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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • About 15 years on, I’m still so happy I got good coursework marks for the route-finding equivalent of a bogosort. Picked a bunch of random routes and pick the fastest. Sure, that guy who set up a neural net to figure it out did well, but mine didn’t take days of training, and still did about as well in the same sort of execution time.














  • Up until now I’ve been using docker and mostly manually configuring by dumping docker compose files in /opt/whatever and calling it a day. Portainer is running, but I mainly use it for monitoring and occasionally admin tasks. Yesterday though, I spun up machine number 3 and I’m strongly considering setting up something better for provisioning/config. After it’s all set up right, it’s never been a big problem, but there are a couple of bits of initial with that are a bit of a pain (mostly hooking up wireguard, which I use as a tunnel for remote admin and off-site reverse proxying.

    Salt is probably the strongest contender for me, though that’s just because I’ve got a bit of experience with it.



  • Two main points personally:

    • with self-moderation, you can’t really say “I don’t want to see this sort of content”, you can only say “I don’t want to see this content again”. A well stated set of rules for a community let’s you know what to expect, so you get to make that choice if advance. This is a massive difference in preventing distress and general unpleasant feelings. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it’s a lot nicer.
    • it avoids massive duplication of effort. If you have a moderator-to-reader ratio of 1000:1, you’ll be saving the vast majority of self moderation with those people would be doing. Yes, reporting exists, but it’s a tiny fraction of the time one would spend “moderating” for yourself


  • I’ve got a mix of hosting environments personally. A dedicated box hosted with Hetzner (their auction prices can be pretty decent) plus a Pi 4 and an old NAS for internal services. Docker containers used for pretty much everything - mostly set up with a big ol’ /opt/ folder with a bunch of service specific folders with docker-compose.yml files and bind mounts galore. Got a wireguard VPN bridging between then because that seemed sensible.

    Running Portainer for some extra management and monitoring, then a bundle of stuff:

    • Mailcow for email
    • Owncloud for for sync and storage
    • Phototropism
    • Bitwarden
    • Emby for media playback
    • NextPVR for recording
    • Private instances of Pleroma and Lemmy
    • A slightly broken telegram/grafana stack with some container monitoring stuff hooked in
    • The odd dedicated game server when the need arises … and some things I’ve forgotten about.

    Got a spare old i5 machine around set up to auto hook into Portainer if I need some extra grunt at some point, but it’s more likely to be used when I can’t be bothered paying for the dedicated box.

    Aware a lot of it’s suboptimal, but it’s easy to work with and familiar, and that’s enough to make it workable.