SavvyWolf

It still looks like you’re relying on IP addresses, which means if you want to host a Plebbit server (sorry, “always on peer”) you need one of the following:

• Use a hosting provider, which is something you want to avoid according to your pitch.
• Serve it from your own personal network under your own IP. Given that you’re worried about censorship from even the DNS system, I imagine this is something you absolutely don’t want to do.

Imagine Bob is hosting a community about cat pictures, and I want to send him a picture of my cat to forward to other followers of that community.

How do I:

• Locate bob given a name or some other ID
• Verify that it is indeed Bob (and not someone pretending to be Bob)
• Prove to Bob that I am indeed who I say I am
• Send that cat picture without anyone in the middle snooping on it

All of this in a political environment that bans the sharing of cat pictures.

With Plebbit there’s no global admins like Reddit, so you fully own your community and nobody can take it away from you.

I mean, that’s true of Lemmy and any other message board type system based on ActivityPub and ATProto. From a technical standpoint, there is no central authority on them.

My question is… What does this do that ActivityPub and ATProto doesn’t do? That’s the angle you should approach this from (and be ready to defend… People on Lemmy seem adamant that ActivityPub is perfect and unbeatable…). We’re technical people here, sell it as a technical solution to a problem rather than using buzzwords or comparing it to Bitcoin.

You’ve mentioned serverless many times, but ultimately I need to send content somewhere and ask someone to send me content. I can’t just throw my posts into the wind and expect someone else to get them. So how do I make a post if not by sending it to a trusted person?

If I wanted to self host a search engine, I’d just use a proper one that actually searches content rather than regurgitates bullshit.

Search engines worked just fine until Google and Microsoft decided that they wanted to sell their AI products.

Ehh… I’ll do it tomorrow.

I like the idea of simple apps, but does their website have to have that silly dvd bouncing thing obstructing text? Especially since it starts playing sound if you interact with it wrong.

In regards to full system backups, there’s no real need to back up the OS itself. Canonical will give you a clean Ubuntu install if you ask then nice enough, after all. Personally, the risk of having to spend an afternoon reconfiguring my system isn’t that big a deal compared to the storage and time needed to back up an entire image.

I know systems generate a lot of “cruft” in terms of instslled programs and tweaked configurations over time which can be hard to keep track of and remember. But imo that should be avoided at all costs because it leads to compatibility and security issues.

For backing up databases, there’s scripts like automysqlbackup and pg_dump which will export a database to an sql file which can be easily backed up without worrying about copying a broken file.

I actually recently set up borgmatic earlier today and I’d recommend it except for the fact that you seem to be using Docker, and I’m not sure how best to backup containers.

Daily backups here. Storage is cheap. Losing data is not.

I think a peer to peer model could work for social media, but if you’re trying to sell it using a pepe meme, I’m not interested…

But fundamentally… Why not implement what you’re thinking ontop of ActivityPub or ATProto than rolling your own thing? None of the issues you’ve described facing them are particularly insurmountable. They just need a bit of devwork.

I think convention is for files served by the server to go in /srv or even /usr/lib.

None, I use Nix instead. :P