rimu

That's a secret. But the selfhost community has lots of advice, e.g. https://piefed.social/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world/p/2146191/safely-exposing-services-to-the-internet

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Rimu @piefed.social 2d ago

Yeah it's not great. I could have a PSU blow out any time and it'll take me days to sort it out, probably. I have a spare server (these things are < $100 so why not) but getting it ready for prime time wouldn't be quick either.

Anyway the resiliency of the fediverse is in the network - people can just use another instance for their fix of shitposts until their main comes back.

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Rimu @piefed.social 2d ago

A long-time mastodon contributor is shutting down their instance - https://vmst.io/@vmstan/116757564108266599

Small instances close down all the time but in this case it's not just anyone's instance.

This new environment will provide developers with an incentive to find ways to rein in their platform's storage and CPU usage.

Rimu @piefed.social 2d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

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Rimu @piefed.social 2d ago

The next shoe to drop will be when S3 object storage prices double or triple. That'll really thin the herd.

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Rimu @piefed.social 2d ago

I left Hetzner after the price increase a couple of months ago, expecting that hike not to be the last.

Now I run my own hardware. It feels good to 'own the means of federation' and not rent it!

Rimu @piefed.social 2d ago

Another way to look at it would be "if you've got a toy project to practice coding without AI on, do it now" before that is the only option.

Rimu @piefed.social 2d ago

"I told you Mexico would pay for it!"

Rimu @piefed.social 2d ago

I'm aiming for the end of June. Probably only in a basic form but still usable.

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Rimu @piefed.social 3d ago

Try https://www.palemoon.org/, it's a fork of Firefox from a few years ago before it got big.

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Rimu @piefed.social 3d ago

Yes, we need this.

In the next release you'll be able to follow other people (not just communities), which means following people from Mastodon, which means posts are going to start arriving with multiple images.

It's on it's way.

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Rimu @piefed.social 3d ago

I'm not 100% sure.

There's a regular background task that runs every minute. For the last couple of days it has started crashing about once per hour. Approx one in 60 runs ends badly. Not a normal crash where I receive a nice tidy error report saying which line of code it happened in, an ugly crash where all I get is an email from the background task runner saying "864 Segmentation fault (core dumped)" which is very unhelpful.

This went on for a couple of days. I ignored it because it didn't seem to be doing any harm and I have better things to do.

Then yesterday morning I wake up and the whole server is unresponsive, I can't even SSH in. The HDD light is stuck on and the fans are very loud. I turn it off and then on again, it boots up normally.

Nothing interesting in the server logs.

At this point I suspect some experiments with my LAN's internal DNS server that I've been doing recently might have caused it to go offline, as the DNS server is looking flaky and PieFed has been making way more requests than I expected it would. But that turns out to be a dead end. I revert all the DNS experiments back to how it was before, just to be sure. Then I start looking into the segfaults. It's possible that one of the segfaults eventually hit something serious enough that it caused PieFed to get overloaded.

After trying all kinds of things it turns out that I have 3 different python packages that do SSL (database connection, http connections and for encrypting passwords) and they each import a different version of the same C library. They clash and very occasionally causes a random segfault. Switching off SSL on the database connection stops the segfaults. This is fine because the connection happens over a private LAN anyway.

Having nailed down the only two broken bits that were flapping in the wind (DNS and random segfaults), I think it'll be ok again. Probably.

Rimu @piefed.social 3d ago

Yeah, could do. PieFed already does fairly ok at this, explaining the rationale for providing alt text:

All the mobile apps I checked do something similar, with no extra nudging, just an empty text field. Generally the mobile app devs are keen on new ideas like this, maybe do a post in the Voyager or Blorp community and see where that goes.

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Rimu @piefed.social 4d ago

There it is - Mastodon goes out of it's way to warn the user that they haven't provided alt text whereas Lemmy says (optional)

Rimu @piefed.social 4d ago

After postmodernism there has to be an attempt to take the best from postmodernism, modernism, traditionalism and use them in a situation-appropriate way, fluidly and naturally. Because none of those previous stages had the full picture and each has something to offer.

Ken Wilber called this stage "Integral"

Rimu @piefed.social 5d ago

"oh ho ho, I'm going to have some fun with that!", she said