Forest @forestjohnson@pixie.town

thank you matrix synapse for creating another 500 million rows in the state_groups_state table 🙏

Rude Dolf "the rednosed reindeer" Lundgren

@firewally this reminded me of the famous "bowl cut maintenance episode" ❤️ 🤙 ( different author )

@j3s

🦷 🦷 🦷 🦷

@joepie91

This power imbalance used to exist with the written word. There was a scribal class who worked for the king / oligarchs / church and no one else could read and write. I see the programmers of today as a sort of modern-day scribal class.

But in the past, we did eventually reach mass literacy. It didn't mean that everyone became a linguist or studied calligraphy, but it did change the world dramatically. A lot of stuff had to change for that to happen. There was a sort of "meeting in the middle:"

On one hand, the written languages were dramatically simplified so they were easier to teach, easier & cheaper writing tools were developed,.

On the other hand, a lot of effort was put into education so young people would be trained enough to achieve a passable/legible fluency.

I don't know if the same thing can exactly happen with software, considering how much more complex computers are compared to written language, but I believe that something similar *can* happen, and just like with the history of mass literacy, it's going to require work on both sides: both education and simplification.

And like you mentioned, a good architecture for trust/transparency is going to help a ton when trying to apply this idea to computers and software.

@ariadne@treehouse.systems

> why bother with this network?

Because the pattern of allowing folks to participate without operating their own server is what has made fedi/matrix/etc an actual viable alternative to the twitters/discords/facebooks of the world. At least that's my take. It reduced the friction to the point where folks were actually willing to participate & as a result, real network effects were kick-started.

I wish software could fix systemic racism but I don't think any network software really can, it's up to the people using that network to make the most of it.

If I boost a post from treehouse.systems, can someone from whitefragility.net see my boost? Maybe I could change the software so that the boost button simply copy-pastes the post and posts it under my account with a "this is a boost of someone elses post" header and a link back to the original? That would allow important content, if not accounts themselves, to at least slightly "route around" things like this.

But folks usually see "route around" type of features as ban evasion / abuse vector? IDK.

This situation sucks, but I hope that it's not a representative sample of the whole picture. At least on my small little corner of the fediverse I see tons of people who are committed to platforming marginalized voices and more and more "mainstream" people, like those who recently came from twitter, who are beginning to listen or at least become aware that there's something they are missing. At least for me, that's slightly encouraging and I'm hopeful for the future. But also, I'm not an instance admin / I'm just white reply guy #759845. 🤷

@joepie91 I am in the same situation as you and I hate to say it but I have come to the conclusion that there's no substitute for the real thing.

In terms of simulating just the NAT part, the default networking configurations of Libvirt VMs and Docker containers should get you there. So for example, you could test two containers which are on different docker "bridged" networks, and see if you can get them to talk P2P in the usual way: the two will rendezvous somewhere like a STUN server, exchange each-others source ports, and then attempt to connect to each-other via UDP.

So for example:

* container A decides "I will create a socket with source port 12345"
* container B decides "I will create a socket with source port 43211"
* they exchange that info with eachother
* container A opens a UDP socket to the docker bridge IP address with source port 12345 and destination port 43211
* container B opens a UDP socket to the docker bridge IP address with source port 43211 and destination port 12345

To be honest I've never tried this, I have no idea if it will work but based on my somewhat limited understanding, it _should_ work for initial prototyping.

However the problem I see is that when it comes time to polish the application, you will run into situations where every home router is slightly different. I'm not aware of any tools which can simulate that. So far I have simply tried to deploy apps in as many different home networks as possible, those of my friends and family.

pixelfed may have federation issues so:

https://twincities.photo/p/fedipugs/507227390910545262

I set up this thin client computer in my fathers basement today. It cost $35 used on ebay, is fanless at 10W TDP, and has 8GB of RAM.

#raspberrypi

Seems like a fine time to repost this, instead of purchasing a new SBC consider upcycling an old thin-client instead! You get more GB of RAM per $ that way anyways and some great fanless options exist on ebay for less than $50. I'd link to the article I wrote about this but my home server is down right now and I'm traveling.

#raspberrypi

@ehashman

> Where are the radical software collectives self-hosting privacy-conscious [apps] for activists and the marginalized?

I hail from one of them, https://cyberia.club. Or at least I think that's what we aspire to be.

> Where's that vision of digital autonomy? How do we get there, given the cost of labour?

I have written my own thoughts about that on my blog (Archive.org link because im away from home and server is currently 🤮ing) :

https://web.archive.org/web/20220812014732/https://sequentialread.com/federation-vs-clustering-self-hosting/

TL;DR is try to do for IaaS (infrastructure as a service, things like AWS & Cloudflare) what Fediverse/Matrix did for social media SaaS. The 1 sysadmin per 100 users model.

It can't just be 1 admin, 1 computer per "instance", needs to be at least 2 of both IMO.

How to get there? Design for it. Also, treat sysadmins like users, not highly trained professionals, and perform usability tests with them. Build high-usability, high-accessibility interfaces around digital autonomy.

How to fund this effort? IDK ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ my plan was to bank on the idea that "it only takes one".

Software has zero marginal cost, it can be copied infinitely for essentially free. So as long as the software itself is able to do "the job" or at least help in some way, a small number of pro bono workers can make a big impact.