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.
I have a 1TB harddrive on my desktop computer that isn't doing much of anything, so I'd like to dual-boot something "interesting". Suggestions are greatly appreciated, so let me know what y'all find intriguing/interesting/frustrating/innovative....
I switched. Not happy about it and will continue to consider it a factor in my next, but that will be years from now and I'm sure the list will be even smaller.
Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android™️ (WSA). As a result, the Amazon Appstore on Windows and all applications and games dependent on WSA will no longer be supported beginning March 5, 2025. Until then, technical support will remain available to customers....
Amazon is moving away from Android. This move isn't exactly surprising. It is disappointing though, imo. From my limited testing, I was able to side load an xmpp app on Android and message, voice call, video call seamlessly. In theory, the ability for developers of some types of apps to target Android and reach Windows without writing a touch of Windows-specific or accommodating code was a huge opportunity for open source developers to effortlessly reach cross-platform audiences.
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.
I mostly blame Apple for walling off the default text messaging app on the iOS platform. It is ridiculous to me that we are over 10 years into the smartphone era and are stuck in a duopoly with two players that would rather degrade communications between platforms than prioritize interoperability for some base level functionality. I hope that Beeper’s campaign forces regulation that puts an end to the insanity.
We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
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.
My perspective…in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we’re looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that’s a staggering change in energy delivery…largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.
I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car’s lifespan or the battery pack’s lifespan in that car. So…joe six-pack’s rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.
Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state’s mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.
I don’t see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Edit: And in the end, it’s back to good old Fedora with Xfce. I guess I’m an old man, fixed in my ways. Haiku was interesting, but not nearly as stable as needed. OpenSuSE with Xfce was rough, it requires more polish....
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.
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 only saw the app once while scrolling around on f-droid; tried it but it seemed too empty to be useful. The only place I’ve since seen it even being mentioned is this post, but that’s also not specifically about the app. I’m genuinely curious about what exactly the point is of GNU/Jami. Is it just a p2p version of...
It is a nice p2p, e2ee messaging app/service that doesn’t use phone numbers, e-mail or other domain addresses as an identifier. I think it used to be GNU Ring, and can be used as a SIP client.
One other thing I forgot to mention - transparency of the lead developer and service provider is overlooked, imo, as a criteria for picking a secure messaging client. That background information on jami wasn’t terribly clear to me when I looked a couple of years ago; it does seem better now.
For me its honestly a ton of my work software (digital forensics), shit is too niche to be replaced by good FOSS options. Cellebrite, Magnet Axiom, etc. Autopsy is great and free and has a linux version but it simply cannot get the same level of data without a pretty nutty level of custom code....
I would note that ChromeOS is mainstream with normal users and it is effectively a well curated, highly-opinionated Linux distribution. Distros like opensuse Aeon and Kalpa, and Fedora Silverblue, are going from well established platforms into the highly curated, highly-opinionated direction as well. Limited set of options that work well out of the box not prone to breaking, and explicitly not for tinkerers. I tend to think that if Linux is ever going to reach mainstream users (outside of ChromeOS), it will be through these bulletproof, opinionated distros that put bubble wrap around the user.
If it’s mostly about motion detection and false positives, it’s hard to avoid the object detection stuff if you aren’t doing that already. I stopped using Blue Iris before it started integrating object detection and I can’t speak to it at all. I liked the setup I had with ZoneMinder, Zoneminder Event Server, and the associated machine learning hooks, but the developer behind the event server and ML stuff left and it isn’t particularly well integrated. I like how quickly and comprehensively Viseron (github.com/roflcoopter/viseron) has progressed. Very sleek software, engaged developer, uses YOLOv7, and even supports an openvino backend. Well worth a look.
Just looking for a simple app that can stream local rstp. I have been using VLC up to this point but im looking for something a little less glitchy. I’d also like the ability to view multiple streams at the same time....
I have a server at home, so this might not apply to you. But I used this software (github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx) to proxy the rtsp streams from cameras. It makes the streams available over multiple formats, so I stick the webrtc stream from the security cameras into a little, super simple html page I threw together. Bookmarked, on my android home screen, and I’m one click from seeing all of my cameras streaming while I’m on LAN.
Then I wrote a simple bash script to call ffmpeg to take a snapshot from each rtsp stream every x interval. I rewrote the landing page to show a table of those snapshots and each image is a hyperlink to the direct webrtc link to that camera’s stream. And the html page refreshes itself every x seconds.
I’m happy with this approach so far. The streams are now easily available on Android, Windows, Linux devices, no app beyond a web browser required.
What I plan to do next:
Make the web server and proxied streams available over my mesh VPN so that the landing page and cameras are available from outside the LAN.
Start throwing images at doods (github.com/snowzach/doods2) to identify objects, and pass the detection and image to a messenger like xmpp or matrix or telegram or even an irc channel to push an alert to me.
opensuse kalpa - the KDE version of its immutable desktop. Pretty neat combination of rolling core and applications separated out primarily into flatpak and other containers.
