We’ve had to block a number of IPs for our instance. One was a misconfigured fediverse project that was hammering our instance, and a number of them seem to be AI companies scraping for content.
Maybe something similar is happening on your instance?
Otter
I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.
🍁⚕️ 💽
Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023
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Thank you!
2·3 days agoThanks for posting this discussion, I agree with the general consensus from the edit.
Thumbnails are annoying to deal with, and I had trouble the few times when I tried to address it in my own posts. It’s a lot more work to pull a different thumbnail and replace the autogenerated one, especially if you’re on mobile and just want to share something quickly. Still, if someone is posting low effort spam/clickbait often, I’d agree with a mod telling them to knock it off
2672·5 days agocrashes
Maybe, but could it also be an intentional dark pattern to make it difficult to cancel?
6·5 days agoJust do like 10 minutes of research before you buy
The average person might not know what’s reputable and what’s not. A lot of the VPN review sites are also secretly run by the VPN companies, or get paid off by them. Someone might even mix up the bad
PrivacyToolsfor the legitimatePrivacyGuides
On a related note, this story from 2024:
Even ignoring any ownership issues, it’s an awful service. If you look up “ExpressVPN cancel” you’ll find lots of posts and comments from people complaining that they were charged again after cancelling, that the interface makes it difficult to cancel, that they needed to reach out to support multiple times, etc.
Instead:
- Use a different VPN
- Check if you actually need a VPN for your situation
I check this guide from time to time to see if anything has changed with the usual recommendations:
1·9 days agoA few other notes
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MSN links are annoying because they act as a wrapper for the content that another actual news site put out. Finding the original link is better for everyone, and it helps on the Lemmy side since then the UI can indicate cross posts with that correct link
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I don’t find as much value in news stories with “Trump says” in the headline. It helps in order to anticipate what kind of issues he might cause next, but otherwise I’d much rather read what actually happened instead of losing brain cells reading what trump said about it
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2·9 days agoA relevant community for anyone visiting this thread:
I tried with the latest version of chrome and no extensions, still getting an error. I think the problem is with them.
I think what they’re saying is that, to a lot of people (myself included), Signal is currently the best option despite being centralized. The decentralized options have UX issues, too small a user base, or aren’t well known enough to have gone through robust security/privacy reviews. While you can’t see what’s running on the signal servers, the app is open source and so far it looks to be encrypting the information correctly and it’s not sending anything but the minimal data to their servers.
‘A lot of eyeballs on the code’ is only relevant for open source apps. They were making a comparison between Signal and the many other open source mobile messaging apps.
You might also find this chart helpful if you’re looking for other alternatives. Personally, I found Signal to be the best one to get my friends and family onto
Looks good, I’ve added it to this post and the two pinned ones
Finally! This was keeping me from recommending Signal to more people
If you do decide to opt in to secure backups, you’ll be able to securely back up all of your text messages and the last 45 days’ worth of media for free.
If you want to back up your media history beyond 45 days, as well as your message history, we also offer a paid subscription plan for US$1.99 per month.
That’s excellent to hear. Hopefully no one abuses the media backups, I would understand if they did it by file sizes
For people asking about alternative communities, we put together a list a while back when closing
!askmen@lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/post/48642221“Ask” communities (for starting a discussion):
For questions that are more specific to your situation:
Group specific communities:
Broader in topic (not necessarily questions):
30·19 days agoThere are some other projects in this space already, with varying levels of open source / selfhostability / features
Zulip and Revolt looked the most promising for Slack and Discord replacements respectively
6·22 days agoYou might like [email protected], which is specific to software
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal
United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.
I see, I’ll edit my other comment. So what even changes then, were they even making exclusive deals in the past? The discussion I remember was about how being the default made it difficult for others to compete since most people don’t change the defaults.
I think they’re referring to Firefox’s funding, a lot of which was through search deals
An article from 5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox
edit: seems like that hasn’t changed by this ruling either
United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal
Same creator as Faster than Light, which is also on sale
I’m not sure which guides to recommend, but in case it helps narrow down your search, you could share more about your situation:
Do you have any existing hardware or are you planning to buy? If so, what is the budget for the equipment and where in the world are you approximately?
What did you want to self host? Some services would benefit from a certain type of setup. For example, if you’re serving lots of media, if you need redundancy and uptime, if you’re running AI models or something that needs a GPU
General tips:
For Linux, a lot of people go with Ubuntu server because there are a lot of existing guides for it. You don’t need much Linux knowledge to start self hosting since you can learn by doing over time. Some concepts to explore before getting started might be cron, the Linux file system, and user permissions.
For Docker, you should be fine if you know the basics. I’d recommend using Docker Compose since it’s easier to understand what’s happening when its written out in a nice yaml file. Install Docker and Docker Compose on the server, and then install something like DockGE to manage the compose files. When you want to run a service, copy the Docker compose file and then swap the port to what port you want to use, and the volume to the location you tend to use.
For a very basic setup, I’d find a video guide for