[-] Wander@packmates.org 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

@Omniraptor ah yes! Probably that's why.
Actually the whole original post was sent via Mastodon.

I tend to write posts that I share to my Mastodon followers and then at the end I mention a Lemmy community if I believe the community would also find it interesting.

[-] Wander@packmates.org 13 points 10 months ago

@MigratingtoLemmy use a hammer to break the screen, control via adb :vlpn_happy_blep:

[-] Wander@packmates.org 11 points 10 months ago

@benjohn @selfhosted 6-8 GB of RAM with powerful CPU and GPU that was designed to run games and can in some cases run small AI models is nothing to scoff at imho.

[-] Wander@packmates.org 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

@selfhosted Update:

  1. Just to clarify, the the whole point is that Android makes it easy for less tech oriented people to host small single user / family services.

It does not need to be perfect, have massive throughput or allow for massive amounts of read/write cycles.

If people can host their own media server like Jellyfin or note taking apps like Joplin instead of using commercial services by simply installing an APK on an old phone they can leave connected at home, that's already a big win.

  1. Regarding device longevity, Android 13 apparently supports / will support full KVM emulation. Windows can be run if you have root while android based VMs are expected to be possible without the need for root. Since this type of virtualization allows VMs to run their own kernel, keeping the "server app" updated should allow the user to be protected even if the host OS is outdated as long as these server-app-VMs are trustworthy themselves.
[-] Wander@packmates.org 16 points 10 months ago

@RegalPotoo Maybe I should have been more specific in the wording of my title.

No one planning on hosting public multi-user service that would see some serious traffic would probably benefit from hosting on a phone.

Someone who wants to simply run a single-user instance or their personal nextcloud? I think that's a real possibility.

[-] Wander@packmates.org 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

@southsamurai Oh that's definitely a huge concern, but not just for self-hosting but for privacy in general.

But still, if the average joe wants to self-host something using an old phone is probably the easiest way to get them to try self-hosted alternatives and drop corporate / commercial services.

Maybe not the 'average average joe' such as my parents, but anyone who is minimally curious enough to do stuff such as registering a domain, setting up a game server for friends and maybe has opened the CMD windows console once or twice in the past following a tutorial. That kind of demographic (IDK if it has a name) might be much more inclined to self-host if it was as easy as installing an APK and letting your phone one somewhere at home.

Overall as long as Android doesn't become straight out malicious spyware itself, the benefit of dropping commercial alternatives might very well be a net positive. In a worst-case scenario, any tunnel / vpn configuration necessary to expose a service to the internet could also add an automated step to blackhole requests to google's tracking servers.

99
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Wander@packmates.org to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?

Wait, what?

Think about it. At some point everyone has had an old phone lying around. They are designed to be constantly connected, constantly on... and even have a battery and potentially still a SIM card to survive power outages.

We just need to make it easy to create APK packaged servers that can avoid battery-optimization kills and automatically configure an outbound tunnel like ngrok, zerotrust, etc...

The goal: hosting services like #nextcloud, #syncthing, #mastodon!? should be as easy as installing an APK and leaving an old phone connected to a spare charger / outlet.

It would be tempting to have an optimized ROM, but if self-hosting is meant to become more commonplace, installing an APK should be all that's needed. #Android can do SSH, VPN and other tunnels without the need for root, so there should be no problem in using tunnels to publicly expose a phone/server in a secure manner.

In regards to the suitability of home-grade broadband, I believe that it should not be a huge problem at least in Europe where home connections are most often unmetered: "At the end of June 2021, 70.2% of EU homes were passed by either FTTP or cable DOCSIS
3.1 networks, i.e. those technologies currently capable of supporting gigabit speeds."

Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/broadband-coverage-europe-2021

PS. syncthing actually already has an APK and is easy to use. Although I had to sort out some battery optimization stuff, it's a good example of what should become much more commonplace.

cc: @selfhosted
#selfhosted #selfhosting

[-] Wander@packmates.org 4 points 11 months ago

@KayOhtie @Wander@yiffit.net It wasn't working for the longest time. And I believe it still only works for SFW posts, not NSFW posts. But basically the reason I'm surprised is because either lemmy or mastodon weren't talking to each other before and now due to some change it works (albeit not always).

