Big BOOM 💥 a few minutes ago. I was staring off toward the south and into the sky when I saw the huge flash; 180° off into the horizon, from my comfy chair on the back patio.

One thousand one, one thousand two, thousand three, one thousand four, thous...... 💥 BOOM ❕❕❕

So, geez. Pretty fricken' loud for that distance. Not as far away as the harbor itself, so maybe some crystal methodists dispatched themselves to Valhalla.

In the olden days I'd hit up Twitter coz it was the best for "just happened", local events. People actually understood that kind of democratized power, to disseminate information his before it was possible to even enter a news cycle.

X? It's certainly better than it was before #Elon, but lost had been that hyper local community vibe that made real time distribution such a beautiful possibility in a non commercial distribution channel. I suspect that things will heavily coalesce between spontaneous local... Hubs, for lack of a better term, in a global search enabled environment (again), after this current madness constricting almost all other information through the next couple of weeks.

But then again, this is Los Angeles. Land of 💥 boom and doom (and I mean that in the most real sense). It's almost a bloodsport and aspects do exist where you can place wagers in some pretty heinous categories. I'm just being matter of fact here.I grew up here.

Shit happens around here. It always has. 💥 Booms aren't really anything new around here lolz.

I remember a particular big BOOM 💥 I was standing in the living room one afternoon at my buddy's 'luxury apartment' (The Willow Tree, in Torrance, on PCH, next door to my highschool).

I was stoned out of my mind (on weed, teenager, duh!) and I was facing a sliding glass door (open) mostly occluded by drapes, when suddenly, the drapes activity flew up from the carpeted floor, half way to the ceiling.

Then, as they softly fell back towards their positions in front of the glass in the sliding glass doors themselves, spanning I dunno, 12' maybe, they began violently rattling like a motherfucker! I thought both huge panes were going to shatter, like just eight feet in front of me, standing there like the stoned idiot I was.

I dunno recall exactly how many seconds had passed, at least 8 or 9 I figure but memories actually get warped over time, blyet I've always known distinctly, and I recall, instinctively, that it was an obscene amount of seconds passing before the BOOM 💥 was to be followed by those drape lifting gusts of wind hitting me in the face.

And it was the biggest BOOM 💥 that I had ever witnessed, still to this day; and the Port of Los Angeles maybe six or more Miles behind me, when a big ass ship (a really big ass ship) in the harbor was vaporized, lives indelibly within my very Carcass - I shall never, ever, EVER forget that.

Well that's all I really wanted to share. But I would like to ask everyone to take just a moment, no matter what country you're in/from, to reflect with thanks for all the men and women in uniform serving our countries so our children can sleep all comfy and shit at night, with their little Teddy Bears, autobots, ninja turtles, or Peter Rabbits.

Peace be to all, bitches 🤘 🤠🤘 Truly 🙂

#tallship #observations #musings #please_boost You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

⛵

.

An open letter to His Excellency Alexandre de Moraes

#Elon rises again as the champion of the people. This didn't end well for the United States during the #Clinton administration; it didn't end well for the Australian government's legislation after that; it most certainly failed gloriously when Hosni Mubarak believed he had 'turned off' the Internet in #Egypt; and it isn't going to end well this time around for the doodoohead judiciary of #Brazil either!

As many of you are used to hearing me say, "Stupid goes all the way to the bone". Yeah, I gots lotsa 'isms 🤘😜🤘

On that note, today's #bonehead award goes to judge #Alexandre_de_Moraes, who remarkably, has just proven that it is indeed possible to fuck yourself in your mouth. Most of us didn't even realize the abyssal depths of such stupidity he just achieved actually existed.

Yo! Moraes! You're no #Captain_Picard; you can't just say "Make it so" and have that be the case.... You're a first class moron, and what did you really expect after threatening that attorney's life? Did you really expect Elon to name someone in her stead for you to disappear?

#X is now closed in your country. Elon announced that about a week ago now, so the company isn't actually extant within the confines of your #Banana_Republic jurisdiction.

Here's what you can do now. You can decide what Internet traffic may and may not be allowed to traverse your data centers (good luck with that too), and see what the citizens of your nation have to say about it. Already, many of us are waiting and ready to provide Wireguard services that will instantly emasculate you - such is your prerogative, to enact a #Great_Firewall_of_Brazil - just like they have in Merry Olde England. Don't you just love dystopian constructs like #Ofcom?

You might wish to hold a straw poll of the citizens of your nation, or experience the flavor of your own ejaculate. How dare you tell the good folks of your nation what they are and are not permitted to see under penalty of imprisonment!

You're now venturing into territory where the much mightier have already fallen. I'd tell you to stay in your lane, but I think I'm much more interested in selling a lot of popcorn 🍿 to this little career ending shit show.

We've had the #Clipper_Chip, the #V_Chip, and other sorts of choke chips and there's not a single solitary systems engineer worth their salt who wasn't an unindicted, bonafide felon in the United States prior to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in ruling U.S. v. Bernstein as unconstitutional for infringing the First Amendment.

