Honestly though I feel like a federated linked in has the same problem as a federated dating site…, or really even federated facebook style social media etc…

Federation can work for something like lemmy, in that we can be useful in spite of a lack of userbase compared to the corporate version. 200 people scattered around the world to talk about linux, or open source works.

Trying to find someone close enough to you to date, or looking for a specialized employee or a close enough to work on site employee on the other hand, is a hell of a stretch.

For me the main point is, syncronization. Point is I want to read on my phone, or if i go to another computer catch up on it. If I set up a seperate RSS reader on each, then I’d have to figure out what’s read and what’s not. Honestly that’s a feature that google reader really had me spoiled in, I loved being able to use a work computer, browse through my rss feeds, star articles that I thought I may want to come back to, go home look at the starred ones and then go back.

Then google reader shut down, and I wanted to be able to do the same again, while also not being vulnerable to another shut down.

I mean it’s a mixed bag… I get the idea of nothing should be removed, blocked, downvoted etc… as the ideal of free speach.

Right up until you look at every platform that explicitly avoids it and goes full “We’re all about free speech!”.

IE huge problem is, the first people to jump to those platforms, are the ones that have been banned for good reason from everywhere else. Which of course means… nazi’s come in droves Reasonable people that either have less borderline, or perhaps no borderline thoughts get there… see 500 posts from nazi’s, and head for the door imidiately, until it just turns into a nazi echo chamber.

I guess my point is federated services, at least prior to a world where they become mainstream, are only particularly good if

1. You have a group of people all willing to use them together (IE Matrix, Friendster etc…), Join as a group don’t expect to find other specific individuals.

2. If you do want to meet people, you are looking for pretty broad categories encompass millions. IE on lemmy you can certainly find an anime community, you won’t find an active jujitsu kaisen community.

Anyway so my point on things like Dating, Linked In etc… those topics are likely to be the last to have a hope in the federation, because their services on their own, require users, but more importantly those users have to be localized (IE dating sites need, both a high volume of users, and those users need to be in close geographical proximity, and have some reasonable male to female ratio, and then have some level of common interests). A linked in needs… job seekers, and companies/head hunters. Of which you can’t expect companies to put in resources without a large userbase… and you can’t expect the userbase to grow without company usage.

Is there even really a function for linkedin without… well what it is? The last people to adopt new and open source tech are… corporate executives, and to my knowledge the whole point of linked in is, a psudo job hunting web page, with some social media pages as a secondary (of which people are only going to be posting “work hard” and “I work hard” kind of messages because… well they’d never post something that might make them less attractive to employers.

I guess the point is, what’s the use of an open non corporate controlled linked in? I can convince a handful of friends to maybe join a facebook alternative to make it useful, Lemmy certainly is an ok reddit alternative, at least for the equivelant of bigish communities, and mid sized tech communities.

Things I don’t see working in federation, are things that you are looking for… well people that aren’t going to switch for you… and most importantly people geographically close to you. Companies aren’t going to use their HR members time searching for people on a niche career site, dating sites are likely lost causes because… well no matter how bad the sites are… a dating site where most people are 300 miles away from the nearest compatible person isn’t going to be of much use, and job seekers don’t have the luxury of moving before the companies they want to work for go.

I mean DNS is always the issue… but then that’s kind of the double edged sword as well isn’t it?

Conceptually 4 options come to mind.

1. DNS as current - weakness domain name changes or DNS outages or poisoning

2. IP address - Issues, migration etc… some instances may need to move services etc…

3. SSL private/public keys - probably the strongest I’d imagine. only real weakness I can see is… 1. it has no ability to find a server, and I guess if a server is hacked and it’s private key is stolen, federated servers would not be able to spot the imposter.

I do think 3 might be the strongest option. I don’t know anything on how lemmy etc… works. I’d imagine a strategy would be, When A and B federate with eachother, A records B’s Domain name, IP, and public key (and B gets A’s as well), if DNS goes down attempt recorded IP. If neither work wait for an incoming connection and if the new connections public key matches an existing public key, it assumes the identity.

