yeah…

They asked for easy, or newbie friendly - and didn’t particularly mention privacy concerns.

Other than that, if they don’t have a port 80/433 ingress from their ISP there are scarce simple solutions that don’t require another server that also needs management, either by them or a corporate entity.

back when i was on a DOCSIS modem, i noticed concurrent downloads would disrupt uploads and vice versa. i think this may depend on the type of connection OP has.

I used to work at a cable company, that was either a problem that people with low SNR had. Either from external factors (tree branch on a cable line) or in-home ones (bad splitter). A modem will ramp up it’s gain in order to offset this (to a point), and in so doing, create a lot more interference between channels. OR they were hitting their ingress rate limit (which is quite agressive on residential plans because DDOS’es). It’s surprisingly easy to hit your ingress rate limit for modern http/https webservers hosting complex web apps. Lots of concurrent connections open up to try to download all the resources when you go to any website in a modern browser and while it’s not a TON of data, the short period of time causes the traffic to easily hit the PPS/BPS rate limit that ISPs employ.

But yeah, it all depends on the ISP.

I’d argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It’s basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.

I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to “gigabit cable” with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn’t good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.

Also agree that it’s not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.

deleted by creator

The best “bang for the buck” in your use-case is to use Nextcloud - Nextcloud Talk is your Jitsi replacement, and the files feature can be extended with the Nextcloud Photos plugin (https://github.com/nextcloud/photos).

As for your domain question:

1. You should use any computer you’d like that meets the Nextcloud recommendations, the key is of course isolating this machine on your home network so any “funny business” stays on the server. You can do this with VLANs or an entirely separate LAN connected to a different WAN (ISP).

2. Many places, I like porkbun.com for real custom domains for cheap, but for your use case, you might be able to use a Dynamic DNS provider for free. It just likely won’t be an easy to remember URL (or at least, as easy as a root domain only). If you have a newer ASUS or Netgear router/modem they both have Dynamic DNS built in and you can select from a few different providers that have both free and paid tiers. ALSO it might be better to use Google Domains (now squarespace domains) since, IIRC, many DynDNS configs for routers support Google Domains too. Cloudflare can also be a decent registrar, and I’d recommend using them if you use any other cloudflare services (see below).

3. Other things to consider: Your ISP may block port 80, meaning lots of issues. If this is the case, you might want to use a tunnel of some sort. Cloudflare has a great solution here. Even if they don’t block port 80, they may aggressively throttle and shape your incoming traffic - causing issues. Again, the tunnel is a good solution here. And, of course, your upload bandwidth matters a lot, you’ll need something around 100Mbps upload for a decent experience when accessing your stuff over the internet. The 30Mbps that’s typical of DOCSIS modems won’t cut it. Outside of these concerns it’s all about making sure you isolate your server from your “home stuff” to keep things secure.

I mean sure maybe 10 years ago. But most static sites like blogs and such can fit entirely on a cloudflare page worker under the free tier. Or heck, even the free allotment on AWS S3 or other object storage providers.

I mean, perhaps this isn’t a static site and it’s built on some sort of CMS and has a postgres database in the background. In that case it probably runs around $5 to $10 a month.

Of course, this all presumes that the person setting this up is fairly savvy about the offerings available. I see a lot of people making silly decisions in this space, thinking that they need some full fat virtual private server, when all they really need is an object storage bucket behind a DNS c-name.

I guess I didn’t really see the pressure that they were under.

I hope they heal! But it’s a bummer that such an excellent resource will be taken down.

I wish more creators were willing to hand their creations to someone who wishes to continue it. But oftentimes, I fear that it’s far too entwined with a person’s identity for that to be common occurrence.

Lucky! I wish I had symmetrical fiber with all the ports available.

I totally have a server capable of hosting a LOT of things but lack the upload to make use of it. I’m considering transferring to a rack mount and sending it to be colocated at a datacenter within driving distance.

You missed one:

ISP - Internet Service Provider

Eh, but then he won’t learn anything. I’ve never found that response acceptable. It just perpetuates the problem. To each their own though!

