When spam started to become overwhelming here I signed up to the largest mbin instance, Fedia.io. On one hand it runs well and isn't overrun with spam posts. On the other, it's missing some communities that are active on kbin.social.

It also doesn't have a meta or askmbin type of community, like kbin does.

Are there any other differences I should consider before deciding which of the two to drop?

Edit: I also got a server error when I posted this and thought my post had been lost. Phew! This doesn't happen on Fedia.io.

Just wondering if local communities could use kbin that way.

Most social platforms have open source and federated alternatives now:

YouTube -> PeerTube
Instagram -> Pixelfed
Reddit -> Kbin / Lemmy
Twitter -> Mastodon
Facebook Groups -> ?

Friendica is the only alternative I've heard of for Facebook Groups. I haven't had enough time with it to see if it works as well yet, though. I've watched the very few videos about it online. So I have 2 questions.

1. Does anyone have another suggestion besides Friendica? I'm a little surprised that FB Groups don't have an equivalent. Maybe Lemmy / Kbin serve the same purpose anyway but I did find FB groups a little more user-friendly for people who are less technical.

2. Am I fooling myself in thinking that some platforms are more ethical than Meta/Twitter/Google? They might not profit off of genocide, but they probably can't moderate massive disinformation campaigns should they arrive on their shores. Telegram, for example, seems to be rife with dodgy channels that go unchallenged.

I’m just thinking if the energy use that data centres and streaming platforms require, and the climate crisis. Would one be significantly better than the other in terms of energy use?

I run a web server (lighttpd) to serve a few pages to the world. I've installed the nordvpn client and when I run it two expected things happen:

1. I lose my SSH connection to the machine, and
2. My website becomes inaccessible to the public

Is it possible to run the VPN and still maintain the SSH connection on the local net and the web server connection on the internet?

I’m struggling to pan the chorus of my song. It only has drums, bass, one slightly distorted guitar and a lead vocal.

The drums have a nice default panning spread from L-R in the DAW I’m using (Logic). But the convention I’m reading online recommends putting bass and vocal in the centre.

My question is, what do I do with the guitar, which is just playing a power chord at the beginning of each bar.

I like songs that fill the stereo spectrum but due to the composition, this one seems narrow by comparison.

I’ve read about stereo expanders but I’m not sure when to sure them. I was also thinking that I could somehow split the guitar into two tracks by frequency and pan those differently. Not sure how to go about that yet and then not sure if I would need to do the same for vocals in that case.

Any suggestions on how to make the mix a bit more exciting without changing the composition ?

I have a QNAP NAS which uses RAID 5 across 3 HDDs. There are lots of good videos online for setting up RAID (even DIY solutions using linux), but how do I know when there's a problem and what's the typical way to maintain it?

I'm guessing that these systems log an indication somewhere that a disk is about to fail, and when I see that log entry I should power down the system and replace the disk with one of the exact same size. Is that right?

Edit: I have found a good overview here: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=OhzrPInWMyo

In essence, he's saying:

1. Enable a recycle bin feature so that accidentally deleted files can be recovered.
2. If the device itself (not the disks) fails, one option is to replace the device and insert the disks in the same order as before. But there's a chance that the disks were corrupted by the failing device, in which case the next point is what you need.
3. EXT4 is a common filesystem format with QNAP and specialised recovery software can help you recover information from the disks. He demonstrates Hetman RAID recovery. You will need to connect all disks simultaneously though, so if you don't have enough ports for this you'll need to get an adaptor of some kind.
4. If just a single disk has failed, then in theory you should just be able to replace it, but there can be complications, which he discusses at 6:37 in the video (the video is just 7:51 duration).
5. RAID is not a backup. Please backup your data too.

Any video on YouTube claiming to be a trailer isn’t. I know it’ll be a great movie but curious to see if there is a trailer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury_2

Everything seems to have an RDA associated with it (Recommended Daily Allowance), so I imagine that something like this exists. I'm not interested in weight gain/loss though, purely nutrition. I'm a light eater and I'm sure I could do with supplements or dietary modification.

My user account on linux gets some Cron Jobs among mail from humans. I don't want to see the cron messages.

How can I script it so they are moved out of the "inbox" view (for example, on Squirrel Mail or my mobile client)?

I can grep for root@<domain> (Cron Daemon) to find the files that are emails from Cron. But I don't know how to actually process them from here.

Edit: they are using dovecot here, in case that makes a difference. Messages appear as files in the format:
1696857026.V902I580559fM559719.<domain>.de:2,

Edit 2: I have learned that the trailing S can be appended to a filename to mark it as read (or Seen), so I just need to know how to move it from the inbox to somewhere safe now.

I accidentally found out that mpv can play videos from the TTY, meaning I don't have to log in to a graphical session. It even has a scaled OSD, unlike anything I've seen in a terminal UI.

Obviously there are plenty of terminal applications that work in a TTY, (edit) intext-mode or using ncurses (/edit), but are there any others like mpv that aren't strictly terminal apps but don't require a display server (maybe because they do the job themselves)?

I'm considering getting back to self-hosting again, but I remember a problem I never quite figured out.

My first services were a gemini server and lighttpd server and these were easy to set up, very satisfying and continue to work well for years. I also have FreshRSS and Calibre-web running well here.

But as I try to add more, sometimes instructions would include apache settings that clashed with the apache settings for something else. The instructions assume I don't already have apache installed and can just apply any settings I want.

Another issue, the new service might take over the domain, becoming the default service for the domain. I'm assuming that this is a port issue but I don't know.

Then there were docker containers. Some used docker compose while some did not.

One that I just couldn't get working was Nextcloud, which I wanted to host surveys from. They won't answer my support questions on their community hub unless I set up SSL though (which I don't plan on doing).

Does anyone have general advice on these issues? If it's just part of the difficulty of self-hosting, then maybe it's not for me. Too much time and energy was getting spent on it.

Thanks!