cstine @ cstine @lemmy.uncomfortable.business

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2 yr. ago

Apple will follow suit: don't be taken in by the 'we love our customers' nonsense they like to present. They make billions in selling ads too, they just do it a little more quietly than Google.

They're not wrong in that most people aren't suited to or should be running what is effectively public services for other people from some surplus Dell R410 they found on eBay for $40.

That said, it's all a matter of degree: I don't host critical infra for people (password managers, file sharing, etc.) where the data loss is catastrophic, but more things that if it explodes for an afternoon, everyone can just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to be The Guy who lost important data through an oversight on an upgrade or just plain bad luck.

But, on the other hand, the SLA on my Plex server is 'if it works, cool, if not I'll fix it when I can' and that's been wildly popular I haven't had any real issues, because my friends and family aren't utter dicks about it and overly entitled, but YMMV.

TL;DR: self-hosting for others is fine, as long as the other people understand that it's not always going to be incredibly reliable, and you don't ever present something that puts them at risk of catastrophic loss, unless you've got actual experience in providing those service and can do proper backups, HA, and are willing to sacrifice your Friday evening for no money.

The only comment I'd add here is that you should make sure you have a real domain, that you've paid actual money to, when setting this up. ActivityPub assumes the domain is immutable, and the free dynamic domain names you can get (or free TLDs like, say, .ml was) are a bad choice. Spend the $10 or whatever, because if something happens to your domain name, you cannot just update it in the database and fix federation: it completely breaks everything in a way that's not repairable.

The closest thing you're likely to get is a black and white Brother laser.

It's as open as a printer is likely to ever be in terms of driver support, the availability of parts is reasonable, and you plug the thing in via USB and then forget it exists until you need to print something.

I have a 2300D I've had for most of a decade now and the only thing I've had to do is put paper in it.

Good news, then: http://canvas.toast.ooo/

And that's why corporate social media is so sticky: your average user doesn't care WHAT is done to them and the most they'll maybe do is grumble slightly and spend a little less money, but won't actually bother to do anything or make any changes, or go somewhere else.

Amazing how corpo marketers have forgotten that the first time around, everyone wearing these was called a glasshole.

Doing a re-play of the Wing Commander games. So far has been 80% Wing Commander and 20% the 'edit your config.sys file so the game loads' minigame it came with.

Object skipping is a most welcome addition, especially given I've had a couple of print failures when a super skinny tall thing gets wonky and I'm forced to chuck it all to try again.

Wow, I'm shocked that they're going to sell the biometric data to anyone who wants it. Well, not that shocked. Actually, not shocked at all.

UptimeKuma is what I use; it'll watch tcp connections, docker containers, websites... whatever. And the notifications are pretty comprehensive and probably cover anything in 2023 would want to be using.

Just to be pedantic, it's not pull, it's push: the data is POSTed from the server that hosts the community.

Right now loading a page makes a bunch of API queries to pull all the related data for the posts, votes, sidebar info, and so on AND the API is very untuned and sending way more data than the WebUI/a client needs to actually generate a page: hence my 'it's less efficient' comment, though this is certainly something that can be tweaked to improve performance between the back and frontends.

I will, however, admit that this is only true if someone is actually reading the content they're subscribed to. The 'subscribe to everything' scripts turn this math on its head because now you are using resources to gather data you don't care about.

ActivityPub isn't anything more than JSON over HTTP(s); there's no reason at all that you couldn't simply tunnel all the traffic using hidden services over Tor using nothing more than the Tor daemon to create a hidden service and the proxy functionality to route all outbound HTTP traffic over Tor.

ActivityPub is not a distributed network: you don't have communications between servers in a mesh, the server that owns a community(ex. fediverse@lemmy.world) pushes out JSON data to any subscribers.

Small servers won't talk directly to each other, unless they're subscribed to communities on each other so having a lot of small servers doesn't actively impact the load on each other, but only on the larger servers that have the more active communities.

And, even then, the JSON requests are going to be a lower impact than a user actively browsing the site, though probably only marginally and maybe not in all cases.

I love the Silicon Valley techbros lately. Their sales pitches have gone from 'we have this cool new thing' to 'we've created something that solves the problems you didn't have until we created the problem you're now dealing with!'.

Much shareholder value or something, I guess.

IRC is extremely federated: building a network of linked servers sharing the same channels was done pretty early in it's existance.

If anything, IRC is more decentralized than ActivityPub-based services, because there's no 'home' server for a given IRC channel, and if thus if a server goes down, you don't lose all the channels that were created on it.

The windows version isn't released yet; the Mac version is.

Allegedly Windows is by end of year, but they're not really being exact with a date.

I think the top 3 reasons are, ultimately, the same reason; the people who are already there don't want you there, and they like the obscurity of discovery and obfuscation of communication, confusion around instances for onboarding, and ability to gatekeep exactly how you're allowed to use the platform.

There's issues with the underlying platform, for sure, but the established user base likes it the way it is, and is very strongly invested in preventing change.

And, that's okay! If you have a platform that you enjoy using, it should be defended, and aggressively.

But, at the same time, you shouldn't be utterly confused why so many people either don't want to or bounce right off your platform and aren't sticky when it's pretty obvious (and has been for a while) that the culture is the big driver for it.

That's fair; I wasn't really considering how poorly performing PSUs were at extremely low loads, despite knowing that they are.

Odd that a random brick would be substantially better than a same-era actual PSU, but I suppose it's hard to say without more specifics.

Partially it's a license problem. The MPL around gecko is much closer to the GPL than the BSD license that that Chromium blink uses, and thus it's much less appealing for commercial products to use it.