A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

  • 4 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • If you just want something simple that does the job, you can try a turnkey solution like YunoHost. There’s several other ones out there. Some with containers, some with more or less pre-packaged software… If you want to learn more during the process, maybe don’t and do it yourself because these things don’t teach you a lot. There’s some resources like the awesome-selfhosted list in the sidebar of this community. But I think for installing services you’d mainly look at the specific documentation of the specific service you’re just about to tackle. And maybe read up on Docker containers etc to judge whether you want to do it that way.




  • It’s difficult to discuss development in public places like here. There’s always a hundred things on the backlog. People want this, other people want that and someone needs exactly the opposite if all of it. There are a a bazilion ways users can annoy each other and all of it needs fixing. Then a project needs to be stable and reliable. It also needs new features. Performance needs to be right… It’s a proper nightmare job to balance all of it and maintain a mid-sized project. On top of it people will feel entitled, send in security vulnerabilities, complicated stuff that needs review and messes with things, other devs want something to be cleaned up, changed around, want someone to write more or less unit tests… and that also needs time for a plethora of good communication. And then there’s the actual architecture design and coding, which isn’t easy to begin with.

    I didn’t study the code. But I’d bet the representation in the database stays the same, no matter which way it’s phrased on transport. It’s some sql relation between answer and post either way. A UI will also want to know how to style a comment at the point it processes that comment, so it makes sense to have it there. On the other hand it makes more sense for the semantics to have it attached to the post. Then there’s who can edit it. We need to trust incoming notes from third parties anyway. And maybe admins or mods can change it as well. They might be on arbitrary instances. So I’m not even sure if it changes anything with security.

    And then there’s always many ways to skin a cat in software development. We can have long meetings to write specifications. We can choose to be a bit more explorative and figure things out along the way. We can even choose to make mistakes and fix them later. I think that’s a great thing with computer programming. Fixing mistakes is usually very cheap compared to for example a mechanical engineer who maybe likes to avoid wrecking a $1m piece of equipment. But that also means software developers have the opportunity to work a different way. And there’s a time for each of the methods. The trick is to apply the correct one at the correct time. I really can’t make a good statement here, I’d need to read the code and judge based on all the nuances I just mentioned. It’s regularly not as simple as something appears from the outside.




  • Yeah, I wish there was a good technical solution for this baked into the Fediverse. PieFed has some of that, you get some features for migrating communities there. But all of this is integral part of this place. We also have like 10 technology communities. It’s not obvious what to subscribe to. Some formed due to growth and changed dynamics. Some because someone was against AI and someone else pro AI, and they split off and made yet another community with the same name. None of that is intuitive to newbies. You can of course subscribe to all of them but then you’ll regularly get the same post 5 times in your timeline because it also leads to cross-posting and all kinds of things… This is by design, though. And it’s difficult to design online platforms to be easy to use, cater to all people, grant freedom to everyone… I think we still got some room for improvement 😉


  • Yes. Entirely different software. Different programming language and tech stack. Also different system requirements and feature set.

    Not sure about the developer spirit. PieFed development has traditionally been moving crazy fast and it gets like several new features every month. I think that’s a matter of focus. It comes with consequences, though. But I think overall the project is doing a good job with trying to be compatible to other software. Prioritizing important stuff and doing the right thing. Sometimes some things get done, rather than be 100% perfect. But past experience tells me things often get fixed or changed around once necessary. Not sure if that’s a wise decision here. The JSON exchanged between the servers is probably extra work if changed around later.




  • Lol. Why isn’t Forgejo in Development but some predecessors are? And Gitea is listed twice. And why is a tower defense game listed under Automation? Also I think a few projects I use are missing. Why isn’t the most common content management system there? The second most common password manager? The reverse proxy everyone uses? And who on earth needs customer live chat and a lot of business-scale website analytics, webshop systems and CRM and ERP in their homelab?? I’m sorry but this looks like slop.


  • Maybe first check if it’s even legal to robo-call the police emergency line. I suppose with off-the-shelf systems that’s done by people in some callcenter who read the notification. In this case that’d be you. Or they’re somehow certified or have some agreement with the police… I don’t know the details. Technically it’d be possible. I’m running an Asterisk PBX server and hook into the dialplan with the REST API (that’d be ARI on the Asterisk side). That way Home Assistant can call me and make my landline phone ring twice once the laundry is done. And Asterisk can do arbitrary things. You could make it call you, play back some announcement, wait for your answer and process it and then call the police line and play back some pre-recorded message.

    But you’d really need to talk to police and ask them about how to interface with them.









  • Yes. I think several clients have open feature requests. The Stalwart documentation has a list of projects. There is one command line client as of now. But I’m not switching to a cli mail client or proprietary software, so I’ve postponed it. We’ll see where this is going.

    I welcome these modernization attempts. Though in theory I’d love to see someone revamp email in its entirety, add encryption, signatures, chat and crack down on spam and phishing. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen, but that’d be great, too.