Enjoy your Friday
ericjmorey
joined 1 year ago
Nice article.
why bother? Why I self host
Most of this article is not purely about that question, but I dislike clickbait, so I’ll actually answer the question from the title: Two reasons.
First of all, I like to be independent - or at least, as much as I can. Same reason we have backup power, why I know how to bake bread, preserve food, and generally LARP as a grandmother desperate to feed her 12 grandchildren until they are no longer capable of self propelled movement. It makes me reasonably independent of whatever evil scheme your local $MEGA_CORP is up to these days (hint: it’s probably a subscription).
It’s basically the Linux and Firefox argument - competition is good, and freedom is too.
If that’s too abstract for you, and what this article is really about, is the fact that it teaches you a lot and that is a truth I hold to be self-evident: Learning things is good & useful.
Turns out, forcing yourself to either do something you don’t do every day, or to get better at something you do occasionally, or to simply learn something that sounds fun makes you better at it. Wild concept, I know.
Contents
Introduction
My Services
Why I self host
Reasoning about complex systems
Things that broke in the last 6 months
Things I learned (or recalled) in the last 6 months
- You can self host VS Code
- UPS batteries die silently and quicker than you think
- Redundant DNS is good DNS
- Raspberry PIs run ARN, Proxmox does not
- zfs + Proxmox eat memmory and will OOM kill your VMS
- The mystery of random crashes (Is it hardware? It’s always hardware.)
- SNMP(v3) is still cool
- Don’t trust your VPS vendor
- Gotta go fast
- CIFS is still not fast
- Blob storage, blob fish, and file systems: It’s all “meh”
- CrowdSec
Conclusion
What self-hosted services did you set up passkeys on? How did setting it up go?
Is there a passkey setup that's easy to self host? I think passkeys with a backup would be best.
The two rooms linked above are mirrored, so you can use either XMPP or Matrix, from any client you prefer, on pretty much any platform under the sun!
There's no XMPP link in the README above the quoted statement.
Awesome! Best of luck to the new team!
Mp3 is a proprietary format on copyright. Some idiot ceo can came and change the rules, let’s add an ads mandatory for each decoder.
This is not true. Copyright is not relevant to an encoding standard. The standard has been unchanged for 26 years and all legal claims of patent rights related to implimentations of the standard have expired before May 2017.
@[email protected] you should probably know about this as well.
I'm very confused about what your requirements are based on reading your post and some of your responses to comments, but I'm going to suggest that you look into Quarto
You can use this as an opportunity to have a conversation about what it is about those movies that she likes. This could open up to a larger conversation where you can connect and grow your relationship as mother and child. Or she might just say something vague and simple and you can ignore the movies while they sit in a separate library.
I try to be positive here on programming.dev but someone gave you an incredibly thoughtful reply and you returned the favor with absolute disrespect. I think the only positive outcome here would be for me to simply block you and encourage others to do the same.
I'm going to throw this out there not being sure how true it is, but I find it interesting to think about.
XMPP is much more widely used than Matrix if you count WhatsApp (Meta/Facebook). ActivityPub is much more widely used than AT Protocol and nostr combined if you count Threads (Meta/Facebook). So reasons why people aren't talking about XMPP include not wanting to recognize that Meta is hugely influential in this space and that most people don't talk about the underlying protocols of the services and tools they're use at all leaving a self selected group of people looking for alternatives with traction that don't depend on Meta. Outside of WhatsApp, there's not a lot of traction with any particular XMPP implementation. And none of the XMPP implementations have a Discord-ish organization of chat rooms that's popular and familiar right now. Matrix has both right now (although I don't think it will ever be more than a small niche in the mobile messaging space).
I'm fine with using Matrix for what it is. There are programming language communities that have been very helpful for me and a number of Lemmy related communities that have been nice to be a part of.
3367
This should be a pinned post as it really captures the essence of my experience so far.
(programming.dev)
Source by joedeandev
0
Discuss.Online reduces infrastructure: Here is an update on how the server infrastructure changed
(discuss.online)
Word never really got out about Discuss.Online which was set up to handle a huge influx on signups. But the signups haven't materialized. Here's what the admin has to say.
cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/198448
Timeline and reasoning behind recent infra changes
Recently, you may have noticed some planned outages and site issues. I've decided to scale down the size and resilience of the infrastructure. I want to explain why this is. The tl;dr; is cost.
