mozz

You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:

1. Stick it in the freezer for a short while.
2. Take it out.
3. Boot it up.
4. If it works, get all the data off it as quick as you can.

Wait, how does that work? Can you do Nix package management on a Debian system or something?

Debian is mine and has been for decades + I’m a little bit happy to see it’s still well represented / well thought of in the community. Everything works, and you can choose new + exciting with headaches sometimes, or old + stable with no headaches but old.

Only real issue is the package management hasn’t kept pace with node / python / go / everything else wanting to do its own little mini package management, and so very occasionally that side is a little bit of a mess

NixOS I would like to try at some point as the core philosophy seems a little more suited to the modern (Docker / pip / etc) era, but I never messed with it

I think no 😕

ActivityPub is so loosely designed (in my opinion as somewhat of an outsider) that the opportunity was squandered to be able to have all different services interact smoothly with each other. It’s basically one little fiefdom per app, and if Pixelfed wants to make itself compatible with Mastodon’s fiefdom, then fine, and likewise for Mbin with Lemmy and etc, but it’s not really “cross compatible” between the whole universe of apps, in the same way as other better-designed protocols like email work, where it’s just “email” with no app specificity to it. It is a shame and a missed opportunity with how the protocol was designed, I think.

I think in general, the fediverse people are working on solutions, but we’re sort of stuck into the present setup which has this not really ideal compartmentalization and there’s not a good way to fix it. Certainly not from the Lemmy side that I’m aware of. Two possibilities though:

• Pixelfed has in-progress work on groups support, which is apparently very close to reality and at which point it should be able to interoperate with both Mastodon and Lemmy, which are the two main fiefdoms at present. And, Dan seems like he takes it pretty seriously the idea of maintaining compatibility all around (incl specifically with Lemmy).
• You can do kbin/mbin, which is more “Lemmy like” and is the best currently-working option I’m aware of for interoperating with Mastodon and Lemmy both (incl following Mrs. Hedge on Pixelfed and also any Lemmy communities). That’s why I am using mbin currently FWIW.

Ask GPT to rewrite your configuration, check over it with diff to make sure it didn’t do something dumb, bingo bango

Tor’s obfs4 protocol is pretty difficult to block, and it has some other transports that are options if obfs4 is unusable in a heavy censorship regime. This page is a good overview of how to start; with the right transport and bridge setup it’ll be extremely difficult for your ISP to prevent you having access.

You could make your home server a securely-accessed onion site and connect to a remote-access-via-web service you’re running there. That part might be a little challenging (and this process overall may be overkill) but it’d be very challenging for them to block it, I think, so if you’ve tried some things and had no luck, that might be the way to do it.

Be careful obviously

Honestly having GPT write one-off code for you for particular selected pieces (esp ones that require a lot of domain knowledge) works pretty well in my experience

I think one of the worst things that happened to internet culture was when “I’m a fellow nerd and I am happy if you made me some free nerd stuff, thank you” got replaced with “I’m a customer and you are making a product for me” mentality. It’s like someone is doing you a favor by joining your Lemmy instance, or running your free software, and it gives you the right to complain to them and demand features or things you want, and you’ll threaten to leave and not bless them with your presence anymore if you don’t.

I see this all the time with Lemmy: People pressuring the devs to do some thing in some particular manner, and them constantly explaining “hey, our time’s not unlimited and we have a large number of priorities, we’ll get to it when we get to it, if you feel strongly about it please do it yourself or hire someone” which is 100% reasonable, and then for some reason that’s a problem.

Does it work out okay with 12 cores purely on CPU? About how fast is the interaction?

I played around a little with Ollama and gpt4all but it seemed to me like it wasn’t fast enough to be useful on pure CPU, but if I could just throw cores at it then I might revisit the issue.

Preach

(a) network effects (b) inertia © Matrix is still kind of a pain in the ass

Are all easily more capable to explain it (d) all the users are otherkin

I absolutely agree with the central message. I would add a few reasons, notably lack of end-to-end encryption and partial ownership by Tencent, as strong reasons to stay away if you can avoid it.

That said, a lot of the particular details listed here actually aren’t right to me.

• By choosing Discord, you also lock out users with accessibility needs, for whom the proprietary Discord client is often a nightmare to use. - From the footnote: “What I can tell you is that, to my surprise, Discord’s accessibility has apparently improved in recent years, and more blind people are using it now. One of my blind friends told me that most Discord functionality is very accessible and several blind communities are using it.”
• Users of novel or unusual operating systems or devices (i.e. innovators and early adopters) are also locked out of the client until Discord sees fit to port it to their platform. - What do you mean? The web client doesn’t work on web browsers that are running on unusual OSs?
• Discord also declines service to users in countries under US sanctions, such as Iran. Privacy-concious users will think twice before using Discord to participate in your project, or will be denied outright if they rely on Tor or VPNs. - I’ve used Discord through Tor and as far as I can tell it works fine.

Like I say I actually agree with the central thesis but not with more or less any of the specific reasons he cites.

If you’re comfortable with poking into code changes, you might even also try to find the place where incoming posts are processed in the code, and just flip it so every submitted post is set to followers-only.

Mastodon, and just turn off federation and registration maybe, and wrap the whole thing in HTTP authentication or something so you don’t have to worry about random people finding random holes into read-only access to the content?