Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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  • 88 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • When talking about hardware, the physical computer itself, a “server” is commercial grade and designed to run under heavy loads for years on end with very high reliability. Error correcting RAM, redundant power supplies, room inside for huge processors, more airflow than a C-130 for cooling, etc.

    On the software side, a “server” is just a computer that provides some service to users on a network. You very likely have one of those Wi-Fi router/ethernet switch things from the likes of Linksys or whatever, right? That is almost certainly acting as a DHCP server for you LAN, in that capacity it might handle kilobytes of data a day because dynamically assigning IP addresses on a household Wi-Fi network is not a very demanding task, so it’ll do it on a tiny little ARM processor with a few MB of RAM. It probably also has a web server, which is how the “go to its IP address in your browser and get to your router settings page” works. It’s serving a little website that most of the time gets absolutely zero traffic.

    So, turning a desktop PC into a “server.” The question is, what services will it provide? Desktop PCs are pretty good at mostly low traffic with bursts of intense work, so if they’re going to sit still doing nothing while you’re at work all day, and then maybe handle some file storage or media transcoding during the evenings while you’re home, a PC will do that just fine, if you’re okay paying the power bill of having a computer up and running all the time.

    If you’re hosting a website or a game server with a lot of active users around the clock, you might want to look into more professional hardware.


  • It can, but is it likely to? To get my passwords, you’d need my KeePass database itself, which is only stored on computers I own. To unlock my password database, you need my password, which I have not stored digitally anywhere, and you’d need to have the keyfile. Oh which of the hundreds of thousands of files on my system is the keyfile?

    So you’ve gotten my password database open. Critical things like my lynchpin email address and banking accounts just aren’t in there. Those I memorize only. All of the “This would be bad if this got compromised” accounts have 2-factor authentication.

    Compared to breaking into a retailer or bank’s servers and getting hundreds of thousands if not millions of credentials, that’s a lot of effort to get one guy’s Lemmy account deets.





  • Lemmy, and I guess mbin and piefed, seem to be their own little island. I’ve used a Pixelfed account to comment on a Peertube video, I tried that from my Lemmy account and it threw an error. That “ActivityPub services even of different formats can interact with each other” thing seems to break down with the Reddit clones. I genuinely can’t tell if I’ve never interacted with an Mbin instance or if they just look exactly like Lemmy from a Lemmy account.

    People still use Lemmy exactly like they use Reddit, they fill it with screenshots of or links to other platforms. If there is direct interoperability with Pixelfed or Peertube or Mastodon, no one seems to know how to use it. I’ve heard but not played with Kbin/Mbin’s microblogging capability, so your mbin account is kind of also a Mastodon account in a way your Lemmy account isn’t?

    Hell, commenting on that Peertube video from Pixelfed was done ass-first. Go to a Peertube instance’s website not logged into an account there, choose a video, then under that video click in the comment field, a pop-up appears that asks you to sign in or “remote interact” in which you input your account@instance.lol name, which opens a separate window for you to log into that account on that instance, where you are then given a form to write the comment. It doesn’t feel like a design feature, it feels like a thing that is technically possible.


  • I have seen this conversation play out a lot:

    “We need to do [something] if we want the Fediverse to grow!” “Who says we want the Fediverse to grow?”

    There are those who are perfectly fine with this being their little corner of the internet, somewhere they can personally escape to, and there are those who think they’re leading a revolution, overthrowing the oligarchs and creating a new paradigm for the world where we run on solar power and eat vegetables and other “better for you” wholesomeness.

    As you say, it’s working fine right now while servers and their admins and moderators can handle the relatively small load. Just the legitimate traffic of Reddit would collapse the infrastructure pretty quickly.

    A day or two ago I saw someone in a thread about “What actually stops the Fediverse from going the way of Reddit” acting actually offended at the idea that hosting your own instance would require owning server hardware or paying to rent one.

    If the goal is to replace commercial social media with federated systems…where’s the funding going to come from?


  • I’m still not entirely sure where each individual parcel of data is stored.

    My account is on sh.itjust.works; the URL for the page I’m viewing this in is a sh.itjust.works address, this post and comment thread are from lemmy.world. When I hit reply in a few minutes my time, this comment will be sent to sh.itjust.works. Does it get stored there, or does it get forwarded to lemmy.world and stored there? If sh.itjust.works shuts down, does this comment disappear with it?

    Possibly depending on how that works, viewing one lemmy instance’s content from another may not be “using that instance” but posting or commenting might be.