👌 Debian is a really good choice from my perspective. I've been using it for the last decade or so. Glad the community could be of some help. And you found some good use for that old machine.
And don't try using a webbrowser with modern websites on that thing. I mean how much RAM does that Vaio have?
(You can also try more modern distros. Just don't install the latest desktop environment and expect it tr run smoothly. LXQT or LXDE, XFCE or some slim desktop might be better suited for something old.)
I use a RAID for the data but the backups go to simple single disks. My reasoning is, I already have a RAID and redundancy. And I don't have an unlimited budged. It'd already need 2 disks to fail to wreck the RAID and then also the backup has to fail with that solution. That's probably a fire or ransomware or a deliberate effort. Adding one more disk of redundancy would probably not change much. But It'd cost and add complexity.
Also this way I don't need to care about buying disks of a certain size and go through painful migration processes more than necessary. I can re-use the drives with mismatched sizes and swap them in to the backup pool.
I mean the great thing about this architecture is, we don't need to abandon ship. I'm deliberately waiting for something that will be compatible with it. And it'll be the same community. Just a different software with a few much needed things on top.
And I'm kind of passionate about it in the first place, because I like this place. And we have to pay attention not to fall out with each other about details. Sometimes it's just not easy.
Sure. I personally am waiting for PieFed to come along. They seem to know what's important to address and also have some good ideas how to tackle it.
I'm 100% ready to support that and focus my engagement there. I'm pretty sure just changing the software codebase isn't changing too much... But I'd like some more independence from the few people currently doing everything.
And that's also what I've done. I haven't recommended Lemmy to friends and family, yet. And I've refrained from running my own instance, too. Despite having the server ready for that.
Well, they're a bit over the top and oversimplifying things in my opinion. But you're also not contributing anything of value. You could instead add your perspective if it's different. I mean I'd probably read it and it'd get us ...anywhere?...
Thanks. I'll delve down a bit more into the world of Drupal and Wordpress plugins. Maybe I can piece something together with that. It's just very annoying to always navigate around all these paid plugins that come with a barely usable open variant...
Hehe. I think my needs are a bit more complicated than that. I could probably put together a Perl script for CGI to collect some signatures 😆 But I'm still missing 85% of the total things I need. I'm glad we have easy deployment methods nowadays. I mean I've started like that. Fighting with CGI and badly organized PHP scripts. And they've all gotten a headache to maintain at some point. But nowadays I can set up an environment with python, flask and a database in about the same time. It's just that that web development isn't fun (to me) anymore. You always need 3 frameworks to do a single task, learn how to use them and maintain the requirements, and spend quite some time implementing javascript popups if an input got accepted, do mandatory email double-opt-in techniques and do lots of theming and responsive design stuff... I'm sorry, I got a bit off track here. But I'd really like to avoid this.
It is a bit more nuanced than that. There are normal people there, too. It's been one of the largest instances when the Reddit exodus happened. Some of the users chose the largest and the 'official' instance. And some of them are still there.
But lemmy.ml is operated by the same people who also run lemmygrad, some moderators seem to be the same. And unfortunately the whole Lemmy software platform is developed by "those" people.
I don't mind leaning a good amount to the left. I think a few socialist values would advance society and economy. Especially in places like the USA. And I've been called a communist for that. But being a tankie is beyond my comprehension. Why would anyone like Putin, defend the CCP and what they do to people. And I'm not overly bothered with the left vs right. It's the constant yelling, being super argumentative, doing brigading and spreading misinformation.
I think things are changing. I'm paying attention now to the usernames in the comments. And lemmy.ml isn't the dominating place anymore. Most of the usernames I see come from a broad range of instances. And that's a good thing. It's still a home to some big communities which needs to change, too. And I'm also waiting for a new software to come along, written by different people with a different motivation and agenda. In my opinion that's one of the next steps to emancipate ourselves. I mean if you don't like lemmy.ml you probably don't like the people making the decisions there. Which unfortunately are the same people who also write all of the Lemmy software. And their software development decisions reflect the same attitude. But also that's going to change. A few people are working on good alternatives which strive to listen to the community, invite people to participate and also finally implement proper moderation tools and a few other tweaks to foster good behaviour.