Too bad you guys don't have one of those:

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-joins-appeal-bernstein-encryption-case (and so, so much more)

We do however, and the Bill of Rights are sacrosanct in this country, bitch!

So, I must say that I'm really amused by your pathetic overreach in attacking a completely separate corporation for the humiliation you've experienced from another. Didn't you realize that Elon can just suspend #Starlink services for your entire nation until such time as you pay your outstanding bills (and penalties) to the collection agency of his choosing?

I mean, this is truly comedic - but what are the government services and citizens going to do to you once their Internet services cease? I doubt the ensuing consequences will rise to the level of the fate exacted upon Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu, but it ain't gonna be pretty.

At least professionally, your pronouns will be was/were.

So go with God, you misguided totalitarian imbecile, and may your peers have mercy on your soul.

#tallship

⛵

.

That's right folks! Stripey Sums it up below.

#Fediverse is often misconstrued as that network in the #DeSoc space powered by #ActivityPub exclusively - NOPE!

In fact, even mastobruhs would be wise to note that Eugen's original creation was an #OStatus networked product until quite recently in Fediverse evolution years.

Still, there's a lot of otherwise respected tech personalities that continue to insist and spread disinformation to the contrary. Shame on them - someone, everyone, needs to edjumacate those individuals spreading FUD and confusion to the next generation of n00bs arriving in this free and thriving world of privacy respecting, horizontally scaling, #FOSS based social communication systems.

Apparently, what I've quoted below was part of a larger, longer conversation, yet I'm confident that just what #Stripey points out below in correcting someone else's erroneous assumptions more than correctly describes Fediverse and puts an end to any misunderstanding for all sentient #Fedizens 🤘🤠🤘

#tallship
@strypey

⛵

.

RE: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/users/strypey/statuses/113015290565128857

@ovelarsen

h/t to my friend @mjj for bringing this to my attention.

I'm other news, Google was, for lack of a better term, convicted for being a monopoly, just a couple of days ago in a court case brought by the Attorney General of (I think) Iowa - I'm sure there will be others here reading this that know more about that and what's to be expected next in the fake world of justice, but so far so good 👍

Anyway, point being, One man can make a difference in the world, and everyone should consider contributing to #OSM.

#tallship #FOSS #Crowd_Sourcing #Open_Street_Map Thanks Morten!

⛵

.

RE: https://norrebro.space/users/ovelarsen/statuses/112938719158882540

Wow!

Somebody just threw a like on this old post of mine from a few years back.

Many of the links in the thread aren't alive anymore, or have moved elsewhere, but I'm going to boost it via direct link here because it appears to still have an attached zip file of probably one of the nicest Gopher clients for Windows I've ever used - Gopher Browser for Windows v1.2, by Jaruzel which I don't think is available any longer.

It's very attractive, intuitive, compact in size, and accepts slang (forgives you for not using proper Gopher syntax), unlike #LaGrange, a more fully featured and beautiful Windows client for both #Gopher and #Gemini protocols.

https://gleasonator.com/objects/e3b98342-7075-4189-ba62-c165f5863d6d

You may need to scroll up or down a bit. Lemme know if the d/l doesn't work (it used to).

There's also a bunch of other info there in that thread as well, much of it relevant and some of historical #Fediverse significance, and a few SSH capable #BBS clients too 🤘😜🤘

For those of you who are #Emacs folks, I highly recommend the #Elpher Gemini and Gopher client, which you can get from #Melpa.

I hope that helps!

#tallship #FOSS

⛵

.

ASP, Intranet, and other mostly forgotten terms of trends harkening back to the ghost of Internet past. Yeah, how 'bout that?

But one of my favs, "BSOD", experienced an overnight resurgence in the lexicon over the breakfast table yesterday.

Even after most folks had long since forgotten this NT phenomenon's affectionate derision, it remained a commonly recognized "oopsie" not resulting from operator failure, yet regardless, one that evokes shuddering waves of guilt within the user.

Have you been Microsoft'd lately? Does your bum hurt? We've been telling you so for decades yet you just continue bending over and begging for it.

"What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men."

#tallship #Linux #FOSS #AYBABTU @eloy

⛵

.

RE: https://hsnl.social/users/eloy/statuses/112818128697453981

Have you ever received an HTTP 418 status code while browsing? If so, it may be because you were trying to put a square peg in a round hole, or vice versa.

Indeed, RFC 2324 Lays out the specification, and Oopsies! It turns out that an April Fools joke was canonized, albeit with some utility. Turns out, even if someone's not trying to pull your leg, by telling you "I'm a Teapot", it's likely you're gently being encouraged to look for a resource other than the way in which you're asking.

For example, you ask for a coffeemaker and receive the error, HTTP 418 (I'm a Teapot). It's certainly nicer that a 404 and yet indicates that there is content where the page you've just asked for exists.

