Forest @forestjohnson@pixie.town

Oops i forgot to include this link to thomas reed post https://infosec.exchange/@thomasareed/109376747868155703

IMO, pressure on #FediCulture to push CW usage closer to the "NSFW" mainstream cultural standard is not necessarily a bad thing. I acknowledge this is probably a classic straight white guy take but i think CW is weird! I honestly have a hard time believing that the CW feature / culture is as good at preventing harm as its hard-core adherents claim.

The question of what should be CW'd, what images should be fogged until click, etc, its subjective, culturally relative, and I feel like the current status quo might be a #Whiteness that has made black folks feel uncomfortable / unwelcome here.

Some of this is based on reading @shengokai takes on Mastodon and it's affordances, some of it from other posts I've seen around, I am curious what other ppl around me think.

I just published a new blog post about hardware choices for home-brew servers:

https://sequentialread.com/i-was-wrong-about-arm-sbcs/

*[Shut] Up the Punx!!!*
Bomb the Music Industry

https://video.strongthany.cc/watch?v=pdGB01Zk4xg

I believe it has the same Heterogeneous Multiprocessing design from cell phones, a combination of low-power and high-power cores, which helps a lot in terms of power efficiency especially when the software can take advantage of it.

Anyways, it's happening. The meek little SBC has grown up, it's a Real Computer now. Yes, things like graphics drivers and virtualization support are surely lacking. And it's not $35 any more. But as an affordable server platform for linux-based apps and containers, these little boards just keep getting better and better.

a user on the radxa discord quoted 18 Watts at the wall under 100% CPU stress. 4-5 watts at idle was a little bit of an underwhelming result, but it may be tune-able to get that figure lower.

RK3588 CPU has been picked up by Radxa, Orange Pi, and Firefly, and it pushes **serious** numbers on the CPU benchmarks, almost 4x better than the Raspberry Pi 4. Comes in 8GB and 16GB RAM flavors.

Listening to *It's all about the Pentiums* by Wierd Al Yankovic while obsessively researching the newest SBC releases of the year

Wow this is an incredibly long and detailed read, great for desktop / integrated software developers like me to understand how these kind of attacks work and how to prevent them

https://emily.id.au/tailscale

So I see two ways forward for the fediverse, either:

A. Mastodon has to be refactored / rewritten to use Ruby Fibers, the non-blocking concurrency feature for Ruby

OR

B. We have to switch to a different Fediverse software that is based on a more modern software development framework.

Personally I think B might be the best option, and my money is on GoToSocial!!

These days pretty much every modern web server framework or library is based on the same non-blocking IO primitives that `nginx` invented. But Mastodon is still lagging behind on thread pools where each thread blocks while it's waiting for the remote client or server.

Mastodon doesn't fork off a new process or spawn a new thread for every request, but it's darn close to it.

How did the web evolve past this scalability challenge? It didn't necessarily involve buying a faster computer. The developers of the venerable `nginx` web server famously struck first blood when they cracked what they called the "c10k" problem for the first time. (handling 10 thousand simultaneous connections to the same server application).

This happened in the early 2000s, and the nginx server in question was consuming only about 2.5MB of RAM during the load test.

This style of client and server application has its roots in things like `inetd` (internet daemon) and CGI (common gateway interface). Benno Rice explains in a section of his excellent presentation covering the history of linux and unix:

https://video.strongthany.cc/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo&t=4m58s

> [Then things changed...] the internet happened. That inetd model was great when [you were dealing with a small amount of stuff going on], like, [only a few users would have telnet connections] ...The web looked like it would work that way too, and then it became really really popular. And so you end up with situations where forking off a process to handle every single connection doesn't really scale that well.

Many Mastodon server users and admins have mentioned that the load from all the new users is causing a strain on the system -- large outbound queues, delays on messages, slow page load times, etc.

The good news is that these problems don't have to be solved by buying a more powerful computer.

The Mastodon software uses an old (circa 90s and earlier) way of organizing its code, which I like to call "one-thread-per-request with blocking IO"

One of them is GoToSocial, which I see as a dark horse poised to surpass Mastodon and become the best general purpose Fediverse server implementation.

https://nlnet.nl/project/GoToSocial/

Congrats to everyone who has worked incredibly hard to make that project a reality!