Anafroj @ Anafroj @sh.itjust.works

Posts

1

Comments

107

Joined

2 yr. ago

That's true, but only initially. Once you get SPF/DKIM right, that you domain name grows a few years old (enough to be considered established) and that you nailed your configuration, there is no issue anymore. I've been running my own Postfix on a Pi in my home for about 5 years, and It Just Works ™. The only maintenance I do is updating the software (done when updating the rest of the OS), and I don't get shadowbanned mails anymore, even when sending to outlook.com (which is. by far, the worst peer when self-hosting emails).

EDIT : by the way, fun fact : it seems not as related to IP reputation as it's often said (well, unless the IP has bad reputation, of course). I changed my ISP late last year (thus changed my IP), I was very afraid I would lose my good reputation and have to start over with getting my mails shadowbanned, and… nothing happened. My mails just got delivered as usual. So I bet the domain name is at least as important as the IP.

Playing devil advocate, here : you can expect the life expectancy of bigger instances to be slightly to significantly bigger, if anything because their admins feel more responsibility due to the number of users depending on them. That argument does not hold if we're comparing using a big instance vs self-hosting, though (the life-expectancy of your self hosted instance may be smaller, but if you shut it down it means you're not interested anymore in the fediverse, so no big deal - except maybe for the holes you leave behind you). And anyway, I'm not sure better life expectancy is more important than making sure the fediverse stays decentralized.

I've already heard mention of Thousand Year Old Vampire, never played it, though. There are a lot of things happening in the space of solo roleplaying which are boons for writing, but you will need several lifetimes to try them all. :) I stick to the three ones I use and already know well from tabletop gaming (dnd, shadowrun and traveller), and I don't want to start system hopping, because for me the focus is the story, not the rulesets, and it would get in the way. The only exception I made to that was to start using some parts of Mythic GM Emulator, because it can be used on top of the rulesets I use and it did indeed made my story way more interesting, especially when the pace is cooling down and you're not sure what to do next.

You can think of it like that, a scrapbook that updates everyday with new things about your chosen subjects. Or you can think of it as a newspaper in which there are only news about things you like. It's quite close to a Facebook/Twitter feed where you would follow companies/projects/artists you like, with the notable difference that there is not a centralized authority (the owners of Faceook or Twitter) who can decide to change your experience (by altering what you see, removing some content, adding some ads or whatever). Oh, and also, you can't comment. :) (but the articles you're reading in your aggregator have links to their original web page, which often contain a comment section).

(sorry for the double post, the instance I'm on was throwing errors)

Gotcha, thanks for satisfying my curiosity. :) Of course, you can plug a usb drive on the Pi, but you know better what your needs are. Good luck!

Max-P already provided good options, but I have to ask what I, and probably other people, wonder : why don't you just run that scrapping program from your home server, then?

Well, the good news is that the "fediverse" is actually built on a web standard (ActivityPub), which you implement in any software you want. :) What that means is that the "the fediverse" is more comparable to "the web" than to a given social network. There are people building websites you won't agree with, same goes with fediverse software. Move on and find those that you like, or build them. The fact that it's built on web standards mean that anyone can decide to add their own software without concerting with anyone else, without asking permission from anyone else, you just build and publish. That's what made the web so strong since its beginning, and that's IMO a core advantage of ActivityPub compared to other decentralization projects.

I'm sorry, I'm not taking your word for it, that's not how it works. :) Do you have reliable sources on that?

requested info : I don't use Facebook. I've had an account I opened in 2018 due to peer pressure, and I closed it in 2018.

I'm not familiar with that story, so correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like a classic case of shooting the messenger. Facebook is a communication tool. The fact that horrible people used it to do horrible things doesn't sound like a problem with the tool, except of course if people from Facebook were aware of it while it was happening (I doubt so, for the simple reason that they would have nothing to gain from that, and much to lose ; but again, correct me if I'm wrong). Genocides have probably been organized using phone and paper mail systems, but nobody would say "stop using phones, it's bloodstained". At least, with Facebook, there's a possibility of moderation that never existed with previous means of communication.

… but fuck Facebook anyway. :P

You're welcome. Have fun, that's the most important part of it. :)

Oh yeah, indeed, there was Mystic Quest (the european name for the first game) before. Although, it was such a different beast it's only with Wikipedia later that I discovered the two games were related.

