algernon

algernon , 1 month ago

...and here I am, running a blog that if it gets 15k hits a second, it won't even bat an eye, and I could run it on a potato. Probably because I don't serve hundreds of megabytes of garbage to visitors. (The preview image is also controllable iirc, so just, like, set it to something reasonably sized.)

algernon , 1 month ago

I only serve bloat to AI crawlers.

map $http_user_agent $badagent {
  default     0;
  # list of AI crawler user agents in "~crawler 1" format
}

if ($badagent) {
   rewrite ^ /gpt;
}

location /gpt {
  proxy_pass https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse163/20wi/files/lectures/L04/bee-movie.txt;
}

...is a wonderful thing to put in my nginx config. (you can try curl -Is -H "User-Agent: GPTBot" https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/robots.txt | grep content-length: to see it in action ;))

algernon , 1 month ago

That would result in those fediverse servers theoretically requesting 333333 * 114MB = ~38Gigabyte/s.

On the other hand, if the site linked would not serve garbage, and would fit like 1Mb like a normal site, then this would be only ~325mb/s, and while that's still high, it's not the end of the world. If it's a site that actually puts effort into being optimized, and a request fits in ~300kb (still a lot, in my book, for what is essentially a preview, with only tiny parts of the actual content loaded), then we're looking at 95mb/s.

If said site puts effort into making their previews reasonable, and serve ~30kb, then that's 9mb/s. It's 3190 in the Year of Our Lady Discord. A potato can serve that.

algernon , 1 month ago

I don't think serving 86 kilobytes to AI crawlers will make any difference in my bandwidth use :)

algernon , 1 month ago

It's not. It just doesn't get enough hits for that 86k to matter. Fun fact: most AI crawlers hit /robots.txt first, they get served a bee movie script, fail to interpret it, and leave, without crawling further. If I'd let them crawl the entire site, that'd result in about two megabytes of traffic. By serving a 86kb file that doesn't pass as robots.txt and has no links, I actually save bandwidth. Not on a single request, but by preventing a hundred others.

algernon , 1 month ago

It's about 5 times longer than previous releases were maintained for, and is an experiment. If there's a need for a longer term support branch, there will be one. It's pointless to start maintaining an 5+ year branch with 0 users and a handful of volunteers, none of whom are paid for doing the maintenance.

So yes, in that context, 15 months is long.

algernon , 1 month ago

/forˈd͡ʒe.jo/

algernon , 2 months ago

Threads does not interact with the Fediverse in its current form. It's a horn blasting into the fediverse at best. It's not participating in the fediverse, it's shouting into it. As such, it's correct to not report on how thredsizens participate in the fediverse - they do not, not at this time.

algernon , 2 months ago

Ah! My bad.

mumbles something about big corps choosing way too generic names for their stuff

algernon , 2 months ago

Compared to three months? Yes. It's also an experiment, to see how much additional work is required to keep an LTS release going in practice.

If it turns out the effort/benefit ratio is good enough, it can be extended. The original plan was two years, which is still not as long as other softwares' LTS offerings, but Forgejo also doesn't have the financial backing of said projects that offer longer LTS.

algernon , 2 months ago

...and you think 14-17 year olds won't circumvent this in mere seconds? Like, they'd just sign up at an instance that doesn't implement these labels, or doesn't care about them, or use their parents accounts, or ask them, or an older friend to sign them up, and so on. Even if age verification would be widespread and legally mandated, I highly doubt any sufficiently determined 14-17 year old would have any trouble getting past it.

algernon , 2 months ago

There's a very easy solution that lets you rest easy that your instance is how you want it to be: don't do open registration. Vet the people you invite, and job done. If you want to be even safer, don't post publicly - followers only. If you require follower approval, you can do some basic checks to see that whoever sends a follow request is someone you're okay interacting with. This works on the microblogging side of the Fediverse quite well, today.

What I'm trying to say is that with registrations requiring admin approval gets you 99% of the way there, without needing anything more complex than that.

algernon , 3 months ago

Fair bias notice: I am a Forgejo contributor.

I switched from Gitea to Forgejo when Forgejo was announced, and it was as simple as changing the binary/docker image. It remains that simple today, and will remain that simple for the foreseeable future, because Forgejo cherry picks most of the changes in Gitea on a weekly basis. Until the codebases diverge, that will remain the case, and Forgejo will remain a drop-in replacement until such time comes that we decide not to pick a feature or change. If you're not reliant on said feature, it's still a drop-in replacement. (So far, we have a few things that are implemented differently in Forgejo, but still in a compatible way).

Let me offer a few reasons to switch:

• Forgejo - as of today, and for the foreseeable future - includes everything in Gitea, but with more tests, and more features on top. A few features Forgejo has that Gitea does not:
  • Forgejo makes it possible to have any signed in user edit Wikis (like GitHub), Gitea restricts it to collaborators only. (Forgejo defaults to that too, but the default can be changed). Mind you, this is not in a Forgejo release yet, it will be coming in the next release probably in April.
  • Gitea has support for showing an Action status badge. Forgejo has badges for action statuses, stars, forks, issues, pull requests.
  • ...there are numerous other features being developed for Forgejo that will not make it into Gitea unless they cherry pick it (they don't do that), or reimplement it (wasting a lot of time, and potentially introducing bugs).
• Forgejo puts a lot of effort into testing. Every feature developed for Forgejo needs to have a reasonable amount of tests. Most of the things we cherry pick for Gitea, we write tests for if they don't have any (we write plenty of tests for stuff originating from Gitea).
• Forgejo is developed in the open, using free tools: we use Forgejo to host the code, issues and releases, Forgejo Actions for CI, and Weblate for translations. Gitea uses GitHub to host the code, issues and releases, uses GitHub CI, and CrowdIn for translations (all of them proprietary platforms).
• Forgejo accepts contributions without requiring copyright assignment, Gitea does not.
• Forgejo routinely cherry picks from Gitea, Gitea does not cherry pick from Forgejo (they do tend to reimplement things we've done, though, a huge waste of time if you ask me).
• Forgejo isn't going anywhere anytime soon, see the sustainability repo. There are people committed to working on it, there are people paid to work on it, and there's a fairly healthy community around it already.

algernon , 3 months ago

Forgejo has no official Windows builds, and since it is not tested on windows at all, it's not guaranteed to work.

algernon , 3 months ago

Yes.

algernon , 4 months ago

Nevertheless, as Bluesky grows, there are likely to be multiple professionally-run indexers for various purposes. For example, a company that performs sentiment analysis on social media activity about brands could easily create a whole-network index that provides insights to their clients.

(source)

Is that supposed to be a selling point? Because I'd like to stay far, far away from that, thank you very much.

algernon , 4 months ago

Very bad, because the usability of such a scheme would be a nightmare. If you have to unzip the files every time you need a password, that'd be a huge burden. Not to mention that unzipping it all would leave the files there, unprotected, until you delete them again (if you remember deleting them in the first place). If you do leave the plaintext files around, and only encrypt & zip for backing up, that's worse than just using the plaintext files in the backup too, because it gives you a false sense of security. You want to minimize the amount of time passwords are in the clear.

Just use a password manager like Bitwarden. Simpler, more practical, more secure.