This is in some ways a concern that many have dug their heels in over, clinging as intransigent as ever when it comes to #tmpfs discussions beginning twelve years ago on the #Debian Dev list.

Often, in practice, cron is used to clean out unneeded clutter in /tmp or /var/tmp, as well as other methods. An issue I have is with the systemd defaults including /var/tmp in tmpfs on some implementations because temporary files here are intended to be persistent across reboots.

By default, systemd cleans out files in /var/tmp by default after 30 days, and this can be problematic, while the default is 10 days for /tmp. /var/run and /var/lock are also Incorporated - But I digress.

After well over a decade, about half of the major Linux distros have migrated to tmpfs: Arch, Fedora, and some versions of SuSE number among the most familiar. Others have not: Redhat, SLES, and other "Enterprise" focused distros, along with Debian, ... Until just recently, when much to my surprise during routine updates I noticed the switch to tmpfs has now occurred.

w00t 🤘🤠🤘

With respect to Slackware, does it use the traditional disk based method or the RAM based tmpfs? The answer to that of course, is "Yes, of course, it absolutely does!"

"Which one did you say?" I actually didn't, lolz. As is usually the case with Slackware (and Arch and Gentoo), it's really however you want it!

In Slackware, the implementation is much more elegant however. You simply mount /tmp on a ramdisk (again, leave /var/tmp alone - these files are intended to be persistent across reboots, and for possibly much, much longer than a mere 30 days).

Okay so back to Debian. If you're one of those fraidy cats that doesn't believe, or rather, isn't competent or confident enough to run Enterprise production machines on rolling distros, I've got good news for you! You won't be needing to concern yourself with this until Debian 13 is officially released or you're forced to upgrade to it in the next few years. Lucky you!

For the rest of us however, already running #Trixie, it has indeed arrived. Welcome! Here's the problems...

You may, depending on what daemons you run in production, want to tweak your defaults. i.e., 10 days may be less than appropriate for your company's needs. Remember, #cron is your friend. It's also why Slackware's approach was referred to as elegant, because you have to take into account what it is you want or need before you implement it.

For example, since you already know that you don't want temp files to survive reboots in /tmp, there's really nothing faster than disk space residing in RAM anyway.

On the other hand, Poettering doesn't make up the rules for the developers of this world or sysadmins. If you're not careful you can wind up right back on a spinning disk platter again, since the default for #systemd is to allocate 50‰ of your RAM for tmpfs, if you don't have ample memory, you go to SWAP.

Oh, the irony :p

When you're in an HA environment where your UNIX boxes have uptimes exceeding 800+ days, and the only reason to reboot is to install a new kernel, Poettering's 30 day default storage for tempfiles in /var/tmp, or for that matter, a default for files in /var/lock or /var/run, ... is absolutely absurd - this is why we have cron and shell scripts (and Perl/Python).

tl;dr: This is why I started of with that amusing simile about HTTP 418, because if you just trust systemd to hold your hand, you just may find that one of your mission critical Enterprise services informs you that it's been told it's a #Teapot 🫖

That's not a good thing when 5, 500, or 50,000 people expect their shit to just work without ever having to know your name as the person who makes that happen for them.

Disk based storage is the safe bet; that's why #Redhat still does it that way. But it's certainly not the most performant, and requires the steady fingers of a competent systems administrator for the care and feeding of the tmp file systems - otherwise, like so many n00bs have discovered (in the days when hard drives didn't exceed a Gigabyte in capacity), you may wake up one day to find that you've hammered your filesystem, everything is running, but nothing is doing anything it's supposed to be doing - now, rm and du have become your best friends until the moment you discover that rotating your log files and keeping /tmp clean is actually part of your job...

Even as a casual workstation user on your personal laptop. It's your job.

For those interested, here's an example of the systemd defaults for tmps should you wisely consider the beneficial consequences of responsible planning for managing the size of your growing tempfile directories, from the Arch Wiki:

/etc/tmpfiles.d/tmp.conf
# see tmpfiles.d(5)
# always enable /tmp directory cleaning
D! /tmp 1777 root root 0

# remove files in /var/tmp older than 10 days
D /var/tmp 1777 root root 10d

# namespace mountpoints (PrivateTmp=yes) are excluded from removal
x /tmp/systemd-private-*
x /var/tmp/systemd-private-*
X /tmp/systemd-private-*/tmp
X /var/tmp/systemd-private-*/tmp

Umm... 10 days, /var/tmp? IMNSHO, that's maybe just a tad (way more than a tad) aggressive.

Although I've so far only alluded to it, I actually do recommend that you consider removing /var/tmp from any cleanup schedule too, instead using cron and shell scripts, along with a little proactive monitoring to keep that part of your tempfile systems clean.

And remember: "You may be short, and you may be stout, but unless it's April 1st, don't let anyone call you a Teapot." 🫖

For further reading you can checkout the [LWN article here] (https://lwn.net/Articles/975565/?ref=news.itsfoss.com).

As always, feel free to boost and share this with others (sharing is love), and I'm always interested in hearing your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

I hope that helps. All the best!

