I am sure it was discussed here before, but I can't find a good way to search this community.

Are there any arguments against having a user's identity federate, and be compatible across platforms?

For example, let us say I sign up with my instance, matcha_addict@lemy.lol

But what if I go on mastodon, and I want to have my own micro blog. Or maybe go to write freely and post some blog posts. I'd have to make a different account on each one.

What if mastodon or write freely could just let me log in with my lemmy account (or lets call it federated account). This has several benefits:

• users don't have to scratch their head on if I am the same person or not across these platforms
• theoretically, someone following my feed can get updates on what I do on multiple platforms

Now I understand this would be difficult to implement and iron out all the edge cases, but am I missing anything on why it wouldn't be a desirable feature, given it is implemented?

From a practical sense, ActivityPub may be the obvious choice as it gives easier interop with the largest federated platforms.

But what else? There are existing platforms built on these protocols, such as movim for xmpp, and another for matrix I forget.

From a technical standpoint, are there any major pros and cons?

I heard often about activityPub being challenging to implement.

Now I know part of this is because, if you are building on activityPub, you want interop with existing platforms such as mastodon, and they do their own thing.

But ignoring that aspect, what is so hard about activityPub? What could have been done better?

I am a software developer, so feel free to use software dev concepts and terms when explaining. Thanks!

Lemmy developers have said there are no near plans for allowing users to follow mastodon or other activityPub networks, so I'm considering another platform that can do this.

It looks like mbin, Piefed and FediLab have the ability to do this. Has anyone tried them and have a comparison?

I also heard it may be possible to do from just mastodon-like platforms. Anyone tried this?

I know they're quite different technically. But practically, what does ActivityPub unlock that was not previously possible with RSS and basic web tech stack?

I think I have an idea of the answer. RSS may provide a way for users to "subscribe" to content from a feed, equivalent of following and putting it in a unified feed.

But it does not have a way for users to interact with the poster, like comments or likes. This may be possible with a basic web stack though, but either users will have to make accounts on every person's site, or the site has to accept no user auth. (but this could be resolved with a identity provider standard, like disqus does)

I suppose another thing activityPub does is distribute content to multiple servers. Not sure if this is really desirable though?

Anyways, did I miss anything?

I recently learned about nsjail, a utility to sandbox applications or provide workload isolation.

It seems to be lighter weight than firejail and possibly better suited for server applications.

Has anyone used this? What's your experience with it? I'm curious about using it for my web server applications as an additional layer of Dr hotty.

Is there any fediverse client out there (mobile or pc or web) that has support for multiple types of content, rather than just for one?

Most apps I find are only mastodon-like (including pleroma etc.), or only lemmy-like, or only peertube-like. One of the main benefits of the fediverse is that I could theoretically access all of those from one platform. But the clients I saw don't seem to support it too well.

Is there any fediverse client out there (mobile or pc or web) that has support for multiple types of content, rather than just for one?

Most apps I find are only mastodon-like (including pleroma etc.), or only lemmy-like, or only peertube-like. One of the main benefits of the fediverse is that I could theoretically access all of those from one platform. But the clients I saw don't seem to support it too well.

Hi all,

I found a hobby in trying to secure my Linux server, maybe even beyond reasonable means.

Currently, my system is heavily locked down with user permissions. Every file has a group owner, and every server application has its own user. Each user will only have access to files it is explicitly added to.

My server is only accessible from LAN or VPN (though I've been interested in hosting publicly accessible stuff). I have TLS certs for most everything they can use it (albeit they're self signed certs, which some people don't like), and ssh is only via ssh keys that are passphrase protected.

What are some suggestions for things I can do to further improve my security? It doesn't have to be super useful, as this is also fun for me.

Some things in mind:

• 2 factor auth for SSH (and maybe all shell sessions if I can)
• look into firejail, nsjail, etc.
• look into access control lists
• network namespace and vlan to prevent server applications from accessing the internal network when they don't need to
• considering containerization, but so far, I find it not worth foregoing the benefits I get of a single package manager for the entire server

Other questions:

• Is there a way for me to be "notified" if shell access of any form is gained by someone? Or somehow block all shell access that is not 2FA'd?
• my system currently secures files on the device. But all applications can see all process PIDs. Do I need to protect against this?

threat model

• attacker gains shell access
• attacker influences server application to perform unauthorized actions
• not in my threat model: physical access

The telegram app has a very nice interface, but I want to use a self hosted xmpp chat server.

Is there maybe a fork of telegram that makes it work with a self hosted xmpp server? I would imagine that this is possible.

If not, is there anything that at least gets close to how nice telegram UI is?