[-] Wander@packmates.org 5 points 11 months ago

@Wander@yiffit.net HOLY SHIT I CAN SEE A #LEMMY IMAGE PREVIEW ON MASTODON.

[-] Wander@packmates.org 4 points 11 months ago

@AdellcomdoisL @Wander@yiffit.net Actually that's my preferred option but then I was worried that by not having an option for andromorph or gynomorph characters it could also be some sort of erasure. I definitely need more feedback / opnions on the matter.

25
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Wander@packmates.org to c/meta@yiffit.net

Announcing status.packmates.org and status.yiffit.net

Heya everyone!
I've been mostly silent for some time, but it's all with good reason (I promise!)

Over the last few days I've spent a lot of time on server maintenance. Many of these changes will be invisible to you as users (such as getting a /48 ipv6 range, setting up SLAAC/DHCPv6, reviewing security and firewall rules, etc...)

But today I set up something that I can share: status pages!

Head over to:
- https://status.packmates.org
- https://status.yiffit.net

(they're the same page actually, but the different domain is to make it easier to remember if you're a user of one site and not the other).

There's a slight caveat in that the status page is hosted on the hypervisor itself, so if that goes down, everything goes down but you'll at least know by not being able to load the status page itself!

Ideally I would host this somewhere external but we're not there yet. One day I hope to even have a server cluster for redundancy, but we'd have to host many more services to be able to justify this.

cc: @meta

18

Quick question about DNS and DoH that I thought about after reading this post:

https://packmates.org/@silvereagle@furry.engineer/111176886781705659

Wouldn't it make sense for Firefox or another third party to bundle and transparently forward all DoH requests to cloudflare so that:

A) Cloudflare doesn't know who made what request due to not knowing the origin

B) Firefox doesn't know who made what request due to TLS

#Infosec #Privacy
CC: @privacyguides

[-] Wander@packmates.org 4 points 1 year ago

@fediverse I've read that this is called an overlay network. Unfortunately many of the ones I've seen documented focus on keeping things in their own private networks which is okay but not fun.

ULA addresses require no permission and were designed precisely to knit together private networks. We can just use domain names and convert them via checksum into a static ULA /48 prefix. DNS can be used to announce routes, or eventually something more BGP-like given that ownership of a domain can be verified and thus authorization to announce routes.

If domains ever become a bottleneck one could use private TLDs with some consensus mechanism and even create multi-layer networks this way where packmates.layer.1 and packmates.layer.2 are two different networks even though they might have the same address range.

Anyways, I'll go out and touch some grass now.

[-] Wander@packmates.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@breadsmasher I have no idea how Tor works. In this case I would say most peers would have no problem disclosing a public IP, but it could have benefits in making resources in a private network accessible and as long as the endpoint can be reached those resources would be hosting provider agnostic.

I would say this is less about hiding user activity than it is about logical networks, abstracting away the hosting provider and allowing to knit together self hosted services, regardless of where they are hosted.

19
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Wander@packmates.org to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

Federated wireguard network idea
Any feedback welcome.

Let's keep things stupidly simple and simply hash the domain name to get a unique IPv6 ULA prefix.

Then we would need a stupidly simple backend application to automatically fetch pubkeys and endpoints from DNS and make a request to add each others as peers.

Et voilà, you got a worldwide federated wireguard network resolving private ULA addresses. Sort of an internet on top of the internet .

The DNS entries with the public IPv4 / IPv6 addresses could even be delegated to other domains / endpoints which would act as reverse proxy (either routing or nesting tunnels) for further privacy.

Maybe my approach is too naïve and there are flaws I haven't considered, so don't be afraid to comment.

Exact use cases? Idk, but it sounds nifty.

#privacy #networking #VPN #wireguard #infosec

cc: @fediverse

14
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Wander@packmates.org to c/meta@yiffit.net

We now have hourly snapshots / backups!

