kikobar

kikobar, 8 months ago to mastodon

I tried to enable #Elasticsearch in my #Mastodon solo instance, and it triggered a huge workload to index around 17 million documents.

This process would have taken several days to complete with the current resources allocated to the instance.

I opted for terminating the process and disabling Elasticsearch, but I'd like to hear other experiences:

• Is this only a temporary behavior? (ie. after initial indexation it becomes easier on the server).

• Is there any periodic 'cleanup' process? (ie. my server ingest many GB of toots every day, will I end up with a huge Elasticsearch database?).

• Am I missing something valuable for not implementing Elasticsearch?

Looking forward to hear your thoughts.

#mastoadmin #solohosting

kikobar, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to Futurology

#Meta objective with #Threads is to attract the VIP accounts on #Twitter. Nothing else.

These accounts are 'broadcasters' in nature, they have many times more followers than people they follow, and they generate a lot of traffic.

These accounts and their traffic are 'low hanging fruit' since #Musk decided to make Twitter unbearable for its users and even risky for its own sponsors to continue paying for adds.

But Meta, with all its shortcomings, is the best positioned to grab those accounts. They have solid infrastructure, good developers, decent discrimination of bots vs humans... and even an acceptable moderation (despite the terrible mental health toll on their overseas moderators).

Now, there are basically 4 types of these VIP accounts:

1.- VIPs who are already in #Instagram - no major action needed, just the ability to post text-only instead of pictures and video. Many people already do that my posting text-made-pictures or neutral pictures with interesting captions.

2.- VIPs who are already discontented with all commercial social media platforms abusing and polluting their content with adds and other algorithm-driven content before it reaches to their audiences - these are potential candidates to once and for all decide to run their own websites or #Fediverse sites and connect directly to their audiences. They need a quick connection to their followers though, so the action here is to provide them with a quick access to the massive crowd of Instagram and they will be very happy.

3.- VIPs (high traffic generators) who are controversial standers, whose posts are sometimes even illegal... but juicy because they attract a lot of clicks. To grab these Meta needed a way to not be seen as the host, curator or publisher, but still being able to 'pipe' their traffic. Any ideas? - Yes, tell them to run their own instance and apply 2.-

4.- VIPs who are already VERY pissed with all commercial social media and have chosen to make the Fediverse their new home by joining some instance, and they are very happy with smaller audiences, our blocking and defederating patterns and our conversational way of socialising - These are very few and they will never join nothing that smells like Meta, so no action is possible.

We must note that none of these people with millions of followers can ever join any of our instances or they will immediately make them crash, so they need something rock solid and scalable.

So now I understand what all the Meta joining the Fediverse is all about... just using it temporary for grabbing those accounts.

Of course, the next action will be to tinker with their implementation of #ActivityPub a little bit, just enough to making it incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse... we've been there before.

And after all that, we will continue happily ever after as two different universes as we have always been. 😎

jwildeboer, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Every time a truly open protocol emerges, the vultures that shout "monetisation" will show up and demand that artificial scarcity must be created or else they will not come. But adding artificial scarcity to an open system makes it non-open. 1/7

kikobar, 3 months ago to microsoft

Any clue why #Microsoft #DMARC reports score so bad as #spam at my server?

All other big and small email providers score way better than this.

Does anyone have a similar issue?

Return-Path: <dmarcreport@microsoft.com>  
Delivered-To: ******************************  
Received: from ***********************  
 by ************** (Dovecot) with LMTP id ************************  
 for **********************; Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:09:03 +0800  
Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1])  
 by ***********************(Postfix) with ESMTP id *****************  
 for ******************; Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:09:03 +0800 (+08)  
Authentication-Results: **************************;  
 dkim=fail reason="signature verification failed" (2048-bit key; unprotected) header.d=notification.microsoft.com header.i=@notification.microsoft.com header.b=ahN2emes;  
 dkim-atps=neutral  
X-Virus-Scanned: Debian amavisd-new at ****************************  
X-Spam-Flag: YES  
X-Spam-Score: 2.321  
X-Spam-Level: **  
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=2.321 tagged_above=-9999 required=2  
 tests=[BASE64_LENGTH_78_79=0.1, BASE64_LENGTH_79_INF=1.502,  
 BAYES_00=-1.9, DKIMWL_WL_MED=-0.001, DKIM_SIGNED=0.1, DKIM_VALID=-0.1,  
 HTML_MESSAGE=0.001, MIME_BASE64_TEXT=1.741, MIME_HTML_MOSTLY=0.1,  
 MPART_ALT_DIFF=0.79, NO_RECEIVED=-0.001, NO_RELAYS=-0.001,  
 SPF_PASS=-0.001, T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE=-0.01, T_SCC_IS_DMARC_REP=-0.01,  
 T_TVD_MIME_NO_HEADERS=0.01, URIBL_BLOCKED=0.001]  
 autolearn=no autolearn_force=no  