#tallship #FOSS #Linux #Slackware #Arch #Gentoo #SuSE #Fedora

⛵

.

As a longtime provider of services in one form or another since the late 80's and early 90's, I felt the pain of having to write out the following blog post/update.

Drew is an opinionated perfectionist with an attention to detail and his perspective that chafes some, endears others, and deservedly, receives the respect earned when someone strives toward par excellence for those for whom they provide services for.

I have some differing set of conclusions from my understanding of what he laments as the ordeal he's been through in the past year, like, "why would anyone consider a carrier besides DHL for international overseas shipments?" Also, I fail to see the logic in moving his entire infra from the U.S. (where there are many affordable top-tier carrier hotels - aka datacenters) to Amsterdam, which also has fine facilities and maybe it is because of privacy concerns which depending on what those are, may indeed be quite valid from my perspective.

But not having IPv6 fully deployed (as a result of datacenter choice?) is puzzling, although almost inconsequential operationally, in production, ... Almost.

Considering I've always looked directly at the carriers themselves, used my own delegated IP infrastructure for core operations, I tend to look at a datacenter as three things:

- Electricity
- Fail-over electricity (Generators)
- Air conditioning

Most folks rent a rack that comes with transit, I ask how much the XC is - I can find, mix, and pick my transit providers. I just wanna know that my shit is secure in a suite or cage behind locked cabinets that I personally have 24/7 access to at anytime (even though I'll rarely do so) and have 24/7 remote hands to swap drives, hot-pluggable power supplies and plug cables into the designated ports I specify, etc. Those things typically come w/zero cost.

For DDoS'ing, I do like to outsource this as part of a package, and I'm open to any offers of included transit/XC and want to know how much each additional 20A of electricity cost me each month in addition to the rack fees. Putting the onerous of protecting my customers from a good DDoS'ing on someone else like my upstream takes a lot of worry away.

Shipping machinery though, that's a bit distinct too, I've been burned a few times domestically, although always recovered my *tangible costs - time? well, I've lost a couple of customers because their infra was lost or damaged in transit, but insurance is important - Drew had that. What I'm really wondering though, is who besides DHL would you even trust to ship servers over the Atlantic Ocean?

That's a cost I would not consider skimping on - A girl I almost married worked for DHL for over 20 years and they'll cut a check at the drop of a hat, which might have worked out well for Drew considering these were old boxes ready for retirement anyway and the replacement cost (new stuffs) is what you insure for.

Anyway, I've really admired much of what Drew has done over the years, was cheerleading for him as he migrated from full time paycheck person to finally being able to announce that he "thinks" he can make enough money for a living by devoting himself full time to FOSS with his fledgling SourceHut.

Yah, sometimes his head swelled up pretty big, making it hard to fit through doorways, and I've butted heads with him here and there on technical matters only, but have always respected him, and in truth, he was never not correct even if his way was the wrong way, or there was simply a better way - usually those were matters of opinion coz there's more than six ways to Sunday to skin a cat.

Anyway, he's been kicked in the balls really hard, which if you know much of him, must have been really hard to lay all of that out in some manner of detail (He's almost always brutally transparent). For that, and moreover for getting right back up after being knocked down (maybe by da man?), I applaud his candidness. His devotion to those of you reading this that may have free repos at SourceHut, and I'm also encouraging everyone to kick in at least a few bucks - fuck that dumb app that you don't need, let alone pay $2.95 for the exclusive right to be tracked - I urge you with all FOSSiness in mind... Give it a read, and send him whatev, ... I guarantee it will come back to you tenfold.

Drew is a consummate FOSS warrior, do it for yourself, please - Five bucks, fifty bucks, heck, whatever isn't going to cut into your budget for porterhouse steak this weekend would be nice.

And it will make you feel good too.

Full disclosure: I'm not getting shit from this article. Drew and I only converse occasionally and usually it is to disagree - some folks are just good coz of what's in their heart, their commitment to the community, and whether you're a fan or not doing this for him really is doing this for yourself and everyone else in the FOSS world.

Here's the link to the article/update.

#tallship #FOSS #OpenSource #SourceHut #Git #repo

⛵

.

This Should be *a huge conversation in the #Fediverse - really.

@jupiter_rowland certainly paraphrases much of the sentiment here in the Fediverse where many conversations are taking place, albeit briefly, and then dismissed, but why? Are people too busy to care? Are people too apathetic to take seriously anything that begins with the letters, masto...? Do those 5 letters really invoke such categorical dismissiveness that cuts into topics that would otherwise likely gain immediate traction were it not for mention of that corporate monolithic silo brand?

Probably; likely; perhaps - take your pick. There is indeed a general apathy amongst especially long term Fedizens and also Lemmy users who are refugees from Reddit, but it's okay to dismiss masto as the neo-corporate EEE platform conceivably threatening the UX for millions of Fedizens. And like it or not, there does need to be a viable shitposting platform, which is exactly what masto is, inhabited in very large ways by people who, as Jupiter raises the question, "are incapable of actually engaging in textual conversation. There's something to that.