Headline sort of buries the lede of how important those two were to building lxd and supporting the container ecosystem on linux. Sad to see. I have been using lxd on my home network and vps instances for years. Disliked when the project moved to snap-only distribution, but at least other projects picked up native packaging. And it doesn’t seem like lxd is going away, which is nice. But Canonical explicit seizure of control withers confidence I had in the long-term viability of the software for my own use.
Reddit is reaching out to moderators after tensions rose over recent policy changes and API pricing. A Reddit admin acknowledged the strained relationship and outlined new weekly feedback sessions and other outreach efforts to repair ties. However, moderators remain skeptical of Reddit’s efforts given mixed results from past...
Is Reddit easy to explore for new places? Maybe it got better in the new UI, but search was historically bad and discovering relevant subs was pretty difficult. I sort of think people dipping their toes in fediverse waters forget how rough around the edges Reddit was/is. I agree that lemmy and its ilk have a lot of room to improve on usability, but the bar doesn’t seem exceptionally high.
Hi everyone, I’m looking for an RSS feed reader available both for PC (Windows and/or Linux) and Android. I would like to have my feed synced and organized in the same way (and maybe some backup functionality too)....
The rise of distributed computing was at a time that CPUs didn’t really throttle down. CPUs in general were just a lot more power hungry. But if you had to leave the computer on for some reason and had spare CPU cycles, it made sense to contribute them to a distributed computing project - the power was being spent anyway and it seemed like a good cause. Today, modern CPU sip power and throttle down and you are actively driving power consumption by taxing the CPU. There is a much less favorable cost/benefit equation today, but in terms of the cost of the power consumed AND the climate cost of the power consumed.
My wife and I have been struggling to find a decent app that we can use to check things off. Primarily, we’d be using it as a grocery list, but ideally I’d love for the same app to be able to handle her long-term “honey do list” projects, and for that one cloud-syncing is a must....
Paaster is a secure and user-friendly pastebin application that prioritizes privacy and simplicity. With end-to-end encryption and paste history, Paaster ensures that your pasted code remains confidential and accessible....
Is it text only? xmpp should be lightweight and smooth sailing. prosody configured to never expire messages would give you a forever archive on the server. There are good mobile clients, plus web/pwa and native desktop clients.
So I want to setup a messaging server in my home that works like Telegram or Whatsapp - it should use the local network as we plan on moving around a lot of photos and files between our devices for some projects...
xmpp has a number of file transfer modes. http upload has been smooth sailing for me. It uploads the file to the server and holds it according to a retention period you configure. Shows up in the client you sent it to.
xmpp works, but the domain needs to resolve correctly. I'd just use a free domain that you point at the server LAN ip, plus an acme client that can do a dns challenge. Prosody is pretty bulletproof and very lightweight.
deltachat + email. Set up a little IMAP server for the lan and use Delta chat to create a messaging over it. Or just use an email client.
Notification works like any other message. http upload is just the method the client uses - it's more or less transparent to the clients involved. It's still sending and receiving as you would expect from a messenger.
xmpp has clients doing voice and video - it has for years. It is p2p and falls over in some nat to nat situations, which is where stun/turn come in on the server. Check out jmp.chat - they built a voip phone service using xmpp clients.
If a sizable chunk of the Reddit community can move to an alpha/beta grade link aggregator platform that can't handle the load because we believe in the decentralization or the instance's mission or the overall concept of federation, why is it too late for the community to re-adopt a mature messaging platform that mirrors those ambitions?
It is battle tested, standardized, widely used, have open source servers and apps, end-to-end encryption (OMEMO), self-hostable and are low on ressources and more....
I use it for OMEMO encrypted family messaging and image transfer (snikket). Very fast messaging, lightweight server, and the A/V works quite well. Biggest issue, imo, is the lack of a great iOS client - not a judgement on the developers, I think that's just the reality of developing on iOS. But an iOS client that works as seamlessly as Conversations would go a long way to regaining lost traction.
I haven't used Matrix for messaging, so take this with a grain of salt. But xmpp servers and clients seem to be lighter on resources. Matrix has more capabilities for large groups.
Omemo is double ratchet and my messages sync to multiple devices. New device can't read old messages sent before exchanging keys with the other clients.
I would like to hear more about what you're doing / how you have it set up. I've used xmpp to relay messages from home automation stuff - which usually involves piping something to a script calling a library.
There is also Cheogram (conversations fork), which is actively developed/tweaked by the jmp.chat folks - very nice. Also Snikket (conversations fork) that is themed and tweaked to use with a snikket server, but it happily works with other servers.
Another interesting tidbit. Chromebooks integrate the Android runtime to run play store apps. Windows 11 is also kinda/sorta shipping an Android runtime, but not by default. You can also spin up an Android runtime on Linux. I tested the snikket android app on Windows 11 and ChromeOS - works perfectly. So, I suspect all conversations forks can run across Android, Windows, ChromeOS, and Linux platforms - pretty neat. Doesn't solve the iOS gap and getting the runtimes going could use polish on Windows and Linux. And nothing against the other desktop apps in development, but the ability to essentially run the Android app against most major environments makes me want to contribute to that code base (if I had any ability to develop for android, that is).
The standalone converse app was problematic when I tried it last. Also, there was a summer of code attempt at bringing jingle a/v sessions to converse, but it was never completed and nobody seems to have picked it up.
