant service you host, and you need a VPS at a minimum to handle mail unless your ISP allows it (which they probably don’t). There’s going to be front loading needed in order to make sure the IP you’re given isn’t on blocklists, and you’ll need to take appropriate measures with Apple, M$, Google, Yahoo, etc in order to send email to their domains. The good thing is that I’ve you do that, you’ll never need to touch it again.

I personally use iRedMail because of the breadth of documentation, but mailcow and others like that are allegedly nice. I prefer the omnibus solutions because I don’t care to do manual service configuration if it’s not necessary.

Been doing email hosting for my domain for 25 years, 12 years with iRedMail.

I’m talking less about the executive branch than I am the legislative branch. Congress has been firmly in conservative control for over 30 years (I’m old enough to remember third way Democrats, Reagan Democrats and the moral majority), and without a change to FPTP voting, we’re going to be stuck with it veering further to the right.

Then we’re stuck with semi permanent GOP control, then.

Perhaps in your state, but in Oregon, we can bring initiatives to the ballot through voter signatures. It’s how we got RCV in Multnomah county, and it’s how the (failed) Measure 117 landed on our ballot this year. Sadly, it was badly written and Oregon voters are gunshy after the (also horribly written and implemented) Measure 110 (narcotics decriminalization) got onto the ballot.

Not really. What you’re asking for is for some unknown third party (like the Pacific Greens 😂😂😂) to pop up into place and immediately take the national reigns like a boss. That ain’t happening, bruv, otherwise it already would have. Ditching FPTP at least gives the average voter the opportunity to vote for different people (like Sanders not having to caucus with Democrats, or Working Families Party not having to caucus with Democrats, etc).

Or you can sit back and vote third party in a defacto two party system. It’s worked well so far. 🤷🤷‍♀️🤷‍♂️

That would be after FPTP voting is replaced with RCV or STAR in all 50 states. Trying a third party before those steps will hand the federal government to the GOP for the remainder of my life.

Indeed. If that had not been paying attention over the last couple of years and saw both sides of that second ballot, it would be super overwhelming. Thankfully I did my research ahead of time and knew how to vote before opening the ballot envelope. I still didn’t drop it off until a day or two before, though. After that article about the drop box fires, I figured it was a good idea to wait until mid day near election day.

Probably because it was incomplete for reasons unknown. I’m not sure why, but we get really bad ballot measures. 118 was super terrible, and 117 was seemingly unfinished.

Interestingly, we had extremely low turnout in the local elections. Apparently RCV, or the sheer number of candidates (over 100 for 12 positions), or a combination of both contributed to very low turnout. There were more people voting for POTUS than any of the local candidates, which is a little disappointing. I’ll dig into the numbers this weekend.

I started working on a hobby project recently to meld the utility of Beets with a music and podcast streaming service, like Subsonic. I’m developing this with a contract-first approach, and so far I’ve gotten most of the podcast management code in place, but I’ve not started working on the frontend outside of integrating a skeleton project into build process. I’ll add a note to look into supporting webdav data sources directly.

I plan on doing another big dev push around Christmas, so hopefully I’ll have an MVP app to show off around that time. The frontend is a basic vite/react base and the backend is Spring Boot with Kotlin. I’ll be looking for some contributors for the mobile app side within the next few months.