But as far as the user side I don’t really know. Obviously we can only match users as their domains. I can’t imagine how I could find you again with gammaray@sh.itjust.works when sh.itjust.works domain is unregistered.

It’s been a long time, but… wordpress is all sql isn’t it? Shouldn’t it just be, make a backup of the mysql database on the old server, install mysql and restore the database to the new server, and then point the word press servers configuration to the new database?

IMO I don’t see why you get a second human involved. Store the database in an encrypted form… save a copy to some cloud service. Why count on another human for it

I’ve long since switched to foundry, but I used to use

https://www.rptools.net/toolbox/maptool/

It’s not web based, but the clients are available for linux mac and windows,

Not sure that really works for git though… at least with regards to it’s primary usage.

git isn’t just a backup… it’s about version control.

IE the point is if you know what you are doing, you realize this function isn’t working in this edge case, you can search through and find out, when did this part of this file change… and what was it before, and it will basically find exactly that.

If you encrypted it so that git couldn’t actually read the contents, then you basically reduced a crazy powerful tool, into a glorified dropbox. (IE yeah you could revert back to previous versions… but you’d basically be counting on your memory for what you changed when, if the git server can’t read the files).

I guess for me it kind of depends on your definition of “self host” as 90% of what I host is a hetzner server running out of finland. because well that’s off site backups lol.

my setup is.

Local: Frigate (CCTV manager), Homeassistant (home automation), Matrix (chat).

Remote: Mealie (recipe collection), Vaultwarden (works with bitwarden clients), Nextcloud (files and documents), Freshrss, gitea (github alternative)

Now in terms of wanting an offsite backup, you are probably right, assuming you don’t have something offsite that you can syncronize with, and assuming you don’t have any major privacy fears of what is hosted, those things are probably best to use cloud for, assuming you are more worried of losing everything in a house fire, than you are of say the stuff being spied on by a 3rd party or caught by hackers.

So yeah I’d say, personally in things I like to have self hosted… on site, probably I’d say a local messanger is good if you’d like a reasonably private communication for friends/family etc… Niche things like RSS readers, or recipe books, really anything strange niche you can probably search for some program to self host it.

IMO the learning curve for caddy is almost non existent, and just about anything you might want to selfhost almost certainly has a quick simple caddy configuration you can copy paste with just updating the relevant domain. Personally learning curve for caddy was probably way lower than figuring out the edge cases of apache that I was using before

It’s called amazon web services.

In short there’s 3 major cloud providers

Amazon Web Services

Google Cloud Platform

Microsoft Azure

All 3 basically do the same thing, real simplified version of it. it’s kind of a giant pool of server resources that are leased to you by demand. So say if you are netflix and have 100 million people watching the day a new series drops, but then only have 1 million watching tuesday night, they pay based on how much is currently being used, rather than having to set everything to handle peak, but be idle 90% of the time.

again yeah it’s expensive for most purposes… and one can argue how bad it is on the whole, but it is kind of what most companies have been using for a lot of things for the last 15 years.

Can we like, maybe normalize adding descriptions of the product to these announcements? On the blogs of these apps pages that’s one thing, but on selfhosted forums etc… where we are drawing attention to the product of which many aren’t familiar with… a 2 sentence summary of what the product is before going into the long changelog, would make everyone so happy.

I mean I agree… it’s kind of the constant crux isn’t it?

The IT nerds pick a protocol that’s uncontrolled, you need to select options and servers, because… well obviously that’s kind of the definition of uncontrolled.

Some big name with big VC backing makes a big platform, makes it simple as possible, no choices, no control but good defaults. Average joes all flock there, build huge communities, users happy. Obviously the bulk of the creative types, celebrities etc… that most people care about flock there.

Big corp or VCs start demanding more monetization, or political censorship, or whatever kind of enshittification they inevitably always will. Users complain, but it all continues to amplify… open communities announce “hey we’ve got our alternative here”, they say “thanks but nah that’s too complicated, and you don’t have the users that I want to see anyway”. People complain more… and either adapt and accept the enshitification as normal… or maybe another big VC backed individual or other corp opens an alternative and pulls off the impossible critical mass goal, and process repeats.

