tallship

@tallship@public.mitra.social

Slackware, OpenBSD, and a bit of a Debiantard.
FOSS and Privacy Advocate. Secure, Enterprise Cloud.

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tallship, to foss

As a longtime provider of services in one form or another since the late 80's and early 90's, I felt the pain of having to write out the following blog post/update.

Drew is an opinionated perfectionist with an attention to detail and his perspective that chafes some, endears others, and deservedly, receives the respect earned when someone strives toward par excellence for those for whom they provide services for.

I have some differing set of conclusions from my understanding of what he laments as the ordeal he's been through in the past year, like, "why would anyone consider a carrier besides DHL for international overseas shipments?" Also, I fail to see the logic in moving his entire infra from the U.S. (where there are many affordable top-tier carrier hotels - aka datacenters) to Amsterdam, which also has fine facilities and maybe it is because of privacy concerns which depending on what those are, may indeed be quite valid from my perspective.

But not having IPv6 fully deployed (as a result of datacenter choice?) is puzzling, although almost inconsequential operationally, in production, ... Almost.

Considering I've always looked directly at the carriers themselves, used my own delegated IP infrastructure for core operations, I tend to look at a datacenter as three things:

  • Electricity
  • Fail-over electricity (Generators)
  • Air conditioning

Most folks rent a rack that comes with transit, I ask how much the XC is - I can find, mix, and pick my transit providers. I just wanna know that my shit is secure in a suite or cage behind locked cabinets that I personally have 24/7 access to at anytime (even though I'll rarely do so) and have 24/7 remote hands to swap drives, hot-pluggable power supplies and plug cables into the designated ports I specify, etc. Those things typically come w/zero cost.

For DDoS'ing, I do like to outsource this as part of a package, and I'm open to any offers of included transit/XC and want to know how much each additional 20A of electricity cost me each month in addition to the rack fees. Putting the onerous of protecting my customers from a good DDoS'ing on someone else like my upstream takes a lot of worry away.

Shipping machinery though, that's a bit distinct too, I've been burned a few times domestically, although always recovered my *tangible costs - time? well, I've lost a couple of customers because their infra was lost or damaged in transit, but insurance is important - Drew had that. What I'm really wondering though, is who besides DHL would you even trust to ship servers over the Atlantic Ocean?

That's a cost I would not consider skimping on - A girl I almost married worked for DHL for over 20 years and they'll cut a check at the drop of a hat, which might have worked out well for Drew considering these were old boxes ready for retirement anyway and the replacement cost (new stuffs) is what you insure for.

Anyway, I've really admired much of what Drew has done over the years, was cheerleading for him as he migrated from full time paycheck person to finally being able to announce that he "thinks" he can make enough money for a living by devoting himself full time to FOSS with his fledgling SourceHut.

Yah, sometimes his head swelled up pretty big, making it hard to fit through doorways, and I've butted heads with him here and there on technical matters only, but have always respected him, and in truth, he was never not correct even if his way was the wrong way, or there was simply a better way - usually those were matters of opinion coz there's more than six ways to Sunday to skin a cat.

Anyway, he's been kicked in the balls really hard, which if you know much of him, must have been really hard to lay all of that out in some manner of detail (He's almost always brutally transparent). For that, and moreover for getting right back up after being knocked down (maybe by da man?), I applaud his candidness. His devotion to those of you reading this that may have free repos at SourceHut, and I'm also encouraging everyone to kick in at least a few bucks - fuck that dumb app that you don't need, let alone pay $2.95 for the exclusive right to be tracked - I urge you with all FOSSiness in mind... Give it a read, and send him whatev, ... I guarantee it will come back to you tenfold.

Drew is a consummate FOSS warrior, do it for yourself, please - Five bucks, fifty bucks, heck, whatever isn't going to cut into your budget for porterhouse steak this weekend would be nice.

And it will make you feel good too.

Full disclosure: I'm not getting shit from this article. Drew and I only converse occasionally and usually it is to disagree - some folks are just good coz of what's in their heart, their commitment to the community, and whether you're a fan or not doing this for him really is doing this for yourself and everyone else in the FOSS world.

Here's the link to the article/update.

#tallship #FOSS #OpenSource #SourceHut #Git #repo

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tallship, to fediverse

First, Mostr, the #Fediverse bridge between #ActivityFed and #Nostr.

Next, Bridgy Fed, the Fedivese bridge between ActivityPub and #Bluesky.

#w00t :)

So Ryan, thank you for this most valuable tool to bring people around the globe together in #DeSoc - creating (and curating, as you have) ***Bridgy_Fed is one of the very best things that the Fediverse has to offer people on both sides of the protocol divide, and I really don't think that there are enough Thank you's to go around for all of the selfless effort you've put into this service.

So as meek and perhaps insignificant as it may sound, THANK YOU!

#tallship #bridge #interprotocol_communication #FOSS #Thank_You

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RE: https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://snarfed.org/2024-05-20_53092

@snarfed.org@snarfed.org

tallship, to random

Content from Socialhome boosted or quote-posted in Hubzilla looks really nice and the inline media of articles is preserved as presented in the original post as well - very nice!

