Oh, I see. Yes, that may very well be a matter of point of view. For me, modding the printer is part of the fun, not something I do to try desperately to stay on the cutting edge. :) The RepRap dream of “printers that can reproduce themselves” never fully materialized, but modding is the next best thing.

Are they still sold, anyway? I mean, sure, someone who has no printer should buy a more recent one. But that was not the subject, here : the question was if it was needed to replace an Ender 3. I certainly would not, personally, it would be throwing out a perfectly good printer for incremental upgrades. Of course, it depends on the usage. For someone who uses their printer professionally to serially print all day, sure, it’s probably worth it upgrading. Me? I really don’t care if my prints are slower. I really don’t find the Ender 3 hard to get a print right either. But I’ve been printing since the wooden Printrbot Simple about a decade ago, maybe I’m just used to it.

I’m using a pi4 8gb as my server, with a pi4 2gb as backup in case the first one dies. It’s a very classic server, running postfix/courier-imap for mails, lighttpd for web, bind9 for dns, ergo for irc, sqlite3 for databases. I also use fail2ban for IDS and cron to run tons of various task. All of that is hosted on a Gentoo linux OS.

The one thing I don’t want to use is docker. I love docker for development or for deploying the main app at work, but it makes managing updates a nightmare for handling multiple services on my server (most your containers probably contain vulnerable software due to lack of system updates), and it eats resources needlessly. Then again, it’s made possible because I avoid the big webapps that usually need it.

Has there been so much going on in the market? I’m still using my Ender 3 and I’m not sure what I would add to it, it serves me well (I already added a BL Touch, in the early days I got it, and a glass bed, although I don’t see much benefit from that last part). It’s just doing the job perfectly. 🤷 That being said, I only use it for functional printing. I way more often use my Elegoo Saturn (a resin printer), as I use it to print my tabletop minis.

That sucks, sorry for you to have to go through that. Do you already know modeling/sculpting? If not, that’s the perfect time to get into it, and really be able to do anything with your printer when you get it. :)

Take back the control on your data, that’s the whole point… :) Where are you regularly saving data? Those are the prime candidates. Look at self-hosted alternatives for those services. I know big webapps hosted in docker containers managed by kubernetes is all the rage around here, but you can often find Unix style equivalent for such services, the main advantage of putting it on a server being to be able to access it from multiple devices. But you do you, if you prefer hosting big webapps, that’s fine too. :)

2033 is maybe a bit too far for me. :P Here one for 2027 : “Y (previously known as Reddit) finally shuts down after failing its pivot to b2b AGI support board. CEO says the world doesn’t deserve Y anyway.”

Bluesky already implemented that

Oh really? Awesome. I’m still not going to use a generalist social network, but they’re doing it right. :)

although most users will just stick to the default one

Yeah, indeed. My taste for tinkering may be showing, I should acknowledge it’s not something widespread. 😅

I would one up that suggestion : what could be awesome would be to allow users to choose which sorting algorithm they use, and possibly tweak it. This would allow people to share the sorting logic they like, and there would be no trust issue, since you can verify the logic is respected by changing it.

Not sure how realistic this proposal is, though, because this could lead to performance issues if users submit too complicated sorting logic, which could be exploited to DoS an instance. On the other hand, it could be solved with a timeout mechanism : “if your query takes more than 100 ms to load, we kill it”. And also, you can’t just let users run arbitrary SQL, obviously, so this would require to implement some sort of meta-language safely transpiled, this would be the real challenge.

In such a widespread usage, there would probably not be “the fediverse” anymore, but a galaxy of clusters of interconnected instances. Spam would be a serious problem, so instances would switch to whitelisting instances they want to federate with instead of just occasionally “defederating” from them. It would not only happen because of spam, by the way, but also because of political/cultural/ideological divergences. Maybe even because of laws.

There would be a boom of innovations, made possible because of the data openly accessible and the fact that we would finally have a standard on which to build upon to create third party applications (which, from a developer perspective, was the promise of the web-2.0 and its APIs, but never truly materialized). You would see alternative frontends for everything, and applications that allow to get new insights or use your data in new and smart ways.

The big businesses would still be around, by the way. They would open their own instances, publish lot of ads and add cool features found nowhere else so that most people join their instances, which would quickly become the go to instances for everyone, dwarving all other instances. We would spend a lot of time evangelizing so that people join smaller instances instead, but our folks would answer that it’s less convenient, they would have less easy to use features and their account is already at BigCo anyway. Plus, to fight spam, terrorism, child pornography, nazis or whatever is the scarecrow then, they would severely limit the possibility for small instances to interop with them, adding arbitrary technical barriers that most implementers won’t succeed in hoping. But we won’t care that much, because we will have our own alternative networks with more content on them than ever.

GitHub is a great platform, which has championed open-source for decades, now. I don’t think anybody has anything to blame them for (except people not liking the idea that AI is trained on their code, like sibling mentioned), it’s more about fears it may go bad. Because basically, it’s where most of the code of the world is hosted, it’s a single point of failure. People also have questioned the pertinence of having all open-source code hosted on a proprietary platform. And the acquisition by Microsoft also had a chilling effect on those of us who remember Internet Explorer 6’s Microsoft more than VSCode’s Microsoft.

For those reasons, it is desirable for those who love the idea of decentralization to look up for alternatives. But even there, it’s perfectly fine to stay on GitHub, “decentralizing” doesn’t require everybody to leave. :) Plus, even when using an other forge, it’s still good to keep publishing mirrors on GitHub for visibility and discoverability, currently.

