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sj_zero

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

sj_zero , to fediverse

Link aggregators have a problem on the fediverse. The approach is server-centric, which has positives, but it also has major negatives.

The server-centric approach is where a community belongs to a certain server and everything in the world revolves around that server.

The problem is that it's a centralized formula that centralizes power in a the hands of a whichever servers attract the most users, and potentially breaks up what might be a broader community, and makes for a central point of failure.

Right now, if [email protected] and [email protected] talk on [email protected] then a lot of things can happen to break that communication. if c.com defederates b.com then the communication will not happen. If c.com breaks then the communication will not happen. If c.com shuts down then the communication will not happen. If c.com's instance gets taken over by management that doesn't want person1 and person2 to talk, then the communication will not happen.

Another problem is that [email protected] and [email protected] might never meet, because they might be on [email protected] and [email protected]. This means that a community that could reach critical mass to be a common meeting place would not because it's split into a bunch of smaller communities.

Mastodon has servers going up and down all the time, and part of the reason it's able to continue functioning as a decentralized network is that as long as you're following people on a wide variety of servers then one server going down will stop some users from talking but not all of them so the system can continue to operate as a whole. By contrast, I'm posting this to one server, and it may be seen by people on a wide variety of servers, but if the one server I'm posting this to goes down the community is destroyed.

There are a few ways to solve the problem...

one method could work as something like a specific "federated network community". There would be a local community, and the local community would federate (via local mods, I presume) with communities on other instances creating a specific metacommunity of communities on many instances that could federate with other activitypub enabled communities, and if any of the federated communities go down the local community remains. If any servers posed problems they could cease being followed, and in the worst case a community could defederate totally from a server (at a community level rather than a server level) In that case, [email protected] and [email protected] could be automatically linked up once both connect to [email protected] (I'm thinking automatic linking could be a feature mods could turn off and on for highly curated communities), and if c.com shuts down or defederates with one of the two, [email protected] and [email protected] would continue to be able to talk through their federated network.

Another method would be something more like hashtags for root stories, but I don't know how server-server links would be accomplished under a platform like lemmy, kbin, or lotide. I don't know how hashtags migrate on mastodon type software and how that migrates. In that case, it might be something like peertube where a network is established by admins (or users, I don't know) connecting to other servers manually.

Finally, I think you could implement the metacommunity without changing the entire fediverse by having the software auto-aggregate metacommunities. You could create a metacommunity community1 on a.com that would then automatically aggregate all posts on communities called community1 on all known servers. The potential downside of this is you could end up with a lot of noise with 100 posts of the same story, I haven't thought much about how you could handle duplicates so you could participate but wouldn't have 100 similar posts. In this case with respect to how to handle new posts, each metacommunity would be a local community and new individual posts would be posted locally and federated to users on other metacommunities. If metacommunities of this sort became the norm, then the duplicates problem may be solved organically because individuals using metacommunities would see the posts on other metacommunities and wouldn't bother reposting the same story, much like how people see a story and don't repost in individual communities.

One big problem is scaling, doing something like this would definitely be a non-trivial in terms of load per community. Right now if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from one server. Under a metacommunity idea like this, if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from many, many servers. lemmy.world has 5967 total instances connected to it, and 2155 instances running lemmy, lotide, kbin, mbin, or friendica that could contain similar types of community, that's a lot of communities to follow for the equivalent of one single community, especially if some of the communities in the metacommunity have a lot of traffic in that community. You'd have to look at every known server to first see if it exists and second if it has a community appropriate for the metacommunity, and the metacommunity would have to routinely scan for dead hosts to remove from the metacommunity and live hosts that may start to see an appropriate metacommunity has been created.

I'm sure there are other solutions, but I'm just thinking of how things work within my current understanding.

Of course, for some people, the problem is one they don't want solved because it isn't a problem in their view (and that's a legit view even if it's one I'm not really amenable to). Some people prefer smaller communities, or want tighter control over their communities. For servers or communities that don't want to be brought into a metacommunity, it seems like some sort of flag to opt-out (or opt-in as the case may be) should be designed in -- I'm thinking something in the community description like a textflag NOMC or YESMC that server software would be designed to respect.

With respect to moderation, It seems to me that you could have a variety of strategies -- you could have a sort of default accept all moderation where if one instance moderates a post other instances take on the same action, or whitelist moderation where if one instance or one set of moderators on a whitelist take an action then other instances take the same action, or a sort of republican moderation where if a certain number of instances take an action then other instances take the same action, and probably an option for individual metacommunities to only accept moderation from the local community the original post came from. I suspect you'd want a choice in the matter per metacommunity instance on a server.

sj_zero OP ,

I should have said threadiverse in the title. Oh well.

sj_zero OP ,

(and lotide doesn't implement editing at all, despite ActivityPub supporting it so my options are delete and repost or leave it)

sj_zero OP ,

No, I'm using lotide, another link aggregator altogether. It's a lot leaner, especially on the front end.

Wander , (edited ) to selfhosted
@Wander@packmates.org avatar

The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?

Wait, what?

Think about it. At some point everyone has had an old phone lying around. They are designed to be constantly connected, constantly on... and even have a battery and potentially still a SIM card to survive power outages.

We just need to make it easy to create APK packaged servers that can avoid battery-optimization kills and automatically configure an outbound tunnel like ngrok, zerotrust, etc...

The goal: hosting services like , , !? should be as easy as installing an APK and leaving an old phone connected to a spare charger / outlet.