Sorry, the question in title sounds naive. I have no doubt that math is essential in programming, but I am thinking about philosophy of programming and want to summarize when they're needed in programming. My attempt is below:

Most applications of programming are making electronics do things through their interfaces. Whether that's telling a screen to display something, a network wire to transport data, a hard disk to persist data.

But we often need math because we often transform data, or we might make said electronics do things based on user input, or an event. Transforming an event to data is a mathematical construction.

Some applications are almost purely mathematical, like banking, crypto currency, or encryption.

In your opinion, does this fully explain why we need math in programming? Is there a better way to sum it up?

Hi all,

I am looking for a local database that is easily accessible via the command line.

It can be SQL or non-SQL

Whats my use case? I want to use it kinda like a second brain. A place to save my notes, my todo lists, my book reading lists, links / articles to read later, etc.

I want it to be a good CLI citizen so that I can script its commands to create simpler abstractions, rather than writing out the full queries every time.

Maybe sqlite is what I need, but is that ideal for my use case?

Edit: removed notes, as evidently they aren't suitable for this and aren't like the rest.

I am thinking to make the following tool, but wanted to get opinions before I embark on this journey.

The tool builds container images.

The images are optionally distroless: meaning, they do not include an entire distro. They only include the application(s) you specify and its dependencies.

What else does the tool give you?

• the build tool uses a package manager to do dependency resolution, so you don't have to manually resolve them like many docker files do. (NOTE: The package manager is not installed on the container image. It is only used by the build tool)
• uses gentoo's portage to build the software from source (if not previously cached). This is helpful when you're using versions of software that aren't built against each other in the repos you download from
• allows specifying compile flag customizations per package.
• makes use of gentoo's existing library of package build or install recipes, so that you only have to write them for uncommon apps rather than in every docker file.

I find it crazy that so many dockerfiles are doing their own dependency resolution when we already have package managers.

What do you think? Is this tool useful or am I missing a reason why it wouldn't be?

This instance performs spectacularly. Admin is always on top of everything. No drama, and I have high confidence that this instance won't disappear without notice.

Our admin does not get enough appreciation, so big shoutout and thanks for your hard work ❤

I understand that nvidia support for wayland is lacking, but I know it's possible.

For context, I was using sway 1.8 for a while (no official support for nvidia). It was working almost perfectly, only minor issues. After the update to 1.9, I get constant flickering.

I can downgrade to 1.8, but the fact that 1.8 was working tells me that it is possible for a window manager to work well for nvidia. The problem is the sway team does not want that headache (understandably so).

Are there any alternatives that work well with nvidia?

Bspwm has many appeals, and I do not want to focus on those. I want to focus on binary-tree separation of windows and its benefits vs alternatives. What's the appeal?

For comparison, Sway and i3 allow for the v-split and h-split layout, so you can have 2 or more windows split side by side. You can nest them, so it is sort of an n-ary tree. It feels a lot more powerful.

So why the binary tree? The others seem richer and more capable. Bspwm is marketed as more powerful than i3 but it seems the other way around?

I am looking to program something similar to a simulation game, but free-form in its customization and scripting to the point where no strategy game will get me close enough.

I initially thought to start from scratch, simulating all the basics. Simulating money, people, resources, maps, etc. Obviously this is very ambitious.

Are there any libraries or frameworks that could help me with this? I don't want something opinionated that decides the model for how to simulate, for example, money or a person. I want to preserve the ability to simulate those with the models and math of my choosing. But maybe a library that has the foundations of simulation in general, so that I don't have to build everything completely from scratch?

I understand what I said sounds very vague. This will be something I will discover as I do more of it, so forgive the vagueness.

I am building an application that is using JSON / XML files to persist data. This is why I indicated "outside of SQL" in the title.

I understand one benefit of join tables is it makes querying easier with SQL syntax. Since I am using JSON as my storage, I do not have that benefit.

But are there any other benefits when using a separate join table when expressing a many-to-many relationship? The exact expression I want to express is one entity's dependency on another. I could do this by just having a "dependencies" field, which would be an array of the IDs of the dependencies.

This approach seems simpler to me than a separate table / entity to track the relation. Am I missing something?

Feel free to ask for more context.

I like tasks.org but unfortunately it doesn't look like this will come any time soon.

Plus points:

• if the task can be assigned to multiple sub-lists (or projects, buckets, etc).

I want a to-do list app that syncs from a json file (or other human-readable data format), so that I can view and modify the file (via a CLI like jq) from my computer too, and it would still reflect on my phone when it syncs.

Does this exist? Preferably it uses a format simple enough that makes it possible / easy to modify it via jq.