If you're cool with it and /u/wahaha is cool with it, I can make it be.

The inability to add moderators to forums you make isn't a setting on my end. It's just something to do with Postmill (the software that powers this site). I can still manually add users as mods to any forum, but for some reason forum creators can't. Hopefully it's an issue corrected in a future update of the software.

I have no opinion one way or the other. I don't think that use of the word is actually offensive. Hunter is just trying to be hip and cool or whatever, which is cringey as hell, but not 'offensive' (in my opinion). Then again, I'm not 'qualified' to have an opinion on the matter. I just think it's some silly glorification of a culture that has some white people adopting lingo like that and I never understood why people get upset at that use of the word when used in that context.

I just posted because it'd be a massive story and in the news for a week had this happened a year ago with the last president's son, or something. There would be a lot of social media outrage, etc.

Anytime I hear a white person say shit like that I just think of J-Roc from Trailer Park Boys. https://tube.incognet.io/watch?v=qeqyL-V0Sho & https://tube.incognet.io/watch?v=b1YIjzq6X8k

Welcome.

I honestly haven't looked into the whole thing that much, BUT I could see it all being a big ploy to stir up support for regulation and controlling the narrative to the masses that 'crypto = bad'.

OR, it was just lucky hackers who happened to stumble upon some vulnerability and took advantage of it.

I could watch at least five more minutes of that.

Probably no more, though. But that's still more time than I'd want to watch regular sports for.

Believe it or not, I know a girl who has gone to rehab multiple times over her kratom addiction. I know it's legal in the US and a mild opiate but she's been in-and-out of rehab over it and alcoholism. Mind you, she isn't a hard drug user. She's definitely an alcoholic and heavy kratom user, and smokes weed from time to time but hasn't done anything most would consider 'hard'. But kratom and booze she struggles with maintaining any level of control.

I have no opinion on kratom, I've never done it or had any strong desire to do it. Mainly because my introduction to it was from her, and her experience was that of someone addicted to it which didn't make it sound fun.

I've sure met a handful of interesting people from Tinder, that's for sure, ha!

Ohhh, good writeup, as always.

My biggest gripe and one of the reasons I sort of moved away from using it was simply how it handles DNS requests. I found that it was what was constantly changing my /etc/resolv.conf to use Cloudflare for DNS when not accessing Lokinet.

Can you confirm if that's still happening? Go to https://dnsleaktest.com/ or any other similar tool and let us know the output. What does your /etc/resolv.conf file show as your nameserver(s)?

Even when connecting to my own VPN service, etc. My DNS was leaking to Cloudflare when the Linux desktop client was installed. Tired of having to manually change it back and forth to access Lokinet and to access the clearnet without my DNS going to CloudFlare, I decided to just stop using it.

With that said, I hope they fix that. It may be isolated to Linux users only, I have no Windows devices to test. And I hope them success in what they want to achieve.

BUT, I couldn't shake the feeling that the goal was more to create a cryptocurrency than it was to create a network that solves any of the problems of pre-existing networks of similar fashion (Tor, I2P, Yggdrasil, ZeroNet, etc) and was put off by the high cost of running service nodes, registering domains, etc.

I run an I2P router, I run a Yggdrasil node, I'm spinning up some Tor stuff soon to test. I understand the concept of wanting to reduce the likelihood of sybill attacks by 'making it too expensive' for any single party or government to 'control the network' by deploying a large number of nodes to analyze traffic... But let's be real. Governments have unlimited budgets (not "really", but you know what I mean...) when it comes to things like 'cyber security' and 'national security'. Just because some script kiddie isn't going to spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy a bunch of relays, exits, or other network nodes to analyze traffic doesn't mean governments won't. They will. And they do this on other networks already, whether publicly or not. They'd be stupid not to. (Not that I condone it, but it's worth pointing out that it's very likely)

I'm not 100% dismissing it yet. I could be wrong on all fronts and five years from now I may be kicking myself for not buying Oxen when it was $0.28 or whatever it was when I first got interested in it. I might be upset that I dropped Loki support for this site, and it could potentially be the number one traffic source to Ramble. But, I sort of doubt it. This site got about the same amount of traffic from Lokinet that it did from Yggdrasil which is a network without all the suspected venture capitalist funding (No one would ever answer me who/how everything was being funded for Loki) and without the coin attached. I never cared enough to actually dig deep into the origin/funding behind the network.

Furthermore, it's a bit worrisome when their only online community is a very tiny subreddit ( https://old.reddit.com/r/oxen_io/ 588 subscribers). I think they have a Discord (eww, gross) and of course, Session. I had my own issues with Session but as far as I know it was never production ready and was still in beta so I can't really complain. I like the idea of Session more than I like the idea of another anonymity network that requires buying their crypto to do common things.

The network is a business first, and everything else is second.

That's the first time I've really gone on a Loki rant in public, but that's sort of how I've been feeling lately. Someone please come prove me wrong.