As a longtime provider of services in one form or another since the late 80's and early 90's, I felt the pain of having to write out the following blog post/update.

Drew is an opinionated perfectionist with an attention to detail and his perspective that chafes some, endears others, and deservedly, receives the respect earned when someone strives toward par excellence for those for whom they provide services for.

I have some differing set of conclusions from my understanding of what he laments as the ordeal he's been through in the past year, like, "why would anyone consider a carrier besides DHL for international overseas shipments?" Also, I fail to see the logic in moving his entire infra from the U.S. (where there are many affordable top-tier carrier hotels - aka datacenters) to Amsterdam, which also has fine facilities and maybe it is because of privacy concerns which depending on what those are, may indeed be quite valid from my perspective.

But not having IPv6 fully deployed (as a result of datacenter choice?) is puzzling, although almost inconsequential operationally, in production, ... Almost.

Considering I've always looked directly at the carriers themselves, used my own delegated IP infrastructure for core operations, I tend to look at a datacenter as three things:

- Electricity
- Fail-over electricity (Generators)
- Air conditioning

Most folks rent a rack that comes with transit, I ask how much the XC is - I can find, mix, and pick my transit providers. I just wanna know that my shit is secure in a suite or cage behind locked cabinets that I personally have 24/7 access to at anytime (even though I'll rarely do so) and have 24/7 remote hands to swap drives, hot-pluggable power supplies and plug cables into the designated ports I specify, etc. Those things typically come w/zero cost.

For DDoS'ing, I do like to outsource this as part of a package, and I'm open to any offers of included transit/XC and want to know how much each additional 20A of electricity cost me each month in addition to the rack fees. Putting the onerous of protecting my customers from a good DDoS'ing on someone else like my upstream takes a lot of worry away.

Shipping machinery though, that's a bit distinct too, I've been burned a few times domestically, although always recovered my *tangible costs - time? well, I've lost a couple of customers because their infra was lost or damaged in transit, but insurance is important - Drew had that. What I'm really wondering though, is who besides DHL would you even trust to ship servers over the Atlantic Ocean?

That's a cost I would not consider skimping on - A girl I almost married worked for DHL for over 20 years and they'll cut a check at the drop of a hat, which might have worked out well for Drew considering these were old boxes ready for retirement anyway and the replacement cost (new stuffs) is what you insure for.

Anyway, I've really admired much of what Drew has done over the years, was cheerleading for him as he migrated from full time paycheck person to finally being able to announce that he "thinks" he can make enough money for a living by devoting himself full time to FOSS with his fledgling SourceHut.

Yah, sometimes his head swelled up pretty big, making it hard to fit through doorways, and I've butted heads with him here and there on technical matters only, but have always respected him, and in truth, he was never not correct even if his way was the wrong way, or there was simply a better way - usually those were matters of opinion coz there's more than six ways to Sunday to skin a cat.

Anyway, he's been kicked in the balls really hard, which if you know much of him, must have been really hard to lay all of that out in some manner of detail (He's almost always brutally transparent). For that, and moreover for getting right back up after being knocked down (maybe by da man?), I applaud his candidness. His devotion to those of you reading this that may have free repos at SourceHut, and I'm also encouraging everyone to kick in at least a few bucks - fuck that dumb app that you don't need, let alone pay $2.95 for the exclusive right to be tracked - I urge you with all FOSSiness in mind... Give it a read, and send him whatev, ... I guarantee it will come back to you tenfold.

Drew is a consummate FOSS warrior, do it for yourself, please - Five bucks, fifty bucks, heck, whatever isn't going to cut into your budget for porterhouse steak this weekend would be nice.

And it will make you feel good too.

Full disclosure: I'm not getting shit from this article. Drew and I only converse occasionally and usually it is to disagree - some folks are just good coz of what's in their heart, their commitment to the community, and whether you're a fan or not doing this for him really is doing this for yourself and everyone else in the FOSS world.

Here's the link to the article/update.

#tallship #FOSS #OpenSource #SourceHut #Git #repo

⛵

.

Someone wrote a simple installation guide for #Mitra

https://buck.al/mitra-installation/

We already have the #ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, but even before that, there were initiatives for other CMS frameworks - static site generators like the following, for #Hugo.