Well, #A11Y is a very real concern, perhaps for the FEPs, considering there are projects that are very close in architecture to completely ignoring anything that isn't part of the W3's official specification, and that's okay.

It is, however, a misnomer that one must insert alt-text into media on the masto platform, at least at this juncture. Forcing the hand of refugees from the deprecated, #Privacy_Mining, monolithic silos is yet another complication that those poor souls need to be gently nudged into accepting - but even more importantly, ... "Why".

Some popular Android clients will complain if you try to post media without also including alt-text, some have no facilities at all for doing so. This is an adoption phenomenon, slowly being rolled out, as awareness increases (awareness of the WHY - not the HowTO) with respect to the reasons it is an important design consideration.

Do people actually get unceremoniously banned for not including alt-text for attached media on masto? Yes, On some instances they do, as if it will have any affect at all on the wider Fediverse - I have heard on several occasions that this does indeed happen - there aren't many things that piss people off more than having something that is important to them getting yanked out from underneath them in rug-pull fashion than that of an #instabanhammer, and yet childish, juvenile moderators and admins on several masto instances are truly guilty of such dystopian tyranny and abuse of privilege.

Those types of adversarial, clickish masto instances are much of the reason Fediverse gets a bad rap in some silo social networking circles, and it isn't a fair characterization, but the offensive behavior persists. More than an impetus for the deployment of #smolweb, single-user instances, it is indeed primarily a masto phenomenon.

Not a pretty thing, but masto always has been a caustic cauldron of cacophony of enmity and active vitriol, and that's just one more reason to expedite the outreach programs popping up all over the place to entice the good folks to ditch it in favor of many other good social networking platforms mentioned by Jupiter in his cw-LONG article (I wish he wouldn't bother catering to those mastoblasters with that sentiment, they should at least be smart enough to see that it's more substantive than their shitposting personas are capable of parsing).

RE: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/9e481d2a-72a6-4f4a-bad8-b72cf6272327

@jupiter_rowland

Synchronet BBS as an #onion node makes #telnet over #Tor a secure protocol because your exit node is the #BBS itself...

Brilliant!

- Synchronet over Tor on an rPi - Marvelous!

But what about those #MS_Windows users out there? How about a gzipped tarball, all nicely packaged up so you can distribute around, of a custom built #PuTTY client that will securely connect people to your #Synchronet_BBS over telnet?

Brilliant!

- Create a custom PuTTY package to distribute for your BBS over Tor - Magnificent!

What was that again? Oh yeah, ... Brilliant!

Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #Synchronet #rPi h/t to @dheadshot

⛵

.

I'm often inspired to share my thoughts, expound upon something I've read that sparks that inspiration, or pose a bit of socratric reasoning in discourse. Sometimes we actually edjumacate ourselves by asking the tough questions rhetorically. Sometimes it's even more effective if we share those quests with others. It can be a phrase, a paragraph, or a sentence that ignites that quest for understanding within me, and whether I'm simply working it through it myself for my own sake or a genuine desire to share some kind of enlightenment or wisdom with others, I usually feel better doing it in the public eye at the end of the day when all is said and done.

There's a bit of a stir in the Fediverse. Darnell offers us some valuable considerations and specifics in the link to his blog post below.

For me, I think the most interesting part when you read between the lines is, ...

> This latest move could be a way for Meta to use Threads to thwart any potential ActivityPub powered rivals in the Fediverse (like Pixelfed, Friendica & WordPress).

Note that nowhere is masto even listed there - it's insignificant. The #ActivityPub powered rivals in the #Fediverse cited are what have been considered for many years the direct corollaries to #InstaSPAM and #Faceplant, respectively, which of course are the exceedingly capable platforms #Pixelfed and #Friendica.

In all of that, considering that #WordPress is the big game changer here of most recent repute, enjoying a 42% market share of all websites worldwide certainly blows away anything Meta has to offer, but even though it is past the 4th of May, Faceplant and InstaSPAM still do comprise the #phantom_menace flavor of this week.

- Pixelfed has a very nice interface for browsing images. Unlike InstaSPAM however, there isn't this overwhelming nausea attending user accounts with duck-ass selfie-kisses blown into bacteria laden bathroom mirrors, or the overwhelming shitposting of memes scraped from other non-verbal teenage neanderthals. So yes, there's less traffic, typically, but actual photos of things that are actually important and relevant to the people posting them, and more so, liked and boosted by people who appreciate such sentimentalism or professional art. On the downside, is Pixelfed's relatively lackluster editor that fails to provide the poster with paragraph breaks in the WebUI with any reliability, it's mastocrap-like paltry 500 character limit per post, and a complete lack of formatting capabilities (i.e., Markdown or BBCode, Etc.). Having said that, the 500 character limit is easily remedied in a single entry of a config file, which is a blessing to many who have resorted to using the #A11Y alt-text fields to provide the descriptions and narratives for images uploaded, but the other sophomoric qualities of the editor leave massively huge run on paragraphs for the reader to endure - like this one, for example :p

Other awesome projects either spawned directly from, or inspired by the success of Pixelfed are the FediDB research database, which although pretty, leaves much to be desired with respect to completeness; Sup, a client/server federated chat app model; Loops, a closed beta service that aims to position itself as a replacement for, and similar to YouTube shorts; and PubKit, a tool service in closed beta at this time that attempts to service the same or similar tests that the production https://funfedi.dev/ resource does.

