I have mixed feelings on post deletion. On the one hand, historical technical forum conversations are an incredibly valuable resource, and /c/selfhosted is a technical community. The value comes from having a history in context, and deleting part of the context damages the whole and makes the whole corpus less useful overall. It also allows incorrect or outdated information to fester when there isn’t a strong historical context that can be referenced.

On the other hand, people are right to be concerned about leaving large tracts of text available on the open internet, where it can be scraped, profiled, and possibly de-anonymized. I am very sympathetic to those who delete out of concerns for their own privacy, and I don’t know what a good solution is.

Maybe a compromise would be (on user “delete”) to leave the contents of a post intact, but simply delete the username from the post, and the post from the user’s history? Deletion on the fediverse is a bit of a sham anyway, and it would leave valuable discussions intact for other users.

You take the consonants, I’ll take the vowels.

An idea I’ve been kicking around is a sort of distributed down detector. Community members could download spin up a service that registers with a host’s statuspage service, which gives it a schedule for pinging monitored servers, and instructions for where to send the UP/DOWN results. Hosts can choose where to display the data (e.g. statuspage.blahaj.zone would display statuses for services on its own server as well as servers it federates with. If one service or server goes down, the outage would show up on federated services almost immediately. Intermittent outages would be easier to verify too.

Monitor runners should be able to manually choose which pages they monitor and where they send reports, but it wouldn’t be too hard to provide fediverse hosts custom images with their preferred pages and report destinations all configured, so users could just spin it up and let it run.

It would be nice to have a distro with some basic flight control drivers preconfigured so we didn’t have to build from scratch for every airframe. Maybe wouldn’t get the same performance profile as proprietary drivers but something that could get off the ground. It could even be called AvioNix.

😆 This thread was what made me realize I’m at the 20 year mark. Funny how the milestones keep sneaking up. You’d think after doing it for so long getting older would feel more familiar.

I think the ideal is to have some people who gravitate toward the bleeding edge, and some people who gravitate toward the stable center. I think, when the system works well, each group benefits the other. For example, I like debian for my servers because I like my servers to be as stable and low-maintenance as possible, but I am also really fascinated by NixOS and its approach to system administration. Personally I still need to play with it some more before I trust it with a production service, but I could see running a Nix-based distro at some point. And I appreciate all the brave testers out there right now, finding problems and fixing them. What they do makes my life as a simple server manager a lot easier.

How do you like it? I’ve seen it around but never installed it to play with it. Is it helpful in your creative endeavors?

I don’t use the ArchWiki as much as I used to, but I have been in awe of it for a while. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another wiki of similar scope that well put together. It’s quite an achievement in my opinion.

That’s how it should work, I think. All the downstream distros do their crazy experiments, the community identifies what it likes and doesn’t like, and what it likes makes its way upstream to spawn. The further upstream it gets, the wider its influence is felt. Debian is what makes it that far upstream.

The first linux distro I remember using was Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), so I’m just about at 20 years, maybe a bit less than that; I think it had been released for a while before I decided to give it a go. I tend to stick with debian-based distros, though I’ve used arch variants off and on for my daily driver for years at a time. Still got it kicking around on some machines now, though not any of my daily drivers. Servers are a mix of Debian and Ubuntu Server, machines with UI are either Ubuntu or Mint, or some resource-light version of Ubuntu, depending on the device and the mood when I last reformatted them. I have used Fedora/RedHat/CentOS at various points, but usually because someone was paying me to do so. Same story with OpenSUSE, but even less commonly. I have a few devices running variously dated versions of PostmarketOS, Lineage OS, even one device that still runs CyanogenMod (it does not get internet privileges). I have a few Raspberry PIs that all run Raspbian (or whatever it’s called now).

EDIT: Just remembered I used to use CrunchBang Linux for a long time. I bought the only computer I could afford (a “netbook” with Win 10 Starter), put crunchbang on it (after experimenting with a few distros), and really kinda fell in love with OpenBox. I don’t use it anymore because I don’t like the default settings and haven’t been bothered to set it up properly lately, but I had that netbook set up just so and it worked really well. it was my main and only computer for several years.

We’re watching the old internet fall apart.

Please dish if you feel so inclined. I thought it felt very “blogger who has written a lot of blog posts” but I didn’t get any AI smell.

I’ve known for a while that one day the day would come when I wouldn’t be able to pick out the AI artifacts, and I’d join the throngs that chase the will o’ wisps through the dead internet. Maybe this is it for me.