I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 that is by now almost 10 years old, it runs perfectly on Linux and is a fantastic choice even today. It’s built like a tank and that Intel i5 powering it is immortal. DDR3 RAM is dirt cheap now and it takes up to 16Gb, you can swap its HDD to a SATA SSD (if not done already) and batteries for it are still cheap and plentiful.

If you’re looking for something affordable for software dev, I can’t think of a better choice for $200-$300

https://www.lenovo.com/lt/lt/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t430/

They really built this one right, they don’t make them like this anymore.

Hey, thanks for your feedback.

Good point on the Admin account potentially not being e-mail verified, I’ll add that bit in there.

Lemmy stores a record of users in two places:

• local_user is where local accounts are stored. Each entry has an id and a person_id.
• person gets an entry for every user@instance that your Lemmy instance learns about, including users which were created on your instance. local_user entries are mapped to person entries using the person_id.
• local_user doesn’t actually keep track of user@instance - it’s all stored under person and referenced via the person_id.

This means that to free up the user names, you would also need to delete the respective entry from person. There are a few ways you can achieve this:

• You could grab a list of all person_id numbers where email_verified=‘f’, then use this list to delete from person.
• You could just delete the specific username you want to free up from person (where name=‘username’).

Edit: This also explains your confusion around the id of the Admin username - id would’ve been ‘1’ and that’s the one that matters. person_id was ‘2’ because your instance likely learnt of another user before the Admin somehow. I just checked mine and person_id is also 2, so it seems like the standard thing it does.

I didn’t worry about this too much since these were all randomly generated junk usernames that nobody would ever miss and I didn’t think it was worth the extra hassle to try and delete them from person too, since it would be a bit cumbersome especially if there’s a lot of them.

Anyway, to free up those usernames just delete them from person using one of the options above.

I hear you on the need to delete junk data, my hope is the devs will eventually include some decent tools for that. It’s a good suggestion, I may put something together when I have a bit of time.

A solution you can try meanwhile is to use an admin account to ‘purge’ the stuff you want to delete - purging does remove everything from the server. Annoyingly you don’t get the option to purge your own posts as the admin, but you can use a second admin account to work around this.

Have you thought of self-hosting mailcow? https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

It’s very easy to set up and fairly straightforward to maintain, if you have a static IP and it’s not impossible to get a PTR record then I highly recommend it. Yes you’re self hosting your own mail server but mailcow vastly simplifies this.

Alternatively plonking it on the right VPS can also work.

Hey, that is weird behaviour, I haven’t encountered it in my testing with Chrome. There are a few things you can try to figure out what’s causing it:

1. Try clearing your browser cache (cookies, offline site data, etc): https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32050?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop - sometimes, especially after Lemmy updates, things can be a bit wonky until you do this.
2. If the problem persists, try using another instance to see if the same thing is happening there too. You’re welcome to try lemdit.com if you wish.

This will help you narrow down the problem.

I suspect there may be two separate things going on:

1. The comment behaviour you mentioned may be related to browser cache and recent Lemmy updates introducing infinite scrolling.
2. The generic page error is likely related to the instance you are using. lemmy.world has suffered through a few DDoS attacks recently so it’s possible that you are getting those errors when the instance is down due to those attacks. If it happens again, then perhaps take a screenshot and post it here.

Let me know how you go.

In practice UPC will probably have some kind of fair use policy buried in its terms of service - your best bet is to go through those terms and see what you find. Fair use typically means they will start throttling you beyond a certain point. Most ISPs keep this reasonably vague (e.g. if your usage is in excess of what they deem to be reasonable, but no actual data amounts defined).

Not all ISPs have a fair use policy though, and typically you’re better off on large ISPs where your usage doesn’t really stand out that much.

Hey, nice write-up again - thanks for sharing!

It’s not a mass exodus. There was a sizeable influx of people from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin, sure, but that’s measured in the (low) hundreds of thousands. Reddit has hundreds of millions of active users.

The reality is it’s not even close to a mass exodus, not yet.

Thanks for highlighting this, it does sound very counter-intuitive!

It also sounds like frequent updates are a pain in the ass for mobile users, I hope Lemmy stabilizes to a point where we don’t have to update every other day.

You’re welcome!

Then yes most likely the topic is removed, it sounds like everything is fine. If you’re able to comment on the board as well then you’re definitely not banned.

Hey, I’ve done a bit of testing to help you out, here’s what I found.

1. If you get banned from a community, then it will show in the instance Modlog (link at the bottom of the page):

2. There is otherwise no notification given to the user or any text to say you’re banned.

3. I could still search for the community and view it, but just couldn’t post to it.

4. There is no difference in behaviour between getting banned from a community on your home instance, or getting banned from a community on a remote instance.

I’m guessing you can still access the instance the community was on? Can you check the Modlog?

My 2 cents:

Simple, no domain required stuff:

• Pi-hole for self-hosted DNS: https://pi-hole.net/
• Navidrome for self-hosted music server: https://www.navidrome.org/ (best to pair this with an external portable HDD/SSD for music storage)
• Set up syncthing on it and use it for automatic file back-up: https://syncthing.net/ (that external HDD/SSD will come in handy again).

More advanced, should pair with a domain:

• Nextcloud for your own personal cloud/calendar/etc: https://nextcloud.com/ - it won’t be blazing fast but it will work well, I had it running on a pi for a while.
• Simple web hosting - the pi is great for hosting low traffic stuff like blogs etc.

Thanks for adding this clarification, it’s a great point to include.

That makes sense, I think you may be on the money there.

That’s an awesome project! I love re-purposing computers for self-hosted stuff.

Let us know how you go, as @sleepybear@lemmy.myspamtrap.com says, your setup will probably be different than his or mine, but I’m also happy to help if I can.

I find Docker a mixed bag, it vastly simplifies some things, but then it complicates others.

Yes the bit that gets me is having the whole Docker networking layer with its own firewalls and rules, on top of host networking. Whatever was happening, Lemmy was not hitting the host or router firewalls at all. So maybe it was a Docker permissions thing, I really don’t know.

Then you have to worry about performance and how Docker handles assigned resources, this post was very interesting in this respect: https://lemmy.world/post/920294 (the bit on solutions).

Then again, it’s so much more straightforward to deploy Lemmy with Docker, none of this is a real problem unless you’re a big/public instance.

Hey, great write-up, thanks for sharing!

I find it interesting how you had to declare a DNS server for federation to work. I played a bit with Docker Lemmy but I ran into weird Docker networking issues when trying to get it to talk to my mail server, which is in another docker container on a seperate VM. I just couldn’t get them to talk to each other!

I ended up building Lemmy from scratch, which was painful given the state of documentation, but somehow more workable than that Docker quirk I encountered. It’s still a mistery to me how to solve that one, though it’s probably just my lack of experience with Docker, I generally prefer setting things up the old fashioned way.

I agree, embedding tweets will become far less desirable now.

It’s possible, he does seem to be deliberately strangling it in many ways. There is probably some truth to the scraping allegations, I suspect a huge chunk of the traffic to my humble Nitter instance was generated by bots/scrapers, for example.

But there were also many legitimate users (like me) that just wanted to read a tweet someone linked without having to worry about interacting with Twitter directly. I’m certainly not going to start logging into Twitter now just to see the occasional random junk, and I suspect the same is true for most people in my camp. So overall he’s gutted the reach of Twitter even further with this move, it’s silly.