One foot planted in “Yeehaw!” the other in “yuppie”.

  • 14 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Even on Windows, Proton drive is hot garbage. It never syncs my files correctly. Has a tendency to leave half encrypted uploads just lying around. Eating up desk space.

    Don’t even get me started on how long it takes to upload anything. Got a 1 GB file? Good luck!

    And that’s before getting into the fact that it’s proton’s third product. It was announced in 2019. 5 years and they still don’t have proton drive as a working product.

    Another gripe I have is that the Linux VPN client still doesn’t support wireguard. Sure, you can download wireguard configuration files. And they work just fine. But changing servers is a pain in the ass because of it.

    It’s made me seriously consider dropping my visionary plan and moving to a more competent provider.

    That being said, proton mail has been fantastic. And I have a ton of domains on it. So it would be a pain to move. I guess I’m just in a stalemate.


  • I’m really surprised no one mentioned Terra Invicta!

    Basically if the Three Body Problem series was a Grand strategy game.

    In terms of grand strategy it is quite grand. So massive and complex that even 100 hours in, I haven’t completed a game.

    That being said, it’s so addicting. I haven’t really played any other Sci-Fi games where you can take over multiple countries on Earth, take over other bodies in the solar system, and field space Navy to defend the planet.






  • I find myself in a similar boat, a bit too small to warrant serious moderation. When I started I wasn’t sure how big or small I wanted to go. City-sized seemed to at least match my original vision of deeper community integration - could still be the route I go, actually. The userbase is growing, albeit slowly, and that’s without any real advertisement of the instance.

    I was thinking of making a small fork/plugin of the lemmy-ui so we (tucson.social) could showcase community sponsors/advertisements. Something decidedly non-targeted and respectful of user’s sensibility and privacy while also allowing local businesses a new place to advertise to locals. Not sure how well that would go over, but given that many of the third party apps might use Google Ads, it might not be too terrible, and if done tastefully, maybe even desirable? It’ll certainly give me a better foot in the door if I want to do B2B advertising.

    Like, I’m imagining putting up ads in the dispensaries in return for running advertisements on tucson.social. Gosh, anywhere people are forced to stand in line and kill time on their phone is an opportunity for them to discover tucson.social (or az.social, for that matter) like bus stops and movie theaters.

    I suppose for me, the bigger question of it all is if Lemmy is sustainable longer term - or even if it has enough appeal on its own.

    I’ve been really eyeing mbin, a way more active fork of kbin, that supports both microblogging and reddit-like threads. Combining the functionality into a single site could be compelling.

    The downside is that there is no real way to easily migrate the site. So I’d probably opt to start fresh with less than 100 users total and only a dozen of them active.

    Which led me to wonder about other folks trying to do similar things. Sure, y’all might not be as idealistic about online communities resembling local ones as I am, but if we all want growth, perhaps consolidating onto az.social (maybe onto Mbin in the process) would be a pragmatic route to achieve that aim?

    Anyways, I connected to you on Patreon, if you’re interested in discussing a consolidation onto something like mbin, just hit me up.

    P.S. Neat cloud thing you got going! Wish I had the capital to do something like that! There’s not enough colocation providers down here in Tucson. And also I geek out about servers, hypervisors, and network equipment.


  • I normally would, but my wife has the same problem and she’s done that 3 times in the last 6 months. In fact, her problem became MUCH worse because the “clean slate” was far more impressionable. She’d search up beauty routines, only to find that Youtube thinks she now wants to see “popping” videos, even though she’s now searching for dinner recipes.

    So yeah, I saw her experience and decided “no thanks”.

    To be fair, MOST of YouTube I watched can be found on Nebula and Floatplane, both of which will likely not have this issue since it’s not a user-content platform. Not to mention, the creators likely make more from those platforms anyways.

    YouTube is basically unavoidable though, so now I just view everything through a piped instance if I absolutely need something that can only be found there.


  • I used to subscribe to YouTube premium as of just a few days ago. Even without the ads. There was something very seriously wrong with the suggestion algorithm.

