leetnewb @ leetnewb @beehaw.org

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I like what Cheogram is doing, between the client and the funding model.

Let's say my interests are self-hosting and tennis, and I make public MUCs for self-hosting and tennis - great, but now what? How are users discovering the community. What is a chatroom without users? The community or traffic need to happen before the chat.

Selfishly, I would like to see beehaw remain on the fediverse. I enjoy the community, the curation, and desire for strong moderation. It is a great window to the broader fediverse link aggregator community. Beehaw's ideals and structure clearly appealed to many Redditors and the like. The concept of federated communities seemed appealing, and beehaw is an important voice in the evolution of the moderation of a federated network.

However, the sacrifice that the admins have had to put into making the platform survive while the software finds its uncertain way through a mountain of growing pains seems unsustainable (just my pov through the last 3 months) - not just on the technical side. There's that saying - when you find yourself in a hole, quit digging. It's hard to see how moving from Lemmy to something more sustainable, if it exists, would be the wrong move.

Painful decisions rarely come with a flashing light that scream "now's the time" - but the loss of your major technical contributors sounds stunningly close.

Edit> fixed a typo or two

Prosody and openfire have easy deploy converse options I've used in the past. My point was more that creating a chatroom doesn't create a community. I am curious to see how Libervia's xmpp/activity pub bridge matures. All of the built-ins plus potential to federate across activitypub makes an interesting technology underpinning for a community.

The lists of public xmpp group chats I've found are all centered around xmpp software - clients and servers. If I ever find myself in the position of launching or running a large community (unlikely), I'd try to offer an xmpp-powered chat. It seems like the decision today is Discord -> Matrix -> IRC - xmpp isn't even in the running. But maybe users have to be a little more vocal.

Tumbleweed is generally the place to be. I think it is easier to target for packagers and is the basis for most of the interesting stuff going on in the distro. The immutable versions (now named Aeon and Kalpa) use something like a stripped down Tumbleweed at the core, with applications mostly containerized. Think tight rolling core that has strong automated tests and rather safe, with applications mostly isolated in Flatpak to prevent library conflicts and such.

Did you check the opensuse community repos? Search here: https://software.opensuse.org/ - lots of stuff that isn't included in the core / official.

Nothing gets solved overnight. I realize that f-droid isn't the be all end all, but hey, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe Aurora is a stop-gap, but maximize your use of f-droid alternatives and support the developers however you can. Be active in alternatives to the big-tech sites, like posting in beehaw communities.

Poaching something I posted on Reddit /r/selfhosted at the beginning of the year:

Back of the envelope math. Assuming 30,000 active users here on /r/selfhosted x $50/yr = $1.5M / 20 -> $75,000 per year. In other words, if /r/selfhosted gave $50 per person per year, "we" could contribute $1.5M to open source projects we use. Some projects probably wouldn't know what to do with resources and/or don't have the infrastructure in place to receive anything, so not a panacea. But for the well organized and developed projects?

It's sort of wild if you think about it. There are probably 10-12 very popular self-hosted applications with a very long tail, but 20-25 probably captures a very healthy cross section of use. Not every project or developer can accept monetary donations or use them effectively. But $75,000/year is median household income in the US.

There are almost certainly many more open source software and app users than there are self-hosted people - I'd imagine the self-host people are a subset. So what if we add open source software and mobile apps to the collective pool we could financially contribute to - again, $50/year/per able user - maybe the number of supportable applications goes up to 50 or 80.

Leading the thought experiment to a logical conclusion - if 80 open source projects received $75,000/year in donation income (at a minor cost to those able to pay and none to the vast majority), enough in most parts of the world to support a person and possibly a family, we would have more amazing, privacy respecting options. It doesn't necessarily solve everything, most people naturally free-ride, and organizing many small contributions at a massive scale isn't a solved problem itself. But, my point is that users collectively have way more power than we realize.

One other thing I forgot to mention - transparency of the lead developer and service provider is overlooked, imo, as a criteria for picking a secure messaging client. That background information on jami wasn't terribly clear to me when I looked a couple of years ago; it does seem better now.