On a technical level, user count matters less than the user count and comment count of the instances you subscribe to. Too many subscriptions can overwhelm smaller instances and saturate a network from the perspective of Packets Per Second and your ISPs routing capacity - not to mention your router. Additionally, most ISPs block traffic traffic going to your house on Port 80 - so you’d likely need to put it behind a cloudflare tunnel for anything resembling reliability. Your ISP may be different and it’s always worth asking what restrictions they have on self-hosted services (non-business use-cases specifically). Otherwise going with your ISP’s business plan is likely a must. Outside of that, yes, you’ll need a beefy router or switch (or multiple) to handle the constant packets coming into your network.

Then there’s a security aspect. What happens if you’re site is breached in a way that an attacker gains remote execution? Did you make sure to isolate this network from the rest of your devices? If not, you’re in for a world of hurt.

These are all issues that are mitigated and easier to navigate on a VPS or cloud provider.

As for the non-technical issues:

There’s also the problem of moderation. What I mean by that is that, as a server owner you WILL end up needing to quarantine, report, and submit illegal images to the authorities. Even if you use a whitelist of only the most respectable instances. It might not happen soon, but it’s only a matter of time before your instance happens to be subscribed to a popular external community while it gets a nasty attack. Leaving you to deal with a stressful cleanup.

When you run this on a homelab on consumer hardware, it’s easier for certain government entities to claim that you were not performing your due diligence and may even be complicit in the content’s proliferation. Now, of course, proving such a thing is always the crux, but in my view I’d rather have my site running on things that look as official as possible. The closer it resembles what an actual business might do, the better I think I’d fare under a more targeted attack - from a legal/compliance standpoint.

I dunno, my OLED panel has some notable image retention issues - and a screensaver does appear to help in that regard.

Eh, I went back to screen savers due to my use of OLED panels. Better than a static lock-screen image for sure.

I dunno what this GM is doing but I find that ChatGPT (GPT4 particularly) does wonderfully as long as you clearly define what you are doing up front, and remember that context can “fall off” in longer threads.

Anyways, here’s a paraphrasing of my typical prompt template:

I am running a Table Top RPG game in the {{SYSTEM}} system, in the {{WORLD SETTING}} universe. Particularly set before|after|during {{WORLD SETTING DETAILED}}.

The players are a motley crew that include:

{{ LIST OF PLAYERS AND SHORT DESCRIPTIONS }}

The party is currently at {{ PLACE }} - {{ PLACE DETAILS }}

At present the party is/has {{ GAME CONTEXT / LAST GAMES SUMMARY }}

I need help with:

{{ DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF TASK FOR CHAT GPT }}

It can get pretty long, but it seems to do the trick for the first prompt - responses can be more conversational until it forgets details - which takes a while on GPT4.

Thank you for the measured take on this.

You are correct, I don’t intend to pressure or cause harm! But I certainly see the results, and it is indeed pressure. As another commenter pointed out, there are many instance admins who work a bit closer to the team on the Matrix chatrooms and that’s their preferred method of communication. Now that I know this, I’ll let things cool down and join myself. I definitely intend to contribute where I can in the codebase, and I wouldn’t dream of escalating to public pressure for smaller concerns.

However, I have a slight, and perhaps pedantic disagreement about making changes. In this case, the request was for not making a change. If it weren’t for the fact that the feature was already ripped out it would be as simple as not removing it (or in this case re-working it a bit). I understand that it isn’t the current reality, and that it required work to revert - and if not for a ton of spambots, I think It would’ve been easier to adapt.

Ultimately it will take time to discuss workarounds and help others implement them, and the deadline is ultimately the arrival of the version that drops the older captcha (or was, in this case - it’s getting merged back in as we speak - might even be done now). With that reality, I had a sense that this could be an existential problem for the early Threadiverse.

I definitely didn’t intend to suggest that the Devs were in any way at fault here. I read the github issues enough to come with the takeaway was that the feedback they were receiving seemed to be “Admins and devs alike are okay moving forward and opinions to the contrary are minimal, let’s move forward”. It was definitely intended to be a way to communicate using raw numbers (but not harassment). I’d like to think I’m fairly pragmatic in that if it IS working for folks, then that is a contrary opinion, and that it was missing.

Where I definitely failed was my overly emotional messaging. It’s certainly not an excuse, but my recent autism diagnosis does at least help explain why I have an extremely strong sense of justice and can sometimes react in ways that are less than productive in some ways.

