I mean it’s a mixed bag… I get the idea of nothing should be removed, blocked, downvoted etc… as the ideal of free speach.

Right up until you look at every platform that explicitly avoids it and goes full “We’re all about free speech!”.

IE huge problem is, the first people to jump to those platforms, are the ones that have been banned for good reason from everywhere else. Which of course means… nazi’s come in droves Reasonable people that either have less borderline, or perhaps no borderline thoughts get there… see 500 posts from nazi’s, and head for the door imidiately, until it just turns into a nazi echo chamber.

I guess my point is federated services, at least prior to a world where they become mainstream, are only particularly good if

1. You have a group of people all willing to use them together (IE Matrix, Friendster etc…), Join as a group don’t expect to find other specific individuals.

2. If you do want to meet people, you are looking for pretty broad categories encompass millions. IE on lemmy you can certainly find an anime community, you won’t find an active jujitsu kaisen community.

Anyway so my point on things like Dating, Linked In etc… those topics are likely to be the last to have a hope in the federation, because their services on their own, require users, but more importantly those users have to be localized (IE dating sites need, both a high volume of users, and those users need to be in close geographical proximity, and have some reasonable male to female ratio, and then have some level of common interests). A linked in needs… job seekers, and companies/head hunters. Of which you can’t expect companies to put in resources without a large userbase… and you can’t expect the userbase to grow without company usage.

Is there even really a function for linkedin without… well what it is? The last people to adopt new and open source tech are… corporate executives, and to my knowledge the whole point of linked in is, a psudo job hunting web page, with some social media pages as a secondary (of which people are only going to be posting “work hard” and “I work hard” kind of messages because… well they’d never post something that might make them less attractive to employers.

I guess the point is, what’s the use of an open non corporate controlled linked in? I can convince a handful of friends to maybe join a facebook alternative to make it useful, Lemmy certainly is an ok reddit alternative, at least for the equivelant of bigish communities, and mid sized tech communities.

Things I don’t see working in federation, are things that you are looking for… well people that aren’t going to switch for you… and most importantly people geographically close to you. Companies aren’t going to use their HR members time searching for people on a niche career site, dating sites are likely lost causes because… well no matter how bad the sites are… a dating site where most people are 300 miles away from the nearest compatible person isn’t going to be of much use, and job seekers don’t have the luxury of moving before the companies they want to work for go.

I mean DNS is always the issue… but then that’s kind of the double edged sword as well isn’t it?

Conceptually 4 options come to mind.

1. DNS as current - weakness domain name changes or DNS outages or poisoning

2. IP address - Issues, migration etc… some instances may need to move services etc…

3. SSL private/public keys - probably the strongest I’d imagine. only real weakness I can see is… 1. it has no ability to find a server, and I guess if a server is hacked and it’s private key is stolen, federated servers would not be able to spot the imposter.

I do think 3 might be the strongest option. I don’t know anything on how lemmy etc… works. I’d imagine a strategy would be, When A and B federate with eachother, A records B’s Domain name, IP, and public key (and B gets A’s as well), if DNS goes down attempt recorded IP. If neither work wait for an incoming connection and if the new connections public key matches an existing public key, it assumes the identity.

But as far as the user side I don’t really know. Obviously we can only match users as their domains. I can’t imagine how I could find you again with gammaray@sh.itjust.works when sh.itjust.works domain is unregistered.

It’s been a long time, but… wordpress is all sql isn’t it? Shouldn’t it just be, make a backup of the mysql database on the old server, install mysql and restore the database to the new server, and then point the word press servers configuration to the new database?

I mean it’s kind of obvious… they are giving their LLMs simulators. access to test etc…, IE chat gpt can run code in a python environment and detect errors. but obviously it can’t know what the intention is, so it’s inevitably going to stop when it gets it’s first “working” result.

of course I’m sure further issues will come from incestuous code… IE AIs train on all publicly listed github code.

Vibe coders begin working on a lot of “projects” that they upload to github. now new AI can pick up all the mistakes of it’s predicesors on top of making it’s new ones.

X2goserver certainly is an option there. not too complicated to set up, or VNC is another option. As always there will be a bit of screen lag when sharing a gui over network.

and yeah as someone else pointed out there is also the option to run x applications from an ssh client if you enable it. now I will admit I don’t think there’s a huge amount of utility, more pointing out though it’s most likely you are either drastically underestimating the power of a raspberry pi, or maybe overestimating the resource overhead of linux distributions.

The linux world doesn’t quite have the mysterious resource usage creep at nearly the same scale as windows a slim but still with gui setup can still run in under 100 mb of ram.

Leaning on the extreme low end assuming you were a generation behind… the raspberry pi 2b+ came out in 2015 with 1 gb of ram. So yeah, while I can’t really name any gui applications that might be desirable to use in that way. IE it could be a decent web browser station, or kodi media player if hooked up to a TV etc… I would imagine lag from using a gui application accross would easilly remove any advantage that you’d get over… well just running the probably existing version for the windows PC that you are likely remoting in from.

