Sorry, I don’t have an answer to your question, but two other communities that would fit: !homelab@lemmy.world and !homelab@selfhosted.forum

They’re both not really active, though. And someone asked about OpenSense hardware before and didn’t get any answers…

Just writing this so you have some other places to look up, in case your post gets deleted, I think you’re technically in the wrong community here. As per rule 3 in the sidebar, this community isn’t about hardware questions.

Sorry, I’m not not able to help with that. Maybe there’s a limit how many old messages your server or client syncs?

I suppose it’s old drama by now. And I didn’t check if there’s new one in the meantime. As of now, both projects are active. Both have a userbase. Judging by the lasst commits, it’s still the case that Tuwunel is a one-man-show and Continuwuity is a community project.

I think whether you do closed source software is a personal choice. Based on considerations of your application. Like money, of if you want to rely on a company and how well they do their job, if it’s still gonna be around in 7 years. If you can customize it enough to suit your needs. Or you base the decision on ideology.

I’ve been using Yunohost on the NAS. And it’s simple, works well and is pretty reliable, I didn’t get any major issues for many years now. (And in general, community maintained open-source software has served me well. So that’s what I do.)

Downsides as a proficient Linux user are: You can’t just mess with the config while the automatic scripts also mess with the config. You need to learn how they’re set up and work around that. Hope software has a config.d or overrides directory and put your customizations there. Or something will get messed up eventually. And you can’t just change arbitrary things. The mailserver or SSO or reverse proxy and a few other components are tightly integrated and you’re never gonna be able to switch from postfix to stalwart or something like that. Or retrofit a more modern authentication solution. It is a limiting factor.
And YunoHost doesn’t do containers, so I doubt it’s what you’re looking for anyway.

I’m a bit split on the entire promise of turnkey selfhosting solutions. Some of them work really well. And they’re badly needed to enable regular people to emancipate themselves from big tech. Whether you as an expert want to use them is an entirely different question. I think that just depends on application. If you have a good setup, that might be better suited to your needs. And if done right might be very low maintenance as well. So switching to a turnkey solution would be extra work and it might not pay off. Or it does pay off, I think that really depends on the specifics.

Yes, surely. I mean we’re a bit in a different situation in a digital place. Votes are way easier here (than in real life) and we can easily automate it into bigger processes.

For example I could envision something like a jury to make judiciary decisions. Not sure if that counts as direct democracy… But we don’t have to ask everyone about every moderation decision. Maybe just grant everyone the ability to report stuff and then the software goes ahead and samples 15 random people from the community (who arent part of the drama) and makes them decide. I believe that could help with fatigue. And speeds it up, we can just set the software to take people who are online right now, and discard and replace them if they don’t get at it asap.

Or make it not entirely direct, but at least do away with the hierarchies in a representative democracy. Instead of appointing moderators, we’d form a web of trust. I’m completely free to delegate power to arbitrary people and if my web of trusted people arrive at a score of 30 it’s spam, it is spam for me. And someone else could have a different perspective on the network. That’d help with all the coordination as well, because I can just not care, and the platform automatically delegates the power. And once I do care, I’m free to vote and that spares other people the effort to do the same. That’d at least make it direct in a way that we’re all moderators and users at the same time.

Of course democracy is a trade-off. And there’s a million edge cases, and we need some other things which go along with it. Accountability and transparency. We’d need an appeal process, for example with my first example if the jury doesn’t do a good job.

I’m probably not at a 100% perfect solution with these ideas. But I’m fairly sure we’d be able to do way more in a software-driven platform than the analogies we can take from countries and their approach at decision making. Especially regarding hierarchies within the system. However, things also clash. Transparency might be opposed to privacy. We have a lot more abuse on the internet than in the real world and it’s maybe not just easier to do votes here, but also easier to manipulate them, than what we’d take inspiration from in the offline world.

