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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • 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.



  • Here’s a slightly different story: I run OpenBSD on 2 bare-metal machines in 2 different physical locations. I used k8s at work for a bit until I steered my career more towards programming. Having k8s knowledge handy doesn’t really help me so much now.

    On OpenBSD there is no Kubernetes. Because I’ve got just two hosts, I’ve managed them with plain SSH and the default init system for 5+ years without any problems.


  • 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