It is a nice p2p, e2ee messaging app/service that doesn't use phone numbers, e-mail or other domain addresses as an identifier. I think it used to be GNU Ring, and can be used as a SIP client.

If it's mostly about motion detection and false positives, it's hard to avoid the object detection stuff if you aren't doing that already. I stopped using Blue Iris before it started integrating object detection and I can't speak to it at all. I liked the setup I had with ZoneMinder, Zoneminder Event Server, and the associated machine learning hooks, but the developer behind the event server and ML stuff left and it isn't particularly well integrated. I like how quickly and comprehensively Viseron (https://github.com/roflcoopter/viseron) has progressed. Very sleek software, engaged developer, uses YOLOv7, and even supports an openvino backend. Well worth a look.

Blue Iris is terrific software. I'm curious though - what tended to go wrong with the alternatives?

I would note that ChromeOS is mainstream with normal users and it is effectively a well curated, highly-opinionated Linux distribution. Distros like opensuse Aeon and Kalpa, and Fedora Silverblue, are going from well established platforms into the highly curated, highly-opinionated direction as well. Limited set of options that work well out of the box not prone to breaking, and explicitly not for tinkerers. I tend to think that if Linux is ever going to reach mainstream users (outside of ChromeOS), it will be through these bulletproof, opinionated distros that put bubble wrap around the user.

I have a server at home, so this might not apply to you. But I used this software (https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx) to proxy the rtsp streams from cameras. It makes the streams available over multiple formats, so I stick the webrtc stream from the security cameras into a little, super simple html page I threw together. Bookmarked, on my android home screen, and I'm one click from seeing all of my cameras streaming while I'm on LAN.

Then I wrote a simple bash script to call ffmpeg to take a snapshot from each rtsp stream every x interval. I rewrote the landing page to show a table of those snapshots and each image is a hyperlink to the direct webrtc link to that camera's stream. And the html page refreshes itself every x seconds.

I'm happy with this approach so far. The streams are now easily available on Android, Windows, Linux devices, no app beyond a web browser required.

What I plan to do next:

1. Make the web server and proxied streams available over my mesh VPN so that the landing page and cameras are available from outside the LAN.
2. Start throwing images at doods (https://github.com/snowzach/doods2) to identify objects, and pass the detection and image to a messenger like xmpp or matrix or telegram or even an irc channel to push an alert to me.

I think a Reddit-styled UI is ok for community forming. I found many nice, niche communities on Reddit. It takes time for those communities to really emerge, though. And they might not form on Beehaw.

opensuse kalpa - the KDE version of its immutable desktop. Pretty neat combination of rolling core and applications separated out primarily into flatpak and other containers.

Headline sort of buries the lede of how important those two were to building lxd and supporting the container ecosystem on linux. Sad to see. I have been using lxd on my home network and vps instances for years. Disliked when the project moved to snap-only distribution, but at least other projects picked up native packaging. And it doesn't seem like lxd is going away, which is nice. But Canonical explicit seizure of control withers confidence I had in the long-term viability of the software for my own use.

Is Reddit easy to explore for new places? Maybe it got better in the new UI, but search was historically bad and discovering relevant subs was pretty difficult. I sort of think people dipping their toes in fediverse waters forget how rough around the edges Reddit was/is. I agree that lemmy and its ilk have a lot of room to improve on usability, but the bar doesn't seem exceptionally high.

I like miniflux as well. Probably worth noting that the dev offers paid hosting.

I think prior posts cover things pretty well, but I wanted to add a couple of ideas/thoughts:

1. Single pot meals can be very convenient and save prep and cleaning space. The instant pot is great because it can sauté, steam, slow cook, pressure cook.
2. Sheet pan meals. Foil over the pan, maybe a bowl for mixing - easy, single pan, space efficient, minimal clean up.

For grocery, KitchenOwl. And you can add custom items. Doesn't really work as a todo list though.