The US is not “discovering” the corruption, the US is creating the corruption.

Ukraine meanwhile is caught between two (self-styled and failing) superpowers through little to no fault of their own, and that is obviously not a great place to be.

Looks really nice and seems like it should be a great foundation for future development. Personally I can’t lose Nextcloud until there are sufficiently featureful and reliable clients for Linux, Windows, Android that synchronize a local copy and help manage the inevitable file deconfliction (Nextcloud Desktop only barely qualifies at this, but it does technically qualify and that represents the minimum viable product for me). I’m not sure a WebDav client alone is enough to satisfy this criteria, but I am not going to pretend I am actually familiar with any WebDav clients so maybe they already exist.

I wonder if some kind of pledge system would work. Similar to Patreon, but instead of paying immediately or paying monthly, you simply make a pledge that if such-and-such creator starts uploading content to such-and-such free platform, then your pledge for $x amount goes through (either monthly or one-time). There’s no actual money changing hands or any actual commitment to do so, until and unless the creator in question comes onboard. Sort of like a bug bounty, multiple people could make individual pledges to build up a pot of money, that the creator could then cash in. I can see some avenues for potential abuse, and of course people can just cancel once “mission accomplished”, and you’ve got to expect some level of that happening but assuming creators and their community have a good and supportive relationship and really are trying to support each other I don’t really see that being too much of an actual concern.

We need something that helps make the case to creators that there is a real market for this, that there is a path to being compensated for their work, and that those parts of their community that are interested in this will still help support them. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be directly competitive with Youtube, at this point, we’re not going to collect millions of dollars. But it shows that there is potential money being left on the table, and even if it’s only a little bit of money, it’s not much work for a little bit of extra money, and the creator will ultimately have to decide whether that work is worth the extra money.

Right now, there’s no guarantee at all, and in fact there usually is no financial benefit. They’re just guessing whether there might be some money down the road for them on alternative platforms, and that’s a pretty tough sell for anybody, nevermind somebody making millions already.

You’re on the right track. Like everything else in self-hosting you will learn and develop new strategies and scale things up to an appropriate level as you go and as your homelab grows. I think the key is to start with something immediately achievable, and iterate fast, aiming for continuous improvement.

My first idea was much like yours, very traditional documentation, with words, in a document. I quickly found the same thing you did, it’s half-baked and insufficient. There’s simply no way to make make it match the actual state of the system perfectly and it is simply inadequate to use English alone to explain what I did because that ends up being too vague to be useful in a technical sense.

My next realization was that in most cases what I really wanted was to be able to know every single command I had ever run, basically without exception. So I started documenting that instead of focusing on the wording and the explanations. Then I started to feel like I wasn’t capturing every command reliably because I would get distracted trying to figure out a problem and forget to, and it was duplication of effort to copy and paste commands from the console to the document or vice versa. That turned into the idea of collecting bunches of commands together into a script, that I could potentially just run, which would at least reduce the risk of gaps and missing steps. Then I could put the commands I wanted to run right into the script, run the script, and then save it for posterity, knowing I’d accurately captured both the commands I ran and the changes I made to get it working by keeping it in version control.

But upon attempting to do so, I found that just a bunch of long lists of commands on their own isn’t terribly useful so I started to group all the lists up, attempting to find commonalities by things like server or service, and then starting organize them better into scripts for different roles and intents that I could apply to any server or service, and over time this started to develop into quite a library of scripts. As I was doing this organizing I realized that as long as I made sure the script was functionally idempotent (doesn’t change behaviors or duplicate work when run repeatedly, it’s an important concept) I can guarantee that all my commands are properly documented and also that they have all been run – and if they haven’t, or I’m not sure, I can just run the script again as it’s supposed to always be safe to re-run no matter what state the system is in. So I started moving more and more to this strategy, until I realized that if I just organized this well enough, and made the scripts run automatically when they are changed or updated, I could not only improve my guarantees of having all these commands reliably run, but also quickly run them on many different servers and services all at once without even having to think about it.

There are some downsides of course, this leaves the potential of bugs in the scripts that make it not idempotent or not safe to re-run, and the only thing I can do is try to make sure they don’t happen, and if they do, identify and fix these bugs when they happen. The next step is probably to have some kind of testing process and environment (preferably automated) but now I’m really getting into the weeds. But at least I don’t really have any concerns that my system is undocumented anymore. I can quickly reference almost anything it’s doing or how it’s set up. That said, one other risk is that the system of scripts and automation becomes so complex that they start being too complex to quickly untangle, and at that point I’ll need better documentation for them. And ultimately you get into a circle of how do you validate the things your scripts are doing are actually working and doing what you expect them to do and that nothing is being missed, and usually you run back into the same ideas that doomed your documentation from the start, consistency and accuracy.

It also opens an attack vector, where somebody gaining access to these scripts not only gains all the most detailed knowledge of how your system is configured but also the potential to inject commands into those scripts and run them anywhere, so you have to make sure to treat these scripts and systems like the crown jewels they are. If they are compromised, you are in serious trouble.