This provides threaded comments on Hugo sites for #Fedizens. Just as clean, but on something superduper fast (Hugo). Very nifty!

#tallship

⛵

.

RE: https://mastodon.online/users/veronica/statuses/110035145753110132

@veronica

#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"

Phrases such as, reasonably secure should be indicators of how ridiculous it is to assume that any secure platform is EVER completely, and totally secure.

That begs the question, "Exactly how secure do you require your communications to be?" The answer is always, ... relative.

Which means that you should always believe Ellen Ripley when she says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"

https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher-problem

#tallship #encryption #PGP #secure_communication #Privacy #FOSS

⛵

.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who's actually been paying attention over the past couple of years:

https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-hard-fork/

All I can really say is, "OH Happy Day!"

Let the games begin, I'll bring the popcorn :p

#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse #fork #masto @thenexusofprivacy

⛵

.

This is an example of a marketplace listing in Flohmarkt.

What "I" did here...

- Went to the "All" tab over at Flensmarkt - Much like PeerTube, there's a Home, Local, and All tab, the latter of which includes items from other instances that you've manually federated with within the radius you've specified from your location.
- Next, there's a choice to make if you're interested in an item. You can register for a local account (I don't see any reason to do that unless you want to post a listing on that particular server), or you can remotely add yourself (like I did). Since the remote features don't quite seamlessly work with Mitra, I tried this from a masto server - no joy. I tried it from another masto server (a masto fork) - no problem this time, even on an older version of masto. That was humorous to me, as I've a bit of disdain for mastopub servers and found it amusing that even some of the instances running the very latest version of masto won't work, while older one's based on forks do; but I've got a twisted sense of humor.
- So next, you can engage with the seller directly from your local instance on most Fediverse platforms (support is added for various additional Fediverse platforms all the time). In this case, (visible because I chose the "All" tab), the particular item was from yet another #Fohmarkt server elsewhere - this is a very nice feature, like #DeSoc #eBay!!!
- From there, once you boost the item in the listing, others can see it in their streams, boost it further, make arrangements directly with the seller, etc. Kinda Kewl.

This is different from how most other attempts to deliver a marketplace into the #Fediverse. Usually, what I've seen is someone trying to integrate the functionality local to a platform, which networks (via ActivityPub federation) only with other like platforms. That's not a Fediverse solution - that's a platform solution and leaves everyone else on the fediverse not running that particular platform disenfranchised.

For example, using the Epicyon server platform as an example, it is first to be understood that this particular server platform is designed for very small numbers of user accounts per each instance. You also have to manually contact the admin of remote Epicyon servers yourself (or be contacted by them), then mutually agree to federate each other's marketplaces separately and distinct from any wider federation configurations your server has. Considering the inconveniences with locating other Epicyon instances that may or may not have enabled and made use of their marketplaces and establishing a mutual publishing agreement, coupled with the likelihood that each of your instances between 1 and 10 users, posting an item in the marketplace has a pretty high probability of being more effort than its worth - especially since it dosn't federate with any other Fediverse platforms.

Others follow a similar design, but also generally operate like normal #ActivityPub federation using a blacklist method, as well as being able to accommodate potentially hundreds, or even thousands of users per each instance (yeah, I know, semi-monolithic); so even if those marketplaces didn't already automatically federate across the Fediverse with all instances of other like server platforms, it's still a huge improvement over the previously discussed smolweb platform's model.

But they're still not Fediverse wide...

This is where Flohmarkt really starts to shine - it's fully Federating (Still a WIP wrt some platforms - see the wiki for particulars) across the entire #ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse.

You can check for the latest particulars on Flohmarkt's current Federation status if you're interested in your particular Fediverse platform and level of interoperation with Flohmarkt instances.