A fan translation was actually completed in 1999 and kinda big news so you could have played it way back then if you were able to run a ROM patch

Oh really? Nice, I missed that. But well, I didn't speak English either back then, so it probably wouldn't have helped. :)

Yes indeed, giving proper notice seems like minimal etiquette. Then again, life happens. Admin may be caught in some tragedy making maintaining their lemmy instance not exactly a priority, or they may even be dead.

There is not much you can do to just migrate your account somewhere else, that's a limitation of federation (compared to fully decentralized protocols, like Secure Scuttlebutt), but I'd wish Lemmy would implement ActivityPub's following endpoint, so we can easily build scripts to backup the communities we're in.

Secret of Mana 2, when I was a kid in the 90'. I knew back then it was released in Japan, and I was waiting for it in Europe. … and it never happened. 😂 I think I've seen they finally translated it recently, as a retrogame, but hey, my tastes and priorities changed a bit in 30 years.

This made me laugh as well, especially given how that concept is prevalent in the US. 😂 OP is probably not a native speaker.

It's a feed protocol for websites. Each time you see that icon, it's a RSS feed :

You have a RSS client, a program you use to display your news. In it, you paste the url of the RSS feed of the various websites you want to follow, and just like that, you have an app in which you can go every morning to see what's new in your favorite websites, all at once.

Now, the problem of course is that not every website, by far, is offering RSS feeds, so you have to look for those who provide one. RSS is popular among techies and journalists, so press and tech blogs are where they are the most common. On top of that, there are many websites having RSS feed without even knowing it, because they use Wordpress or other engines that automatically provide RSS feeds. Those are a bit more tricky to get your hand on, because there is no link anywhere on their page, you have to look in the source code of the page (using Control + u) to find an "alternate rss" or "atom" link. It used to be automatically detected by browsers, showing an icon in the url bar when a RSS feed was detected, but it's not the case anymore. You can still install a browser extension to make them appear, like this (chrome) or this (firefox).

For the record, youtube has RSS feeds for all publishers, reddit has RSS feeds for all subs, most major news websites have RSS site, so it's quite useful, provided you can find the feed urls.

Then, to actually aggregate the news, you need a RSS client in which to paste those feed urls. There are tons of them. Name your favorite platform, there probably are a dozen RSS clients for it. Mobile, web, desktop, it's everywhere. So pick the one you like best. :) You just have to search for "RSS client for ". A couple popular exemples : The Old Reader on the web and Thunderbird (which is also a mai client) on desktop.

I don't think it's a Mastodon problem. It's a generalist social network problem. Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, why are we using those? For some, it's "to keep in touch" with friends and family, and they're happy seeing any activity, preferably things that makes them smile (that's more Facebook). For others, it's a mean to build street cred in their industry by publicly saying on topic things that sound smart (that was Twitter). But if you look for interesting discussions on things you like, in order to learn something, they're terrible at that. It's where specialized communities, discussing only one topic, shine. It used to be forums, then reddit, now lemmy. RSS is also a very good way to get that kick.

Not to sound too pessimistic, but we live in a time where we see Twitter collapsing, despite being one of those "too big to fail" websites. My bet is that none will stand the test of time, the web is ephemeral (and archive.org is an underappreciated wonder of the world). I would rather say that what you really need is a backup routine.

I believe it is something like that. Or it is not mounting the drive correctly and not finding it, or it is something else.

Yes, that's what I had in mind. I already had similar problems with initramfs, because it was responsible to load the drivers needed for mounting the disk where the kernel was, so a bad initramfs caused the boot to fail from the get go failing to mount the partition.

That being said, I've looked at my Pi, and I have no idea what would serve as an initramfs in all those Pi specific files in /boot, if any. If you really want to understand what happened, I guess a possible path would be to find resources on the web explaining in details the Pi boot process, since it's different from usual linux boot process (it's not just the Pi either, I played with other ARM devices, like the stuff from pine64, and they all had their own way to boot).

Sorry to hear that, booting problems suck and are horrible to debug.

The next step I would try would be to boot an other install, like a liveusb or a raspbian, on the same usb port, to completely eliminate a hardware problem if it boots properly.

If it is a software problem, it seems to happen very early in the boot process, so my bet would be a corrupted initramfs/initrd (or what is equivalent on a Pi). No idea how you could debug and fix that on Ubuntu, though (especially on a Pi where /boot is… different). Maybe installing an other Ubuntu on an other disk or stick, then copy the boot files (making a backup of the original files to restore them if it doesn't help, no need to pile up possible causes of trouble). Throwing it here in case other people know better.