- Friendica was once a platform that closely mimicked the look and feel of Faceplant. And then it wasn't, as the Faceplant monoverse continued to evolve in look and feel, and Friendica lagged in what I typically refer to as "Prettiness". Those days are long past, Friendica looks better and better with each and every successive release, and there's an obvious effort on improving the UX for users, making it much more intuitive, and the UI, tending to the "Prettiness" that I do indeed place so much emphasis on.

Once the original darling of the Fediverse, Friendica is once again at the top of the heap with a few others. This does not include the increasingly marginalized masto brand, as more and more adoptees continue to turn their backs to that has-been flagship.

After increasingly pervasive betrayals of both the #FOSS and #DeSoc philosophies and advocates for the past couple of years, eventually revealing it's own EEE aspirations by actively conflating it's masto brand and registered trademarks with that of Fediverse. Even worse, overtly engaging in an onboarding scheme that actively funnels new #Fedizens to one masto machine in particular, in grand, deprecated silo fashion, the masto corporation has populated one of the largest monolithic vertical gardens in the Fediverse itself. The sad part is that, being just another twitter clone, it still has no sense of community and offers nearly a million users a single point of failure. Ouch!

This masto mega-silo problem becomes even less relevant when you visit the Friendica page above, and gloss over the phenomenal feature set and attention given to interoperability with a shopping list of other platforms, protocols, and clients, including:

RSS/Atom, StatusNet, GNU social, Diaspora, SMTP/IMAP, Bluesky, Tumblr, GNU Social, pump.io, Libertree, Blogger, WordPress, Twidere, AndStatus, Bitlbee, Choqok, Frentcl, Gwibber, Hotot, IdentiCurse, Pidgin/Purple, Mustard, Pino, TTYtter.

Now, you might note that Twitter/X has walled off its deprecated monolithic garden, but that doesn't mean that the client and other toolsets that work with those APIs don't still work just fine with Friendica. And we're not even stating the obvious here - ActivityPub clients like Husky, Fedilab, and Sengi work just fine with Friendica, including Friendiqa and Relatica - two fine examples among the numerous choices you have for native Friendica apps for Android and desktop.

For more of an in-depth read on Relatica, here's an article I published a while back

The second most interesting thing that Darnell mentions, I think, has to do with the verbiage in which he characterizes Existing and traditional Fediverse powered platforms. Rivals. He calls them, "...ActivityPub powered rivals". Hmmmm....

I do believe that's the first time I've actually heard it put quite like that. But it's true. to be certain, it wasn't, not by a longshot, just a little while ago, but now? Well, it's nothing that we've done here in the Fediverse, except for continue to just ignore what's going on with the #subjugated_chattel that have all but succumbed to the #Sunnyvale_Syndrome, and get on with the good work of building and #dogfooding FOSS. But, ...

It's got a lot to do with what you might call interlopers, carpetbaggers, snakeoil salesmen, infestation, or maybe just plain old encroachment of aged and abusive #dreadnoughts into the Fediverse that stubbornly adhere to their deprecated, monolithic silo model of privacy farming technologies.

Hitherto all of these ActivityPub refits and forays into a Privacy mindful and respecting network of social communications systems, people kept using terms like Alternatives, for ActivityPub powered platforms such as the three main platforms mentioned in Darnell's blog article.

Now, they're being elevated to the rank of Rivals? But we, we, didn't do anything!

Neither did the GPL'd Linux Kernel - it just continued to do what FOSS does. It doesn't care what thinks it may be in competition with, or what considers it a threat, or rival or yes, REPLACEMENT for things like Faceplant and InstaSPAM.

Yes, FOSS just lumbers and chugs right along, relatively oblivious to whatever the proprietary, closed source contemporaries think of it - with respect to Linux, It actually entered the jurisdiction of a market dominated by Microsoft, IBM, and a couple of others, was lampooned and ridiculed, until it was considered a Cancer, by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, but this wasn't Microsoft or others encroaching into a space where only Linux and the BSDs resided...

This time it is different, because it's the other way around, but the end result will be the same. In the meantime, the perceived hostile invader, at the moment, is Zuckerberg's Meta. This isn't an EEE in the works, it's a desperate attempt to reach and hold onto the the coping that lines the deep end of a swimming pool which InstaSPAM and Faceplant must learn to swim in, and yet cannot - in the meantime, until it is able to tread those waters, it is feebly dog-paddling toward the edge where a handhold can be made while it is fitted with water-wings.

