schizo @ schizo @forum.uncomfortable.business

Posts

11

Comments

1,437

Joined

1 yr. ago

For those that didn't read, it's just that the use of Bitcoin ATMs in your typical 'oh no! pay us or we have to call the FBI and have your social security number cancelled!' scams has increased. I wouldn't say this is a "new form of fraud", since that scam is as old as well, uh, the internet at least.

Though, I'm honestly not surprised by this, since explaining to grandma how to use what looks like something she's familiar is probably simpler than explaining how to use Coinbase. Oh, and Coinbase has actual safeguards to try to catch people falling for scams which I'm sure the guy who owns the coiner ATM doesnt.

Well, Lemmy's front end talks to it's back end via an API, which is pretty much how every web app of any scale works these days.

There's really not any particular difference between a monolithic app vs a seperate front end in terms of "all those API calls" since everything is basically calling APIs at this point, if they're not made by complete incompetents. (In the case of Mastodon, though, I suppose complete incompetent is possible.)

If the game being old isn't a dealbreaker, I've always enjoyed Phantasmagoria.

Well, a fault isn't just an outage.

You said the other person involved isn't technical: what if say, a database corrupts itself and you're on vacation for a week.

Is the expectation that you'll always be available all the time to fix technical problems?

And, as a failure state: what happens if you simply cannot be reached for that week no matter what. What's the failover plan for the rest of the people involved in the business?

There are some. Mastodon has a lot of garbagey nonsense, but they do at least have a proper API which will let you make a non-shit front end if you wanted.

I'm going to being contrarian, as is my bit.

I self-host everything and fully believe everyone else should too.

HOWEVER, if your self hosted shit breaks for say, 3 days, how much money is this going to cost you?

For business stuff you really really should determine what your backup plan for 'Oops shit's dead' is well before shit's dead, and honestly, in some cases, maybe it makes more sense not to host everything and have a couple of things that would wreck your business provided by a SaaS company that has a SLA, and on-call engineers, and all that good shit.

Just a thought to keep in mind, I suppose.

doing donuts in a Pittsburgh

Well, he could also head down to Philly, and hold a rally at the Four Seasons (Total Landscaping).

Who gives a fuck that he was a sports star 20 damn years ago?

Like in what way does that make his blatant abuse of power which he used to rape children in some way better?

I'm not one to tell developers what to do, but from a user perspective, comments (which is like, most of the damn point, no?) are effectively broken and that makes the whole platform kinda... defective.

I've discovered I follow topics but very very rarely care about who is posting/commenting, which makes microblog feeds doubly not my thing. Forums and Lemmy match far more what I'm after than Twitter-style feeds ever will, because the amount of curation to find a single interesting person (who then doesn't turn out to be an utter monster) is just... too much involvement for some idle time-wasting.

Also I don't know what you mean about the politics being insufferable on Lemmy, comrade. Perhaps you need to take a nice long vacation to the People's Re-education Retreat and hot spring?

I'm going to get shit on, but outside of Lemmy, there are just... no active groups on the various fediverse group site aggregators that I'm remotely interested in.

It's all news, politics, political news, and political peacocking. Which fine, if that's what you're after, but I'm here for nerd shit, and Lemmy is utterly completely awash in nerd shit.

The other problem is an ActivitPub problem. Even if you follow someone, if you're not following every single human on fucking earth, you're not going to see all the replies to their posts on your server. So your clever post was already made 8 hours ago, and unless you click on another link that takes you to their instance you can't actually browse what replies actually exist before posting.

Which is just stupid: if I have to visit someone else's shit in order to see if I should reply, I might as well just you know, use that server and save myself the trouble.

IDK, I liked the UX and it was interesting while it lasted, but it was really just a massive resource drain and had far less interesting nuggets than other options did.

Ah I live somewhere that was already entirely fiber before Verizon sold it, so from that perspective, it seems super silly.

Though, I think Verizon has proven they're more than capable of committing massive fraud with grant money without the need to sell off parts of their business to do so.

As with all things in life, as soon as I touch it, it explodes, lmao.

I think this means I'm done with trying to host fedi-Twitter. Discoverability on a small instance sucks, maintenance on a small instance sucks, and the software available designed to do a reasonable small instance doesn't exist.

That, and since relays are almost entirely required if you expect ANY useful content discoverability, you're just wasting a huge amount of resources on crap you don't want, don't care about, and can't really delete because all of these pieces of software expect you to keep everything from everywhere forever.

Think I'll just do a rm -rf and get that ~25gb of disk space back and stick with Lemmy (which is my preferred interaction format anyways).

This is hilarious.

I'm living somewhere that, less than a decade ago, was sold to Frontier, built out FiOS network and all.

I guess that wasn't the best idea, then, Verizon?

I get it as a means to generate revenue, but I wouldn't ever want to be responsible for mail deliverability if I'm getting paid for the email.

I'd just outsource that shit to SES, or mailgun, or mailchimp, or brevo, or whoeverthefuck and not worry about it.

The host it yourself thing just struck me as a weird thing that suddenly was EVERYWHERE I was looking and I couldn't figure out what in the world the use case was.

So basically an RSS feed for people who don't understand RSS feeds.

So I'm curious: why does everyone suddenly have newsletters?

There's not a single selfhosted forum/subreddit/community/magazine/whatever that's NOT full of lots and lots and lots of people who suddenly have the need for a newsletter.

Like who is subscribing, and to what, and like... why?

I made this mistake and hosted my mom's webpage and email.

Anytime anything happened, she was on the phone to me complaining about how horrible it all was.

Email bounced because she got the address wrong? My fault. All the spam she got? My fault. Images were the wrong size on her webpage? My fault. Typo in a PDF she was sending to a client? My email server must have messed it up.

I could continue, but jesus christ, it was a disaster.

Never, ever, ever, ever host for family members unless you're willing to put up with that kind of shit, because that's what always happens.

Can you use passkeys/webauthn/fido2/whatever instead of password+totp for the sites in question?

If so, like, do that: your yubikey supports that shit natively and will completely eliminate your migranes, other than having to make sure the passkey is on each device (which, honestly, is not that complicated.)

Brave Sir Musk ran away. Bravely ran away away.

Doesn't look that way from here?