I like Lemmy. But this platform had a hard time from the start. And it's still struggling. Mixing technological difficulties and innate problems of growing a community with drama, bad decisions, waywardness and friction within the community on many different levels is just stupid and unnecessary. But I'm still waiting for progress and a bright future. I think Federation is one of the best approaches with some potential to make that happen.
I think the solid technological basis is what I'm a bit more concerned as of now. But apart from that I agree that it is us, the community who sets the tone and we decide who we want to listen to, nice people or people with behaviour disorders and an attitude. And it's a vicious circle. At some point a platform has an image and is bound to tip and attract more like-minded people and less normal ones. And the dynamics are there and we need to actively fight for a nice place.
Do you mean https://civicspacelabs.org ? That seems to not be actively developed for a long time alreadt. And sadly I also couldn't find any successor. It's been a Drupal plugin, right? Drupal also lists "Open Social" but I'm not sure about that. Doesn't properly match my needs and their website smells like open-core software and they'd rather sell me something...
Thx. I found the most important communities to me. I'm glad most of them have an alternative and those are going strong. I can live with losing a few minor ones.
Concerning "blocking them": I'm not sure. I was a strong opponent to the whole defederation and "safe-space" thing last year. Where especially beehaw.org decided to do their own thing and rigorously defederate, often preemptively and without talking to people. I think such behaviour splits the community and disconnects people. I really don't like all the drama, falling out with each other and particularism. And I think all the feud is a sure way to kill the platform before it even took off with the general public... Honestly, I'm slowly changing my mind. Give me some more time.
Thank you. I've already worked through the awesome-selfhosted list and also did some googling with terms like "citizen", "initiative", "action group", "grassroots movement", "collaboration", "campaign", "petition"... And I found several projects for sharing food or organizing clubs or handling user-feedback, a few discontinued or very specialized solutions. But nothing that really suites this use-case. And if I put in "change.org" into alternativeto.net, it doesn't show any open source alternatives. ☹️
I'm pretty sure I can piece something together with a Wiki, and some software to handle form submissions and polls, customize that for signatures, maybe also a Nextcloud. And Fider.io looks nice. I could install all of that, link inbetween those and strap an SSO on top. But that's a proper amount of effort to get all of that customized and then also doing the SSO and coming up with an idea how to make the users like to sign up, choose a password etc...
At this point I'm still waiting for some easier / more integrated recommendations. But thanks for the idea with the marketing, I'll do some more research with that in mind.
Thanks for the clarification, I think you should have made that a bit more clear in the comment.
But I agree. We shouldn't only not listen to nazis and other bad people, but actively not invite them to our home in the first place. In my opinion that means giving them the boot and then defederating once they accumulate on instance dedicated to their cause.
Keep in mind that we like Lemmy for being a federated platform.
I don't think there is enough awareness at this point. And the way we do it here, it has to come from the community. The people and mods have to become aware and make a decision to move their participation and the communities to another instance. I don't see a way around that. This will take some time, patience and effort.
I've started to do my part and unsubscribed from !Fediverse@lemmy.ml I'm now going through my list of subscriptions and find alternatives to other communities, so I don't contribute to the lemmy.ml communities being the larges ones any more.
[Edit: Wow. I've replaced 32 communities, some with substantially better alternatives, and I've found a few nice additional ones in the process. I still need recommendations for alternatives to: "Peertube", "Libre Culture", "Crawling the IndieWeb", "datahoarder", "Linux Phones", "postmarketOS", "osu!". I'm glad I did this. I think this is the way to make a change as a simple user. And now I'm not part of the problem anymore. It took me the better part of an hour, though.]
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