big fan of mini PC’s

Same, but just be careful if you venture outside of the “reputable” vendors.

I bought one recently from Aliexpress, and while it’s perfectly functional, it’s using an ethernet chipset that doesn’t have in-kernel drivers so I have to keep compiling new drivers for it every time the kernel upgrades.

Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that I could do without, and not something a slightly more expensive version of what I got would have.

Search will never search non-local content.

Which is the point I’m trying to make: right now, you cannot use search as a discoverability medium, unless you’re on something the scale of mastodon.social.

Search with a focus on new content discoverability is utterly useless for smaller or single user instances, because a search that only finds things you already know about isn’t exactly a useful search for discoverability.

If I have to be on the biggest instances, then there’s very little difference between something like Bluesky and Mastodon in terms of usability, and uh, I might as well pick the one that’s more likely to have the most growth and diversity of content.

We have to give up on the idea of having easy and direct access to the whole of thw fediverse.

I agree, and it’s why I’ve pretty much migrated back to centralized services with the exception of Lemmy, because Lemmy works very well in terms of finding useful shit to follow in a way that literally no other federated platform does.

Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place,

They’re also subject to interpretation, regulatory capture, as well as just plain being ignored when it’s sufficiently convenient for the regulators to do so.

“There ought to be a law!” is nice, but it’s not a solution when there’s a good couple of centuries of modern regulatory frameworks having had existed, and a couple centuries of endless examples of where absolutely none of it matters when sufficient money and power is in play.

Like, for example, the GDPR: it made a lot of shit illegal under penalty of company-breaking penalties.

So uh, nobody in the EU has had their personal data misused since it was passed? And all the big data brokers that are violating it have been fined out of business?

And this is, of course, ignoring the itty bitty little fact that you have to be aware of the misuse of the data: if some dude does some shady shit quietly, then well, nobody knows it happened to even bring action?

How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?

I think what they’re saying is that the ideal wouldn’t be to force everyone to host their own, but rather for the people who want to run stuff to offer them to their friends and family.

Kinda like how your mechanic neighbor sometimes helps you do shit on your car: one person shares a skill they have, and the other person also benefits. And then later your neighbor will ask you to babysit their kids, and shit.

Basically: a very very goofy way of saying “Hey! Do nice things for your friends and family, because that’s kinda how life used to work.”

The problem I ran into is that every single platform that primarily interacted with Mastodon (The keys, etc.) had the same exact same set of problems.

While yes, my Firefish instance had search, what was it searching? Local data only, and once I figured out that Mastodon-style replies didn’t federate to all of someone’s followers, it became pretty clear that it was uh, not very useful.

You can search, but any given server may or may not have access to data you actually want and thus, well, you just plain cannot meaningfully search for shit unless you go to one of the mega instances, or join giant piles of relays and store gigabyte upon gigabyte upon gigabyte of garbage data you do not care about.

The whole implementation is kinda garbage for search-based discovery from it’s very basic design all the way through to everyone’s implementations.

For me, it’s full text search.

I tend to want to find an opinion on something very specific, so if I can just toss a phrase or model number or name of something into a search field and get actual non-AI, non-advertisement, non-stupid-shit results, that’d be absolutely ideal.

Like, say, how Google worked 15 years ago.

Install it and use it?

Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).

It’s very centralized, but it’s not that different from what you’d have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.

Though really you shouldn’t do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate “microblog” shit because it’s designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)

15 million Series A financing

Maybe shitty corporate search engines are failing me, but has there been a stated valuation for Bluesky? Googling 'Bluesky valuation" or any combination thereof is a problem since that’s a business term so lol, lmao, search engine worthless.

$8m seed + $15m A series may be a shockingly small amount of equity, or it could be the whole damn company but I’m just not seeing it actually posted anywhere.

Two thoughts come to mind:

1. If it’s there and you aren’t having it shoved down your throat, then that’s still a VAST improvement over Twitter, which has gone from shitty social media to blatant hate indoctrination platform.

and

2. Did you just now discover that most people are shitty? I always assumed most people figured that out at 13 or 14.

The master-omnibus image bundles all that into a single container is MUCH simpler to deploy.

Literally just used their compose file they provide at https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny/blob/master/docker/example.omnibus.docker-compose.yml and added in the device names and was done.

Are uptimekuma and whatever you’re trying to monitor on the same physical hardware, or is it all different kit?

My first feeling is that you’ve got some DNS/routing configuration that’s causing issues if you’re leaving your local network and then going through two layers before coming back in, especially if you have split horizon DNS.

Wonder if the hamburders are cold.

For sure, just wanted to mention that it’s not just the China side of the trip you need to be vigilant about.

If your device is out of your sight, then yeah, you should probably assume it’s compromised.

Of course, that’s hardly JUST China doing funky shit with your devices, but depending where you’re calling home, odds are customs/immigration when you head home will try to do the exact same thing, too.

And the answer to everything is yes, always use a VPN if you don’t trust the network and you should never trust the network.

Judging from the last time I looked at their comment platform, it had the feeling that the only users of it were ones that were banned from Youtube because of the toxic shit they’re wanting to post so I mean, I guess, but it’s not the experience you’re wanting, probably.

Does !12345:p do what you want?

Edit: that also makes hitting the up arrow result in whatever command that was, so if you wanted to edit the line or whatever, you could !12345:p, up, then edit and execute.

Uh, are you sure your shell you’re using is bash and not zsh or something else?

Bash is indeed just !12345.

Why not save time and do it the other way?

Install the minimal/netinstall image, and then add what you need.

You’ll probably spend less time adding than trying to figure out what’s installed that you do or don’t need and trying to remove random packages without breaking anything.

Obama was the last Democrat to run on change in the system

And, even then, he enacted a shockingly small amount of actual change.

He had the majority long enough that he could have codified Roe V. Wade, and increased the minimum wage, and done UHC and all sorts of shit, but he wanted to policy wonk both-sides across the aisle cooperation shit, and well, ended up passing the Republican version of UHC and bailing out billionaires, which really doesn’t exactly reflect hope and/or change.

I’m not saying he didn’t have problems, or that he had an endless mandate, or that he did nothing, but mostly that the “best” democratic president in damn near 30 years who had the biggest mandate you’re probably going to find in modern politics still did a shockingly little amount of anything to improve or harden the government against clear nutters - the Tea Party was showing up, so it was or should have been blindingly obvious where that was going to end up eventually going.

I don’t buy the ® “do nothing democrats” line, but boy, they certainly make it hard to refute that claim in any form that’s not a 1000 word essay which is why it plays so very well on TV/news/Twitter.

While I’m mostly sure it parody, its gotten really hard to tell lately.