A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • I’ll just open them up to the internet via an nginx reverse proxy. Make sure sign up is disabled in the applications, and something blocks people from brute-forcing passwords. Pretty sure Nextcloud comes like that per default. And I’ll do updates. And see if I can run stuff in containers or seperate users so in the unlikely case something happens, access to one of my services doesn’t compromise the entire server.

    Lots of other people use VPNs though. Like Wireguard, Netbird, Tailscale…


  • If it’s just you, and you’re fine with the regular login… Just disable signup and don’t add more authentication mechanisms like oauth/openID.

    I’m using nginx as a reverse proxy as well. For now, I added a lot of “deny” directives to ban all the address ranges from Tencent, Alibaba, OpenAI. It’s not a 100% solution, but works well enough for me. I’m mostly worried about AI crawlers causing too much load on my server. And it stopped since, so I don’t think I’m gonna need Anubis and all these extra things in front if my applications. If you like you can look into solutions like a web application firewall like Crowdsec.



  • Well, previously we had LemmyNSFW. That one died, pretty much out of the blue. Now the second admin(?) of it launched FediNSFW as a successor. We have that - for now - I guess? They said they’re gonna try to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.

    But I guess it’s still a single point of failure. If they don’t properly ensure there’s several people who own the domain and hosting infrastructure, can administer the contracts, server etc, it might still be down to one person and their ability to keep it up. And if there’s legal troubles, uncertainty, not enough donations, law changes or the hoster or Cloudflare pulls the trigger, that might be the end of all of it as well. A severe technical issue/mistake could also take down a singular instance. And due to the delicate nature of NSFW content, they probably can’t afford to be 100% transparent with us, so I wouldn’t know whether they’re in a healthy place or not.

    I mean there’s nothing wrong with FediNSFW’s existence. I just think it’s massively questionable to all bet on the same horse, and then call us the “Fediverse”, a decentral platform…


  • Sure. I guess what I meant is, you (or someone) need to ask… In my layman’s understanding of religion (in general), it should be there for the people. And there should be someone around for random individuals to ask “Hey, I’m having this situation in my life and I’m not sure which is correct. Can you tell me? Or can you refer me to someone with enough background to do so?”

    IMO, if religion claims absolute authority, and to know what’s the correct morals on earth… It better have answers for these questions.

    But sometimes you need to ask?! At least that’s what I think. I mean Free Software is around for a mere 45 years, and doesn’t have that much of an organized lobby. And the other side better avoid a definite answer to the question, as it could be negative.

    I don’t know the correct answer. Maybe it’s more nuanced than a binary opposition, or depends on other factors? Or - how we construct our technology is not involving God’s judgement, and it’s more about what we do with it? Or it is haram? I bet there’s a lot of computer programmers out there working for some companies, who’d need to be told if it were. To me, all that selling of personal information, and manipulating the people and the world by algorithms for some corporate interest feels 0% ethical. All I can say is whatever intuition God gave me(?) regarding what’s right and wrong, tell me that one is wrong. And we should do better with technology that shapes our modern world. But my opinion isn’t funded in scripture at all. I’d tend to just handle it like other exploitative gains for business, which aren’t right. But that still doesn’t really answer if the 4 essential freedoms of free software are mandated. I mean even back then, property and contracts were recognized. So it could be completely fine to license software as a product without source code?!


  • I think so as well. Porn is available in abundance. We don’t really need it here. What I think could be nice is people who like to write erotic fiction as a hobby and post their original content. Or people discuss erotic computer games. Or like relationship advice and NSFW questions in case some country abolishes sex ed. Maybe talking about piracy, mental issues, loss… all the things that are deemed “not advertiser friendly” on commercial platforms. That’d be something positive. But it’s not easy. And it often all gets lumped together under some big NSFW umbrella and 95% of people want to share pron clips anyway. Mostly with zero care for copyright or the creators’ consent.


  • Hehe. Yeah, I don’t think we need more content. There’s already some out there. And everyone can add more, all they need is 20sec of time and a redgifs link. What we really need is more admins run servers to host that stuff. And a bigger admin team for the already existing instance so it doesn’t just randomly go away along with all the content, as well. Maybe one or two lawyers, or someone with expertise in bullet-proof hosting, to set it up properly. (And we likely need moderators as well. Half of the communities on the old server used to be a desert. Claimed en masse by some nominal members who left a long time ago.) But original content is certainly welcome 😆


  • I’m not a Muslim, but aren’t there scholars around to answer those questions? As far as I know you’d need a mufti to provide you with that kind of answer to the question. Not a random person from the internet. As it’s a bit complicated and we won’t find direct references to Free Software in 1400 year old scripture. But we have text on trade, and knowledge. Which are related to what computer software is.





  • Start simple, then work your way up. Construct a static website with HTML. Learn how to navigate folders on a (remote) server, so the Linux commandline. Learn how to install software and where to find the configuration and logfiles. Then install some webserver and make it serve your first website. You can do all of this on your own computer. And after that you can learn how to install other web applications, how to reconfigure your webserver to act as a reverse proxy.

    So start with basic webdevelopment first, then do Linux, webservers, and then once you got the basics you can do more advanced apps, containers and all the stuff.

    Not sure which book to recommend. But I often recommend https://yunohost.org/ to people who just want to run webservices. It does most of the complicated stuff for you and you just need to click install for software in YunoHost’s catalog. You just need to learn a few basic things about the internet, because it’s fairly easy to use.




  • Yeah, You’ll have to do a lot more troubleshooting than this. Did Docker successfully bind to port 8000? Can you curl it from the VPS itself? Does the container and the things in it run properly? Are there any error messages in the logs?

    I’m not a Docker expert, but I’d start with the docker commands which show if a container is running and which ports it actually binds. Maybe a ss -at. then do a curl http://localhost:8000/ and see if it returns your webpage. If it doesn’t, you need to fix your webpage container first. Or see if you can come up with an easier method to deploy your website.

    A reverse proxy in any shape or form, will require your website to run, first.


  • Well, computer programmers still do things like Project Euler and code wars. Some people go Geocaching and more organized events which include riddles and different places. We got Escape Rooms… People still listen to shortwave radio and figure out whether number stations change due to the Iran war… I read people tried to use modern AI on the Voynich manuscript and other older riddles… It’s probably all out there, just the internet changed, and now it’s almost impossible to find in the big haystack and walled discord rooms etc. And social media got more consumerist. You’d (on average) be mindlessly doomscrolling there, these days. Not actively look for puzzles to solve.




  • Gee. God beware anyone answer the one interesting question. And that’s whether the book / storytelling is any good.

    I mean it’s not surprising to me how random internet people disagree. They always do… But we could just ask a professional?! Book critic is a real job. They could tell us within a few hours if the book is any good. Or full of common story tropes. And “sudden plot twists” like when I tried writing a story with AI 😅 And whether it’s going anywhere, or how it compares to other books which have some artistic quality or meaning to them.