We're not actually that small, we have about 90k subscribers. But we're still small fry compared to many that are closed.

In the spirit of malicious compliance, if anyone has any suggestions for what /r/Commandline could become, I'd be delighted to hear them!

There is a long abandoned (but it still runs) project called eDEX-UI (https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui) which basically provides a working, useable terminal surrounded by all sorts of the crap visual appearance of hacker terminals in the movies. Pair that with a terminal editor and you've almost got a movie IDE!

It's kinda fun for a while although I'd be amazed if anyone actually used it as their main terminal emulator program. But you could.

That all seems ... incredibly complicated.

Why not use fwupd? (link is the Arch wiki but should be relevant for any distro). I've been using fwupd to keep my Dell XPS15 BIOS updated for the last few years, with no problems at all.

From the sidebar

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.

Nothing there saying it's specifically for Linux News.

Without a published POC there's a slightly longer window before clueless script kiddies start having a go at exploiting the vulnerability, though.

I'm not sure why Docker would be a particularly good (or particularly bad) fit for the scenario you're referring to.

If you're suggesting that Docker could make it easy to transfer a system onto a new SD card if one fails, then yes that's true ... to a degree. You'd still need to have taken a backup of the system BEFORE the card failed, and if you're making regular backups then to be honest it will make little difference if you've containerised the system or not, you'll still need to restore it onto a new SD card / clean OS. That might be a simpler process with a Docker app but it very much depends on which app and how it's been set up.

Yes, once I've had a few ideas that we like the sound of, we fully intend to offer the sub's users a genuine vote on its future. If nothing else, it will stop Reddit admins from simply saying that we're going against the members' wishes.

Either way, once the new rules are in place and the sub is open I'll personally be quitting as a moderator and leaving Reddit completely because I no longer wish to devote my unpaid labour to such a company.

How is that any different from what we have now?

Threads has launched, but has federation disabled. So right now Threads is a standalone system, and it and the Fediverse cannot intercommunicate.

If Threads later adds in federation but all the of the Fediverse blocks them, we're in exactly the situation that exists right this minute. And that doesn't seem to be hurting the Fediverse at all.

It's not a perfect analogy, but a good way to think about it if you're not a programmer is to say "why do we need recipes when we can just buy a product in the store and read the ingredients list".

Just because you know the ingredients, that doesn't mean you know how to put them together in the right order, in the right quantities, and using the correct processes to recreate the finished product.

Yes, it matters hugely.

Let's say I do a google search for "how to frobitz a widget" and the top result (because as you say it's in Google's cache) points me to a post on /r/WidgetFrobitzing.

I then click through and find that the post is deleted or has been changed to say "lol Spez sucks use Lemmy" or whatever. I'll almost certainly close that tab and go back to google to find another link. That deprives Reddit of clicks through its ads, of time spent on site, and it also means that user is less likely to follow links to Reddit in future as they will know they're not as useful as Google thought they were.

what if I'm not using CoreOS?

Podman runs on any distro (or more strictly: any distro that uses systemd). It's essentially a FOSS alternative to Docker.

GRUB (or any other bootloader) doesn't care about and in fact doesn't even know about X, Wayland, or any other userland GUI system.

It's not a numbers game. "They killed one of our children" does NOT make it OK for us to kill one of their children.

Give Clojure a go.

It's a modern variant of lisp that runs on the JVM and has deep interoperability with Java, so you can leverage your existing knowledge of Java libraries.

But as it's a lisp, it will have you thinking about problems in a very different way.

systemd [is] a niche

Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn't systemd-based unless you're deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.

You don't need a desktop for CAD anymore.

Not for the raw processing power, but anyone doing serious CAD work is going to want at least a 21" monitor, relying on just the laptop screen is going to be difficult especially (and I speak as someone aged over 50 myself) as your eyes become less able to focus on fine details as you get older.

So OP needs to decide if they're going to want to use the machine for other things as well, in which case a laptop + external monitor might be fine, or if it's a dedicated work/hobby CAD machine in which case why not get the desktop + monitor.