#email #postfix

darnell, 1 month ago to meta

I know #WhatsApp is popular amongst Americans 🇺🇸 who travel outside of the country, but I doubt #Meta will replace #iMessage in the #UnitedStates 🇺🇸 in the near future.

#Apple has already lost to #Facebook Messenger in #America 🇺🇸, so in a sense @zuck has already won.

👉🏾 WhatsApp Reveals Biggest iPhone Update For 2024—It's Impossible To Beat https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2024/05/04/whatsapps-surprise-new-update-iphone-15-pro-max-iphone-16-pro-max/

kikobar, 2 months ago to threads

Will following accounts in #Threads from my #solohosting #fediverse site create a massive traffic to my tiny #mastodon instance?

Mastodon is famous for caching many gigabytes of posts and profile pictures that have to be deleted every day.

ben, 1 month ago to random

I don't like reading from an ereader - I'm one of those old-school people who prefer actual paper books - but I can no longer use a reading light in bed because it'll wake up the kid. An ereader with a backlight would be better. But I don't buy books on Amazon. What's your favorite non-Kindle reader that you've actually used?

kikobar, 4 months ago to Israel

I had never donated directly to #UNRWA before.

It is time to start doing so.

https://donate.unrwa.org

#Israel #Palestine #Humanity #war

kikobar, 1 year ago to random

What is the effect of having #hashtags in the profiles?

Is it just a way of mentioning our interests or does it have any impact on the searches?

kikobar, 11 months ago to music

I finally understood why these acoustic basses are not so popular.

They are so quiet instruments that you would need to plug them for any practical use in a gig, so what is the point of them being acoustic at all?

The only great thing about them is that you can just grab them and play them on the couch at any time without having deal amps and cables... and I am loving it. 😉

#music #guitar #bass

fabio, 1 month ago to bitwarden

Just migrated from #Bitwarden to #Vaultwarden.

Same API, same features, same UI, and support for other DBs than MSSQL.

One single stand-alone application vs. Bitwarden’s 10 Docker containers. 70MB of RAM vs. 2GB. 3MB of db storage vs. 300MB.

Why was a password manager supposed to take so many resources in the first place? Just because it runs on a Microsoft-only stack and on .NET’s inefficient VM? Just because somebody thought that it was a good idea to separate everything into different containers (even icons and 2fa are modeled as separate services in Bitwarden)?

It reminds me of my recent migration from Mastodon to Akkoma. I got more features, 5GB of RAM freed up and 300GB of storage freed up almost overnight.

Writing and running inefficient software that pointlessly consumes all the resources available on a machine should be a crime in a world with limited resources.

It makes me think of how much shitty bloated software like @bitwarden, probably based on awfully inefficient languages and frameworks like Java, Ruby on Rails and .NET, is running out there, pointlessly sucking up resources for doing simple jobs that could easily be done with 99% less resources.

Today’s developers, spoiled by IDEs, powerful machines, docker-compose and shortsighted “just throw more RAM at the problem” approaches, have forgotten how to write efficient software. Time for them to learn how to write good efficient software again. Software doesn’t eat the world. Only shitty software built on shitty framework does.

kikobar, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to sustainability

I don't understand why this is considered an existential risk, with governments spending fortunes to 'fix the low birth rate problem'.

I believe it is good news.

We are clearly a species that needs to reduce its footprint on Earth. There is nothing sustainable about our ever-growing population.

Only in a distorted fantasy worldview of perpetual growth without negative consequences the low birth rate could be a concern.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68402139?utm_source=press.coop

#sustainability #population #humanity #economy

kikobar, 1 year ago to random

@jwildeboer I have been using S/MIME with #Thunderbird since at least 2015.

Many of the reasons described in the #letsEncrypt forum are true, which does not mean S/MIME is impossible to fix or use.

There is native support for S/MIME in many email clients both desktop and mobile/tablet, including most of the 'stock' clients installed by default in most of the devices, so this is not an issue.

