Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

  • 3 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle


  • That’s okay, too.

    For me, I only let people I know use them (friends and family) with the exception of my Lemmy instance, of course (and even that’s not wide open to the world).

    I’d be running these for myself whether anyone else used them or not. Unless I’m hosting for hundreds of people, the cost to run these services is the same as it is just for myself. Granted, I don’t have people gaming the system trying to backup their entire PCs to their email inbox or Nextcloud, but that’s where the trust factor (and storage quotas) comes in.

    As far as being responsible for all that goes, again, the small audience of people I know personally lets me explain that it’s all “best effort”. That said, I do take my own backups and high availability seriously and they benefit from that.


  • How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?

    It’s a lot easier to ask Matt down the street to customize or add a feature than it is to ask Google, FB, etc.

    Case in point: I’ve run my own email server since 2013 or so. I’ve got friends and family that use it. One of my friends asked if there was any way to setup rules to filter emails and such. I was like “yep” and added on Sieve to Dovecot and setup the webmail (Roundcube at the time) with the Sieve plugin.

    Granted, that’s a pretty basic feature that pretty much all commercial email providers offer, but the point is someone asked for it and I made it happen for them.


  • The article mentions things like auto-payment subscription services which can definitely be a pain to deal with (even while you’re alive lol). Depending on how the payments are setup, it can be as easy as having the bank cancel the debit/credit card. For direct debit from checking accounts, though, it’s often a lot more complex to get stop payments on those (been there, unfortunately).

    So leaving your account details (in a password manager, text file, notebook, etc) has some tangible benefits. At the very least, it makes it easier on your survivors to handle your affairs.


  • I’ve self hosted long before the privacy/subscription nightmare of modern cloud/SaaS platforms was a thing. I do it because I enjoy it (and at the time I got started, I had crap internet so having good local services like offline Wikipedia was important).

    Not everyone has to self-host. I run lots of services, mostly for myself, but friends and family who don’t know a kernel driver from a school bus driver also use them. So the expectation that everyone self host is and always has been “pie in the sky”. And that’s okay.

    Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place, you still do not own or control your data. You’re still subscribing to services instead of owning software. You can’t extend, modify, or customize hosted software. Self hosting FOSS applications addresses all of those.

    So rather than expect everyone to self-host, we should be working towards communities offering services to one another, pooling resources, and letting those interoperate with each other.

    To make fun of an old moral panic in the 90s: “It’s 11pm. Do you know where your data is?” Yep, it’s down the street in Matt’s house.






  • I don’t use the desktop app, but the mobile app has a setting for what to do with the original file:

    1. Keep in original folder
    2. Move to app folder
    3. Deleted

    I have different sync folders setup differently depending on use case, but I typically use option #1 as my “default”.

    Maybe when you setup the sync folder, you set it to delete the local files?

    Also, is the OneDrive folder a “real” folder or virtual one? I’ve only used Google Drive for things like that, and the local folder just holds a skeleton of the contents and pulls from the network on-demand. It…does not play well with other sync utilities or even copying through robocopy.









  • We used to use it before switching to Google Workspace (don’t get me started on how much I hate that), and Teams wasn’t too bad. But it had two things going for it then:

    • It was replacing Skype for Business which never should existed because it was so awful. Compared to SfB, literally anything was an improvement.
    • At the time, it was basically a Slack clone that didn’t have everything and the kitchen sink bolted on yet and was decently lightweight if you used the browser version.




  • Matrix also is close to checking all the boxes, but it wasnt clear how it works on mobile (Element seemed like the mobile app that was recommended).

    I run Matrix, and it’s pretty great. Though I would recommend Schildichat over Element for the mobile app. I had all kinds of issues with Element Mobile somehow screwing up the E2EE keys for my other sessions. Nothing seemed to fix it except removing my account from it completely. Switched to Schildichat and haven’t had that issue since.