losttourist

That all seems … incredibly complicated.

Why not use fwupd? (link is the Arch wiki but should be relevant for any distro). I’ve been using fwupd to keep my Dell XPS15 BIOS updated for the last few years, with no problems at all.

I’m still struggling to understand what advantage Docker brings to the set-up.

Maybe the application doesn’t need to write anything to disk at all (which seems unlikely) but if so, then you’re not saving any disk-write cycles by using docker.

Or maybe you want it only to write to filesystems mounted from longer-life storage e.g. magnetic disk and mark the SD card filesystems as --read-only. In which case you could mount those filesystems directly in the host OS (indeed you have to do this to make them visible to docker) and configure the app to use those directly, no need for docker.

Docker has many great features, but at the end of the day it’s just software - it can’t magic away some of the foundational limitiations of system architecture.

I’m not sure why Docker would be a particularly good (or particularly bad) fit for the scenario you’re referring to.

If you’re suggesting that Docker could make it easy to transfer a system onto a new SD card if one fails, then yes that’s true … to a degree. You’d still need to have taken a backup of the system BEFORE the card failed, and if you’re making regular backups then to be honest it will make little difference if you’ve containerised the system or not, you’ll still need to restore it onto a new SD card / clean OS. That might be a simpler process with a Docker app but it very much depends on which app and how it’s been set up.

Yes, I think that ‘masquerading’ is the key bit to grasp. The MITM Proxy isn’t just intercepting the traffic, it alters the traffic as it passes through.

DigitalOcean’s guides in general are pretty good for all sorts of things, whether it’s a generic discussion of a concept like the ones you’ve posted, or a step-by-step guide for installing and configuring specific systems or software. Even if you’re not using DO as a host, much of what they suggest is still very useful.

Do you want zombie orphans? Cos that’s how you get zombie orphans. Listen to the AI, it’s trying to save the world from becoming a dystopian TV series!

It’s not a numbers game. “They killed one of our children” does NOT make it OK for us to kill one of their children.

How is this supposed to be enforced? In a decade’s time are shopkeepers going to have to challenge anyone buying a packet of fags who looks under 28? And then later it’ll be “sorry mate, can you prove you’re 44?” and so on.

markdown support

If you are on (or migrate to) a server using the Glitch-Social fork of Mastodon, you’ll get markdown support. It’s a game-changer, in my opinion. (glitch-soc has lots of other nice features too, btw).

While true, I think most people’s concern is that their laptop is stolen and along with it all the access details for their email, online banking and so on.

If you’re doing things that mean you’re going to be the target of people with the knowledge, time, and technology to freeze the RAM and attempt to recover the data, you’re presumably already well aware of those (and other) dangers anyway.

systemd [is] a niche

Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn’t systemd-based unless you’re deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.

what if I’m not using CoreOS?

Podman runs on any distro (or more strictly: any distro that uses systemd). It’s essentially a FOSS alternative to Docker.

GRUB (or any other bootloader) doesn’t care about and in fact doesn’t even know about X, Wayland, or any other userland GUI system.

There is a long abandoned (but it still runs) project called eDEX-UI (https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui) which basically provides a working, useable terminal surrounded by all sorts of the crap visual appearance of hacker terminals in the movies. Pair that with a terminal editor and you’ve almost got a movie IDE!

It’s kinda fun for a while although I’d be amazed if anyone actually used it as their main terminal emulator program. But you could.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but a good way to think about it if you’re not a programmer is to say “why do we need recipes when we can just buy a product in the store and read the ingredients list”.

Just because you know the ingredients, that doesn’t mean you know how to put them together in the right order, in the right quantities, and using the correct processes to recreate the finished product.

I haven’t run up my own Threadiverse server yet, but I self-host my own one-person Mastodon, also on Hetzner. Yes, it will eat up a lot of disk space, so if you’re trying to keep costs down you need to send all the media to S3-compatible storage. I use Backblaze B2 which costs me something like $2/month for 200GB of Mastodon media.

I would assume Lemmy or Kbin would also be greedy for asset storage, as they’ll pull in media (images and videos) for any community you follow. So again pushing that all off to a low-cost storage system such as S3 makes a lot of sense.

The developer of kbin, @ernest, has said that automated processing of account deletion requests is on the roadmap but currently it’s a manual process.

As you can imagine, for a piece of software that two months ago was in alpha status with fewer than 100 regular users and then suddenly became one of the most-used systems on the Fediverse, there are still a lot of rough edges to be cleaned up.

How is that any different from what we have now?

Threads has launched, but has federation disabled. So right now Threads is a standalone system, and it and the Fediverse cannot intercommunicate.

If Threads later adds in federation but all the of the Fediverse blocks them, we’re in exactly the situation that exists right this minute. And that doesn’t seem to be hurting the Fediverse at all.

I can’t help with Lemmy, but I’ve been running a single-user Mastodon instance for almost a year now.

Like you, I found that the media very quickly used up much more disk space than I anticipated. There are a few things you can do.

You can tune how long media is stored for: some of this is done in the admin interface, but really you need to set up cron jobs to regularly run various tootctl commands. This is the crontab I use:

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/home/mastodon/.rbenv/shims:/home/mastodon/.rbenv/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

RAILS_ENV=production
# Remove media attachments older than 8 days
11  19  *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove --days 8
# Remove link previews older than 28 days
22  5   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl preview_cards remove --days 28
# Remove files not linked to any post
 3  23  *   *   0     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl media remove-orphans
# Prune remote accounts that never interacted with a local user
44  1   *   *   *     cd /home/mastodon/live && time bin/tootctl accounts prune

You can of course choose even stricter settings but I found that no matter what I did, given that I am following approx 1,000 other Fediverse accounts it still used up more disk space than I was comfortable with.

So I offloaded most of the media storage onto an S3-compatible service. It’s breaking the self-hosting ethos somewhat, but with Backblaze B2 I can happily store and serve several hundred GB of media files for just a couple of dollars a month. To me, that was a no-brainer.

CPU requirements for Lemmy hosting are minimal. Memory is useful - you’d want to use the Pi 4 with either the 4GB or 8GB RAM, anything less than that will work but you’ll be running the risk of difficulties if the server gets busy.

You’ll also need plenty of storage, especially if people are going to start uploading media to your Lemmy host. Given that a Pi runs off an SD card you might well find yourself running out of storage space - I’d recommend attaching a USB storage device for the reassurance in that respect.