I’m just this guy, you know?
I ran an ejabberd node on an old x86 for years for family and some close friends. Works great.
Then I got tired of maintaining devices after long days at work doing IT things. We talked. Signal is easier. We moved over to that, in the end.
A Pi3 1GB will easily scale to 4 people.and beyond. XMPP is really lightweight for text and images. Consider a Pi4 for voice or video though.
I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.
Most of you are alright.
I think the i5 is Ivy Bridge, but I couldn’t tell you what gen that is. My main use of HA aside from the automation is Frigate, which apparently needs the hardware AVX flags. This chip supports AVX512, where my older AMD did not, so that’s why I went with it. Its an i5-3470T, if that helps.
For an older SFF unit, it’s a beast for HA.
I’ve got HA with Frigate + USB Coral w/4 cams, FlightRadar24 receiver/feeder, ESPHome, NodeRed, InfluxDB, Mosquitto, and Zwave-JS on a refurbished Lenovo ThinkCenter M92p Tiny, rigged with an i5 3.6GHz, 8GB RAM and 500GB spindle drive. It’s almost overkill.
Frigate monitors 2 RTSP and 2 MJPEG cams (sometimes up to 3 RTSP and 5 MJPEG, depending of if I’m away for the weekend) with hardware video conversion. FR24 monitors a USB SDR dongle tracking several hundred aircraft per hour. I live under one.of the main approaches to a major US hub.
Processor sits at 10% or less most of the time, and really only spikes when I compile new binaries for the ESP32 widgets I have around the house. It uses virtually none of the available disk. It’s an awesome platform for HA for the price.
As a former user of old.reddit.com and RES, I’ve found the Alexandrite front end (a.Lemmy.world) to be very comfortable. Its not feature-for-feature equivalent to RES, but a lot of the ergonomics are there.
Now, if we could just figure out multilemmies…
Some might say that’s a feature, not a bug. If you’re not willing to stand by your words, then who are you, really?
But fine, let’s talk:
There’s Cloudflare, for what they’re worth on privacy and anonymity.
There’s VPS, as you say, but they are responsive to subpoenas.
There are sketchy “data haven” counties whose sketchy economy you’re fueling with your rent. (* Cough * .ml * cough *)
Chose, but chose wisely.
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Neither more nor less optimistic than the pre-Facebook days of Usenet/Alternet, and E-mail.
Federation works, if you can keep it.
Were you not amused by Poop and Beans??
Without engaging the questions directly (in part because I’ve been discussing this for a fair part of my evening already), thank you for articulating the major discussion points succinctly for folks to engage.
Myself, I’m receptive to good-faith corporate participation in the fediverse, from the standpoint to engagement and dialogue. I’m less enthusiastic about corporate participation in ActivityPub governance because, well… *cough, Redhat*. W3C is a good curator of protocols though, and I hope they are able to resist the worst tendencies of our corporate overlords.
edit to add because “post” is too close to “preview:” I’ve come around to not being keen on the “defederate first” plan of attack. I think the extra participation will be beneficial before it becomes detrimental. Moderation is a platform problem here, and maybe that is where the defederation hammer falls. I dunno. I’m gratified to see ActivifyPub be acknowledged as more than some toy protocol. I guess we’ll see what comes of it.
Well stated! I agree wirh you on most of it The only point I want to make is:
the size of the userbase and the fact it meant you had access to literally any type of person at your fingertips
The niche communities themselves tended to be small and focused, which is what I say improved the quality of the content. Contrast with the large, default sub’s when I think we both agree failed to add value. I say that communities happened to accrete there was because it was low effort and low friction. Now, not so much. It was a naked grab for cash by usurping the uncompensated efforts of a few dedicated people. The true believers moved on.
As a market place of ideas, reddit was a good mega mall. The anchors sucked but the boutiques were cool. Now it’s just a great big building full of disregarded storefronts after the holiday sales have ended.
having the largest userbase, and therefore the most and best content
This is a non sequiter argument. It does not necessarily follow that good content comes from a large userbase. In fact, both of those things are rarely true at the same time. points vaguely at social media
I’m not saying Meta isn’t going to try to run the EEE playbook at some point. Its likely they will, but we are all already skeptical about it. More likely, the play now is to capitalize on the discontent and missteps over at Twitter, and capture the folks over there who are leaving¹. Mastodon and ActivityPub are a functional, free and open source implementation they can use to bootstrap a micro blogging and DM service that supports the familiar hashtag semantics. If they even decide to federate with us, it’s probably just an afterthought. We’re small, and already quite hostile.
Now… Is there value in having a gateway to that content? That’s arguable. I find the kind of stuff posted on Insta to be vapid enough or sufficiently commercial that I feel no need to interact with it. I probably still wouldn’t interact with it even if it happens to show up here. Same for the herpaderp-maga dingbats and their chicanery wandering into discussion threads. Down vote, block, move on. For certain, I would never get back into bed with Meta because-- c’mon-- they’re Meta, and they’re a known quantity. Same as if Google, Amazon, Apple, Reddit (and other failed social media giants) signed on. If their content is available here and of high enough quality to interact with then I’ll interact with it from here or I won’t interface at all. But no, I won’t go into your walled garden to play with your toys. “My terms take em or leave em,” and I think a lot of us feel the same way, deep down.
I do, however, think corporate engagement here IS valuable. In the same way that social media teams at your favorite retail brands engage on the Big Socials, I would also welcome their engagement here as well because its another avenue to interact with the brand as a potential, current or disgruntled customer. There’s no reason the media teams at Nabisco or Target couldn’t set up their own instance and interact with users on other instances. If they play along with us in flgood faith, it works. If they start being evil corporations they get defedersted and lose engagement.
ActivityPub isn’t going anywhere. It’s a standard and a suite of software implementations that nobody can take away. The early adopters are here the community is vibrant llterally in spite of Big Social and now the entrepreneurs are following.
Anyway, I think you’re right to be wary of this move, and about the prospects of the EEE playbook being deployed here as well. I also think we can afford to be a little more sanguine about it for the moment because Meta’s enemy is making a mistake, and we happen to be the arms dealer this week.
Make popcorn and watch the theater. I just read Twitter is suing Meta already, so you know this is gonna be fun!
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¹ Conspiracy theory (I just can’t help myself!): On today’s episode of Billionare Behaving Badly, Zuck underwrites a portion of Musk’s Twitterbuyout. Musk trashes the brand and liquidates the stock. Tesla buys the infrastructure and Meta buys the user base and their analytics
Email is based on Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), defined by the IETF under an RFC or many.
The Fediverse is based on ActivityPub, out of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the same folks who brought us HTML and HTML/2
They are wholly different.
(edit: typos)
It’s like email: after you send it off your own MTA, you have no control over what happens to the copy at the far end, or any other MTAs it happens to traverse.
ActivityPub does distribute updates to posts, including delete intents, but instances are not bound to honor it. Same as how recalling an email isn’t guaranteed to work.
Disturbing? I’d say more that it’s sobering. I think it should prompt people to think more carefully about their accountability for what and how they post. I also may come to change this opinion over time.
News to me! Good to know, though.
I think realtime media routed through the node back when I was running one, but that was quite a while ago now. It wasn’t bad for my crew, but load scales exponentially in those sort of applications as you take on endpoints.