losttourist

losttourist, 6 months ago

That all seems ... incredibly complicated.

Why not use fwupd? (link is the Arch wiki but should be relevant for any distro). I've been using fwupd to keep my Dell XPS15 BIOS updated for the last few years, with no problems at all.

losttourist, 6 months ago

No. The whole point of Federated software is that things happen on one server, and by the very design of the system those things get shared out to other servers. "Things" could be anything from posts to comments to up/down votes.

The only way to have anonymous voting would be to make the up/down votes strictly local to a particular server, which kind of defeats the purpose of a federated system.

losttourist, 6 months ago

I'm not sure why Docker would be a particularly good (or particularly bad) fit for the scenario you're referring to.

If you're suggesting that Docker could make it easy to transfer a system onto a new SD card if one fails, then yes that's true ... to a degree. You'd still need to have taken a backup of the system BEFORE the card failed, and if you're making regular backups then to be honest it will make little difference if you've containerised the system or not, you'll still need to restore it onto a new SD card / clean OS. That might be a simpler process with a Docker app but it very much depends on which app and how it's been set up.

losttourist, 6 months ago

I'm still struggling to understand what advantage Docker brings to the set-up.

Maybe the application doesn't need to write anything to disk at all (which seems unlikely) but if so, then you're not saving any disk-write cycles by using docker.

Or maybe you want it only to write to filesystems mounted from longer-life storage e.g. magnetic disk and mark the SD card filesystems as --read-only. In which case you could mount those filesystems directly in the host OS (indeed you have to do this to make them visible to docker) and configure the app to use those directly, no need for docker.

Docker has many great features, but at the end of the day it's just software - it can't magic away some of the foundational limitiations of system architecture.

losttourist, 7 months ago

Yeah, I remember listening to the radio and the DJ saying he had some free stuff to give away to anyone who could phone or write in with a good explanation of those lyrics. Off the back of that I rushed out and bought the 7" single and spent hours listening to it and writing down lyrics trying to get some meaning out of them.

I didn't work out what it was about, I didn't get the free shit from the radio station, but Nik Kershaw did get a additional record sold. Genius!

losttourist, 7 months ago

Yes, I think that 'masquerading' is the key bit to grasp. The MITM Proxy isn't just intercepting the traffic, it alters the traffic as it passes through.

losttourist, 8 months ago

Do you want zombie orphans? Cos that's how you get zombie orphans. Listen to the AI, it's trying to save the world from becoming a dystopian TV series!

losttourist, 8 months ago

The internet that we invented was a good internet. It's only later on it became a place for misinformation and adverts.

losttourist, 8 months ago

That looks amazing. In the last year or two I've found a pretty good, reliable dough recipe, but I'm never really satisfied with the tomato sauce I use. Do you have a recipe you stick to?

losttourist, 8 months ago

While true, I think most people's concern is that their laptop is stolen and along with it all the access details for their email, online banking and so on.

If you're doing things that mean you're going to be the target of people with the knowledge, time, and technology to freeze the RAM and attempt to recover the data, you're presumably already well aware of those (and other) dangers anyway.

losttourist, 8 months ago

markdown support

If you are on (or migrate to) a server using the Glitch-Social fork of Mastodon, you'll get markdown support. It's a game-changer, in my opinion. (glitch-soc has lots of other nice features too, btw).

losttourist, 8 months ago

what if I'm not using CoreOS?

Podman runs on any distro (or more strictly: any distro that uses systemd). It's essentially a FOSS alternative to Docker.

losttourist, 8 months ago

systemd [is] a niche

Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn't systemd-based unless you're deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.

losttourist, 9 months ago

GRUB (or any other bootloader) doesn't care about and in fact doesn't even know about X, Wayland, or any other userland GUI system.

losttourist, 10 months ago

There is a long abandoned (but it still runs) project called eDEX-UI (https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui) which basically provides a working, useable terminal surrounded by all sorts of the crap visual appearance of hacker terminals in the movies. Pair that with a terminal editor and you've almost got a movie IDE!

It's kinda fun for a while although I'd be amazed if anyone actually used it as their main terminal emulator program. But you could.

losttourist, 10 months ago

I don't know if this will help you but when that annoying 500 error occurs on kbin (and it can be for almost any action it seems) I find it sometimes helps if I hit the back button so I return to where I was and then refresh the entire page and immediately try that action again.

Good luck, I also have 196 and various other meme mags blocked.

losttourist, 10 months ago

It's not a perfect analogy, but a good way to think about it if you're not a programmer is to say "why do we need recipes when we can just buy a product in the store and read the ingredients list".

