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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’m generally not a big fan of big social media like e.g. Facebook where you might have many thousands of followers, purposefully grow the numbers, etc. I personally think these things are an everyday evil. Yes, it’s a bit melodramatic 🙂but that’s how I feel. Reddit, and now Lemmy are about as far as I like to go with it.

    So the isolation of geo-local-only federation is a feature. The feature, actually. I want an entire social media platform that isn’t capable of focusing on single accounts. Where you are near guaranteed to interact with your local community only. Where it would take a dramatic effort for a single actor to influence global opinions. I want a social media platform that isn’t so easy to manipulate. I could go on and on.


  • After reading your responses, it seems like we’re describing two different methods of building this system.

    Your ideas seems to depend on having many instances for various regions, where all instances are federated with each other. So my local instance somewhere in the US would still be federated with for example, an instance in Germany. But the content I receive would be heavily focused on “nearby” content. Interesting

    My ideas are based on an important difference. An instance for my town would only federate with instances for the surrounding towns. Maybe one or two more “hops” away. So sharing content between my local instance and one in Germany would be impossible. Content on my local instance would only be accessible to users in nearby instances. Local content enforced by local federation.


  • I spent several weeks thinking about this exact idea.

    Federation is cool. You could set up each instance to only federate with instances for nearby towns and cities. Maybe a “2 district” radius. Users would only see content for their local communities. Local news stays local. Local government could officially participate if they wish. People you talk to are actually neighbors you might see in person. Larger regions like counties, states, provinces, or even countries, could also have dedicated instances and federate similarly. I think this is the big appeal and it sounds awesome!

    There are a few problems 🙂

    First is a little bit of confusion with posting. Let’s say that I see a post about a cool new restaurant in my town. I share it with a friend who lives a few towns away and that’s outside the “federation radius”. I can’t share the post with that friend very easily. Maybe the tools could be enhanced to make this viable?

    Second is a matter of privacy. How do you know that new accounts belong to people associated with the geographic location of each instance? If you don’t validate, the system will certainly be abused. If you do validate, then users need to supply some real info! Home address, ID, etc. that’s a big deal for users and instance admins.

    Third. What happens if you move? Do you have to abandon your old account and start over? Again, the system itself can be developed further to solve this. But that’ll take time and money.

    Next is the operating costs. You would need to build thousands of instances to build this system up. And each one would have to be tied to a geographic region. You need new features to handle signups this way. You have the simple cost of running these servers. You probably need a lot of staff to manage it all. This is an expensive platform for one party to run. Alternatively…

    It doesn’t have to be one party running this entire system. That’s the point of the Fediverse, right? The operational costs go way down if anyone can run their own instance. But how do you enforce the rules of federating with instances for geographically nearby locations? I don’t see a reasonable way to solve this one.

    I could probably keep listing issues. But these are the big ones IMO. If you solve these, the system is viable and could be amazing.


  • Unfortunately, I don’t remember the source so we may need to go digging. But I recall reading that something like 1/3 of all bugs are related to memory safety. And those bugs translate to things like buffer overflow and privilege escalation attacks.

    The proclaimed advantage is that by making the entirety of Rust memory safe, that entire class of bugs simply won’t exist for projects written in Rust. When they do happen, the bugs will be addressed by the language rather than many thousands of downstream projects. It should be an enormous gain in development performance for the world.

    I think the idea makes sense. Time will tell us how well that works.




  • I agree in full!

    I’ve thought quite a bit about corporate funding of the fediverse. The only possibility good way that I currently see is if there’s a not-for-profit acting as a middle man to dispense the funds. And that not-for-profit can’t voice opinions on how the fediverse is developed. Even this is wishful thinking.

    I’ve actually given thought to creating this non-for-profit but I don’t really know how to get started or get attention for significant donations.


  • Well that’s an interesting take! What aspects are you opposed to?

    IANAL but I did read through the patents agreement that you linked. It basically says do whatever you want with Go as long as it different infringe on Google patents. Which is pretty much backed by US law anyways and I assume other countries as well. The sketchy part is that your license is revoked as soon as they file a lawsuit rather than win it. Honestly, I’d be surprised if Google ever used this in a legal dispute because there would be a huge community backlash.

    That also only applies to Go developers. You would only be a user for a tool written on Go. How does your using a tool written in Go translate to support for Google and its bad practices? Do you not use any software written in Go?

    Sorry if this is sounding argumentative! I’m generally a big fan of Go and definitely opposed to Google and using its products. This is a topic that I haven’t considered before so my questions represent my sincere curiosity.



  • Lodra@programming.devtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldBest way to dockerize a static website?
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    4 months ago

    The simplest way is certainly to use a hosted service like GitHub Pages. These make it so easy to create static websites.

    If you’re not flexible on that detail, then I next recommend Go actually. You could write a tiny web server and embed the static files into the app at build time. In the end, you’d have a single binary that acts as a web server and has your content. Super easy to dockerize.

    Things like authentication will complicate the app over time. If you need extra features like this, then I recommend using common tools like nginx as suggested by others.



  • I recently dug into this because I accidentally trashed my wife’s OS which was encrypted with bitlocker. PITA btw and I couldn’t beat the encryption

    Bitlocker encryption key hash is stored in 2 possible places. First is an unencrypted segment of the encrypted drive. This is bad because it’s pretty easy to read that hash and then decrypt the drive. The second place is on a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) which is a chip on the motherboard. This is better because it’s much more difficult to hack. It can be done but requires soldering on extra hardware to sniff the hash while the machine boots up. Might even be destructive… I’m not sure.

    Either way a motivated attacker can decrypt the drive if they have physical access. For my personal machines, I wouldn’t care about this level of scrutiny at all.

    Anyways you can see if any open source solutions support TPM.