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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Well, centralization and giving up your freedoms, letting someone else control you, is always kinda easy. Same applies to all the other big tech companies and their platforms. I’d say it applies to other aspects of life, too.

    And I’d say it’s not far off from the usual setup. If you had a port forward and DynDns like lots of people have, the Dns would automatically update, you’d need to make sure the port forward is activated if you got a new router, but that’s pretty much it.

    But sure. if it’s too inconvenient to put in the 5 minutes of effort it requires to set up port forwarding everytime you move, I also don’t see an alternative to tunneling. Or you’d need to pay for a VPS.




  • I found that. Seems it mainly addresses caching and database performance, adds some admin and moderation commands. I’m not sure if it addresses any of the shortcomings I have.

    My main question is: Which one is going to be maintained in the years to come and have the latest features implemented? And secondly: Why a fork? Why don’t they contribute their fixes upstream to Conduit?





  • I installed it like 2 weeks ago. As of now it’s still running and has a really low memory footprint compared to Synapse. But a lot of things aren’t implemented. Chatting works fine. I get a lot of warning messages about not implemented things, though. Like my client (FluffyChat) trying to query some profile status … I’d say try it. I’ve done so. But I can really only give some good advise after a few more weeks of using it. Maybe there is a dealbreaker.



  • Yes, you’d damage the car’s electrical system. First of all it’s not designed to feed in energy through that outlet. It’s made to output energy.

    And most importantly: 24V is way too much. 2 times the intended voltage would fry most electronics. Your stereo, the power steering, airbags, … There is a good margin and car electronics are designed to be pretty robust, but you’re pushing it.

    I think they’re still fine because what happens is your car battery absorbs that extra voltage. But it’s really dangerous. On a sunny day you’ll charge your car battery beyond the 14V or so the chemistry can handle. And at that point it’ll degrade fast. The acid in there is going to start to boil, producing hydrogen, so in addition to a destroyed battery, you’re in for a small explosion if you’re very unlucky. And once the battery is gone it’ll start frying the cars electronics because now there isn’t anything keeping the voltage down.

    Get a switch that exclusively connects either the car or the solar panel to the bluetti. One switch that switches between two things, not an On/Off switch. And make sure it’s rated for the current.

    Edit: Or a relais that toggles between both. It can switch if there’s power on the 12V rail, and connect the bluetti to either or.





  • As of now all advice here is kinda missing the point or wrong… (Exept the one recommendation to do updates ;-) I wouldn’t use Cloudflare as it’s really bad for freedom, watches your traffic and most interesting things aren’t even in the free/cheap plans… You can’t restrict connections to the “Established state” or you can’t ever connect to your server… And SSH is a safe protocol. Just depends on the strength of your passwords… And yeah, opening ports is never 100% safe. Neither is using computers. They can be hacked but that’s not helping… And I’d agree using Wireguard or Tailscale would help. But you already said you don’t want a VPN…

    I didn’t have a proper look at the Forgejo Docker container. I’d say it’s safe. It’s probably using keys instead of passwords(?!) I hope they configured it properly if they ship it per default. And it’s running sandboxed in your Docker container anyways and not running a system shell on the machine.

    The issue with SSH is, there are lots of bots scanning the internet for SSH servers and testing passwords all day. Your server will be subject to a constant stream of brute-forcing attempts. Unless you take some precautions. Usually that’s done by blocking attackers after some amount of failed login attempts. This is either preconfigured in your Docker container (you should check, or watch the logs.) Or you’d need to use something like fail2ban on top. Or ignore the additional load and have all your users use good passwords.

    (What I do is use Git over https. That worked out of the box while ssh would have required additional work. But I also have lots of other ports forwarded to several services on my home-server. Including ssh. No VPN, no Cloudflare … I have fail2ban and safe passwords. I’m happy with that.)


  • It depends on the exact specs of your old laptop. Especially the amount of RAM and VRAM on the graphics card. It’s probably not enough to run any reasonably smart LLM aside from maybe Microsoft’s small “phi” model.

    So unless it’s a gaming machine and has 6GB+ of VRAM, the graphics card will probably not help at all. Without, it’s going to be slow. I recommend projects that are based on llama.cpp or use it as a backend, for that kind of computers. It’s the best/fastest way to do inference on slow computers and CPUs.

    Furthermore you could use online-services or rent a cloud computer with a beefy graphics card by the hour (or minute.)


  • I think I can agree with that. For me it’s a bit the other way around. My friends aren’t on Discord. But the network effect is kind of hard to overcome. I’d say you can learn about privacy and new (to you) software and protocols by spending two or three evenings of your life. But convincing all your friends so it becomes any fun is considerably harder. I’d just name the actual issue, then. Otherwise people confuse it with Linux or Signal/Matrix/whatever being harder to operate.


  • Well, the obvious answer to nearly all those broad questions is: “It depends…”

    But I mean what “work” and “effort”? I mean using Matrix isn’t exactly hard… You need to install an App, register for an account, think of a password and log in… That’s pretty much the same complexity as with Facebook or Discord?!

    Surely issueing big tech companies a blank cheque for your life is easy. And you get free services in return. But I don’t think using privacy respecting services and even Linux to do your office stuff is substancially more difficult than giving away all your data.