pitninja

If you want to learn a little bit more about Lemmy, this docs page on join-lemmy.org is a pretty good primer.

No worries! The Fediverse is a different world with unfamiliar terminology and we’ve all been there.

I think maybe you are confusing instances with communities? Instances are the servers you sign up your account on like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml whereas communities like asklemmy are hosted on an instance. I think there’s universal agreement that growing communities is generally a good thing because it leads to more content and discussion. Growing instances on the other hand isn’t super important (indeed there are going to be plenty of people like myself that are going to stick with a single user personal instance and be perfectly happy). I think the person you’re replying to was confused by the wording of your post.

Believe it or not, we’re living in the most peaceful period of human history thus far. I’d recommend the book The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which talks about how far we’ve come. That said, I see the threat of global warming, lack of fresh water, famine, and energy scarcity becoming threats to the current status quo, though. If we don’t figure some things out as a species, we’re likely in for some turbulent times in the next hundred years.

Personally, I think it’d be nice if you could self-host just the bridge instances and connect them with beeper yourself, so that the part that isn’t e2e encrypted is running on software you can validate and hardware you control.

I 100% agree this would be a great solution. That’s what I thought this page was going to be at first until I kept reading and realized it’s just a config guide for the Matrix Ansible setup. I wish they didn’t say “self host Beeper” on that page at all because self hosting Matrix has absolutely nothing to do with the Beeper service other than their devs built the bridges that they’re showing you how to set up with Matrix.

It’s almost not even fair to say they’re merely contributing back to the upstream bridges. Most of the bridges would not exist at all without the Beeper developers.

It’s also kind of funny that the section of their website you quoted still has language that implies you have to pay for Beeper when it’s been free for months at this point. The primary reason to self host Matrix at this point is for privacy and complete control. And self hosting Matrix is only free if you use existing hardware and I would recommend a cloud instance for most people.

Beeper’s server set up is actually a lot more complicated than just standard Synapse at this point. When they say you can “self host Beeper” that’s really not accurate at this point at all. All of their 3rd party chat bridges are dynamically spun up on a per user basis with hungryserv and those servers operate in parallel with a synapse server for Matrix interoperability all behind a roomserv server. Here’s a presentation that one of their lead developers created regarding their new architecture.

Afaik, that isn’t in effect yet, but will become a major factor next year.

It’s actually pretty sad that there are probably going to be some braindead Hollywood execs who completely missed the point of the movie and unironically pitch something like this.

One problem I have with it is that topics can trend and spread so quickly that they get in front of facts and it can easily become a vehicle for misinformation and witch hunts. I think I’ve decided I’d rather get information a little later from fact checking sources than consume and potentially contribute to spreading false information. It just seems like it’s the perfect vehicle for toxic behavior even if it has legitimate benefits when used correctly.

E2EE only exists up to the bridge, not the whole way to your client

I just want to clarify that most bridges can be set up to have E2EE between the Matrix client and the bridge (regardless of whether the bridge supports encrypted chats on the bridged service because not all do, e.g. Facebook), but it is true that the bridge itself has to decrypt and translate between Matrix and the 3rd party chat service, so as you mentioned trusting who hosts bridges or doing it yourself is really important.

Not trying to pile on advice that’s not helpful in your current situation, but I would really recommend getting an air pump to keep in your vehicle at all times for precisely this situation. Mine has saved my ass several times just over the last few years. And that’s also weird about your locking lug nuts—when I had a vehicle that had those, it came with the socket adapter included in the standard roadside kit.

Yeah, the defederation metaphor falls apart as you described because subscriptions to communities requires two way communication, which isn’t going to happen because beehaw isn’t going to acknowledge subscription requests from instances it’s blocked. Instances blocked by beehaw would probably have to do the same type of thing Threads or Mastodon users would have to do to bring in Lemmy content by manually bringing it in via searching the federation link.

You can run headless or do what the person I was responding to recommended and put it behind an authenticated portal, but that’s not really going to stop other instances and clients from accessing the same resources that op is hoping to limit access to except in the most basic case of people casually browsing op’s Lemmy instance through op’s own lemmy-ui.

Edit, but to be clear, what I was responding to and my response didn’t directly address op’s specific concern (which I kind of misunderstood myself before just now rereading) that outside/guest users shouldn’t be able to search for communities from other instances and I think it’s a fair concern because just searching for a community from another instance brings in posts and could be a vector for spam/abuse.

Wouldn’t this do basically nothing to prevent a 3rd party client from browsing your instance without authentication? I don’t know that there’s much that can really be done about this because you need open APIs for other instances to be able to access the content of your instance in order to make federation possible. That said, it’s an important consideration that anybody running a single person instance should consider. If you run a single person instance, people can learn a lot about you just by seeing which communities are available on your instance. The only way to obfuscate your actual interests is to have a dummy account subscribe to all the top communities on the biggest instances. (Which, honestly, this isn’t a bad strategy to employ anyway if you’re wanting a fresh All feed).

I’m honestly trying to figure out how the hell Meta is going to make money on this venture. The genie is out of the bottle for the Fediverse. If they try to show ads on Threads, people will presumably just get an account on a Mastodon instance and follow who they want from Threads…

Are you installing from scratch, docker, or Ansible? I know in Ansible the default nginx config has been wrong for a week or so, but just got fixed this morning.

I used to pay for Google Play Music and get YouTube premium along with it, but stopped when Google decided to make a shittier app/service and drop it.

I’m a little surprised the drop in activity was that low. What the fuck were people browsing when most of Reddit was blacked out?

I would think this would probably be more useful for people involved with video production or animation than music production, which could likely be accomplished on a MacBook.