I do have some criticisms of the particular functionality in federating that the developers have chosen to incorporate, however. Basically, The server admin still needs to manually federate item listings between the local instance and other remote Flohmarkt servers. It doesn't need to be this way however, but one must concede that after going over the documentation and seeing that the concern's of the dev team are over unchecked spam, phishing, poor quality ads, etc., I find it to be a very reasonable concern, although I'm still not comfortable with how the Dev team has hard-coded this conditional into the server's capability, when a slightly different approach might afford self-hosters much greater flexibility and incintive for adoption; namely:

- Make the current model the default
- Enable other configurations for federating between other Flohmarkt servers (and eventually, other platform marketplaces) via either simple configuration files, runtime arguments, or via a GUI in an admin control panel, including that of an uninhibited fully blacklist model of sharing listings between Flohmarkt servers.

I generally tend to think that hard-wired, opinionated configuration choices are a less than ideal (usually bad idea) than acknowledging issues surrounding such decisions and then choosing a default while affording server admins (or users themselves) of being able to manage the options for themselves. This is one of those cases where I feel it could make a huge difference in the viabilty and adoption potential for this, "Strictly Federating Marketplace" Fediverse platform.

The other (very minor) criticism I have for Flohmarkt is the pin & string radius solution as it is currently implemented:

- It's determined by the server admin, instance wide
- It's determined by the server location, or some other arbitrarily decided locale

The radius is a great idea, but I think the following would go a long way towards improving the utility of this feature set:

- The server admin decides whether to enable user-level radius configs or server level, as is the case at this time.
- Local users determine, and have control over whether an established is applied to either their entire user profile's repertoire of items listed, or on a per item basis.
- If he user chooses a per item radius, each listing could have a different radius established.
- The local users have location radius specifications that can be based on different criteria, such as pinning a location on a map of their choice, by country (the free IP2Location databases can accommodate this behavior).
- The user's particular radius settings for each listing must be preserved and observed by all federating remote Flohmarkt server instances (but not by individual remote user shares/boosts, which should remain unrestricted).

This Radius feature is extremely powerful and I think that every effort of the development team to exploit the potential of this feature set should be a major consideration. Eventually, Flohmarkt servers will federate with other server platform types, exchanging listings between say, Flohmarkt servers and Friendica servers, etc.. but the awesome power unleashed through following and boosting capabilities that are already fully available to remote users to share with others holds the potential at this very time to make Flohmarkt item listings ubiquitous across the entire Fediverse, ... And that is really kewl :)

Well, I'd rather tease your interest and see you go checkout more for yourself rather than feed you everything you wanna know about a really kewl #social_commerce communications tool - you really should experience how kewl it is for yourself.

I couldn't locate a #Matrix support room for Flohmarkt like most contemporary software products maintain in the FOSS world, but the more traditional irc chan #flohmarkt at #LiberaChat is readily available, and of course, there's the issue tracker at the Codeberg repo I previously linked to above.

What are your thoughts and impressions on this novel approach to embedding the marketplace commerce structure into potentially everyone's social streams in the form of both a dedicated platform and as passive feeds via the intervention of other #Fedizens who share and boost individual items and listings in Flohmarkt?

I hope that helps! Enjoy!

#tallship #FOSS #Marketplace #eBay #I_can_haz_Cheezburgerz? 🍔
@grindhold @me @flohmarkt_support #flohmarkt_support

⛵

.

RE: https://fedi.markets/users/Yonggan/items/f7f7f8d1-6279-4249-890a-bdd97340d218

@Yonggan

Going back to Konversation for GUI stuffs. DCC file send/receive is kinda important to me. For everything else, including a lot of Matrix usage, WeeChat is still the Kewlist :p

https://bugs.quassel-irc.org/projects/quassel-irc/wiki/Migrating_from_Monolithic_to_Client+Core - just ain't gonna cut it right now.

I still love HexChat.

Honorable mention goes to Halloy, which I think looks really good, supports tiling, and says it supports DCC Send - I don't mind manipulating config files by hand, and I might check it out with a FlatPak, but if I'm sufficiently impressed it looks like I'll have to build the .deb and SlackBuild myself, ... Well? Somebody's got to! Right?

#tallship #FOSS #IRC #DCC #GUI #Quassel #Konversation #Halloy #HexChat #WeeChat

⛵

.

STS-1: The first launch of the Space Shuttle - Columbia, with astronauts Robert Crippen and John Young crewing on 12 April 1981: https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/launch-of-sts-1-from-ksc-complex-39

This was not, "The First Space Shuttle". Enterprise was the first space shuttle, enshrined on the Intrepid Museum at Pier 86 in Hell's Kitchen.