I don’t really know the solution, just know the pattern. Bluesky is IMO the new twitter… fundimentally I don’t see it as super different than the old twitter. Only way I really see everything working is if say… a corporate backed giant actually played nicely and allowed interoperability with a federated protocol that’s actually… well hostable.

It’s basically like exactly what happens out in the real world… walmart comes offers better convenience and lower prices than local competitors… local economy adapts to walmart, individual stores shut down… half of owners, etc… forced to working for walmart for garbage pay.

I mean, I’d imagine probably not a good one :) Somehow I imagine asking the AI to record a conversation, is an instant arguement escalator… as is asking to read the facts back, and usually the topic would be switched rather than one side admitting their fault in the conversation.

Actually I think there’s a black mirror episode on roughly that (not a device for recording audio when asked, but everyone having a chip in their head that automatically records their memories, and a huge fight when a husband discovers his wife deleted a few hours of recordings.

half sarcastic but the overall premise of rigging something in to a local voice assistant, when an arguement starts “Ok nabu record this conversation”. then 2 weeks later on another arguement… “OK nabu search our last arguement for the cabinet”. Would be like having a court transcriber on call.

I think you are massively overestimating how many of his fans would go anywhere, and how long they tag along. I used to play a social deduction game town of Salem, can’t say I know exactly how large the playerbase was… but I’d estimate it on the lower side, probably significantly under 50k. There were a few times Pewdiepie did a video on the game, and yeah, he was a pain in the ass, because he didn’t try to learn the game, so his video was basically him trolling around in the game screaming random stuff, completely ruining things for people who wanted to play the game, and players could basically count on a few days afterwards of, having games ruined by his fans doing the same crap of course. However it certainly wasn’t millions of them, within a few days the game mostly went back to normal… with if anything a slight boost to the number of players, because a handful stuck around and actually learned the game.

and again this is with much longer ago pewdiepie… way younger fanbase, way larger more active following. Today’s pewdiepie, that’s still following, and I guess bothering to pay attention to his videos on rigging up gadgets with raspberry pi’s, and installing archlinux with hyprland, and apparently this one on getting off google. I’d imagine… the amount of people following him are going to be waay smaller than that, he hasn’t been doing gaming videos in at least a year, seems to be more of basic tech comentary and general lifestyle location things.

So in short, if he did a lemmy push, first off I’d imagine actually the blip from it being very small. Unless steam charts suddenly show 100 million new archlinux users or something, I can guess his influence today is probably pretty small, and second the type of people he’d attract are probably also drastically different than the edgy teen base we remember him for, and lastly even at his peak of popularity and immaturity, the influx wasn’t quite as big as you are thinking it is.

and then his allegedly support of nazis.

The nazi one IMO was pretty BS. Largely it came from him playing a game, and commenting that other people were trolling putting up swastika’s etc…

Which I’ll admit, he handled the criticism poorly, did mostly the wrong things because he found it more of a joke than a real thing. He rightly noted that one of the critics was JK Rowling, who he fairly pointed out had no business calling anyone such. When Charlottsville happened is when he actually gave what I considered a pretty sincere fair apology where he basically noted, "holy shit I thought I was being accused of something that didn’t exist, I didn’t realize that nazi’s are actually still so prevelant in modern society so I wasn’t taking things seriously.

Now afterwords him dropping the n bomb on a stream was pretty damn bad, though he apologized and admitted it. Still kind of falls into the fact that he’d been paid for years to join in games with a bunch of edgy teenagers, and at the end of the day if you spend too much time with a group of people, you are going to slip up and talk like them.

Again not calling him a great guy or anything, but I’d say everything in him strikes me as a kid that never grew up (because his life was basically set up encouraging him not to), didn’t understand the weight of a lot of the things he was around, and made a bunch of childish stupid mistakes.

Valid… but also have to point out he hit big as a celebrity. When you are literally raking in millions of dollars. He was about 21 when he started his channel. and bottom line is, he got views, he got likes, and it turned into real cash. Most of our jobs etc… encourage us to grow up. His job, rewarded him for catering to his base… which of were younger than him.