Even though both Tom (everyone's friend) and Eugen are happily traveling around the world snapping photographs and flirting with photography as a hobby, #Mark_Zuckerberg really doesn't wanna be #Myspaced.

If you don't move, you atrophy.

But Friendica, WordPress, and Pixelfed? Well, they're just FOSS, and they're just doing what FOSS does - exist, improve, and evolve. independently and irrespective of commercial threats by would be competitors.

Existing Fediverse platforms continue to onboard new Fedizens hourly, that's not slowing down, and it isn't going to either. Some of these n00bs are straddling the fence until they get their sea legs, existing in both worlds, while others are just cutting ties with the deprecated monolithic silos and jumping into the pool head first.

This phenomena of adoption and the logarithmic increase in onboarding and the deployment of new Fediverse instances is only going to pick up pace as the masses of users on platforms like #Threads and #Bluesky continue to become aware of the Fediverse, and the freedoms they can enjoy in social communication through leveraging WordPress, Pixelfed, and Friendica (and it goes without saying, all the rest of the wonderful platforms too).

With a community facade that pretended to hold the reigns of masto having been dropped, leaving a new 501(c)(3) masto corporation in the US steered by the likes of Twitter founders themselves, the steam is running out on that brand, and although Meta, via Threads, is certainly welcome to participate in the #FEP process (they actually are), there's really no foothold with which they can insert a toe and dictate very much at all that the community itself isn't inclined to adopt already, independently and without concern of capture by well funded special interest groups - like the new US masto corp.

But in closing, let's get back to why all of this doesn't even really matter where existing traditional Fediverse platforms are concerned - or the millions of users actively engaged on those thousands of hubs and instances:

Because it's FOSS, it evolves organically, and just doesn't care about that kind of stuff, lolz.

#tallship

⛵

.

RE: https://one.darnell.one/users/darnell/statuses/112405069391666443

@darnell

#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"

Phrases such as, reasonably secure should be indicators of how ridiculous it is to assume that any secure platform is EVER completely, and totally secure.

That begs the question, "Exactly how secure do you require your communications to be?" The answer is always, ... relative.

Which means that you should always believe Ellen Ripley when she says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"

https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher-problem

#tallship #encryption #PGP #secure_communication #Privacy #FOSS

⛵

.

Okay it's one of those, "What's peculiar here?" kinda things.

Consider the source itself. And I certainly don't mean code of any sort. 'Why' would 'They' cite Wikipedia, as good a resource as anyone might think it to be?

Why not cite yourself? Instead of citing someone else - who will merely turn right around and cite you as the ultimate source reference?

#FOSS #DOS, get it? I was rather amused. Anyway, Here it is.

#tallship #Microsoft h/t to: @csolisr@azkware.net You can haz #Cheezburgerz! 🍔

⛵

.

This is an example of a marketplace listing in Flohmarkt.

What "I" did here...

- Went to the "All" tab over at Flen's Market - Much like PeerTube, there's a Home, Local, and All tab, the latter of which includes items from other instances that you've manually federated with within the radius you've specified from your location.
- Next, there's a choice to make if you're interested in an item. You can register for a local account (I don't see any reason to do that unless you want to post a listing on that particular server), or you can remotely add yourself (like I did). Since the remote features don't quite seamlessly work with Mitra, I tried this from a masto server - no joy. I tried it from another masto server (a masto fork) - no problem this time, even on an older version of masto. That was humorous to me, as I've a bit of disdain for mastopub servers and found it amusing that even some of the instances running the very latest version of masto won't work, while older one's based on forks do; but I've got a twisted sense of humor.
- So next, you can engage with the seller directly from your local instance on most Fediverse platforms (support is added for various additional Fediverse platforms all the time). In this case, (visible because I chose the "All" tab), the particular item was from yet another #Fohmarkt server elsewhere - this is a very nice feature, like #DeSoc #eBay!!!
- From there, once you boost the item in the listing, others can see it in their streams, boost it further, make arrangements directly with the seller, etc. Kinda Kewl.

This is different from how most other attempts to deliver a marketplace into the #Fediverse. Usually, what I've seen is someone trying to integrate the functionality local to a platform, which networks (via ActivityPub federation) only with other like platforms. That's not a Fediverse solution - that's a platform solution and leaves everyone else on the fediverse not running that particular platform disenfranchised.

For example, using the Epicyon server platform as an example, it is first to be understood that this particular server platform is designed for very small numbers of user accounts per each instance. You also have to manually contact the admin of remote Epicyon servers yourself (or be contacted by them), then mutually agree to federate each other's marketplaces separately and distinct from any wider federation configurations your server has. Considering the inconveniences with locating other Epicyon instances that may or may not have enabled and made use of their marketplaces and establishing a mutual publishing agreement, coupled with the likelihood that each of your instances between 1 and 10 users, posting an item in the marketplace has a pretty high probability of being more effort than its worth - especially since it dosn't federate with any other Fediverse platforms.

