tr00st

Thanks for the heads up! Notification set, interested to see what's shown...

Ditto with Caddy. Been using it for a couple of years now and it's made life a lot simpler. Config format isn't always obvious, but for most of the cases I've needed, a standard 3 line snippet gives you a reverse proxy with automatic working HTTPS with valid certificates.

Haha, yeah, I totally have proper backups...

Thanks for highlighting probably the most important part of the article.

Up until now I've been using docker and mostly manually configuring by dumping docker compose files in /opt/whatever and calling it a day. Portainer is running, but I mainly use it for monitoring and occasionally admin tasks. Yesterday though, I spun up machine number 3 and I'm strongly considering setting up something better for provisioning/config. After it's all set up right, it's never been a big problem, but there are a couple of bits of initial with that are a bit of a pain (mostly hooking up wireguard, which I use as a tunnel for remote admin and off-site reverse proxying.

Salt is probably the strongest contender for me, though that's just because I've got a bit of experience with it.

The language in the article does seem to forget that plenty of early smartphones had replaceable batteries... Yeah, it might add some bulk, but it's not exactly going to be a major hardship.

... but it seems like a good reverse step to me. Any consumer replaceable part is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Those are reasonable options - though I'm pessimistic enough to believe that trolls will get better than every automated system, so we'd probably want some manual options. I wouldn't say it's not possible - just would require quite a bit of work, and would likely be an ongoing battle to improve your auto-moderator.

It feels like I'm moving the goalposts, so apologies, but your response got me thinking further. The other big advantages I can think of for central censorship is that it can actually prevent hosting of content - which has two benefits:

• legal concerns - make countries will require the removal of some amount of content - extreme stuff of all the usual sorts. Some jurisdictions will also require minors being prevented from accessing certain content, at least to a reasonable degree - refusing to host that kind of content is an easy solution.
• community unity and protection - is a lot more abstract, age debatable - but I'd contest that central moderation can give a certain "this content isn't wanted in our community" that individual censorship won't. Really difficult to define, though.

Two main points personally:

• with self-moderation, you can't really say "I don't want to see this sort of content", you can only say "I don't want to see this content again". A well stated set of rules for a community let's you know what to expect, so you get to make that choice if advance. This is a massive difference in preventing distress and general unpleasant feelings. It's not absolutely necessary, but it's a lot nicer.
• it avoids massive duplication of effort. If you have a moderator-to-reader ratio of 1000:1, you'll be saving the vast majority of self moderation with those people would be doing. Yes, reporting exists, but it's a tiny fraction of the time one would spend "moderating" for yourself

Fun fact: your known bug count is super low if you don't test properly.

Had an assignment to write a routine algorithm or AI/MLey solution back in my university days. Mine was a broken GA that failed to do anything except pick random routes every time but keep track of the shortest route it'd seen...

... but it was fast enough that I could run 100k random iterations and pick an answer better and faster than a bunch of well coded solutions. Called it stochastic and nailed an explanation, pretty much full marks were had that day.

Personally, I've had to move my working from home planned from a nicely set up home office to a laptop in the kitchen table, because it's by far the coolest room in the house. Besides that, mostly still trying to escape it rather than embrace it - though the lunchtime walks have been nicer!

I've got a mix of hosting environments personally. A dedicated box hosted with Hetzner (their auction prices can be pretty decent) plus a Pi 4 and an old NAS for internal services. Docker containers used for pretty much everything - mostly set up with a big ol’ /opt/ folder with a bunch of service specific folders with docker-compose.yml files and bind mounts galore. Got a wireguard VPN bridging between then because that seemed sensible.

Running Portainer for some extra management and monitoring, then a bundle of stuff:

• Mailcow for email
• Owncloud for for sync and storage
• Phototropism
• Bitwarden
• Emby for media playback
• NextPVR for recording
• Private instances of Pleroma and Lemmy
• A slightly broken telegram/grafana stack with some container monitoring stuff hooked in
• The odd dedicated game server when the need arises ... and some things I've forgotten about.

Got a spare old i5 machine around set up to auto hook into Portainer if I need some extra grunt at some point, but it's more likely to be used when I can't be bothered paying for the dedicated box.

Aware a lot of it's suboptimal, but it's easy to work with and familiar, and that's enough to make it workable.