It would be tempting to have an optimized ROM, but if self-hosting is meant to become more commonplace, installing an APK should be all that's needed. can do SSH, VPN and other tunnels without the need for root, so there should be no problem in using tunnels to publicly expose a phone/server in a secure manner.

In regards to the suitability of home-grade broadband, I believe that it should not be a huge problem at least in Europe where home connections are most often unmetered: "At the end of June 2021, 70.2% of EU homes were passed by either FTTP or cable DOCSIS
3.1 networks, i.e. those technologies currently capable of supporting gigabit speeds."

Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/broadband-coverage-europe-2021

PS. syncthing actually already has an APK and is easy to use. Although I had to sort out some battery optimization stuff, it's a good example of what should become much more commonplace.

cc: @selfhosted

sj_zero ,

Looking at the present, I'm not aware of android devices not booting 10 years after they were released. In fact, my 2013 MotoX is still a perfectly usable phone for many purposes. I had to use it for a few weeks a couple years ago because my phone broke.

sj_zero , to selfhosted

Apparently it's been out since June and I just never realized, but there's a new pfsense out.

https://www.netgate.com/blog/pfsense-2.7.0-and-23.05

Not exactly timely, but I bet I'm not the only one who easily forgets about that particular thing. Most of my stuff is set to autoupdate so I tend to forget.

The upgrade downloaded a large number of packages, I think about 160, during which network connectivity continued to function. After downloading, my router PC reset, and that first boot after the upgrade took quite a few minutes. I ended up running the 90 second timer out after which it reset to 20 seconds a number of times. I was just about to start digging for an HDMI cable to see what when I heard the router beep and my internet came back. Perfect upgrade, didn't need to fix anything afterwards.

sj_zero OP ,

I got it all configured before I figured out the benefits and haven't bothered to migrate since both of them basically do the job for me.

sj_zero OP ,

Really, the same reason I didn't upgrade for 3 months, it's a piece of invisible infrastructure unless something is wrong. I only noticed the upgrade because I was going in to add another static dhcp binding for a new server.

sj_zero OP ,

I've used opnsense in other applications since where I've wanted a good firewall that runs on x86 hardware.

sj_zero , to fediverse

So both lemmy and lotide were having big problems where they'd get totally overwhelmed, especially once I started federating with huge instances. At first I thought it was because my servers aren't very powerful, but eventually I got the idea that maybe it's because it can't keep up with federation data from the big instances.

So I decided to limit the connections per IP address. Long-term testing isn't done yet, but so far both my lemmy and lotide instances aren't getting crushed when they're exposed to the outside world, so I think it's helping.

In /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, under the http section, I added the line "limit_conn_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=conn_limit_per_ip:10m;"

Then, in my sites-available folder for the services, I added "limit_conn conn_limit_per_ip 4;" or something similar. Both lemmy and lotide have different sections for ActivityPub and API, so it appears I can limit the connections just to those parts of the site.

It's only been a few days, but whereas before both instances would die randomly pretty quickly once exposed to the outside world, now it appears that they're both stable. Meanwhile, I'm still getting federated posts and comments.

sj_zero OP ,

That explains a lot. I run everything on bare metal, and I don't think the bare metal instructions included that.

youronlyone , to games
@youronlyone@c.im avatar

Q: What are the five (5) video games from the 20th Century that you want to be able to play again today? And why?

  • Maybe you no longer have time, or, there are no modern ports or adaptation.

I'll start with mine.

(in no particular order)

It seems easier to play than , but as you progress, it is actually challenging. I love the challenge.

  1. / (DOS version specifically).

If I am not mistaken, before there was the franchise, there was “Empire”. It was a fun game. There is available on , but I miss the DOS version that I played a lot.

A very fun game. Once I start playing this, time flies fast. I miss this game.

Here's a video of it, it's hard to explain this game as there are many features/gameplay “modes” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBJ0q52bXJM

Modern games today are usually limited to certain themes. If it's flight, it's flight. If it's tank, it's tank. If it's strategy, that's it. Carrier Command have it all.

  1. / (DOS)

Years before the era of came. RPG-ish space game that made me felt exploring space. This was new to me then and I enjoyed it.

  1. / (DOS)

I know, we can still play this today, however, what I miss with this game is the 2 player mode.

You just play with your friend and blast each other to friendly matches and laughter.

Being able to play 2P mode, face-to-face, is something that we have taken for granted, and now we're all just virtual avatars in online games (even online multiplayer games).

So, how about you?

Q: What are the five (5) video games from the 20th Century that you want to be able to play again today? And why?

@youronlyone

@games @games @gaming @gaming

sj_zero ,

Hardwar is something I wanted to play but didn't think I'd get a chance to, but it's up on steam now (so I just bought it)

I want to play baldurs gate 1 and 2 to completion but I just don't have time for it

I never did play through Final Fantasy 7, and it's a chonker of a game to play through

I've played through the later Final Fantasy Tactics Advance games, but I never got very far into Final Fantasy Tactics.

I own all 5, but my main focus in life has been my little guy.

And as a bonus.... I kinda want to have game of civ.... one more turn!!!

sj_zero ,

Oh, one thing I can't really do anymore (for now at least) is some old school multiplayer gaming in doom, duke3d, quake, all those old games. That was my childhood, but not playing online -- playing where I can look over to my little brother and shit talk him for that kill or whatever.

sj_zero ,

I loved UT99. Still routinely fire it up now and again, but you're right that it isn't the same.

sj_zero ,

I usually hit civ 1 for ms-dos, civ 3 for windows, and I think I have civ 5.

But I like the first for no good reason. Same as my favorite version of simcity is the snes version.

sj_zero ,

Oh noooo!!

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