Oliver Lowe

Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.

But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I’ve written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382

More ideas if you’re interested at https://upspin.io

They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.

This touches on something that I’ve been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.

There’s also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual “thing”. I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.

Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.

This was the provider I went with after self-hosting my mail for 7+ years on an OpenBSD VPS. I feel like Migadu is an honest and good-value service.

Each time your browser makes a request (such as updating the graphs), it’s submitting a new DNS query each time.

That would be surprising; most HTTP clients reuse network connections and connections are deliberately kept open to reduce the overhead of reopening a connection (including latency in doing a DNS lookup).

Then again, I’ve seen worse ;)

Slightly off-topic: I’m not too familiar with FreeBSD (I use OpenBSD), but others may be interested to know you may be able to configure wireguard interfaces without installing any packages. It probably just involves running some ifconfig commands at boot via some entries in /etc/rc.conf. See https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/network/

Yeah I’ve always found that AllowedIPs name a little bit misleading. It is mentioned in the manpage:

A comma-separated list of IP (v4 or v6) addresses with CIDR masks from which incoming traffic for this peer is allowed and to which outgoing traffic for this peer is directed.

But I think it’s a little funny how setting AllowedIPs also configures how packets are routed. I dunno.

You could start troubleshooting by manually executing DNS queries from mainDesktop.lan, and watching the DNS server logs. Not sure what OS the desktop is running, but assuming Windows you could run:

nslookup -type=A pihole.example.duckdns.org.

On macOS/Linux/etc.:

dig -t A pihole.example.duckdns.org.

This could rule out behaviour from the proxy or applications.

Great points. It’s the proprietary nature and lack of interoperability of “the cloud” that causes problems. My email is hosted on a remote server but I have control over my data. There’s no algorithm controlling what order I see my mail in or who I can forward stuff to. There are many different tools and clients available to me and to everyone else to work with their data.

Imagine if publishing a photo from my phone to Instagram meant copying a file from one folder to another. Or if I want to create an automatically translated voiceover from the captions of all my old Facebook photos in a video editor. Right now these operations require complex software. But the technology is all there and has been for a long time.

I often think about https://upspin.io

And sharing changes can be done with just email and regular git! https://git-send-email.io

Everyone else here is saying it’s not recommended. I’d agree with that. But I’m super curious to hear whether we can, not whether we should! So, OP: I say give it a go and report back what problems you run in to!

May be worth having a look at the ActivityPub protocol. It’s the way Lemmy instances (and other stuff!) communicate with one another. From there I think it will be clearer how a single Lenny instance could behave. https://activitypub.rocks

I avoid software which requires a relational database altogether. For me that’s part of the fun of self hosting: what’s the simplest possible system I can get away with at my tiny scale?

I imagine they feel like they’re not getting anywhere.

I played around with smtp2go and it felt like what you’re after.

I know how you feel though. I self-hosted mail for about 5 years with a VPS running OpenBSD. Eventually I looked at “outsourcing” SMTP to get around this crazy IP reputation stuff. But eventually I went with a fully hosted service Migadu.