Honestly wonder if it was due to that interview with Jon Stewart where an EFF representative was basically told that if you’re not on Twitter (X) you’re not relevant to the discussion, effectively. While I don’t agree with that, I think that the EFF not leading by example means it’s hard to argue that other people should leave to bluseky or mastodon.

Also, I mean, if people don’t like it they don’t have to use bluseky to use the app you’ve made.🤷‍♀️ It doesn’t really change that some people out there might like to use both.

Wouldn’t it be better to just make downvotes clamp to zero?

I get not liking the rat race of up vs down votes, but the scoring is designed to help spam prevention itself.

I get it, but also the internet sucks these days and it’s hard to make money on advertising alone. I can’t blame a reputable journal for asking for money to see the articles they publish, and since I tolerate all sorts of patreon business models, I have to be realistic in thinking that this is going to be the only path forward for real journalism. It’s a shame, but it just seems to have worked out this way.

Neat but I’m getting errors just loading the page.

A better browsing experience is definitely a nice idea though. I wonder if we couldn’t just improve the UI/UX of the actual peertube web interface though so that all instances benefitted from this work? (For example, allow setting up aggregate indexers on the instance settings (links to json repos) so that channels that exist on other unknown instances can be found quicker.)

The amount of furry / anime content on the front page might be putting off some new users

I don’t see this on mine. Isn’t NSFW enabled by default?

This is why I don’t generally believe in all being a good “starting” view for new users. Local would probably make more sense until the user has subscriptions, and then defaulting to subscriptions once the user has joined communities. This would mean an always active feed to start, prioritizing the “local” community for users to participate in the instance they belong to, while also not bombarding them with content from the firehose.

My 2 cents, probably easier to say what to do than to do it though, being a programmer myself. 😎

Needing more users is fine. Sure, we could always use more friends (or enemies, I guess)

But, ultimately, just having people come here first and then whatever hellhole corpo-media second is at least a step in the right direction. I feel like user activity increasing is a good sign that there’s a lot of people out there investing time in the fediverse instead of the corporate hell-loop social media.

While LOLA is great, I’d really love an established handshake mechanism for having two accounts on two bespoke services represent the same user.

For example, I want to have a pixel fed and mastodon presence that can be authored between the two. However, you currently can’t make two accounts that are effectively linked to each other. I feel like this linking is important for further decentralizing the fediverse (by effectively decentralizing the user itself)

Ah true, I generally avoid all until I’m out of subscribed content or just looking for new communities

Active is basically like old forum logic, where new comments will bump it up back to the top. Scaled is my go to view first as it does a pretty good job balancing out communities of widely different sizes, so smaller communities that you’re subbed to have a chance of having their post be seen if it’s new and larger in upvoter count.

Hot take: the biggest issue is actually ever entering a community and seeing zero comments. Most reddit addiction stems from wanting to read comments, so I think people should add a comment to something if they’re upvoting and they see that the thread has zero comments.

Nothing eliminates enthusiasm like seeing 0 comments on every post in a community, especially if that community is driven by bots.

Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart or Doctor Robotniks Ring Racers. It’s a good time if you have friends and there are still regular players online.

I mean, it seems like Pihole is generally talked about first as a “ad filter” when it’s discussed online and second as a dns resolver. But either way, just saying that the use for that is pretty much overblown and not worth actually trying for a smart tv, for example, where you can’t normally block ads anyway. (Might be nice for preventing software updates, though.)

Depends on how you do it and what you need from it. I’ve actually moved on from my Pihole instance, for reasons I’ll get into later.

The broad appeal of using Pihole for DNS in a homelab is the ability to route services from domain names on the local host. This can be really useful, especially for “hacking” service availability onto other unintended devices. Additionally, it can be nice for less tech-savvy users who might not be comfortable editing /etc/hosts or just want to check out a service on their phone web browser.

I would generally recommend using an isolated device for Pihole needs; If you’re doing work on your home server, you’ll probably want all users on your service to keep their internet connection working to not be a burden to others living in your household (if you have others). A raspberry pi is a really good target for a pihole, and even a cheap old/used one from the interwebs can serve you well (I was using one recently on a pi3b and it was no issue.) Keep in mind that you can’t really do fallback dns configuration unless you’re ok with losing the key feature of pihole (blocking ads and redirecting domains). Notably, I’m actually not a proponent of running all services on individual compute units generally, I just think DNS is special and you don’t really want to tie it into docker services to keep a separation between the services and the server, so to speak.

This brings me to the second feature: adblocking. This one is really a mixed bag. Ultimately, I turned this feature off only because it doesn’t work for the websites that have arguably the most ad content (youtube, twitch) and really only serves to hurt the smaller players. Sometimes it’s great for blocking things like SmartTV advertisements or data encroachments, but it’s very hard to block ads from a web domain in a way that doesn’t outright block the service itself (so blocking youtube ads without blocking youtube is, seemingly, a fools errand.) I’m willing to hear other people’s opinion on this, I just couldn’t get this working to a satisfactory degree.

I’ve abandoned Pihole as a local dns resolver. This is because Tailscale suits my needs and also allows me out-of-house connectivity to things like my music or personal data so my phone never goes out of communication with my home network. When you use tailscale at home, it’s generally really good about routing that through your local network instead of the relay, so there shouldn’t be that many downsides. Note, I say generally, because there have been times where it goes through a relay unexpectedly which I haven’t solved yet (this is likely a local router configuration issue, anyway…)

I notice that you’re already familiar with Pihole, but just thought that it would be best to “explain” my thoughts on it in the form of a recommendation/editorial form.

This is really awesome.

What OS did you flash on that Pixel6 to get it working? Or are you using a linux vm on an android phone?

Hey,

No much to add to this myself but it’s awesome and you should keep up the good work!

The mini rack is pretty decent, but I wish that the size decided was a 12" or so rack, so that more computer hardware could fit without the struggle.

I’m sure more stuff will be made the accommodate this scene though.

Probably. In all honestly, if you are a hexbear user, I’d be keeping a careful eye on who owns the domain when it magically pops back up.

Centralization is a weakness

While I agree with the basic premise of this, I think this is all-the-more a good reason for design solutions around this problem to be discussed so that more competitors can exist. If the fediverse is to expand, there needs to be easy non-technical ways for users to start up a multitude of instances. More of these types of services actually reduces centralization, in that sense.

Corporate internet doesn’t even filter out “uncomfortable” shit for people. They have a vested interest in keeping people engaged whether it’s through love or hate.

This is a misconception I see all the time. Reddit et al try their hardest to make browsing feel like a roller coaster to keep up engagement.