It is incredible looking back to 2005 and realizing that the world has 1.5 billion MORE people today and the number of internet users grew by ~5.5 billion. Doesn’t really explain Google’s changes - still remarkable how different the internet was that Google built its search platform around.
Hard to argue with Intel, but I run one of the asrock j3455 boards (with a full PCIe slot and 2 SATA ports) and powershell is reporting OSTotalVisibleMemorySize of 12228504.
Pretty sure I am running a j3455 with 12GB.
edit> Confirmed
Random thoughts…
Odd to talk about timing without referencing the election year.
Protecting the solar industry with tariffs in 2012 was probably too late. The US and Europe panel industries were decimated and effectively ceded the market to China.
China bankrupted the only US supplier of rare earth metals in the early 2010s (Molycorp).
There is reporting from April that Chinese EV are piling up in European ports and not being moved to dealers.
opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon
I always find responses like this funny. You know how old you are, but (mostly) nobody reading the comment does. You could be anywhere from 11 to 50!
There isn’t off the shelf software to run things like Reddit, and the work to make that happen is pretty staggering. That isn’t to say there isn’t frivolous spending there - I have no idea.
Lemmy has been developed since 2019 and the software crumbled when network-wide users spiked into the ~75,000-ish monthly range when some vocal Reddit users sought greener pastures over the app/api issue last year. A lot of talented new developers contributed scalability fixes that were obvious to them (but not obvious to the main devs), and we now have the largest Lemmy server handling ~10,000 monthly users without crashing. The work that has gone into making Lemmy, an open-source Reddit alternative written in Rust (vroom vroom) handle the waning spike of Reddit users fleeing, was substantial. Look through the lemmy github issues discussions page and merged closed contributions/discussions for that journey. Those people were largely contributing time and expertise for nothing in return. Imagine paying a market rate to all of the people who contributed substantial time into the betterment of Lemmy. By the way, Reddit was open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Takeaways so far: this is a hard problem, even today with faster software and hardware - and Lemmy needed a diverse set of contributors to get its largest server stable at 10k monthly and ~50k across the network.
Reddit had 46,000,000 monthly active users in 2012, ~7 years after launch. Reddit has 330,000,000 monthly active users today. My guess is that Reddit employs a lot of smart software engineers that are needed to contribute solutions that allow the site to serve an ever-growing user count without major outages with new features rolled in. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Reddit users will never pay a thing to Reddit and it isn’t a good platform to deliver advertising through.
My point: It is easy to gloss over the staggering amount of work, talent, and skill that goes into supporting a site that operates at this scale. Reddit is around the 10th largest site in the US (8th if you exclude search engines) and 12th globally excluding search engines.
Worth mentioning that most modern clients support omemo at this stage.
Which xmpp clients have you used? Conversations and its forks seem far from janky. Movim is nice, Dino is looking good, Kaidan is looking pretty good. Prose could be interesting.
I did back of the envelope math a while back where if active users of large self-hosted communities (such as /r/selfhosted) put $5/month into donations to the most used self-hosted software projects, ~20 projects could get ~$75,000/year of income. Not enough to build a company around, but enough to live well on in many parts of the world as a sole developer or enough for a maintainer to pay for other developer contribution.
I think the open source community fails to organize around the fact that development and maintenance isn’t free, but that as a massive user group, it takes minimal contribution from each to make an impact. Can better messaging and “structure” break the free rider problem?
Thanks for sharing. Anything in particular that was broken, or just a bad experience overall? I thought about spinning it up for family group video chats, but I guess I can cross that one off the list.
The 5 users will only talk to each other, or you have to connect out to the regular phone network? Group calls? Messaging? And when you say secure, do you mean end to end encrypted?
I don’t have experience using it, but it is worth looking at BigBlueButton.
I like what Cheogram is doing, between the client and the funding model.
Let’s say my interests are self-hosting and tennis, and I make public MUCs for self-hosting and tennis - great, but now what? How are users discovering the community. What is a chatroom without users? The community or traffic need to happen before the chat.
Prosody and openfire have easy deploy converse options I’ve used in the past. My point was more that creating a chatroom doesn’t create a community. I am curious to see how Libervia’s xmpp/activity pub bridge matures. All of the built-ins plus potential to federate across activitypub makes an interesting technology underpinning for a community.
The lists of public xmpp group chats I’ve found are all centered around xmpp software - clients and servers. If I ever find myself in the position of launching or running a large community (unlikely), I’d try to offer an xmpp-powered chat. It seems like the decision today is Discord -> Matrix -> IRC - xmpp isn’t even in the running. But maybe users have to be a little more vocal.
Tumbleweed is generally the place to be. I think it is easier to target for packagers and is the basis for most of the interesting stuff going on in the distro. The immutable versions (now named Aeon and Kalpa) use something like a stripped down Tumbleweed at the core, with applications mostly containerized. Think tight rolling core that has strong automated tests and rather safe, with applications mostly isolated in Flatpak to prevent library conflicts and such.
Did you check the opensuse community repos? Search here: https://software.opensuse.org/ - lots of stuff that isn’t included in the core / official.
Nothing gets solved overnight. I realize that f-droid isn’t the be all end all, but hey, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe Aurora is a stop-gap, but maximize your use of f-droid alternatives and support the developers however you can. Be active in alternatives to the big-tech sites, like posting in beehaw communities.
Poaching something I posted on Reddit /r/selfhosted at the beginning of the year:
Back of the envelope math. Assuming 30,000 active users here on /r/selfhosted x $50/yr = $1.5M / 20 -> $75,000 per year. In other words, if /r/selfhosted gave $50 per person per year, “we” could contribute $1.5M to open source projects we use. Some projects probably wouldn’t know what to do with resources and/or don’t have the infrastructure in place to receive anything, so not a panacea. But for the well organized and developed projects?
It’s sort of wild if you think about it. There are probably 10-12 very popular self-hosted applications with a very long tail, but 20-25 probably captures a very healthy cross section of use. Not every project or developer can accept monetary donations or use them effectively. But $75,000/year is median household income in the US.
There are almost certainly many more open source software and app users than there are self-hosted people - I’d imagine the self-host people are a subset. So what if we add open source software and mobile apps to the collective pool we could financially contribute to - again, $50/year/per able user - maybe the number of supportable applications goes up to 50 or 80.
Leading the thought experiment to a logical conclusion - if 80 open source projects received $75,000/year in donation income (at a minor cost to those able to pay and none to the vast majority), enough in most parts of the world to support a person and possibly a family, we would have more amazing, privacy respecting options. It doesn’t necessarily solve everything, most people naturally free-ride, and organizing many small contributions at a massive scale isn’t a solved problem itself. But, my point is that users collectively have way more power than we realize.
I haven’t tested it, but did you look at Damselfly? The documentation seems to suggest you can do it: https://github.com/Webreaper/Damselfly/blob/master/docs/Multi-user.md
https://damselfly.info/