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

  • 10 Posts
  • 167 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • I’ve self hosted long before the privacy 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.





  • 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.


  • Haven’t messed with it personally (yet), but I’ve seen some examples where Caddy can do some cool stuff (I think the example I saw recently was defining routes that can call an arbitrary program with the HTTP request details).

    I use Nginx almost exclusively (I’ve got HAProxy in the mix, too, but it’s strictly for load balancing). Everyone always keeps recommending Traefik to me, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t do anything Nginx can’t already do, and the config is all bizarre and way less intuitive. Not saying it’s bad, just not for me. (This is not an invitation to proselytize Traefix at me lol).

    Use whatever works for you.











  • Snapdrop or PairDrop

    Those send over WebRTC through the browser, and there’s also apps that can tie into the Share menu. You can also self-host it if you want. The data doesn’t go through the server, it’s peer-to-peer, and only devices on your local network can see each other.

    If you long press (mobile) or right-click (desktop) you can send text strings which is great for sending URLs and such between devices.

    I could be wrong, but I don’t think old school Bluetooth OBEX is even part of AOSP anymore.

    I patched Snapdrop to tie into Authelia (uses the display name passed from Authelia instead of a random name) and removed the local network requirement which lets me send files to anyone authorized to use my instance even if they’re not on the local network. The Authelia requirement is relaxed on my local network, so if someone is on my wifi, they can just connect and send (it uses the random usernames if there’s no auth header).