The title of this post is “Loops - short form video wtih ActivityPub - is now open source!”

To mean they’ve published the source code to the public. Reading further, I see “First alpha release” a couple times, meaning the project is in its very early stages and is just now in a state where the developer can upload it to Github for access by the public.

Viewing said Github repository, I find it is licensed under the AGPL, a strongly copyleft license. This software will be free to use, distribute, examine and modify forever under those terms. Looks like the intention here is for the software to be Stallman-style “Free.”

So you have apparently pissed your panties at the mere usage of the words “open source” in which case I’m not even going to bother to try telling you to go touch grass. You’re too far gone.

Removed by mod

Another salvo fired in the battle between Perfect and its mortal enemy, Good.

It is my understanding Bluesky outright is not decentralized. It may have an API that allows satellite instances but if the main official instance goes down the platform dies.

Mastodon, Lemmy and their siblings are decentralized in that no one instance is sacred. If sh.ijust.works were to go offline right now, the rest of Lemmy would keep right on trucking. Hell, all of “Lemmy” could die and Mastodon and Peertube et al would keep right on trucking.

Yeah I hold a general class amateur radio license, and that’s helped me wrap my head around how it works. And I’ve still got a lot of "somehow"s in my understanding.

I just ordered a couple of meshtastic transceivers. Here’s what it is:

LoRa is a patented radio technique that uses some kind of fancy spread spectrum technique to give very low power sub-GHz UHF radio somewhat impressive range. We’re used to a single Wi-Fi access point being able to cover about the size of a large-ish house with wireless data. I can’t pick up my house Wi-Fi in my workshop at the back of my suburban property. LoRa manages to reach out several miles on the same amount of power as a Wi-Fi signal. The tradeoff is bandwidth. A typical Wi-Fi connection can stream video, LoRa isn’t really practical for much more than text messaging. It is my understanding that it’s designed to do things like industrial telemetry.

On top of this is built Meshtastic, an open source mesh networking protocol. You buy a little circuit board that’s got a microcontroller, a LoRa transceiver and a bluetooth transceiver. You flash the Meshtastic firmware to it, and now it is a “node.” “Nodes” can be configured in several ways, but in general they’ll sit there and scream into the void looking for other nodes. Messages sent are like “Tell John I say hello. Pass this on Three times.” If your node hears that message, it will automatically transmit “Tell John I say hello. pass this on Two times.” So in that way, nodes can automatically act as repeaters.

So they have astonishing range for their band and power, and the automatic relaying of messages means a message can propagate pretty far. Mind you, it has limitations similar to old school SMS; a message is pretty strictly limited to something like 288 characters, including emoji.

Many “nodes” don’t have much of an onboard UI; some do but the main intended way for the user to access a node is over bluetooth from the Meshtastic app running on an Android or iOS device. Some units do have onboard UIs or can host a web interface accessed via wi-fi or ethernet.

Meshtastic essentially forms an ad-hoc off-grid SMS-like service. The bandwidth is simply too low to allow anything like web hosting, audio or video. At a ham convention, several hundred nodes saturated the available bandwidth just with procedural pings leaving no room for actual traffic.

Encryption is permitted on this network, I wouldn’t exactly plan a coup over Meshtastic but I think I could coordinate meeting friends at a restaurant without being stalked.

If your project is to abandon the internet, this may be one of many tools necessary.

Or is it a “mode” of KDE? Like can you use a distro of KDE and then put it into Bigscreen mode?

From what I’ve seen, it means a bunch of bitching.

does it only effect privates? what about officers, like, say, captains?

I wonder how much of that has to do wtih chromebooks.

I do not know what those are.

I do want to use that machine for gaming, though more demanding games will be played on my main desktop machine. One thing about that GTX-1080 is it’s a blower-style card, and the Node 202 case …kind of needs it. Not a lot of ways for hot air to escape that case especially in the GPU bay, and I haven’t seen a retail blower-style GPU since the GTX-10 series.

Docker also isn’t available in the package manager for this thing, probably for similar arbitrary reasons; unless it would need to be side loaded.

I’m not buying another commercially made NAS after this one dies/is remotely bricked by Synology.

It’s a Model DS218. I don’t see Container Manager in the software center for it. Apparently there’s some hack workaround for this but…meh.

Managing your own AV equipment has always been a pain in the ass.

Remember when programming a VCR was a stand-up comedy joke?

Vine only lasted like 6 seconds.

When talking about hardware, the physical computer itself, a “server” is commercial grade and designed to run under heavy loads for years on end with very high reliability. Error correcting RAM, redundant power supplies, room inside for huge processors, more airflow than a C-130 for cooling, etc.

On the software side, a “server” is just a computer that provides some service to users on a network. You very likely have one of those Wi-Fi router/ethernet switch things from the likes of Linksys or whatever, right? That is almost certainly acting as a DHCP server for you LAN, in that capacity it might handle kilobytes of data a day because dynamically assigning IP addresses on a household Wi-Fi network is not a very demanding task, so it’ll do it on a tiny little ARM processor with a few MB of RAM. It probably also has a web server, which is how the “go to its IP address in your browser and get to your router settings page” works. It’s serving a little website that most of the time gets absolutely zero traffic.

So, turning a desktop PC into a “server.” The question is, what services will it provide? Desktop PCs are pretty good at mostly low traffic with bursts of intense work, so if they’re going to sit still doing nothing while you’re at work all day, and then maybe handle some file storage or media transcoding during the evenings while you’re home, a PC will do that just fine, if you’re okay paying the power bill of having a computer up and running all the time.

If you’re hosting a website or a game server with a lot of active users around the clock, you might want to look into more professional hardware.

It can, but is it likely to? To get my passwords, you’d need my KeePass database itself, which is only stored on computers I own. To unlock my password database, you need my password, which I have not stored digitally anywhere, and you’d need to have the keyfile. Oh which of the hundreds of thousands of files on my system is the keyfile?

So you’ve gotten my password database open. Critical things like my lynchpin email address and banking accounts just aren’t in there. Those I memorize only. All of the “This would be bad if this got compromised” accounts have 2-factor authentication.

Compared to breaking into a retailer or bank’s servers and getting hundreds of thousands if not millions of credentials, that’s a lot of effort to get one guy’s Lemmy account deets.

There’s a couple youtubers that mirror their content on PeerTube. The Giddy Stitcher for example uploads to Makertube.net