Enterprise was deployed into service on 17 September 1976 without engines or a heat shield in order to test shuttle transport, re-entry, landing and runway taxiing. Originally and eventually twice intended to be retrofitted for launch duty those subsequent plans were scrubbed because there was a slight design change during the construction of Columbia, so Challenger was constructed from later versions of test article components from the Columbia build.

Enterprise, it's namesake itself an homage to the various vessels named U.S.S. Enterprise; NCC-1701 of Star Trek fame, CVN-65 the very first nuclear powered carrier, and of course CV-6 - The "Big E", responsible for having downed a thousand planes, and destroying 300 ships in WWII.

USS Enterprise, NCC-1701 in 1966

USS Enterprise, CVN-65 - the world's first nuclear powered aircraft carrier

"The Big E", as CV6, perhaps the most famous of all the incarnations of the USS Enterprise are, and the most decorated ship of WWII

The Second time Enterprise received the nod for retrofit it was to replace Challenger following her demise, but Endeavor was built instead from again, leftovers.

At 59 seconds, Challenger was go at throttle up, then children and their parents all around the world stopped breathing

The crew of Challenger for mission STS-51L

The incident in this article by NASA is about the first flight, not the first Space Shuttle, as saying so is disingenuous and misleading. Only after a long career was Enterprise retcon'd into prototype status, as it had been designed to always be an orbiter.

STS-1 was the first manned space shuttle launch, with two astronauts aboard - mission commander Robert Young and pilot Robert Crippen, who would make the approach and bring down Columbia onto the runway at Edwards Air Force base in manual deadstick fashion instead of allowing the autopilot computer software to land the spaceship.

Robert L. Crippen manually landing Columbia at Edwards AFB on 14 April 1981.

An interesting fact about the mission that is hardly ever mentioned, but was a very significant source of anxiety and relative uncertainty at the time was that even though Columbia was designed to land by automatic computer controlled software re-entry procedures (aka autopilot), when it eventually did re-enter the atmosphere it was determined on approach of Edwards Air Force Base in California that pilot Robert L. Crippen would manually pilot the spacecraft upon runway approach and subsequently land the space shuttle manually, by hand, without computer assistance.

Also not widely known is the very public existence of a second series of space shuttles, very similar in most respects, and almost identical in many, that were designed <cough, cough>, and built by the Soviet Union - Yup, they worked really well, and they've been keeping them in hangers for almost 40 years in prisine condition.

It takes a lot of care to maintain a fleet of Baran spacecraft.
Russians have bee really good about the upkeep of their Baran space craft, they've even gone so far as to always maintain a backup in case one is scrubbed for a mission at the last minute, with just the right amount of bird guano as a light protective coating.

What happened to that Russian fleet of space shuttles? They sucked, no surprise, bigtime, and only one was ever launched. After that, they were litterally abandoned in their hangers. They even built the world's largest plane to fly these puppies around all over and show them off.

An Antonov AN-225, the worlds largest plane in the world until the Russians destroyed it during the first couple of days of their war against Ukraine. PIggybacked on top is the Baran spacecraft itself.

There have been many subsequent space endeavors by many countries since the United States' space shuttle program, but the experience and information gathered and learned in the process of all the STS series of missions continues to fuel and guide the continuing NASA missions in a way that other space programs could in no way achieve.

So on this day, the 14th of April, the 43rd annivesary of the 1st flight of the space shuttle, take just a moment to ponder what all of the great acheivements were of the 20th century, and how are attitudes have changed with the advent of new technologies, as we're harnessed with new information and understanding of the world we live in. For example, as you'll note, astronauts Young and Crippen are just casually strolling away from Columbia and heading for their shuttle ride and a shower. No Quarantine, like all of the Apollo astronauts returning from the moon had to endure, and for whatever reason, there was actually a computer onboard Columbia that was responsible for automatically taking over the controls of the spacecraft during descent at Mach 25, then acuiring and navigating the landing path, even the landing itself.

John Young and Robert L. Crippen disembarking Columbia after successfully touching down on April 14th, 1981

We can do anything if we put our heads together in cooperation as a team. And let's not forget that Margaret Hamilton put two men on the moon in 1969 with a total of 8k of memory, okay? I'll have more on that in another story.