RE: https://zotum.net/hq/d071a370-de40-5298-92d7-3f19b88d0717

tallship, to fediverse

This Should be *a huge conversation in the - really.

@jupiter_rowland certainly paraphrases much of the sentiment here in the Fediverse where many conversations are taking place, albeit briefly, and then dismissed, but why? Are people too busy to care? Are people too apathetic to take seriously anything that begins with the letters, masto...? Do those 5 letters really invoke such categorical dismissiveness that cuts into topics that would otherwise likely gain immediate traction were it not for mention of that corporate monolithic silo brand?

Probably; likely; perhaps - take your pick. There is indeed a general apathy amongst especially long term Fedizens and also Lemmy users who are refugees from Reddit, but it's okay to dismiss masto as the neo-corporate EEE platform conceivably threatening the UX for millions of Fedizens. And like it or not, there does need to be a viable shitposting platform, which is exactly what masto is, inhabited in very large ways by people who, as Jupiter raises the question, "are incapable of actually engaging in textual conversation. There's something to that.

Well, is a very real concern, perhaps for the FEPs, considering there are projects that are very close in architecture to completely ignoring anything that isn't part of the W3's official specification, and that's okay.

It is, however, a misnomer that one must insert alt-text into media on the masto platform, at least at this juncture. Forcing the hand of refugees from the deprecated, , monolithic silos is yet another complication that those poor souls need to be gently nudged into accepting - but even more importantly, ... "Why".

Some popular Android clients will complain if you try to post media without also including alt-text, some have no facilities at all for doing so. This is an adoption phenomenon, slowly being rolled out, as awareness increases (awareness of the WHY - not the HowTO) with respect to the reasons it is an important design consideration.

Do people actually get unceremoniously banned for not including alt-text for attached media on masto? Yes, On some instances they do, as if it will have any affect at all on the wider Fediverse - I have heard on several occasions that this does indeed happen - there aren't many things that piss people off more than having something that is important to them getting yanked out from underneath them in rug-pull fashion than that of an , and yet childish, juvenile moderators and admins on several masto instances are truly guilty of such dystopian tyranny and abuse of privilege.

Those types of adversarial, clickish masto instances are much of the reason Fediverse gets a bad rap in some silo social networking circles, and it isn't a fair characterization, but the offensive behavior persists. More than an impetus for the deployment of , single-user instances, it is indeed primarily a masto phenomenon.

Not a pretty thing, but masto always has been a caustic cauldron of cacophony of enmity and active vitriol, and that's just one more reason to expedite the outreach programs popping up all over the place to entice the good folks to ditch it in favor of many other good social networking platforms mentioned by Jupiter in his cw-LONG article (I wish he wouldn't bother catering to those mastoblasters with that sentiment, they should at least be smart enough to see that it's more substantive than their shitposting personas are capable of parsing).

RE: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/9e481d2a-72a6-4f4a-bad8-b72cf6272327

@jupiter_rowland

julian, to random
@julian@community.nodebb.org avatar

At the last ForumWG meeting, we discussed at length about Article vs. Note, and whether there was a desire to expand usage of as:Article. You can review those minutes here.

One of the action items that came out was to collate the state of current implementations. Unfortunately, outside of implementations that federate non-textual content (e.g. Pixelfed Stories, Mobilizon Events, etc.), the majority of implementors just use as:Note, which is not surprising given Mastodon's treatment of non-Note objects.

You can see the results of the summary here.

What is less clear is whether there is pent-up demand for use of a different data type for more richly forrmatted content. @mikedev and @jupiter_rowland provided some very illuminating history behind previous attempts to use as:Article, but importantly it seems that Mastodon (via @renchap) may be open to supporting this in some form as well.

While Mastodon has every reason to display as:Note as it sees fit, I'd like to hopefully address the undue influence towards using it especially in instances where as:Article were more appropriate. Mike (upthread) suggested a compromise:

  • that as:Note be reserved for content with attachments (images or otherwise), perhaps with a limited subset of html
  • and as:Article be used for content with a richer set of html (e.g. tables), and including the ability to display inline images

I explicitly did not specify that Note was for shorter content and Article for longer, because there exist plenty of examples of the reverse.

Does anybody see potential complications from such an arrangement?

tallship,

@silverpill @jupiter_rowland @renchap @mikedev @julian

Socialhome supports inline images in posts. Are those as:Note or as:Article?

tallship,

@silverpill @julian

Silverpill wrote:
> Could you provide an example of such post?

Here you go bro: Socialhome post w/inline images.

I'll try to give it a boost from my , , and accounts too (if I haven't already) so you can study/compare the various treatment cases :)

Sadly, I have not yet launched streams yet for study. I know, I'm a lame-O. I'll get to it shortly, prolly just spin up a local VM on Proxmox for that here, I really am anxious to give it a go :)

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simon, to random
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

Several of the major social media platforms - Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter - have effectively declared war on linking to things and I absolutely hate it

"Link in my bio" / "Link in thread" / "Link in first comment"... or increasingly no link at all, just an unsourced screenshot of a page

tallship,

@simon

A couple of things there Simon. How do you know this? Are you still using the deprecated, privacy mining, monolithic silos to which you refer, or are you just taking this on the word of good, 3rd party information sources?