Just because you know the ingredients, that doesn't mean you know how to put them together in the right order, in the right quantities, and using the correct processes to recreate the finished product.

losttourist, 10 months ago

I imagine it's just poor translation. English isn't Ernest's first language, and although he speaks it very well it's very clear from looking at some of the less-commonly-used parts of Kbin that some terms seem to have been translated directly from their original Polish without strong consideration about whether they remain as easy to understand their meaning.

losttourist, 10 months ago

Something becomes an addiction when you persist in doing it even though you know it's not doing you good or even actively causing you harm. By that definition, excessive internet use IS an addiction, because many people will endlessly doom-scroll their favourite sites even though they know there are more important things they should or could be doing.

losttourist, 11 months ago

Yes, it matters hugely.

Let's say I do a google search for "how to frobitz a widget" and the top result (because as you say it's in Google's cache) points me to a post on /r/WidgetFrobitzing.

I then click through and find that the post is deleted or has been changed to say "lol Spez sucks use Lemmy" or whatever. I'll almost certainly close that tab and go back to google to find another link. That deprives Reddit of clicks through its ads, of time spent on site, and it also means that user is less likely to follow links to Reddit in future as they will know they're not as useful as Google thought they were.

losttourist, 11 months ago

I haven't run up my own Threadiverse server yet, but I self-host my own one-person Mastodon, also on Hetzner. Yes, it will eat up a lot of disk space, so if you're trying to keep costs down you need to send all the media to S3-compatible storage. I use Backblaze B2 which costs me something like $2/month for 200GB of Mastodon media.

I would assume Lemmy or Kbin would also be greedy for asset storage, as they'll pull in media (images and videos) for any community you follow. So again pushing that all off to a low-cost storage system such as S3 makes a lot of sense.

losttourist, 11 months ago

This is pretty nice even at such an early stage in development. Very much appreciated, thank you.

losttourist, 11 months ago

flick weeds out of the way where they’ll dry out before they can grow seeds and spread.

Maybe that works in California. In rainier parts of the world that's an awesome way to spread weeds all over the place!

losttourist, 11 months ago

You can't report someone for posting NSFW content in an NSFW sub. Well you can but absolutely nothing will happen.

losttourist, 11 months ago

no and you shouldn't

Surely that's up to the individual. It maybe shouldn't be the default setting, but some people might have very good reasons to not want a permanent record of every silly remark they've ever made, sitting on the internet for all eternity.

On my Mastodon account I've set it up to auto-delete posts after 4 months because I believe social media should essentially be ephemeral.

losttourist, 11 months ago

The developer of kbin, @ernest, has said that automated processing of account deletion requests is on the roadmap but currently it's a manual process.

As you can imagine, for a piece of software that two months ago was in alpha status with fewer than 100 regular users and then suddenly became one of the most-used systems on the Fediverse, there are still a lot of rough edges to be cleaned up.

losttourist, 11 months ago

I have an eleven-year-old floofy boy who looks almost exactly like your Eddy. And Luther loves belly rubs too!

losttourist, 11 months ago

How is that any different from what we have now?

Threads has launched, but has federation disabled. So right now Threads is a standalone system, and it and the Fediverse cannot intercommunicate.

If Threads later adds in federation but all the of the Fediverse blocks them, we're in exactly the situation that exists right this minute. And that doesn't seem to be hurting the Fediverse at all.

losttourist, 11 months ago

I can't help with Lemmy, but I've been running a single-user Mastodon instance for almost a year now.

Like you, I found that the media very quickly used up much more disk space than I anticipated. There are a few things you can do.

You can tune how long media is stored for: some of this is done in the admin interface, but really you need to set up cron jobs to regularly run various tootctl commands. This is the crontab I use:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/home/mastodon/.rbenv/shims:/home/mastodon/.rbenv/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

RAILS_ENV=production
# Remove media attachments older than 8 days
11  19  *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove --days 8
# Remove link previews older than 28 days
22  5   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl preview_cards remove --days 28
# Remove files not linked to any post
 3  23  *   *   0     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove-orphans
# Prune remote accounts that never interacted with a local user
44  1   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl accounts prune

You can of course choose even stricter settings but I found that no matter what I did, given that I am following approx 1,000 other Fediverse accounts it still used up more disk space than I was comfortable with.

So I offloaded most of the media storage onto an S3-compatible service. It's breaking the self-hosting ethos somewhat, but with Backblaze B2 I can happily store and serve several hundred GB of media files for just a couple of dollars a month. To me, that was a no-brainer.

losttourist, 11 months ago

Americans have fetishised the concept of free speech to a remarkable degree. Virtually no other country permits such a toxic policy.

losttourist, 1 year ago

We're not actually that small, we have about 90k subscribers. But we're still small fry compared to many that are closed.

In the spirit of malicious compliance, if anyone has any suggestions for what /r/Commandline could become, I'd be delighted to hear them!