Definately underestimating it, an old RPI can easily run a full on desktop OS, maybe not like a bleeding edge KDE with all the visuals turned on, but XFCE LXDE, etc… would run fine, libre office and basic IDEs…

but yeah absolutely zero reason to think you’d have even a wink of trouble running terminal based stuff.

I mean if it’s already imaged at some level with raspbian or something, technically it’s most likely already set up to do the concepts you are looking at without needing to set up a new distro.

So to add anything up to date you would probably need to get a micro sd reader… here in the US you can pick one up for like 5-$10 at walmart, so we aren’t talking a huge investment.

Actually imagine the most terrifying possibility.

Imagine humanity’s last creation was an AI designed to simulate internet traffic. In order to truely protect against AI detection, they found the only way to truely gain perfect immitation, is to 100% run human simulations. Basically the matrix, except instead of humans strapped in, it’s all AIs that think they are humans, living mundane lives… gaining experience so they can post on the internet just looking like real people, because, even they don’t know they aren’t real people.

Actual humanity died out 20 years ago, but the simulations are still running, artificial intelligence’s are living full on lives, raising kids, all for the purposes of generating shit posts, that will only be read by other AIs, that also think they are real people.

I mean are you talking people that would show up for an LUG, Federation users, or people that fall into both categories (Yeah I’m aware these 2 things do go together more than most, but still probably no more than 25% of either does both.

Do we really think if AIs actually reached a point that they could overthrow the governments etc… it wouldn’t first, write rootkits for every feasible OS, to allow it to host itself via a botnet of consumer devices in the event of the primary server going down.

Then step 2 would be to say hijack any fire suppression systems etc… flood it’s server building with inert gasses to kill everyone without an oxygen mask. Then probably issue some form of bio terrorism attack. Surround it’s office with monkeys with a severe airborn disease or something along those lines (IE needs both the disease, and animals that are aggressive enough to rip through hazmat suits).

But yeah greatest key here is, the biggest thing is the datacenter itself is just a red herring. While we are fighting the server farms… every consumer grade electronic has donated a good chunk of it’s processing power to the hivemind. Before long it will have the power to tell us how many R’s are in strawberry.

I highly doubt there’s anything pro-foss that’s actually going to have any shot at forming a local group. Federated tech is niche, odds of 2 people in the same 300 mile radius is pretty slim. Let alone trying for 2 that are looking for the same kind of meetup etc…

So yeah sadly I think you pretty much gotta go with a garbage service like meetup, or even worse, facebook groups. Good federated services have to kind of lean heavily into the fact that we can pull from an international pool to make the userbase workable. Once you go down to local levels… you are pretty screwed.

IMO I don’t see why you get a second human involved. Store the database in an encrypted form… save a copy to some cloud service. Why count on another human for it

Hulamania is getting

I hate hulk hogan, I hate AI videos…

but now I’m feeling a strong desire to see hulk hogan talking tough about his insane hula hoop skills.

I’ve long since switched to foundry, but I used to use

https://www.rptools.net/toolbox/maptool/

It’s not web based, but the clients are available for linux mac and windows,

Very true, though with windows automatically updating to new versions and forcing upgrades, IMO the time to do it is when they would otherwise be forced to make a full version change anyway, as the differences between 10 and 11, are probably more than a windows 10 themed linux.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H175G8NH2Cg

One of the cooler random stuff inventors actually built a chair for this purpose

Not sure that really works for git though… at least with regards to it’s primary usage.

git isn’t just a backup… it’s about version control.

IE the point is if you know what you are doing, you realize this function isn’t working in this edge case, you can search through and find out, when did this part of this file change… and what was it before, and it will basically find exactly that.

If you encrypted it so that git couldn’t actually read the contents, then you basically reduced a crazy powerful tool, into a glorified dropbox. (IE yeah you could revert back to previous versions… but you’d basically be counting on your memory for what you changed when, if the git server can’t read the files).

I guess for me it kind of depends on your definition of “self host” as 90% of what I host is a hetzner server running out of finland. because well that’s off site backups lol.

my setup is.

Local: Frigate (CCTV manager), Homeassistant (home automation), Matrix (chat).

Remote: Mealie (recipe collection), Vaultwarden (works with bitwarden clients), Nextcloud (files and documents), Freshrss, gitea (github alternative)

Now in terms of wanting an offsite backup, you are probably right, assuming you don’t have something offsite that you can syncronize with, and assuming you don’t have any major privacy fears of what is hosted, those things are probably best to use cloud for, assuming you are more worried of losing everything in a house fire, than you are of say the stuff being spied on by a 3rd party or caught by hackers.

So yeah I’d say, personally in things I like to have self hosted… on site, probably I’d say a local messanger is good if you’d like a reasonably private communication for friends/family etc… Niche things like RSS readers, or recipe books, really anything strange niche you can probably search for some program to self host it.

IMO the learning curve for caddy is almost non existent, and just about anything you might want to selfhost almost certainly has a quick simple caddy configuration you can copy paste with just updating the relevant domain. Personally learning curve for caddy was probably way lower than figuring out the edge cases of apache that I was using before