I don't use SimpleX, but it's hard to argue against a well developed open source privacy focused messaging app. There are a million "privacy-focused" messengers out there with various flaws around security or sustainability. Matrix is great but the goals seem a little different. Plus, it wasn't that long ago that Matrix was struggling to find funding.
[help] could use some parts advice on building a diy nass for docker/media
hi...
History says tariffs rarely work, but U.S. President Biden’s 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs could defy the trend, researcher says ( theconversation.com )
By Tinglong Dai, Bernard T. Ferrari Professor of Business, Johns Hopkins University...
Suggest unto me a new FOSS operating system ( infosec.pub )
I have a 1TB harddrive on my desktop computer that isn't doing much of anything, so I'd like to dual-boot something "interesting". Suggestions are greatly appreciated, so let me know what y'all find intriguing/interesting/frustrating/innovative....
[General question to the Android community] Have you given up on the audio jack, or do you still only buy devices that have it?
(Posting this here rather than !askandroid as it's a quite general question)...
Are We Watching The Internet Die? ( www.wheresyoured.at )
Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android ( learn.microsoft.com )
Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android™️ (WSA). As a result, the Amazon Appstore on Windows and all applications and games dependent on WSA will no longer be supported beginning March 5, 2025. Until then, technical support will remain available to customers....
Reddit has never turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but it just filed to go public anyway ( edition.cnn.com )
Beeper ready to wave white flag if its latest iMessage fix gets shut down ( www.androidauthority.com )
Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive ( signal.org )
We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
Sodium-ion battery breakthroughs may be key to our electric future ( www.techspot.com )
Need an easy voice calling solution
I need a self-hosted securevoice call server that’s easy to deply and uses less than 1 gb of ram....
A giant leap forwards for encryption with MLS ( matrix.org )
Suggest me a libre OS to try using on my new desktop PC
Edit: And in the end, it’s back to good old Fedora with Xfce. I guess I’m an old man, fixed in my ways. Haiku was interesting, but not nearly as stable as needed. OpenSuSE with Xfce was rough, it requires more polish....
Following this road is overwhelming
Buggy software, not so user friendly, things don’t work, new things to learn…...
What is Jami good for?
I only saw the app once while scrolling around on f-droid; tried it but it seemed too empty to be useful. The only place I’ve since seen it even being mentioned is this post, but that’s also not specifically about the app. I’m genuinely curious about what exactly the point is of GNU/Jami. Is it just a p2p version of...
What non-FOSS software are you using that you wish you could replace?
For me its honestly a ton of my work software (digital forensics), shit is too niche to be replaced by good FOSS options. Cellebrite, Magnet Axiom, etc. Autopsy is great and free and has a linux version but it simply cannot get the same level of data without a pretty nutty level of custom code....
Any recomendations on an app for security camera viewing?
Just looking for a simple app that can stream local rstp. I have been using VLC up to this point but im looking for something a little less glitchy. I’d also like the ability to view multiple streams at the same time....
What new OS* have you tried this year?
*or distribution...
Non-Canonical employees removed from LXD maintainership ( mastodon.social )
No apologies as Reddit halfheartedly tries to repair ties with moderators ( arstechnica.com )
Reddit is reaching out to moderators after tensions rose over recent policy changes and API pricing. A Reddit admin acknowledged the strained relationship and outlined new weekly feedback sessions and other outreach efforts to repair ties. However, moderators remain skeptical of Reddit’s efforts given mixed results from past...
Multiplatform RSS reader suggestions
Hi everyone, I’m looking for an RSS feed reader available both for PC (Windows and/or Linux) and Android. I would like to have my feed synced and organized in the same way (and maybe some backup functionality too)....
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]
Recommendations for FOSS shopping list/checklist apps?
My wife and I have been struggling to find a decent app that we can use to check things off. Primarily, we’d be using it as a grocery list, but ideally I’d love for the same app to be able to handle her long-term “honey do list” projects, and for that one cloud-syncing is a must....
Paaster.io - End-to-end encrypted pastebin.
Paaster is a secure and user-friendly pastebin application that prioritizes privacy and simplicity. With end-to-end encryption and paste history, Paaster ensures that your pasted code remains confidential and accessible....
Good Foss Alternative to Slack?
Hey Beehaw, I wanted to check if anyone knew of any good Foss alternatives to slack?...
Do we allow sillier content around here? ( beehaw.org )
Best FOSS Local Messenger Service?
So I want to setup a messaging server in my home that works like Telegram or Whatsapp - it should use the local network as we plan on moving around a lot of photos and files between our devices for some projects...
In your opinion, which FOSS software is by many considered "old" or "obsolete", but are in fact, in your opinion, in many ways better than the newer alternatives?
I'll start:...
IMHO XMPP / Jabber is the best Instant Messenger (IM) protocol
It is battle tested, standardized, widely used, have open source servers and apps, end-to-end encryption (OMEMO), self-hostable and are low on ressources and more....
SimpleX messenger / secure messaging ( social.lol )
Techlore gives an interesting short video on why he doesn't recommend SimpleX right now....