Yep. Assume the worst, imo

Ahh so bots are finding subdomains by scraping SSL certificates?

afaik it was always a land-grab / gold rush mentality - capture the market, then figure out how to make money later. Now, it’s later.

Yep. Everything on that site is AI generated. Another one for the block list!

Hmm Tzatziki Sauce… I’d give it a chance, it could work.

Good question.

A GUI will be easier to get into - you can use a gui file browser app to learn the layout of the file system, you can use a GUI text editor to change config files, that sort of thing. It’ll mean you can do a few basic things intuitively which will be less intimidating. So from a maintaining momentum and morale point of view it might be best to have a GUI initially even though you have to learn all the cli stuff eventually anyway and you’ll most likely be running a headless server on real hardware eventually.

Self-hosting is a very individual journey - everyone wants different things and finds they own way to meet their own requirements. So there isn’t really one guide that covers everything.

Anyway, as a general road map:

1. Create a Virtual Machine on your PC. Install Linux inside the VM.

2. Play around in the VM to learn Linux basics. When you break the OS you can just wipe the VM and reinstall.

3. In the VM, try some docker containers until you’re comfortable-ish with docker.

4. Maybe try Yunohost in the VM. You might find Yunohost saves you a lot of time and hassle.

5. Get hardware suitable for your goals.

6. Install Linux, configure networking and docker containers on real hardware.

If you’ve ever spent 10 minutes using an AI agent, you’d know that there’s no way to predict how many tokens it’s going to use before you give it a task. It can be $0.20 worth sometimes or $20 other times. Or anything, really.

It’s only after watching it churn away for a few minutes that you can assume it’s gotten stuck and have the option of pulling the plug before the bill gets run up too high. But you need to watch it like a hawk and you need to be the one paying the bill otherwise you’re not going to care (e.g. workers using AI at work aren’t paying for it, their company is).

Taken in aggregate across a month, that unpredictability might average out or it might explode.

Replying to this post with an AI slop comment takes some balls, mate

No obvious signs, nope. It wasn’t until I started using it in earnest that I got suspicious and then when trying to work on the code it became very clear.

Well, yeah. There are lots of reasons. But basic self-interest is something we can all agree on.

I made the mistake of installing Starling recently, not realizing how it was made. I contributed a PR to it, wrote a few issues describing some showstopping bugs, and since then there’s been absolutely no activity from the creator.

That’s fine, they are under no obligation to work for free. But I wouldn’t have installed it if I knew it was abandonware.

My second computer had a 20 MB HDD and it was wonderful to have soooo much space compared to the previous computer which had no HDD and 3 floppy drives.

Then a year later I added a second 20 MB HDD and was absolutely swimming in space.

Back then a ‘large’ app was 100 KB. You’d spend all day writing code and produce a 13 KB file.

whaaat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_enema#Native_American_ritual_usages

You could use apache to create a webdav share. I bet there’s a pre built container for it.

Webdav is really underrated, imo.

Really old CPUs (486 or earlier) lack the computing power to do SSL at any decent speed. So you’re limited to serving http, gopher, nntp, or telnet. Maybe IRC.

You could have a modern computer handle the SSL connection and proxy requests through to the antique but some of the purity of the thing is lost by doing that.

To clarify - we’ve had that setting for a long time and it won’t be automatically changed on existing instances unless an admin chooses to. I’ve just changed the default of it for new instances (of which there are much less, lately).

It’s the easiest way to stop scrapers, way easier than getting Anubis or fail2ban working properly. Unfortunately it comes at the cost of walling off an instance but most instances are for individual / small group use so it’s an ok default to have.

Scrapers are not federating.

Activitypub could be used to harvest content on a ongoing basis but to get all the historical data, which is the stuff they want, they can’t use activitypub. Lemmy only has the last 50 posts in each community’s outbox.

In the latest version, PieFed defaults to a mode which requires a login to browse. An admin needs to tick a box to expose themselves to scrapers.

If Lemmy automatically generated a list of related communities then mods wouldn’t need to manually maintain a list.