    I was getting cartel violence videos, and dead animal videos. Never watched one before in my life. Yet. YouTube seems to think that I should want to watch this crock of shit. This started coming up about 6 months ago. Until now I’ve been reporting each video as they come up. But that doesn’t seem to help at all.

    At this point I think YouTube is a danger to society - if it’s recommending cartel violence videos to me unsolicited, what are they suggesting to my nieces?

    I have completely nuked it from my life. Almost all of the YouTubers I like are on Nebula or Floatplane so it doesn’t feel like I’m missing much.





  • yeah…

    They asked for easy, or newbie friendly - and didn’t particularly mention privacy concerns.

    Other than that, if they don’t have a port 80/433 ingress from their ISP there are scarce simple solutions that don’t require another server that also needs management, either by them or a corporate entity.

    back when i was on a DOCSIS modem, i noticed concurrent downloads would disrupt uploads and vice versa. i think this may depend on the type of connection OP has.

    I used to work at a cable company, that was either a problem that people with low SNR had. Either from external factors (tree branch on a cable line) or in-home ones (bad splitter). A modem will ramp up it’s gain in order to offset this (to a point), and in so doing, create a lot more interference between channels. OR they were hitting their ingress rate limit (which is quite agressive on residential plans because DDOS’es). It’s surprisingly easy to hit your ingress rate limit for modern http/https webservers hosting complex web apps. Lots of concurrent connections open up to try to download all the resources when you go to any website in a modern browser and while it’s not a TON of data, the short period of time causes the traffic to easily hit the PPS/BPS rate limit that ISPs employ.

    But yeah, it all depends on the ISP.


  • I’d argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It’s basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.

    I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to “gigabit cable” with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn’t good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.

    Also agree that it’s not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.



  • The best “bang for the buck” in your use-case is to use Nextcloud - Nextcloud Talk is your Jitsi replacement, and the files feature can be extended with the Nextcloud Photos plugin (https://github.com/nextcloud/photos).

    As for your domain question:

    1. You should use any computer you’d like that meets the Nextcloud recommendations, the key is of course isolating this machine on your home network so any “funny business” stays on the server. You can do this with VLANs or an entirely separate LAN connected to a different WAN (ISP).

    2. Many places, I like porkbun.com for real custom domains for cheap, but for your use case, you might be able to use a Dynamic DNS provider for free. It just likely won’t be an easy to remember URL (or at least, as easy as a root domain only). If you have a newer ASUS or Netgear router/modem they both have Dynamic DNS built in and you can select from a few different providers that have both free and paid tiers. ALSO it might be better to use Google Domains (now squarespace domains) since, IIRC, many DynDNS configs for routers support Google Domains too. Cloudflare can also be a decent registrar, and I’d recommend using them if you use any other cloudflare services (see below).

    3. Other things to consider: Your ISP may block port 80, meaning lots of issues. If this is the case, you might want to use a tunnel of some sort. Cloudflare has a great solution here. Even if they don’t block port 80, they may aggressively throttle and shape your incoming traffic - causing issues. Again, the tunnel is a good solution here. And, of course, your upload bandwidth matters a lot, you’ll need something around 100Mbps upload for a decent experience when accessing your stuff over the internet. The 30Mbps that’s typical of DOCSIS modems won’t cut it. Outside of these concerns it’s all about making sure you isolate your server from your “home stuff” to keep things secure.




  • He did this thing where he unified his shell history across thousands of hosts - it was super handy given our extensive use of Ansible playbooks and database managment commands. He could then use a couple hotkeys to query this history within a new open document. Super handy for writing out shell command steps or wrapping things in a bash script you’re working on. Unfortunately I don’t really have a link to HOW to do this, I just remember thinking “Oh my god, that would save me SO much time”.

    Nowadays, I just have this giant document with hundreds of our runbook commands and enable Github Copilot to make it SUPER easy to do the same thing without establishing an SSH session in the backend.