Indeed, no one is really interested in using fake money (aka crypto currencies). But that doesn’t mean Taler depends on banking APIs. Taler is a complete digital bank software package and some unofficial regional currencies (most notably a bigger one in Italy) have started using it fully independent of the officially recognized fiat banks or their APIs.

Again, according to the Taler website, the exchange tracks every transaction in order to prevent double spends. If it has a full view of the network, it can employ statistical analysis.

Again, you spend max. 5 minutes browsing the website and now claim you are the expert on Taler 🙄 Just because you track if a token has been spend or not, doesn’t mean you can track who spend it, or what on. This is all well explained in the Taler documentation and it has been explicitly designed to be resistant against such statistical analysis.

It depends on the banking system with its proprietary APIs and centralized money issuance.

It does not. That is as optional as fiat exchanges with cryptocurrencies.

In order to spend money, you need to receive it first. I don’t know if it makes you a “seller” in Taler, but in any case, this partial protection probably makes de-anonymization of all transactions via statistical analysis much easier.

No, you get it from an exchange. And the resulting tokens are like physical cash and can not be de-anonymized by the exchange or anyone else in the chain. That’s like the entire point of Taler. I think you should really inform yourself better before making yourself look really stupid by confidently spreading such non-sense.

Yes, but open-core will come back to bite you in the ass anyways. Enshittification built in.

https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/vikunja/

Taler is centralized and has poor privacy protections

This is non-sense. It’s not centralized at all and the privacy protections are excellent, just designed to different specs (privacy for buyers, but not sellers).

This is not a new argument, but the author is a bit confused with the terms. Usually it is phrased as “social network” Vs. “social media”.

Wero is a trap at best or more likely a figleaf that is meant to fail.

EU private banks much prefer the status quo over systems like the Brazilian PIX taking over the digital payment systems.

So when the EU central bank started looking into a sovereign alternative to Visa/Mastercard etc. the private banks scrambled to put together Wero to delay and maybe prevent the central bank from coming up with a system like PIX.

Sadly GNU Taler was never really an option for these banks, as it is an open standard and thus even if they supported it, the central bank could still plug into it with their own system and thus they would be forced to compete with that.

https://video.hardlimit.com/c/opensource_gaming/videos

Wouldn’t they especially want a working communication channel in case there is an extended power outage?

As a start it might be better to rent a VPS or so with a service that does backups etc for you. It will be hard to convince people to use it, and issues like dataloss or longer downtimes will kill it for sure.

Also, a large rack server is total overkill for what you want with a few hundred members at most.

Cloudflare tunnel error 🤦

With Podman and Quadlets you can use the same command to check on containers as well. The Systemd integration of Podman is pretty neat.

No, Luanti is a platform for Minecraft like games, like a place to find lots of user generated games and such, I guess Roblox is a bit similar to that (I never tried Roblox, so I am guessing). It is also fairly easy to make your own games with it.

There are however games for Luanti that are very similar to Minecraft such as Voxelibre and Minecloina.

Even if they sell like hot cakes relative to their intended audience of Steam users, it will not make much of a difference in overall market share. Steam might be relatively big with PC gamers, but overall they are rather tiny.

While it isn’t easy for Matrix, running an quivalent XMPP server on Tor, I2P or similar is fairly well documented, and there are multiple such servers accessible both on the clearnet and Tor.

Many XMPP clients also have built in Tor proxy settings.

I don’t get why people continue to recommend Minecraft when there is the much better open-source Luanti project: https://www.luanti.org/

Don’t look online, ask friends and family if someone has an old laptop you can get for free. Very likely someone does, especially if you are ok with a bad battery and/or a broken screen.

A RPi3 can work, but it being ARM based will cause various headaches when learning compared to something x86.

Typically a video-chat server does no transcoding so this isn’t a major issue. But for hosting a Peertube or Owncast server it would.

The old A/V chats in Matrix were just Jitsi-meet in disguise, but this has been largely deprechiated now with Element Calls.

Bitcoin and Ethereum only have liquidity in the market because scammers use it for their pig butchering etc. scams. And all the major exchanges are complicit in that. Many Banks are scammy, yes, but not that scammy by a long shot. Sorry to burst your bubble 🤷