I'm happy to inform both packmates.org and yiffit.net users that both sites now benefit from the ZFS filesystem that the new server has been set up with.

I have implemented automated hourly snapshots for 24 hours + daily snapshots for 31 days. In theory they will only grow in size if there's actual changes to the disk of both VMs and I should be able to have enough space.

Furthermore, local snapshots are complemented by the daily offsite backups which allow us to recover even if the full server were to suddenly explode. Full backups are first created on the server itself and then copied offsite so that for a full week we have two independent copies of each day.

Depending on space usage I'll make sure to replicate the offsite repository so that there's two offsite copies for the last 31 days + 7 local copies. That would be 69 individual full backup files + snapshots.

I hope I'll have enough space with deduplication.

cc: @meta

21
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Wander@packmates.org to c/chat@yiffit.net

What I've been busy with lately

About three weeks ago I started renting a new dedicated server which is going to host both packmates and yiffit very soon.

Because the server isn't hosting anything yet, I've taken the opportunity to play around and try out different configurations, including ZFS, LXC containers for small services, VLANs for better isolation ( which I did manage to get working ), wireguard tunnels, improved firewall rules, security groups, iGPU passthrough, etc...

Tomorrow I'll wipe the disks, install #proxmox from scratch and make it production ready.

Then it should be as easy as loading a full backup from both yiffit and packmates to complete the migration ( but I'll announce this last step in due time).

Am excited *wags* :dogcited:

cc: @chat

270
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Wander@packmates.org to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world

Algorithm-based social media "recommendations" has normalized us putting up with blatant SPAM

Imagine if gmail or outlook were to place emails by 'creators and brands you might like' in your inbox!?

Following the process of enshittification, the algorithm on many social media platforms is becoming an excuse to push blatant amounts of SPAM to users. It starts as a feature that is genuinely useful, but becomes a tool to show you ads, content from paying users or to keep you hooked with rage-bait content as social media platforms seek to extract more value out of its users.

Algorithm-based social media has its benefits, but looking forward it is becoming increasingly necessary that such an algorithm runs client-side and is owned by the user.

cc: @showerthoughts

126
submitted 1 year ago by Wander@packmates.org to c/memes@yiffit.net

Fuck yeah: Be gay, save rights - Be trans, fight fascism

cc: @memes

21
submitted 1 year ago by Wander@packmates.org to c/meta@yiffit.net

If you're a user at Packmates or Yiffit, you should know that my current stance regarding #threads is a precautionary defederation.

They'll probably launch with federation whitelist and I doubt they wouldn't defederate from us, but there's too many risks and unknowns right now.

I don't think as an admin I should limit everyone's ability to interact with threads just because they're a for-profit company, but there's some huge red flags in regards to data management and potential spam.

So, if anyone was wondering my stance, I'll place a precautionary domain block for now.

Once we have more info and/or they have started federating, I will start thinking about objective conditions that need to be fulfilled to remove the block. It won't be based on my hatred of corporations but actual criteria in regards to guaranteeing user security and health of the fediverse.

cc: @meta

2
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Wander@packmates.org to c/lgbtq_plus@beehaw.org

TIL that there's a pride flag to represent queerness itself.

"Queer is an identity in and of itself that more and more people are choosing to identify with. It is a sort of label for those who don’t want to put themselves in a box. Often considered a movement, queer people are those who fall outside of and/or renounce the cultural norms around sexuality, gender identity, and/or gender expression.

The word queer can mean different things to different people, but the most accepted definition is someone who is not cishet or someone with variant experiences with orientation, gender, and/or sex."

https://queerintheworld.com/queer-pride-flag/

cc: @lgbtq_plus

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Wander@packmates.org to c/test@pawb.social

Do you know if it's possible to create link-posts to Lemmy from Mastodon?
@test

4
submitted 1 year ago by Wander@packmates.org to c/furry@yiffit.net

I love this fox-ear-hoodie! (art by Chunie)

Source: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/52590267/
cc: @furry

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Wander

joined 2 years ago