2. PieFed did a public poll to form a roadmap for 2025. I think it turned out very well. PeerTube also does that. The open-source tool that looks like GOG’s website is called Fider

I love it as well. Though, from a software developers perspective, it rarely goes all the way. There’s just so many technical decisions to be made, limitations, vague requirements, contradictions. Sometimes users think they want something but they really need the opposite of it… And they always want wildly different things and more often than not it’s not healthy for the projects to approach it that way. They’d instead do it in order as mandated by the technical design, have more pressing issues and all of that is buried beneath layers of technical complexity. So the users hardly know what’s appropriate to do. I believe that’s why we often gravitate to the “benevolent dictator” model in Free Software. Or why some regular (paid) software projects fail or exceed budged and time planning.
It should be that way, though. If software is meant for users, the developers should probably listen to them, so I love what these projects do, to at least augment their development process with some participation and guidance by the target audience. And some people are really good at it. (Edit: And we might have elements of a meritocracy as well, and people need programming skills to participate in some ways… So, I think we might not be able to do more than try to make it as democratic as possible. At least as far as we’re talking about the development process itself.)

I think the most obvious one is moderation. What gets deleted, who gets kicked out. Then for example community rules, what’s the topic and rules of discussion. Every user/member could have a say in that. Maybe we could do some more structural and organizational decisions.

It gets a bit tricky with technology. Ideally we could do things like democratically decide to have a voice chat (if that’s what people want) and somehow 3 months later the platform has a voice chat… But it’s not that easy, software development doesn’t work this way.

Uh, I’d love someone to have a try at full-blown direct democracy. Most aspects being controlled (and ideally owned) by the very same people who use the platform. Not sure if that’s good or feasible, though.

And what I always love is to see design principles that foster a nice, amicable atmosphere. Some online communities, games etc have aspects of that. It’s somewhat more rare on modern social media. I sometimes wish hanging out on the internet was a bit less about politics, trolling and memes, getting agitated amongst random anonymous people. And a bit more like an evening at the Irish Pub with friends. Or getting to know new friends there.
We do things like that. I just think good platform design still has potential to achieve way more than we currently do.

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I’d expect at least the authors who do talks about the Fediverse to be here: Cory Doctorow… Marc-Uwe Kling… There are some webcomic authors as well. And we have some journalists. Heise Online comes to mind, they have their own Peertube instance. Then some other known activists, bloggers… And some people share drawings, fanart etc, not sure if that counts.

Edit: I forgot George Takei, and several other people.
Here’s some list of noteworthy accounts including some celebrities: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts

Sure. Sadly I don’t have the proper tools around to do that. And in my case I wasn’t too sad. These devices had 100mbps ethernet and a slow wifi standard. Now they’re on e-waste and I got an upgrade to Gigabit ethernet and 5GHz wifi 😆

Not sure if I get your point. Abstraction is a concept used by IT people to deal with complexity. You’ll use Docker containers in order not to have 200 very specific problems and learn about the intricate details of all of them. Or use a turnkey solution because a working day has a finite amount of hours and you can just not care and have somebody else set the XY value of Postgres to 128 because that’s somehow needed for software M on python x.xx… Of course you’re then not going to learn about these things. It is not “bad”, though, in itself to abstract these issues away from you. Same for the other things I mentioned, networking, virtualization. Abstraction there allows to swap out complex things, do things once and in a clean way because it’s easy to miss things without abstraction and you always need to pay attention to a bazillion of specifics. Also helps with backups, deal with issues because things should break within confined layers, punch above one’s weight, security, do something once and roll it out several times…

I think what you want to avoid is poorly designed or written software. Or poorly done setups. Or not learn about important things. Abstraction is generally something you want, especially with complex things.

Maybe try something like YunoHost. That’s a web server Linux distribution. And it’s supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You’d need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn’t the only option to help with the set up.)

But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.

Yes, OpenWRT lasts way longer. Main thing that ends support is hardware requirements. My old devices with only a few megabytes of memory got dropped eventually. Not because of the chipset, a modern OpenWRT would just not fit any longer. I rarely see other reasons for them to discontinue updates.