If it's the former, why?

If it's the latter, then yippie kai yay! The demise of these platforms is underway and in full swing - just as Steve Ballmer once called Linux "Cancer", the fact that these silos aren't simply ignoring links to particular resources, especially those in the , and have taken up with the practice of actively blocking them, is a good thing; and you, as a , should be proud.

Yet again, if it is the former, and you really insist on validating and monetizing those privacy mining silos via your subjugation as inventoried chattel there, consider pinning something akin to the following to the top of your profile (make sure to read the alt-text for the image):

tallship, to bbs

Synchronet BBS as an node makes over a secure protocol because your exit node is the itself...

Brilliant!

But what about those users out there? How about a gzipped tarball, all nicely packaged up so you can distribute around, of a custom built client that will securely connect people to your over telnet?

Brilliant!

What was that again? Oh yeah, ... Brilliant!

Enjoy!

h/t to @dheadshot

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tallship,

@silverpill @Hyolobrika

Hehehe.... I suppose this is my opportunity to plug Joshua's free domain name service here that's been a trusted mainstay for over 20 years :p

Perhaps one of the best parts is that you can see how many days (years) the domain has been part of the service, to dissuade concerns over whether there's a likelihood of it suddenly disappearing :)

And.... who doesn't love ?

Aside from lotech schemas, there's also several FOSS based community driven initiatives. There's been a lot of real-world, ad-hoc development since my years of participation in the IRTF/IRSG DTNRG. Full disclosure, I was also formerly employed by Semtech. The notion that there's a use case for communications that can take months, even decades to arrive (or never at all) is a valid concern for many practical applications.

More immediate, and relevant communications systems for most folks here on Terra Firma include projects like Lokinet, which has some great info HERE, and also aspires to the same level of, um... disconnectivity (sneakernet-like) or operability that @silverpill mentions above - the value of having a client/server architecture that is prepared to exploit this out of the box is much relevant that one might think.

Some of these semi-production or production ready real world initiatives and communities are:

  • CellSol - It is noteworthy to mention that Texas is the only state in the USA that sports an (actually only mostly) autonomous electricity grid (not dependent upon the national grid), although it's not publicly managed, and has been criticized as such due in part to nearly 1000 deaths occurring in the winter of 2021. The repo is HERE. Here's a PoC for one such use case from the PoV of a native Texan: Apologies for directly linking to an article in the monolithic silo space.

During my years living quite literally off-grid in the wilderness of the forested mountains in Northern California, I had the privilege of meeting and contracting for several farms and individuals deeply steeped in what is generally referred to as the prepper movement. These weren't cray cay militants (at least not most of them) or paranoiacs calling for revolution or believing the end is nigh, but rather, farmers and families who were, rightfully so, extremely concerned with security and safety for their small communities and loved ones. To survive in places like that, which exist all over the world, one must begin with self-sufficiency that covers 4 seasons; beyond that, protecting the 'me and mine' aspects of your assets and property are very real considerations.

The work I focused on led me to developing microwave surveillance systems using inexpensive, solar powered Ubiquiti Nanostations with ranges capable of exceeding 10KM, strategically placed in almost inaccessible locations overlooking entire valleys as well as within small perimeters of their farms and households. This included off the shelf PTZ cameras, many of which were capable of license plate and facial recognition, but more importantly, being able to determine the difference between things like Bears, Deer, and Humans - false positive intrusions detected are quite frustrating, lolz.

All of this was coupled together with Shinobi, which can be monitored and controlled from anywhere, on any device. The repo is here.

With the extreme threat levels of thievery and other concerns in those regions, and continuous incidents of such, a comprehensive based, powered communications and surveillance system is an in demand market. Internet access is of course, problematic in such regions, which creates the market for WISPs operating in the unlicensed microwave bands a high demand commodity as well.

This is merely demonstrative of the need for another niche type computing arena - community networks completely unconnected to the Internet:

All of these projects, protocols, and initiatives have solution based choices for the various kinds of Delay Tolerant Networking standards and communities actively developing for connectionless, intermittently connected systems, or autonomous networks that aren't neccessarily interdependant upon a classic, traditional, Internet connection.

Not sufficient to just eschew the deprecated, privacy disrespecting monolithic silos, it's also not prudent to depend upon clearnet aspects of the Internet either. In practice, it's possible to take pretty much any platform technology that listens for packets and fashion the ability to be accessible and available via I2P, Tor, IPFS Yggdrasil, and other IP routed constructs, yet moreover, the majority of people only consider intercommunication in terms of the IP routed packet switched network we call the Internet (powered almost entirely by Cisco IOS and the like), without due consideration given to the fact that this single common denominator is also a single choke point - kludgy platforms like masto that can't even keep up with the contemporary movements in the social networking landscape aren't going to fare well when it comes to the expanding horizons opening up with movements like those above, while others like Sreams, Mitra, and perhaps protocols such as Nostr that exhibit the ambitions to explore and exploit emerging technologies in communication will fare much better, adapting (and embracing layer 1 & 2 networking) along the way.

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