Snot Flickerman

Where do all the lovely self-hosters here turn when they want to chat networking or server hardware?

I know this might seem like a strange answer, but… IRC channels on private torrent trackers. Many of the people on these sites actively have large and complex setups running. There often is a lot of talk about hardware for servers and networking in those IRC channels. Or at least there is on the trackers I am on.

I know that’s not necessarily a helpful answer to anyone not already in the private torrent tracker community, since its often quite a task to get involved if you aren’t already. However, it’s one that I have had great success with, personally. To anyone who already is on a private torrent tracker, if you haven’t checked out the IRC, give it a shot and see.

Oh and don’t forget you can self-host The Lounge for a self-hosted web-based IRC client.

Njalla

Security through obscurity isn’t security.

There goes my excuse for not giving up and just paying for Unraid.

I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. Musk never wanted to do anything about the bots, he just wanted to make sure they were parroting his chosen propaganda. He really should lose his shirt over the fact that he purposefully devalued Twitter before purchase by screaming about the bot problem he never intended to fix, but claimed he did.

Probably more likely that they are against it as long as they can be targeted. They want to wait until they are in charge politically and can control it, and then they’ll be behind it so they can target their perceived enemies.

Pretty much how it went here in the USA. All the shit the right wing used to scream and rail against is everything they’re instituting now that they feel relatively sure they won’t have to let go of the power in the future. Once they get their tentacles in, they’ll turn on a dime and support it.

This is fucking amazing. I’m gonna go out and get a weed vape right now! I mean, for hosting a website on, yeah, that’s why, sure, let’s go with that.

Only mildly sarcastic, but even if you’re trying to be careful, you reveal a lot about yourself by making comments at all or interacting with a community at all. Your interests, your writing style, your browser footprint, etc. etc. It’s very difficult to not be truly unique if someone out there is purposefully tracking you as an individual. Depending on where the instance is hosted, they may be required to keep server logs and may further be required to divulge those to police for lawful investigations. “Lawful” obviously can vary widely in interpretation, depending on local corruption levels. I know that if I was of interest in an investigation it would not be hard at all to link me to my real identity, and I just sort of live with that.

thirst content: content that is very sexual in nature without necessarily becoming straight up nudity or pornography, something platforms like Instagram or Twitch are famous for. For young people being unnecessarily horny is often referred to as being “thirsty.” As in “thirsting” after someone you find attractive.

image browsing apps: Instagram could be described as an “image browsing app,” and as such this user is looking for apps that mirror Instagram/Twitter/Pinterest content without actually having to use those services.

https://imginn.com/ - for content from Instagram. Won’t let you view private accounts obviously, but current for non-private accounts.

https://xcancel.com/ - (a Nitter instance) for content from Twitter. Same deal, can’t view private accounts, but anything else goes.

https://coomer.st/ - for OnlyFans/Fansly content.

https://kemono.cr/ - for Patreon/Pixiv/Discord/etc content.

https://github.com/Emy69/CoomerDL - bulk downloader for Coomer/Kemono and others

Not sure for Pinterest.

Anyway, just because they’re “private” in the sense that you’re not using any of the major corporations servers, they’re not private in the sense that the admins of these sites won’t see your IP. Still consider using a VPN while using these for more actual privacy.

The backend security bug effectively exposed an army of internet-connected robots that, in the wrong hands, could have turned into surveillance tools, all without their owners ever knowing.

Suprise, if it has cameras, microphones, gps, data mapping capabilities and speaks to a server outside of your home it is by definition is a surveillance tool.

All of this has always been predicated on the idea that the surveillance will never be used against you somehow. I don’t know why anyone ever bought into that.

loose /= lose

Sorry this one had bothered me for years now and it just seems to get worse over time.

“I let the dogs loose from their enclosure.”

“Of course I would lose my phone when I don’t have Google’s Find My Phone anymore.”

/grammar nazi

Session at least has a foundation behind it as well to try to seek financial support and drive development, and I’ll give it that.

However, personal opinion incoming, I think another underappreciated aspect of the “privacy” conversation isn’t just routing but also hardware ownership. We can rely on other people’s routing services all we want, but in the end, that’s still other people’s property we have to traverse to make connections. Especially for groups that function within a small community, I think locally hosted intranets are really important. Sure, some metadata leakage may happen, but most of the metadata leakage that happens (if I recall correctly) is to the service host/admin. So if you’re in a small, local, tight-knit community you may not be worried about your best friend who is a technical wizard knowing small bits of metadata for your localized interpersonal communications. Especially if you use the Matrix protocol but decline to federate and keep it an “internal” tool for your group/organization. I think “ownership of the means of communication” may be the 21st century equivalent of Marx’s “ownership of the means of production” in terms of importance to the proletariat. If we continue to just use large organizations network pipes to communicate, there are still unfortunately ways to target and block our traffic, even if our privacy is otherwise secured.

Thought it was pretty clear. Matrix sucks.

LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL

I mean I wouldn’t say the original message was clear at all that you as an individual have had bad experiences. There are also people who may have things to say from a development standpoint beyond just “I have personally had bad experiences with it.” So, sorry you had bad experiences, but to be perfectly clear “LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL” doesn’t actually tell anyone anything at all. Thanks, however, for the clarification. I haven’t had issues like that with Matrix in a long time now, but I’ve been using it off-and-on since 2018-ish.

LOOOOOLOLOLOLOL

Compelling argument.

That’s really not something to be proud of.

I suppose XMPP’s 27 years of development is embarrassing as well?

Or are you just shitposting without any concrete arguments for what you’re saying? I won’t argue well thought out arguments, but this shit is just childish. You can do better, artyom.

Personal opinion, Discord was already enshittifying before they did an IPO, like at least 6 years ago or more. The IPO just gave them an excuse to speed up the process.

Exactly this, that’s a client quirk, probably Element in this case.

Exactly, this isn’t even a new problem… it just keeps happening.

As someone who has been advocating for the use of the federated Matrix protocol for a long, long time now, the proliferation of new, competing options actually is frustrating to me. Technically Matrix is actually already fleshed out very well, has several different clients, and even has Thunderbird support so if you’re already using Thunderbird you don’t even need a separate client.

The beginnings of Matrix go back as far as 2014 so it honest has at this point 12 years of development behind it. I know Matrix has it’s issues, but it’s by far the most secure combined with being able to communicate with large groups of people via federation. There’s definitely slightly more secure options, because they lack federation (and thus don’t leak metadata), but I personally am ambivalent about them because some of them have a kind of crypto-bro feel to the companies behind them and I’m skeptical they won’t go down a path similar to Discord while Matrix on the other hand has been slowly but surely leveraging itself into a position of secure government communications all over Europe. So, to me, Matrix already has a game plan for staying relevant and staying solvent, while things like SimpleX or Stoat I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the enshittification to begin

Open source bona-fides are great and all, but for a lot of these messengers, I absolutely think not enough discussion is made regarding their financial plans to stay afloat whereas the reality is that while Matrix doesn’t exactly have money coming out their ears, they have a slow, steady gameplan that is working out so far.

The whole reason everyone moved to Discord was because it was a centralized place and since Discord needed to pay for it’s servers, it had to find a way to finance that, and enshittification naturally happened. I think it would be foolish to pretend that can’t happen again with several of the current alternatives.