It’s totally not crazy thinking. :) I think the main problem is that while Mastodon and Lemmy implement the server to server part of ActivityPub, they don’t implement the client to server part of the standard, and instead build their own REST API and client. This is why, while you can subscribe to actors from an other application, it looks bad : it’s supposed to be consumed in their own client, or something that tries to emulate it (that, and the fact that they each implement their own extensions to ActivityPub, it doesn’t help).

In a perfect world, ActivityPub based applications would implement the client to server part or the standard too, so that we have a multitude of third party clients that can consume data from any ActivityPub based application without looking broken. I certainly hope we go in this direction in the future, because interoperability looks half-baked, as it is right now, and the fediverse would be just more awesome with such upgrade.

as in my experience, most regular users do not have a Matrix client installed

I understand your point, but by that logic, we should use Reddit rather than Lemmy, as most users are there. It’s not only about ease of use, it’s about being sure users won’t be abused. Discord is still in its acquisition phase, but you can be sure enshitification will come next.

Thanks for raising the issue.

Most probably, people who made that decision are not aware of the implications and made that choice in good faith, so it’s worth giving reasons why you want them to avoid proprietary software, rather than just frowning at them.

To the admins of lemmy.world and anyone who feels confuse about why this is an issue : it is about freedom. You all know how Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc are turning ugly, and you can’t do anything about it. With FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), when it turns ugly, you can do something about it. You (or any technical person who agrees with you) can take the code and go your own way with it (we call that “forking”). No decision of the authors can be forced upon you. Similarly, if you think something is not working right, you can fix it yourself, and send the changes to the maintainers of the code, who usually are happy to get some help. So it’s also about freedom of fixing your own problems, instead of waiting and praying the authors do something about it.

And this is the whole spirit of the Fediverse : taking matters in our own hands instead of being betrayed once more by a company which decides that their bottom line requires to be user hostile. One day, this will happen to Discord to, it always ends up there. That’s why people using Lemmy who are aware of those problems are not happy with seeing lemmy.world use Discord.

Thanks to the admins of lemmy.world for all the work they provide to the Fediverse.

The best you can do to know if it was an attack is to inspect the logs when you have time. There are a lot of things that can cause a process going wild without being an attack. Sometimes, even filling the RAM can cause the CPU to appear overloaded (and will freeze the system anyway). One simple way to figure out if it’s an attack : reboot. If it’s a bug, everything will get back to normal. If it’s a DDoS, the problem will reappear up to a few minutes after reboot. If it’s a simple DoS (someone exploiting a bug of a software to overload it), it will reappear or not given if the exploit was automated and recurring, or was just a one-shot.

The fact that both your machines fell at the same time would tend to make think it’s an attack. On the other hand, it may just be a surge of activity on the network with VPSes with way not enough resources to handle it. Or it may even be a noisy neighbor problem (the other people sharing with you the real hardware on which your VPSes run who will orverload it).

Obligatory check : are you sure you really need a forge? (that’s the name we use to designate tools like Github/Gitlab/Gitea/etc). You can do a lot with git alone : you can host repositories on your server, clone them through ssh (or even http with git http-backend, although it requires a bit of setup), push, pull, create branches, create notes, etc. And the best of it : you can even have CI/CD scripts as post-receive hooks that will run your tests, deploy your app, or reject the changes if something is not right.

The only thing you have to do is to create the repos on your server with the --bare flag, as in git init --bare, this will create a repos that is basically only what you usually have in the .git directory, and will avoid having errors because you pushed to a branch that is not the currently one checked. It will also keep the repos clean, without artifacts (provided you run your build tasks elsewhere, obviously), so it will make all your sources really easy to backup.

And to discuss issues and changes, there is always email. :) There is also this, a code review tool that just pop up on HN.

And it works with Github! :) Just add a git remote to Github, and you can push to it or fetch from it. You can even setup hooks to sync with it. I publish my FOSS projects both on Github and Gitlab, and the only thing I do to propagate changes is to push to my local bare repos that I use for easy backups, they each have a post-update hook which propagates the change everywhere it needs to be (on Github, Gitlab, various machines in my local network, which then have their own post-update hooks to deploy the app/lib). The final touch to that : having this ~/git/ directory that contains all my bare repos (which are only a few hundred MB so fit perfectly in my backups) allowed me to create a git_grep_all script to do code search in all my repos at once (who needs elasticsearch anyway :D ) :

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# grep recursively bare repos

INITIAL_DIR=$(pwd)
for dir in $(find . -name HEAD -exec dirname '{}' \;); do
  pushd $dir > /dev/null
  git grep "$*" HEAD > /dev/null
  if [[ "$?" = "0" ]]; then
    pwd
    git grep "$*" HEAD
    echo
  fi

  popd > /dev/null
done

(note that it uses pushd and popd, which are bash builtins, other shells should use other ways to change directories)

The reason why you may still want a forge is if you have non tech people who should be able to work on issues/epics/documentation/etc.

This. Also, anybody who can identify you as the owner of the host (be it through Whois or through hosting service records) can associate your name to everything posted on that instance, thus profiling you, your tastes and your opinions easily (it’s insane the amount of personal information we can leak on social media, even when thinking we’re not). Clearly not something to do in countries where you can be harassed or worse for your opinions, and probably best avoided everywhere, if privacy is a concern for you. There is some virtue in being immersed in the masses (that’s actually a common anonymisation strategy, from merging streams comes plausible deniability).

StackExchange dumps are available for Kiwix, the project that allows to use a local dump of Wikipedia. You can find all the available dumps there, including the StackExchange ones. You can even build your own search engine through libs allowing to use those zim files (the dumps), if you want.