Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there’s no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.
Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.
Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it’s kinda indexable but not really.
Why would you want to though? I can understand the retro market because there is software like games that either won’t run very well, or won’t run at all on modern hardware. I’m in the market for a ‘powerful’ machine circa 2003-2005 for that exact reason.
When it comes to machines made in 2015? I’m not sure there’s a lot you can run on those machines that you couldn’t on modern hardware, apart from Windows 11.
I guess you could use them for things like media servers, but it would have to be phenomenally cheap, as in cheaper than cheap modern hardware.
Personally, my rule is a 10 year gap is old, a 20 year gap is retro.
There’s more employees than just the border guards themselves. There’s the HR, the IT, Accountants, Legal etc etc. Block all of them. If those services are contracted out, ban their workers as well. Might be a bit troublesome with companies like Amazon or Microsoft, but since you’re banning individual workers rather than whole companies it might work out a little easier.
Make it so the deal is “If you associate with this company and you aren’t a Canadian citizen, you are personally not allowed to enter Canada”
At this point Canada should be playing hard ball. Ban all visas from anyone working for those companies, or anyone who delivers services to those companies for as long as they work for those companies. If they lie about who they work for, the ban is permanent and they personally are not allowed to set foot in Canada ever.
Trade it in to who? Who’s buying PCs that can’t be used? I mean there’s the retro market, but AFAIK they aren’t buying anything after Windows XP.
More like the best choice. If you don’t want to be invaded, you need nukes. Any country that had nukes and gets rid of them is just asking to be invaded. Libya got rid of their nukes, got invaded, collapsed. Ukraine got rid of their nukes, got invaded, got abandoned by the US. Canada got rid of their nukes, Trump is talking about annexing the country. I guarantee Trump would be a lot more polite to the Canadians if they had something they could point right at Mar A Lago and go “Invade us at your fucking peril”.
It doesn’t matter how many nukes Russia has, or how many anti-nuke systems they have. Ukraine only needs to get lucky once. That fear will make Russia back off. It works for North Korea, it can work for Ukraine. The US is unreliable at best and a bunch of lying traitorous scum at worst, so there’s no point in relying on them for anything. The ONLY way a country can protect itself from invasion these days is to have a “I’m taking the entire world with me” button.
Ukraine should just build nukes, test one of them and then say to Russia “Get out, or the next one is landing on Moscow”.
The one thing I don’t like about oldschool forums is that I have to make an account for each one. With each account comes a new place where your email address is registered, and a new password, with each password comes a new avenue for attack if you’re shitty about web security and use the same password (or a variation thereof) for everything. If you use a password manager you’re fine, but I don’t want my email being put everywhere.
There needs to be some kind of SSO that’s open source (like Google but not Google), so I can log into any forum that implements it, but with that comes the cost of running an identity provider and I don’t think forums are going to want to pay for that in addition to their own costs. Maybe some sort of distributed system or something where each forum donates a little bit of compute power to running the IDP, I dunno…