Others follow a similar design, but also generally operate like normal #ActivityPub federation using a blacklist method, as well as being able to accommodate potentially hundreds, or even thousands of users per each instance (yeah, I know, semi-monolithic); so even if those marketplaces didn't already automatically federate across the Fediverse with all instances of other like server platforms, it's still a huge improvement over the previously discussed smolweb platform's model.

But they're still not Fediverse wide...

This is where Flohmarkt really starts to shine - it's fully Federating (Still a WIP wrt some platforms - see the wiki for particulars) across the entire #ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse.

You can check for the latest particulars on Flohmarkt's current Federation status if you're interested in your particular Fediverse platform and level of interoperation with Flohmarkt instances.

I do have some criticisms of the particular functionality in federating that the developers have chosen to incorporate, however. Basically, The server admin still needs to manually federate item listings between the local instance and other remote Flohmarkt servers. It doesn't need to be this way however, but one must concede that after going over the documentation and seeing that the concern's of the dev team are over unchecked spam, phishing, poor quality ads, etc., I find it to be a very reasonable concern, although I'm still not comfortable with how the Dev team has hard-coded this conditional into the server's capability, when a slightly different approach might afford self-hosters much greater flexibility and incintive for adoption; namely:

- Make the current model the default
- Enable other configurations for federating between other Flohmarkt servers (and eventually, other platform marketplaces) via either simple configuration files, runtime arguments, or via a GUI in an admin control panel, including that of an uninhibited fully blacklist model of sharing listings between Flohmarkt servers.

I generally tend to think that hard-wired, opinionated configuration choices are a less than ideal (usually bad idea) than acknowledging issues surrounding such decisions and then choosing a default while affording server admins (or users themselves) of being able to manage the options for themselves. This is one of those cases where I feel it could make a huge difference in the viabilty and adoption potential for this, "Strictly Federating Marketplace" Fediverse platform.

The other (very minor) criticism I have for Flohmarkt is the pin & string radius solution as it is currently implemented:

- It's determined by the server admin, instance wide
- It's determined by the server location, or some other arbitrarily decided locale

The radius is a great idea, but I think the following would go a long way towards improving the utility of this feature set:

- The server admin decides whether to enable user-level radius configs or server level, as is the case at this time.
- Local users determine, and have control over whether an established is applied to either their entire user profile's repertoire of items listed, or on a per item basis.
- If he user chooses a per item radius, each listing could have a different radius established.
- The local users have location radius specifications that can be based on different criteria, such as pinning a location on a map of their choice, by country (the free IP2Location databases can accommodate this behavior).
- The user's particular radius settings for each listing must be preserved and observed by all federating remote Flohmarkt server instances (but not by individual remote user shares/boosts, which should remain unrestricted).

This Radius feature is extremely powerful and I think that every effort of the development team to exploit the potential of this feature set should be a major consideration. Eventually, Flohmarkt servers will federate with other server platform types, exchanging listings between say, Flohmarkt servers and Friendica servers, etc.. but the awesome power unleashed through following and boosting capabilities that are already fully available to remote users to share with others holds the potential at this very time to make Flohmarkt item listings ubiquitous across the entire Fediverse, ... And that is really kewl :)

Well, I'd rather tease your interest and see you go checkout more for yourself rather than feed you everything you wanna know about a really kewl #social_commerce communications tool - you really should experience how kewl it is for yourself.

I couldn't locate a #Matrix support room for Flohmarkt like most contemporary software products maintain in the FOSS world, but the more traditional irc chan #flohmarkt at #LiberaChat is readily available, and of course, there's the issue tracker at the Codeberg repo I previously linked to above.

What are your thoughts and impressions on this novel approach to embedding the marketplace commerce structure into potentially everyone's social streams in the form of both a dedicated platform and as passive feeds via the intervention of other #Fedizens who share and boost individual items and listings in Flohmarkt?

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #Marketplace #eBay #I_can_haz_Cheezburgerz? 🍔
@grindhold @me @flohmarkt_support #flohmarkt_support

⛵

.

RE: https://fedi.markets/users/Yonggan/items/f7f7f8d1-6279-4249-890a-bdd97340d218

@Yonggan

Going back to Konversation for GUI stuffs. DCC file send/receive is kinda important to me. For everything else, including a lot of Matrix usage, WeeChat is still the Kewlist :p

https://bugs.quassel-irc.org/projects/quassel-irc/wiki/Migrating_from_Monolithic_to_Client+Core - just ain't gonna cut it right now.

I still love HexChat.

Honorable mention goes to Halloy, which I think looks really good, supports tiling, and says it supports DCC Send - I don't mind manipulating config files by hand, and I might check it out with a FlatPak, but if I'm sufficiently impressed it looks like I'll have to build the .deb and SlackBuild myself, ... Well? Somebody's got to! Right?

#tallship #FOSS #IRC #DCC #GUI #Quassel #Konversation #Halloy #HexChat #WeeChat

⛵

.