A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • I mean if no single software fits your bill, maybe go for a combination of them? Post your blog posts in a Ghost installation, your podcasts in Castopod and have your community on a NodeBB forum? The Fediverse kinda includes the idea it’s all one big network anyway. So you don’t have to squeeze everything on a single server and one CMS.

    Other than that: Wordpress is open-source. You could also wait for the enshittification to happen. We’re fairly sure someone is going to fork it and maybe they’ll provide a seemless migration. So if you’re patient enough, you might be able to stick with your current setup. Just that you Wordpress will some day have a different name and developer community. These things happen all the time. I’ll just switch from Firefox to LibreWolf once I’m unhappy with Mozilla’s decisions. Solves the user-facing part of the issues, and there’s almost no effort involved.


  • Nice, thanks for the link! I wasn’t aware of that. Sadly as with all shiny new things it doesn’t fit all my requirements… I’d really like to speak to my house in my native language. But I figure English will do. I’m gonna try that.

    Not sure if an ESP32-S3 is fast enough for more advanced DSP plus the rest of an voice assistant. At least I found some ESP32 libraries with noise reduction, echo cancellation… There is the ESP-ADF and a project called ESP32-SpeexDSP. But I didn’t try that yet. The Rockckip / Luckfox development board looks nice as well. A Cortex-A7 and a few hundred megabytes of memory might come in handy. And whatever the NPU does. But I don’t have a clue what kind of software and libraries we got for embedded Linux or custom processing units.

    Anyway. I think the production-grade stuff mostly uses multiple microphones and a combination of beamforming and echo cancellation. I got 4 inmp441 microphones here. But I lack the software/libraries to tinker with that kind of signal processing.


  • Uh, noise cancellation is hard. First of all, the audio pipeline currently isn’t able to resample the microphones, so mic and output need to be connected to separate i2s buses, or it won’t work simultaneously in the first place.

    And then I had some luck with the microwakeword component. It often triggers correctly even with noise in the background. And I have an automation that mutes all media players and the TV when the wake word is triggered. That’s my “noise cancelling”.

    I think more elaborate noise cancelling is going to require some dedicated hardware (or maybe some proprietary ESP-ADF functions) and a microphone array. But that’s probably as expensive as an Voice PE?!

    I’m not in a good place with the voice assistant anyway. Don’t own a graphics card. So it’s slow. And Whisper never gets all the words right for me. So it’s down to the speech-to-phrase addon. And that seems to be broken as of now. At least I get more connection errors than commands through. I think I’m going to do the Sendspin media player first. And then maybe add a microphone and voice assistant later.


  • I’m currently doing it the other way around. Assemble multiple satellites and spread them through the house. With upcoming Sendspin and Music Assistant this might do whole house audio soon. But I don’t own a Voice PE. I just bought some microcontrollers plus MAX98357A codec/amplifiers and connect them to random old speakers I have in my e-waste / upcycling bin. The one thing with an 3.5" audio jack might just go into the preexisting soundbar or stereo in the livingroom.



  • No worries. Your post was well-written. And I’m glad people could offer some advice. Not even the proficient Lemmy users get all of this right all the time. I just figured I’d drop you a comment in case the mods take action, to spare you the effort to also learn about the modlog and how to look up their note… But seems it wasn’t necessary 😄




  • 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.

    1. 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.)



  • 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.





  • 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.