While true, I think most people's concern is that their laptop is stolen and along with it all the access details for their email, online banking and so on.

If you're doing things that mean you're going to be the target of people with the knowledge, time, and technology to freeze the RAM and attempt to recover the data, you're presumably already well aware of those (and other) dangers anyway.

Which would be what, exactly?

Literally the next line on the image tells you what:

"This includes: disability, pregnancy/maternity for the purposes of the mobility assistance use case."

How is this supposed to be enforced? In a decade's time are shopkeepers going to have to challenge anyone buying a packet of fags who looks under 28? And then later it'll be "sorry mate, can you prove you're 44?" and so on.

Americans have fetishised the concept of free speech to a remarkable degree. Virtually no other country permits such a toxic policy.

I'm still struggling to understand what advantage Docker brings to the set-up.

Maybe the application doesn't need to write anything to disk at all (which seems unlikely) but if so, then you're not saving any disk-write cycles by using docker.

Or maybe you want it only to write to filesystems mounted from longer-life storage e.g. magnetic disk and mark the SD card filesystems as --read-only. In which case you could mount those filesystems directly in the host OS (indeed you have to do this to make them visible to docker) and configure the app to use those directly, no need for docker.

Docker has many great features, but at the end of the day it's just software - it can't magic away some of the foundational limitiations of system architecture.

Slackware. Version 3.1 if I remember rightly, with Linux kernel 2.19.x.

It was installed from floppy disks, you needed about 10 of them to do a full install including X Windows.

At the time (1997 or 1998) I only had dial up internet at home, so over the period of several days I brought blank floppies in to work, downloaded the relevant images and copied them on to the disks.

I then spent most of a weekend trying to persuade an (even then elderly) PS/2 with 4 MB of RAM to become a Linux box. Got there in the end, though!

No. The whole point of Federated software is that things happen on one server, and by the very design of the system those things get shared out to other servers. "Things" could be anything from posts to comments to up/down votes.

The only way to have anonymous voting would be to make the up/down votes strictly local to a particular server, which kind of defeats the purpose of a federated system.

Linux doesn't really know about drives, it knows about partitions and mount points.

Obviously this is a simplification, but in general it's close enough. It also could well be your problem - timeshift doesn't know or care that /boot is on the same physical drive as the rest of your system: if it's a different partition, it's separate.

I'll definitely be doing a poll, but as well as a couple of malicious compliance options, one of the choices will be to return to how things were before, and I might also throw in a "stay dark" option. Whatever happens I don't want Reddit admins to be able to turn around and say "you are going against the wishes of the users of the sub".

Not really a viable solution for many scenarios though. What if your PDF has half a dozen pages, your answer becomes really tedious. And in a lot of cases a PDF with forms is expected to be sent back to the person or company that created it once the fields have been filled in. They're not likely to want to receive a bunch of JPEG screenshots instead.

It's a little more than 100€

It's half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.

Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get "I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend" ... "I found one for €15,000, it's a little bit more but ..."

Something becomes an addiction when you persist in doing it even though you know it's not doing you good or even actively causing you harm. By that definition, excessive internet use IS an addiction, because many people will endlessly doom-scroll their favourite sites even though they know there are more important things they should or could be doing.

I haven't run up my own Threadiverse server yet, but I self-host my own one-person Mastodon, also on Hetzner. Yes, it will eat up a lot of disk space, so if you're trying to keep costs down you need to send all the media to S3-compatible storage. I use Backblaze B2 which costs me something like $2/month for 200GB of Mastodon media.

I would assume Lemmy or Kbin would also be greedy for asset storage, as they'll pull in media (images and videos) for any community you follow. So again pushing that all off to a low-cost storage system such as S3 makes a lot of sense.

Yes, I think that 'masquerading' is the key bit to grasp. The MITM Proxy isn't just intercepting the traffic, it alters the traffic as it passes through.

It seems a lot more stable right now. I expect @ernest has been occupied with, y'know, actually having a life. Seeing as it's Christmas and all that.

