Happy Sysadmin Day today to all Lemmy instance operators! Thanks for keeping things running.

sure it is, i do it all the time. sometimes i’ll get a too-slow circuit and need to try another, but, it works on the first try more often than not.

These instances are not only slow, they also sell their user’s information.

I’ve long wondered about this regarding alternate frontends for big sites in general, but especially about the youtube frontends like piped and invidious which must require substantial resources to operate (though sometimes they’re serving the video data itself directly from google, sometimes they’re actually proxying it too)… but, I’ve never seen any evidence of it. Have you?

In any case, many of the popular instances are running on Microsoft or Oracle clouds, and/or Clownflare, so, from a privacy standpoint it isn’t really much different than Google. I use them occasionally in Tor Browser just because they’re less likely to be blocking a Tor exit than youtube proper is.

what caused that?

use cryptography, for decentralized identities and content addressability.

the “fediverse” is ostensibly decentralized but that actually just means it has more single points of failure than the centralized model it is attempting to replace. (a failure doesn’t necessarily take the whole thing down, but, “federated” generally means there are more people and systems which could individually prevent information from flowing from point A to B; eg, I can’t message someone on another server if my server is down or if their server is down.)

Secure Scuttlebutt has a much better data model but is doing other things wrong so I haven’t used it much. Maybe Twitter’s Bluesky thing will produce something good, but I’m not holding my breath. What is clear is that ActivityPub is not a good long-term answer (but it is fun today).

torrents, and yt-dlp (works with bandcamp, soundcloud, etc, not only youtube).

with a few exceptions i only pay for music when i can do so without an intermediary taking a big cut and my data (eg, mostly only in-person at a show), but i have paid for things through bandcamp a few times.

yep, this is almost exactly the same calculation i just did to arrive somewhere between $0.50 - $2 for an SBC :)

that is true; running a small single-board computer probably adds somewhere between $0.50 to $2 per month to your power bill, depending on the model and the rates in your area, and much more if you use a normal PC instead.

If you have a decent internet connection at home, and a spare computer (eg a raspberrypi or something), and you don’t mind everyone knowing your home IP address, it could cost as little as $0.

It’s also possible to rent a virtual server for the purpose for as little as $5/month, but you’d probably want to spend a few times that to get one with better-than-minimum specs from a reliable/reputable operator.

The biggest expense is the time it takes to maintain it. Becoming an infrastructure provider for other people can become quite a hassle, especially if they come to rely on it and are seriously inconvenienced when you have downtime.

lmao the ISS is literally the least self-sufficient place anywhere in the universe where humans currently live

if you live in a GDPR country, consider filing a complaint with your local data protection authority

i think DDG is hosted on AWS

not that it makes much difference but the DDG domains i just checked are currently pointing at Microsoft-owned IP addresses

Can anyone shed any light on what the impetus to this letter was? It very much reads like it must be in response to something specific having been widely distributed prematurely, but doesn’t say what it is/was.

In theory I think you can:

1. put a peer tube video URL in the search box here
2. wait a moment for lemmy to fetch the video page
3. comment on the resulting lemmy page for the video
4. your comment should appear on peertube

However, I just tried it with this video (that instance is running peertube 4.2.0, which is required for some features according to the lemmy release notes) and my comment here has not yet appeared on peertube (nor are the four existing comments on that video appearing on lemmy, nor is the one other video on that channel appearing on the lemmy page for that channel).

see my other comment in this thread, it can translate offline now

The current link in this post goes to a year-old story about the online translation feature… here is the same site’s coverage of this week’s news - which is that there is now offline translation support: https://www.ghacks.net/2022/05/30/firefox-translations-firefoxs-offline-translate-feature-is-making-progress/ (i assume this is what OP actually meant to post). (edit: OP fixed the post’s link)

Here is a web page that loads their wasm translation engline and does the actual translation offline (and it does work in the stable release of Firefox). It’s irritating that the extension still requires a nightly firefox build, as I’d like to use it in my daily browsing but I don’t want to use nightly all the time.

There are a small number of apps that have legitimate reasons for background location access, like OsmAnd which is very nice for making GPX tracks (in an offline, privacy-respecting way). But yeah “foreground location” and “background location” should be different permissions, and really, why should that app even run in the background?

(note: OsmAnd should be installed from f-droid to get the unrestricted free software version; the version in google play hilariously requires you to pay for the ability to download more than a few maps 🤣 )

on the website it sounds like it’s opt-in (via participating sites’ GDPR cookie popups), and it’s a new thing from a major european carrier, so i assume it was designed with GDPR compliance in mind.

(tag yourself; i’m the consenting laptop user sitting on the radio waves)

i lol’d at the comically large shadows in this one (“BaZik”):

…and less than a month later, the new lemmy release allows following peertube channels!

thanks, @nutomic@lemmy.ml et al!