• Margaret Hamilton in 1995 - the world's first Software Engineer, by the way ;)*

Enjoy!

#tallship #Enterprise #NASA #Space_Shuttle @tallship_ @tallship@SDF.org @tallship@public.mitra.social @tallship_@Flipboard.com I can haz #Cheezburgerz? 🍔

⛵

.

@tallship@social.sdf.org @darnelltv@darnellclayton.com

AAAArrrrrgggghhh! Too late! I should have remembered that when you switch from the std editor pane to the "More advanced editor in Socialhome that you lose everything that you had entered into the previous dialog box.

Okay so the replies from my masto account apparently went through, even though the follow from last night broke - I did another follow, and it worked fine. I elaborated on the failure's to follow from my Mitra account already, and although I was able to initiate a reply to this article from my Mitra account it apparently never went through.

So I decided to try what used to be the most reliable method of commenting - a remote post. I'm including a screenie showing what that looks like on Darnell's ActivityPub powered WordPress site for convenience. You have two options, enter your webfinger addy or enter your profile URL - I'm not quite sure from one platform to another whether to preced my profile URL with a /@username or just do a /username, and Friendica is even more weird, lolz.

Okay so I tried both ways with my Mitra account and the AcitivityPub plugin responded with ERROR. Okay, let's see if that means anything.

Next, I enter in my webfinger addy for my Socialhome account and boom shakalaka! Here we are! - well, I lost everything above after switching to the 'advanced' editor.

So, @silverpill@mitra.social , maybe this warrants an issue at: Codeberg HERE?

OH GEEZ! I just noticed! spawning the advanced editor opens a new window! I could have just done a copypasta from the previous window with the slimmed down editor. Oh, well, next time, lolz.

Here's the Screenie I promised

Okay folks, don't nag me, I'm just not going to enter alt-text for that screenie - I've already described it in the body of this post/reply/comment/whatev.

Ya just gotta love inline image / media insertions in articles :)

I hope this helps!

#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse #ActivityPub_Plugin #WordPress - Almost but not quite as kewl as #Socialhome :p

⛵

.

Well... Reddit may not yet have been shown the door, but it has certainly been handed its hat.

Think about it. platforms such as the projects for Kbin, Mbin, Lemmy, Lotide, and now...

https://join.piefed.social/ and the repo is here: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/

Be sure to check the Link below in the link that @jeze left and sign up!

Pretty kewl, IMO. Thanks for sharing Elley :) it looks really nice and I created an account for myself. Seamless federation with the others too - very nice :)

#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse #PyFedi #PieFed

⛵

.

RE: https://kzoo.to/users/jeze/statuses/112168259370814891

@jeze

EVEN IF Threads is going to be a new boss of the Fediverse, which I don’t think realistic, there’s a good chance that would be an improvement.

Mastodon itself has been doing all these very same things to the rest of the Fediverse ever since 2016. Largely the very same Mastodon users who are raging against Threads now are not only cheering on Mastodon forcing its ways and its non-standard stuff upon everything that isn't Mastodon, but demanding more of it.

Week in Fediverse 2024-03-22

Servers

- Hatsu v0.1.1
- lotide v0.15.0
- Friendica v2024.03
- snac v2.50
- Hubzilla v9.0

Clients

- Fedilab v3.28.2
- Tuba v0.7.0
- Husky v1.5.4
- Mastodon for iOS v2024.2
- Photon v1.28.4
- Voyager v2.0.0

Tools and Plugins

- Granary v6.2
- Fedi badge: A badge generator for ActivityPub-enabled social media platforms

Articles

- Bonfire Launches Open Science Network for Academics and Researchers
- Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App
- Oh, Zot! Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub
- The Efforts to Extend ActivityPub
- Threads has entered the fediverse
- Last Week in Fediverse – ep 60

-----

#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub

Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/018e4384-6968-4bee-0dc6-9f542a42d847

You be you.

Believe whatever you want, but just be sure to know why you believe what you do.

https://zotum.net/hq/dbbe6a86-dad2-46f2-89f1-629271d282eb