Not sure if it’s really gritty. Seems it is to a degree. But more like table salt. I stirred it for a bit and it was pretty scratchy for a while but then dissolved entirely after about 2min. I think it’s more water pressure and chemicals doing that job. It sure seems abrasive to coated surfaces, though. I used to put my non-stick pan into the dishwasher. And it wrecked the surface over the course of several months or a year or so. Now I’m not doing that any more and the pan after that lasted me longer. Just my anecdotal evidence, not science… But I’m positive that’s why we’re not supposed to put these things in there. I guess putting a non-stick pan in 5 or 10 times wouldn’t make a noticeable difference, though. But there are other materials, where once does damage. I once (acidentally) put some kind of scoop in, I believe made of aluminum, and that had wrecked it immediately. Had disgusting colors after that.

If that traffic is going through an encrypted Wireguard tunnel, I don’t see a reason to encrypt it a second time. Judging by your description, it’s already encrypted on transport between the router and VPS. HTTPS would add nothing there. It will however add encryption within your DMZ, if you expect something nefarious going on within your DMZ.

Well known in the industry how you don’t assess programmers by lines of code. You kind of want them to be efficient and clean. Spend their day thinking and design clever solutions… Not pump out lots of unmaintainable low quality stuff. And have a million lines of that by tomorrow. But yeah, guess every aspect of this aligns well. You should be using Linux by now. Or at least do the switch in the near future.

If you’re set on these devices, maybe have a look at the open-source projects meant to strip Tuya devices from their Cloud dependencies. There’s some aftermarket firmware available for some devices. And we have projects like TuyAPI, Local Tuya, tuya-mqtt… It involves some tinkering, but some of these devices work with new firmware or a fake version of the API. And there might be some information on specific devices in the HomeAssistant forum. With a bit of luck, someone already tried it. I generally don’t buy devices unless there’s some info in the forum.

Hmm. I think the main damage is done by other factors. I mean even before AI, everything turned into subscriptions and services. We use Office365 these days and the documents are in the cloud. There isn’t much need for Free Software Office Suites or mail clients anymore. Operating systems have less impact because honestly only old people use computers. Everyone else does their stuff on a phone. And then we finally crossed the barrier into a post-privacy world and people don’t care. And on top of that large companies take the nice database projects, libraries etc and monetize products with that. Without caring too much if that’s sustainable. And AI is one negative factor amongst many.

I think educational activities work best once they have some application to someones life. So it’d be something within the realm of a 7yo. And it’s not fun unless there’s a sense of achievement every now and then, along with all the stuff to learn. So probably not too steep of a learning curve.

Sadly they discontinued Lego Mindstorms. I think robotics is a great hands-on topic. People can grasp what they’re currently doing, why they do it, and what it’s good for. It has a tactile aspect, so you’ll train dexterity as well and gently connect the physical realm with the maths.

But other than that, I bet there’s a lot of things you can try. Design a website (and deploy a small webserver). Maybe some easy to use photo gallery if they have a tablet or camera. Maybe a Wordpress for them to write a Blog? They should be familiar with the concept of a diary. Kids love Minecraft, so maybe a Luanti server if you’re into Free Software. But learn how to add NPCs and animals, that is (or used to be?) a complicated process in Luanti and the world feels boring and empty without. A chat server to their loved ones could motivate them to read and write text (messages). Or skip the selfhosting aspect and do the kids games available for Linux. Paint, LibreOffice…

I like the recommendations from other people as well. Sadly I don’t know which kids programming language works best. I think I heard you can just go straight for Python as well. Not sure if that’s true or what age group that applies to. It’s a bit more involved to learn the syntax and why you need brackets around certain things etc but at least they get to learn the real deal and something properly useful. 7 might be a bit young, though. And there might be a language barrier. But that applies to all the computer stuff behind the scenes, unless you’re a native English speaker.

If you just want something simple that does the job, you can try a turnkey solution like YunoHost. There’s several other ones out there. Some with containers, some with more or less pre-packaged software… If you want to learn more during the process, maybe don’t and do it yourself because these things don’t teach you a lot. There’s some resources like the awesome-selfhosted list in the sidebar of this community. But I think for installing services you’d mainly look at the specific documentation of the specific service you’re just about to tackle. And maybe read up on Docker containers etc to judge whether you want to do it that way.

Or maybe @WhiteHotaru@feddit.org would like to do that for us?