They also spew tens of thousands of DNS requests per hour if you stick them behind pihole or another ad black hole revolver.

My mom’s Roku TV accounts for like 90-95% of all DNS requests on her network.

It would be nice if instances automatically maintained a new and low connection count user feed so that people could browse it occasionally and help people find others to connect with.

That could be done either as part of the instance software or via a bot that runs through the instance user list and updates the feed every so often.

Don’t just look at sdb hits in the log. Open up that entire session in journalctl kernel mode (journalctl -k -bN where N is the session number in session history) and find the context surrounding the drive dropping and reconnecting.

You’ll probably find that something caused a USB bus reset or a similar event before the drive dropped and reconnected. if you find nothing like that try switching power supplies for the HDD and/or switching USB ports until you can move the drive to a different USB root port. Use lsusb -t and swap ports until the drive is attached beneath a different root port. You might have a neighboring USB device attached to the bus that’s causing issues for other devices attached to the same root port (it happens, USB devices or drivers sometimes behave badly.)

Always look at the context of the event when you’re troubleshooting a failure like this, don’t just drill down on the device messages. Most of the time the real cause of the issue preceded the symptom by a bit of time.

Yes! This is it right here, this is how you grow the fediverse. Props to UoG for figuring this out early! Here’s to hoping that other universities catch on that providing Mastodon hosting to their employees and students has more value than offloading all of that discussion onto Twitter or Facebook where it can be shaped by a potentially hostile corporate owner.

Lemmy and Mastodon have an equal amount of shitposting and meme content in my experience

Lemmy, I like the simple post structure with all related commentary under the original submission.

Mastodon is fine for people who like it but it’s hard to follow the thread of replies as every reply is its own individual post.

I guess the twatter format makes sense for dashing off quick messages but I find it hard to follow and it’s difficult to find communities and topics of interest without also including a shit-ton of noise along with the signal.

They’ve done it more than once now

Whatever they can get their hands on, including your unique hardware identifiers

Friends don’t let friends use Manjaro

They’ll find some way to make this change break the AUR again

Emacs users be like

Find widely known orgs that use the platform, the BBC comes to mind here. Search for other well known orgs to point out so you don’t just have one example. Highlight the fact that other platforms are cross linking to the fediverse (Meta’a threads for example) so a fediverse presence will give the city a presence on those platforms with no extra effort needed. Point out that Twitter has become an unreliable platform due to ownership change and that that situation could replay itself at any time on any centralized platform. Help people get Mastodon working on phones if needed - the official app is quite good. Basically just sell the platform as best you can, don’t go heavy on ideology and focus on practical benefits.

Offer to help setup the account and show them how to use Mastodon in general.

Also, not necessarily applicable to you but worth keeping in mind: encourage organizations to run Mastodon instances/provide Mastodon hosting for their employees or members in addition to providing email addresses. If an org is providing email to employees or members for business correspondence they could easily provide Mastodon services as well. This enables public discussion with the org in twitter/social media format without a third party controlling the platform.

Write a couple of your own toy services as practice. Write a one-shot that fires at a particular time during boot, a normal service that would run a daemon and a mount service that fires after its dependencies are loaded (like, say, a bind mount that sets up a directory under /run/foo after the backing filesystem is mounted - I do this to make fast ext4 storage available in some parts of the VFS tree while using a btrfs filesystem for everything else.) You can also write file watcher services that fire after changes to a file or directory, I use one of those to mirror /boot/ to /.boot/ on another filesystem so it’s captured by my system snapshots.

I’d start by reading the docs so you have some ideas about what services can do, then you’ll find uses that you wouldn’t have thought of before.

iPod replacement, dedicated smart home device dashboard, dedicated navigation/entertainment system in the car, dedicated UI for something on your home network or weather info or headlines or whatever website you want to check regularly in one place

I wrote simple hooks for my package manager to fire system snapshots before I install or update any package. It’s a nice safety belt that I’ve never actually needed to use, but if I do need it it’s there.

I wouldn’t bother with the cdr or dvdr either, they’re likely to be dead too in 30y.

We usually find solutions or workarounds to Nvidia driver issues within a day or two in the Arch community. The absolute worst case handling I’ve had to do was fork the Nvidia dkms package at the prior version (think nvidia-dkms-550) and run that until Nvidia themselves released a fixed version. Still pretty straightforward.

The most helpful advice I can give to anyone running a distro maintained by folks with day jobs is “take system snapshots before updates” - do that and the worst case fix to any update problem like this is still really easy to handle, even if you’re 10 minutes out from a work call and an update just went wrong.

Personally I’d just drop a note on the old user profile pointing at the new one and hope for the best. Portable accounts isn’t a solved problem in the fediverse yet.

Not to my knowledge. The US is it’s own special flavor of carrier-specific phone hell.