By now I have of course realized (and you all probably have too) that I have independently re-invented infrastructure-as-code. There are tools and systems (ansible and terraform come to mind) to help you do this, and at some point I may decide to take advantage of them but personally I’m not there yet. Maybe soon. If you want to skip the intermediate steps I did, you might even be able to skip directly to that approach. But personally I think there is value in the process, it helps defining your needs and building your understanding that there really isn’t anything magical going on behind the scenes and that may help prevent these tools from turning into a black box which isn’t actually going to help you understand your system.

Do I have a perfect system? Of course not. In a lot of ways it’s probably horrific and I’m sure there are more experienced professionals out there cringing or perhaps already furiously warming up their keyboards. But I learned a lot, understand a lot more than I did when I started, and you can too. Maybe you’ll follow the same path I did, maybe you won’t. But you’ll get there.

Canada’s response: “Ha, we’ll see about that. Such an estimate suggests you have no idea how dysfunctional and inept our government really is. It will take us at least until 2050 to even finalize our procurement plan. At least. 3 years, you guys are adorable.”

Xi understands that Trump is a stupid man and they think they can manipulate him into doing something stupid to advance their interests, which, honestly, they probably can, unless he just does something so stupid that it backfires. Everything’s a gamble with Trump.

Nextcloud is just really slow. It is what it is, I don’t use it for any things that are huge, numerous, or need speed. For that I use SyncThing or something even more specialized depending on what exactly I’m trying to do.

Nextcloud is just my easy and convenient little dropbox, and I treat it like it’s an oldschool free dropbox with limited space that’s going to nag me to upgrade if I put too much stuff in it. It won’t nag me to upgrade, but it will get slow. So I just don’t stress it out. So I only use it to store little convenience things that I want easy access to on all my machines without any fuss. For documents and “home directory” and syncing my calendars and stuff like that it’s great and serves the purpose.

I haven’t used Seafile. Features sound good, minus the AI buzzword soup, but it looks a little too corporate-enterprisey for me, with minimal commitment to open source and no actual link to anything open source on their website, I don’t doubt that it exists, somewhere, but that raises red flags for potential future (if not in-progress) enshittification to me. After eventually finding their github repo (with no help from them) I finally found a link to build instructions and… it’s a broken link. They don’t seem to actually be looking for contributions or they’re just going through the motions. Open source “community” is clearly not the target audience for their “community edition”, not really.

I’ll stick to SyncThing.

According to the protocol they share (ActivityPub) communities and hashtags are essentially the same thing, they’re a grouping containing many posts. Typing out a hashtag is how you tell Mastodon to add your post to that “hashtag group” (and you can add your post to multiple hashtags). In Lemmy, the community you post in IS the group (and you can cross-post it to multiple communities). The result is the same. They’re the same thing, just different ways of connecting your posts into them, and displayed in very different ways depending on which part of the Fediverse you’re using.

Sounds like you’re doing fine to me. The stakes are indeed higher, but that is because what you’re doing is important.

As the Bene Gesserit teaches: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear.

Make your best effort at security and backups, use your fears to inform a sober assessment of the risks and pitfalls, and ask for help when you need to, but don’t let it stop you from accomplishing what you want to. The self-hosting must flow.

Hey don’t make fun of him too much, he might have to buy another yacht to make himself feel better.

And most importantly what happens when the competition between many extra doordashers drives down pay (the mechanism for which is already built in to the way gig work pays by the gig, fewer of which will be split between more drivers) means even the people working for doordash can no longer afford lunch?

This is not sustainable in the slightest. We are using bubbles to cushion our falls from other bubbles as they pop. It’s bubbles all the way down. We’re in a recession, maybe a depression, hard to say because there are so many bubbles we haven’t even reached the ground yet.

The problem is that society has been much too polite with these shitgoblins. I think we should end polite society entirely and start being really thoroughly impolite.

So far, I think you’re safe!

Will this become Lemmy’s “test post please ignore”? I guess we’ll see.

We should skip the whole world war step and go straight to Nuremburg 2.0, now improved with faster sentencing and harsher sentences for fascists and collaborators.

They have declared war on humanity. They will replace us with AI and rocket fuel as soon as they are able to.

The only reason NATO would be involved in a limited nuclear war is if little “multipolar man” decides to start one, in which case we’ll certainly fucking end it for him. That’s how it will be limited.

and seize the means of production, comrades.

User’s post history offers some clues that it may not be worth engaging with them.

Me too. At least with Temu and Wish I know the majority of my money is going directly to some crook in China and not to Bezos. Cut out the extra middleman. Same low quality of goods, direct from the drop-shipper lying about them or perhaps even the factory counterfeiting them. It’s a substantial improvement in supply chain honesty and legitimacy, you’re left with no illusions about the products and all the reviews are fake, so it’s deeply refreshing to not have to try to figure any of it out. It’s always 100% consistent. You know exactly what to expect, with no worry you’re accidentally going to overpay for something you think is genuine and receive a box full of rocks that’s obviously been opened, stolen and returned, nah not on these sites. You’ll get exactly what’s pictured (not to scale necessarily, though). Way more reliable than Amazon.