Reasons
- I started discuss.online about 4 weeks ago. I had hoped that the reaction to Reddit's API changes would create a huge rush to something new, for the people, by the people; however, people did not respond this way.
- I built my Lemmy instance like any other enterprise software I have worked on. I planned for reliability and performance. This, of course, costs money. I wanted to be known as the poster child for how Lemmy should operate.
- As I built out the services from a single server instance to what it became the cost went up dramatically. I justified this assuming that the rush of traffic would provide enough donors to supplement the cost for better performance and reliability.
- The traffic load on discuss.online is less that extraordinary. I've decided that I've way over engineered the resilience and scale. Some SubReddits that had originally planned to stay closed decided to re-open. I no longer needed to be large.
- The pricing of the server had gotten way out of control. More than the cost of some of the largest instances in Lemmy while running a fraction of the user base.
Previous infrastructure
- Load balancer (2 Nodes @ $24/month total)
- Two front-end servers (2 Nodes @ $84/month total)
- Backend Server (1 Node @ $84/month total)
- Pictures server (1 Node @ $14/month total)
- Database (2 Nodes @ $240/month total)
- Object Storage ($5/month + Usage see: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/details/pricing/)
- Extra Volume Storage ($10/month)
- wiki.discuss.online web node ($7/month)
- wiki.discuss.online database node ($15/month) [Total cost for Lemmy Alone: $483 + Usage]
Additionally:
- I run a server for log management that clears all lots after 14 days. This helps with finding issues. This has not changed. ($21/month)
- Mastdon server & DB ($42/$15/+storage ~ $60 total/month)
- Matrix server & DB ($42/$30/+storage ~ $75 total/month)
Total Monthly server cost out of pocket: ~$640/month.
The wiki, Mastodon, Matrix, & log servers all remained the same. The changes are for Lemmy only and will be the focus going forward.
First attempt
As you can see it was quite large. I've decided to scale way down. I attempted this on 7/12. However, I had some issues with configuration and database migration. That plan was abandoned. This is what it looked like:
Planned infrastructure
- Single instance server (1 Node @ $63/month total)
- Includes front-end, backend, & pictures server.
- Database server (1 Node @ $60/month total)
- Object Storage ($5/month + Usage)
- Extra Volumes ($20 / month total)
[Total new cost: ~$150 + Usage]
Second attempt
I had discovered that the issues from the first attempt were caused by Lemmy's integration with Postgres. So I decided to take a second attempt. This is the current state:
Current infrastructure
- Single instance server (1 Node @ $63/month total)
- Includes front-end, backend, & pictures server.
- Database server (1 Node @ $60/month total)
- Object Storage ($5/month + Usage)
- Extra Volumes ($20 / month total)
- wiki.discuss.online web node ($7/month)
- wiki.discuss.online database node ($15/month)
[Total new cost for Lemmy alone: ~$170 + Usage]
New total monthly server cost out of pocket: ~$330
My current monthly bill is already more than that from previous infrastructure @ $336.
Going forward
Going forward I plan to monitor performance and try to balance the benefits of a snappy instance with the cost it takes to get there. I am fully invested in growing this community. I plan to continue to financially contribute and have zero expectations to have everything covered; however, community interest is very important. I'm not going to overspend for a very small set of users.
If the growth of the instance continues or rapidly changes I'll start to scale back up.
I'm learning how to run a Lemmy server. I'll adjust to keep it going.
Here are my current priorities for this instance:
- Security
- This has to be number one for every instance. Where you decide to store your data is your choice again. You must be able to trust that your data is safe and bad actors cannot get it.
- Resilience & backups
- Like before, it's your data and I'm keeping it useable for you. I plan to keep it that way by providing disaster recovery steps and tools.
- Performance
- Performance is important to me mostly because it helps ensure trust. A site that responds well mans the admin cares.
- Features
- Lemmy is still very new and needs a lot of help. I plan to contribute to the core of Lemmy along with creating 3rd party tools to help grow the community. I've already began working on https://socialcare.dev. I hope to help supplement some missing core features with this tool and allow others to gain from it in the process.
- User engagement
- User engagement would be #1; however, everything before this is what makes user engagement possible. People must be using this site for it to matter and for me to justify cost and time.
Conclusion
If you notice a huge drop in performance or more issues than normal please let me know ASAP. I'd rather spend a bit more for a better experience.
Thanks, Jason
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There seems to be mixed reactions to this suggestion. I don't know enough to understand why.