Apple in the 21st century are exactly like Microsoft in the 20th: they view open source and public protocols as an active threat to their business model and will go miles out of their way to ignore any FOSS project even if it could be hugely beneficial to them.

CPU requirements for Lemmy hosting are minimal. Memory is useful - you'd want to use the Pi 4 with either the 4GB or 8GB RAM, anything less than that will work but you'll be running the risk of difficulties if the server gets busy.

You'll also need plenty of storage, especially if people are going to start uploading media to your Lemmy host. Given that a Pi runs off an SD card you might well find yourself running out of storage space - I'd recommend attaching a USB storage device for the reassurance in that respect.

@Haan @CorrodedCranium

It's either: make Reddit take control and risk losing their communities to bad or no moderation

That's where I am right now. I am the solo mod on one small sub (2.5k users) and a joint mod on a couple of larger ones (21k and 90k). All three are still dark and we are fully prepared that the endgame for this will be when Reddit forcibly remove us as mods. It might come sooner, it might come later, but without the active support of many of the larger subs the protest is not going to work.

I have mentally become an ex-Redditor already, only logging on every few hours to check modmail and respond to users asking for access.

It's a very flexible language so can find a niche almost anywhere. I know of fintech companies that use it extensively for their back end data processing systems, and I've seen some really interesting stuff done with Clojure and Apache Kafka. They're a good fit for each other - Clojure, as a lisp, is optimised for processing infinite lists of things and Kafka topics can be easily conceptualised as an infinite stream of data.

Also, when combined with Clojurescript, it provides a single language that can be used full-stack, so could drop in anywhere that you might otherwise use Node.

But I think one of the best things about it is the way it forces you to re-evaluate your approach to development. It's a completely functional language so you have to throw away any preconceptions about OO and finding new ways to resolve old problems is one of the things that should be a joy for most developers, even if it has no practical application.

markdown support

If you are on (or migrate to) a server using the Glitch-Social fork of Mastodon, you'll get markdown support. It's a game-changer, in my opinion. (glitch-soc has lots of other nice features too, btw).

I can't help with Lemmy, but I've been running a single-user Mastodon instance for almost a year now.

Like you, I found that the media very quickly used up much more disk space than I anticipated. There are a few things you can do.

You can tune how long media is stored for: some of this is done in the admin interface, but really you need to set up cron jobs to regularly run various tootctl commands. This is the crontab I use:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/home/mastodon/.rbenv/shims:/home/mastodon/.rbenv/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

RAILS_ENV=production
# Remove media attachments older than 8 days
11  19  *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove --days 8
# Remove link previews older than 28 days
22  5   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl preview_cards remove --days 28
# Remove files not linked to any post
 3  23  *   *   0     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove-orphans
# Prune remote accounts that never interacted with a local user
44  1   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl accounts prune

You can of course choose even stricter settings but I found that no matter what I did, given that I am following approx 1,000 other Fediverse accounts it still used up more disk space than I was comfortable with.

So I offloaded most of the media storage onto an S3-compatible service. It's breaking the self-hosting ethos somewhat, but with Backblaze B2 I can happily store and serve several hundred GB of media files for just a couple of dollars a month. To me, that was a no-brainer.

The developer of kbin, @ernest, has said that automated processing of account deletion requests is on the roadmap but currently it's a manual process.

As you can imagine, for a piece of software that two months ago was in alpha status with fewer than 100 regular users and then suddenly became one of the most-used systems on the Fediverse, there are still a lot of rough edges to be cleaned up.

I imagine it's just poor translation. English isn't Ernest's first language, and although he speaks it very well it's very clear from looking at some of the less-commonly-used parts of Kbin that some terms seem to have been translated directly from their original Polish without strong consideration about whether they remain as easy to understand their meaning.

DigitalOcean's guides in general are pretty good for all sorts of things, whether it's a generic discussion of a concept like the ones you've posted, or a step-by-step guide for installing and configuring specific systems or software. Even if you're not using DO as a host, much of what they suggest is still very useful.