As for the licensing, I agree! I’m talking to some good friends of mine because I want to take my instance WAY further than most others - goal is a non-profit that answers to Tucsonans and residents of larger Pima county rather than someone not in the community. There’s just a lot of features this concept would need that it might diverge so much from the Lemmy vision that it needs to be something new - and hopefully a template for hyper-local social networks that can take on Nextdoor.

Interesting, I definitely see mine. I’m wayyyyyy at the bottom of the popular section, (likely due to the 9 bots that added themselves before I banned the accounts.).

I wonder if one of the settings in your firewall is blocking that particular bot?

I don’t recall when I would’ve done the same, but I do recall not being on join-lemmy until - well - now actually.

Oh! I just remembered something. Isn’t there a site that recommends a lemmy instance? Might it make sense that multiple users found your website because they change the recommendation to distribute new users? Does that sort of pattern hold in this case?

5 huh? That’s actually noteable. So far I haven’t seen a real human user take longer than a couple of hours to validate. Human registrations on my instance seem to have a 30% attrition. That is, of 10 real human users, I can reasonably expect that 3 won’t complete the flow. It seems like your case might be nearing 40-50% which isn’t unheard of but couple this with the quickness that these accounts were created - I think you are looking at bots.

The kicker is, though, if one of them IS a real user, it’s going to be almost impossible to find out.

This is indeed getting more sophisticated.

I wish I could see this time period on a cloudflare security dashboard, I’m sure there could be a few more indicators there.

Guess I best get over there then. Sounds like a place to voice my concerns without resorting to public appeals.

You just said you’re only interacting with a small group of independent admins, but now you’re making a conflated statement of “many Admins”.

I can be working with a small set of independent instance admins (brought together by a newer instance and discussions mostly through discord) and I’ve helped them test a few things and our little discord meta-community is already constructing new features, auto-posting bots of different types (RSS feeds, even posts, etc), and a few other things.

However, this is different from “Most Admins” where my interactions are largely based in the meta/support channels for other instances. This is a much more confusing population to me since many were exposed to the entire “Lemmy is for Authoritarian Communists” that was making the rounds on reddit. It’s resulted in a newer cohort of Admins that aren’t nearly as friendly to the development team.

The only reason you got what you wanted in the end was because someone else put in the work to make it happen

Nah, I would’ve made the change myself, but it wouldn’t do a darn thing because it depends on the inherent security of less technical admins. This project is as much impacted by individual decisions as they are collective ones.

And until the maintainers changed their mind, they likely wouldn’t have allowed a resurrection of the old Captcha anyways - so your point about another person “doing the work” only was really possible once the maintainers communicated that it was acceptable. Because, as stated in my previous point, an individual instance with this change (reverting captcha) doesn’t protect them from instances that don’t.

This all points back to my original point which revolves around new admins understanding the importance of engaging the maintainers and making themselves heard. The fact that people who already do this took offence to my post is a little bizarre because I’m clearly not talking about the people who have been communicating.

Sure, those who’ve been with the Fediverse for a bit are familiar with Matrix and how to use it to communicate back to the core developers. But the new influx of instances and their admins either A - don’t know where to go, B - don’t care, or C - are so ideologically opposed to the rumors they want nothing to do with them.

Huh, that is interesting, yeah, that pattern is very anomalous. If you have DB access you can try to run this query to return all un-verified users and see if you can identify if the email activations are being completed:

SELECT p.id, p.name, l.email FROM person AS p LEFT JOIN local_user AS l ON p.id=l.person_id WHERE p.local=true AND p.banned=false AND l.email_verified='f'

Not so sure on the LLM front, GPT4+Wolfram+Bing plugins seems to be a doozy of a combo. If anything there should be perhaps a couple interactable elements on the screen that need to be interacted with in a dynamic order that’s newly generated for each signup. Like perhaps “Select the bubble closest to the bottom of the page before clicking submit” on one signup and “Check the box that’s the furthest to the right before clicking submit”?

Just spitballin it there.

As for the category on email address - certainly not suggesting they remove supporting it, buuuuutttt if we’re all about making sure 1 user = 1 email address, then perhaps we should make the duplication check a bit more robust to account for these types of emails. After all [email protected] is the same as [email protected] but the validation doesn’t see that. Maybe it should?