I think the big problems are basically 2:

1.- Having a throwaway key and certificate every 30 days (as we do with Letsencrypt SSL/TLS) is very inconvenient because we would need to keep a long collection of them in order access old messages.

2.- People access their email from multiple devices, so syncing the private key securely across all of them becomes a challenge.

For the tech savvy, both problems are manageable:

1.- You can get a free S/MIME certificate from #Actalis valid for 1 year here:

https://www.actalis.com/s-mime-certificates.aspx

---

Please read a very important reply to this post by @duxsco pointing out to the insecurity of the Actalis certificate, and providing a secure but not free alternative.

---

2.- You can manually add this certificate to all your devices and keep an encrypted/secure repository with all your old keys and certificates in case you need to access your archived email.

I've been doing exactly that for years and it is just fine for signing my email.

IMHO for 'fixing' the whole signing and encryption of emails, #OpenPGP is conceptually closer to be a more consistent solution, and I use it with everyone who understands it, but I have to admit that the ecosystems is far less ready than for S/MIME (you will need to use specialised apps or installed plugins, etc.), Thunderbird being a shining exception.

PGP has several very powerful advantages:

1.- You don't need a CA for the sole purpose of generating your keys.

2.- You can use the same keys for many years.

3.- People who really trust each other can sign each other's keys creating a web-of-trust.

4.- There is a free network of keyservers where you can upload your public keys and make them available to everyone.

5.- Most people these days have their own website, blog or social media account where they can publish their public keys for cases when they distrust the public servers. They can manually exchange them too.

In the long run I believe we should promote the adoption of OpenPGP instead of S/MIME, with more people using it, native support should follow.

I am not an expert though, so I'd love to hear from others too. 😊

#pgp #gpg #privacidadebemboa

kikobar, 6 months ago to Hydrogen

Worth reading article about the impracticability of #Hydrogen as a serious potential component of the clean #energy world.

#GlobalWarming #BigOil #Renewables

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/27/icct-hydrogen-trucking-scenario-would-require-europe-to-ban-all-electric-vehicles/

feliciaday, 1 month ago to random

Enabled fediverse sharing on Threads: @feliciaday!

kikobar, 5 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to Israel

'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' by Ilan Pappe.

Painful but necessary reading in our journey to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict, and to hopefully contribute to find a path to peace and reconciliation in a not so distance future.

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8324629W/The_Ethnic_Cleansing_of_Palestine

#IlanPappe #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #war #Peace #Books

kikobar, 7 months ago to github

I'd appreciate your views on Git LFS.

I've always been reluctant to enable LFS in my Git servers basically because of the reasons so well explained by Gregory Szorc in this article:

https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/05/12/why-you-shouldn%27t-use-git-lfs/

When having the need to track big binary files, we have pushed them inside the repos and allowed them to balloon rather than implement LFS.

There is an interesting use case that came now though, which is the case when the interest is not about storing the large files in LFS, but to take advantage of the locking feature only... this case is less controversial as there will be actually no files in the LFS storage and no pointers in the repo.

Please, share your experiences or views. Thanks.

#git #gitlfs #github #lfs

kikobar, 8 months ago to random

So a massive Mastodon update is out?

I think this chicken admin is going to wait for any teething problems to surface before following through.... 😉

#mastoadmin #mastoadmins

fabio, 1 month ago to apple

#Apple challenges the courts again on payments processing.

You can now show users an external link to process the payment outside of Apple’s platform.

But that comes with a new “external link fee” of 27% - to be paid on top of the fee you pay for users who still make their purchases through the App store.

I’ve said it several times, I’ll repeat it: companies like Apple can get away with such parasitic rent-seeking behavior with no added value, and with challenging courts all over the world, because they are practically above the law.

They can afford to create their own taxation system as if they were an independent country, but without being accountable to voters, and without losing a single percentage point of market share if they behave like jerks.

And any fine thrown on them by courts around the world is likely to be only a tiny part of their revenue - unless we get the balls of fining them for hundreds of billions and use that money to support more competition in the market, which would be an act of redistribution long overdue IMHO.

Apple can treat fines as small operating costs because their monopolistic behaviour is still profitable enough to pay those one-off fines many times over.

And if they are above the law, it’s because too many people bought their crap and gave them power that they didn’t deserve. And they’ll keep buying their products even if Tim Cook starts wearing a Darth Vader mask during interviews.

