You can set up a personalized RSS feed with Feeder. It will take a bit of effort to set up, but you can create a feed that is very well tailored to your interests. You can get news feeds but also subscribe to other kinds of content, like scientific publications and financial statements.

Thank you for that reference! Very interesting

Ah, cool! I got my 4 devices today and I have managed to play with them a bit. They are pretty cool! I was able to walk over to a park near my house and spoke with people across the world with no data in my phone :D

I ordered four of the simpler devices this weekend (LilyGO T3-S3 LoRa 868MHz - SX1262) and I have been reading about antennas.

Since I live in a city I am not super optimistic about the range. But I am still very curious about the concept, and I would love to be surprised.

After doing some search about antennas, I have decided to test the following combination:

• 3dBi 868MHz ISM Band Dipole Terminal Antenna for the LoRa that stays at home:

• Sighunter 868 MHz to bring with me.

I also have a vector network analyzer (LiteVNA) that can be used for checking antennas, so I will also try to build some antennas myself. I doubt that my custom antennas will approach the performance of the professional ones… But I just find it such a cool concept.

Have you already gotten to play with it? What is your experience so far?

Yeah, I found out only after choosing that domain name… This TLD also gets penalized by the automatic e-mail spam detectors (like SpamAssassin). I wouldn’t pick the “.xyz” TLD if I were picking today 😅

I wiped all my data from a supercomputer by trying to ‘cd’ into a folder but making a typo and then running rm -rvf * from my home directory.

At least they kept backups… The system administrators were probably amused about who gets access

Thank you - that makes sense!

I think I understand why this is done now. Most HTTP requests are hidden by the SSL encryption, and the keys to decrypt it are client-specific. So, if one wants to block ads at the network level without needing to get the SSL keys of every client that connects to the network, then this is the most specific amount of information that you can provide the PiHole with. The HTTP blocking needs to be set up in a client-specific manner, and that’s why they work well as browser extensions.

Thanks!

Adblocking plugins aren’t limited by this and can filter the actual content and HTTP requests made by the browser.

Why is this the case? What rules do Adblock plugins use that allow them to determine that something that is being served is an ad? I understand from what you are saying that Adblock will block on the basis of the HTTP requests instead of filtering at the DNS level - do ads come with specific HTTP headers that are not processed by the pi-hole DNS server and thus can’t be used for filtering? I don’t fully understand yet the details of how the two ad-blocking mechanisms operate, so their differences are not obvious to me.

I think you left this line behind by accident:

l = Lemmy(INSTANCE_URL)

This is what I think, but if anyone understands it differently please correct me.

Vertical scalability refers to scaling within a single instance. More users join and they post more content, increasing the amount of disk space needed to hold that memory, network bandwidth to handle many users downloading comments and images at once, and processing power.

Horizontal scaling refers to the lemmyverse growing because of the addition of new instances. The problem in this form of scaling is due to the resources that an instance has to use due to its interactions with other instances. So, you may create a small instance without a lot of users, but the instance might still need a lot of resources if it attempts to retrieve a lot of information (posts, comments, user information, etc) from the other larger instances. For example, at some point a community in lemmy.ml might be so popular that subscribing to that community from a small instance would be too much of a burden on the smaller instance because of the amount of memory required to save the constant stream of new posts. The horizontal scaling is a problem when the lemmyverse becomes so large that a machine with only a small amount of resources is no longer able to be part of the lemmyverse because its memory gets filled up in a few hours or days.

I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they’ll give up because the bigger instances are closed.

(This is purely my personal opinion, of course!) In the scenario in which a few large instances dominate, the idea of the fediverse failed. One may estimate the likelyhood of success or failure given how they expect humans to behave, but in the end experiment beats theory. I think that for the fediverse to work a significant cultural shift has to occur, but I don’t think that it is an impossible shift. I would like the fediverse to succeed, and so I choose to take part in the experiment.

This also ignores that the system isn’t horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive

Yes, that might cause some serious issues. The project is still in an early-development phase, and I don’t understand the technical aspects well enough yet to be able to identify whether there is obviously a fundamentally invincible barrier when it comes to scalability. My optimistic hope is that the developers are able to optimize horizontal scalability fast enough to meet the demand for scale. If it turns out to be impossible to scale, then only rich enough parties would be able to have viable instances, and that could be a reason for failure.

A small cloud server + a domain name costs less than a Netflix subscription. The developers have taken care to package lemmy in ways that are relatively straight forward to deploy, so a dedicated person with a small amount of experience can have an instance up and running in an evening. As long as a few percentage of users are willing to pay a netflix subscription to keep a server running, the financial burden would be spread.

This feels like one of those chain messages that we would get on Facebook asking us to do something like posting “I don’t give permission to Facebook to use my data”. Except that this time it is actually true!

I have added “_nomap” to my SSID and now I have to read the manual for the wifi extender, which by default appends _EXT to the SSID 🙄

I would much rather see a “_yesmap” opt-in policy!