If you use anything made by Apple, you are part of the problem.

https://darnell.day/apple-outsmarts-court-upsets-judge-regarding-third-party-app-payments

kikobar, 7 months ago to Israel

Powerful words from Yuval Noah Harari, a voice of wisdom in a moment of madness:

"War is the continuation of politics by other means - Hamas’s political aim is to destroy any chance for peace and normalization, and [...] Israel’s aim should be to preserve the chance for peace. We must win this war, instead of helping Hamas achieve its aim."
-- Yuval Noah Harari

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/19/hamas-winning-political-goals/

#YuvalNoahHarari #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Peace #Humanity #war

fabio, 17 days ago to history

#Platypush 1.0 is out!

It’s been 10 months and 1049 commits since the latest release of Platypush, 7 years since the first commit, and 10 years since the first release of its ancestor, https://github.com/blacklight/evesp.

The past few months have been quite hectic and I have nearly rewritten the whole codebase, but I feel like the software is now at a stage where it’s mature and stable enough to be used by a larger audience.

The changelog is quite big, but it doesn’t even cover all the changes, as many integrations have been completely rewritten.

The biggest (breaking) change is the merge between plugins and backends. Now, except for those integrations that actually listen for messages and execute them (like HTTP and Redis), all the other integrations are plugins. This greatly simplifies the configuration and removes a lot of confusion for new users.

The Docker support has been greatly improved too. There are now officially supported multi-arch images for Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, an official docker-compose.yml file, and both the platydock and platyvenv utilities have been almost completely rewritten to seamlessly automate the creation and configuration of containers and virtual environments (respectively) starting from a single config.yaml.

And the Python API has become much simpler and consistent. No more __init__.py files that the user had to manually create in each subfolder of scripts, just drop a .py file with your automation in the scripts dir and it’ll be picked up. Moreover, the most common imports are now available on top level as well, and there’s no more need to create procedures/hooks/crons with varargs:

from platypush import run, when
from platypush.events.sun import SunsetEvent

@when(SunsetEvent)
def sunset_lights_on():
  run('light.hue.on')

There’s also a revamped documentation portal, which now includes both the wiki and the plugin reference.

Most of the integrations have been rewritten at different degrees, and in the process many bugs have been squashed, many features added and many APIs updated to be more consistent, so make sure to check the documentation pages of your integrations in order to migrate.

And if you have more requests or questions, feel free to open a ticket, a PR or ask on the Lemmy server.

https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Platypush-1.0-is-out

kikobar, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to sustainability

Not having enough children and the 'aging population' issue is on the news again.

IMHO, we don't have an 'aging population' we have a naturally 'shrinking population' (and actually not shrinking yet!)... and I belong to the group which is 'aging' and soon will be part of history... and that is all fine.

We are very far from going extinct because the last Human couple on the planet is considering not having children...

A shrinking population will help us in many ways:

• More willingly accept the migration of our brothers and sisters from other parts of the world.

• It will reduce the massive pressure on the ecosystem of our planet. 'Sustainability' requires a reduction in Human population. We are the 'unsustainable' factor. Yes, our population will shrink, but some other beautiful species may find ways to re-grow.

• It will force us to redefine our social and economic paradigms in a World where 'perpetual growth' is not the norm. Hopefully a system where it is a lot more easier to share than today, as there will be 'more planet per capita' than today too.

So let's not be too scared about Human population shrinkage. It could well be the best that could happen to us.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/why-policies-boost-birth-rates-not-working-some-countries-world-population-day-united-nations-3621006

#Sustainability #Humanity #Population #Migration #AgingPopulation #Aging

yeri, 22 days ago to climate

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/20/climate/doomsday-glacier-melt-antarctica-climate-intl/index.html :(

#Climate #climateCatastrophe #ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency #sealevels #arctic #antarctica #glaciers #glacier

kikobar, 16 days ago to transit

Ride on #PublicTransport...
...and on your #bicycle as much as you can.

These are among the top most impactful contributions you can make to improve the carbon footprint and resilience of your #community. 🙏
🚇 🚌 🚲 🌻

#sustainability #decarbonisation #SmartCities

Some commuters riding on a public bus. Most of them sitting, some standing. There are still seats available. Most of the commuters are looking at their mobile phone screens.
Bicycle storage rack at a train station. It allow commuters to park their bikes and ride on city trains or buses. Most of the slots are occupied, but there are still available slots to store more bikes.

kikobar, 18 days ago to keyboards

Now I type with this... They a lot of fun to use.

#opensouce is great!

#corne #keyboards