pitninja

Personally, I think it’d be nice if you could self-host just the bridge instances and connect them with beeper yourself, so that the part that isn’t e2e encrypted is running on software you can validate and hardware you control.

I 100% agree this would be a great solution. That’s what I thought this page was going to be at first until I kept reading and realized it’s just a config guide for the Matrix Ansible setup. I wish they didn’t say “self host Beeper” on that page at all because self hosting Matrix has absolutely nothing to do with the Beeper service other than their devs built the bridges that they’re showing you how to set up with Matrix.

It’s almost not even fair to say they’re merely contributing back to the upstream bridges. Most of the bridges would not exist at all without the Beeper developers.

It’s also kind of funny that the section of their website you quoted still has language that implies you have to pay for Beeper when it’s been free for months at this point. The primary reason to self host Matrix at this point is for privacy and complete control. And self hosting Matrix is only free if you use existing hardware and I would recommend a cloud instance for most people.

Beeper’s server set up is actually a lot more complicated than just standard Synapse at this point. When they say you can “self host Beeper” that’s really not accurate at this point at all. All of their 3rd party chat bridges are dynamically spun up on a per user basis with hungryserv and those servers operate in parallel with a synapse server for Matrix interoperability all behind a roomserv server. Here’s a presentation that one of their lead developers created regarding their new architecture.

Afaik, that isn’t in effect yet, but will become a major factor next year.

E2EE only exists up to the bridge, not the whole way to your client

I just want to clarify that most bridges can be set up to have E2EE between the Matrix client and the bridge (regardless of whether the bridge supports encrypted chats on the bridged service because not all do, e.g. Facebook), but it is true that the bridge itself has to decrypt and translate between Matrix and the 3rd party chat service, so as you mentioned trusting who hosts bridges or doing it yourself is really important.

You can run headless or do what the person I was responding to recommended and put it behind an authenticated portal, but that’s not really going to stop other instances and clients from accessing the same resources that op is hoping to limit access to except in the most basic case of people casually browsing op’s Lemmy instance through op’s own lemmy-ui.

Edit, but to be clear, what I was responding to and my response didn’t directly address op’s specific concern (which I kind of misunderstood myself before just now rereading) that outside/guest users shouldn’t be able to search for communities from other instances and I think it’s a fair concern because just searching for a community from another instance brings in posts and could be a vector for spam/abuse.

Wouldn’t this do basically nothing to prevent a 3rd party client from browsing your instance without authentication? I don’t know that there’s much that can really be done about this because you need open APIs for other instances to be able to access the content of your instance in order to make federation possible. That said, it’s an important consideration that anybody running a single person instance should consider. If you run a single person instance, people can learn a lot about you just by seeing which communities are available on your instance. The only way to obfuscate your actual interests is to have a dummy account subscribe to all the top communities on the biggest instances. (Which, honestly, this isn’t a bad strategy to employ anyway if you’re wanting a fresh All feed).

I used to pay for Google Play Music and get YouTube premium along with it, but stopped when Google decided to make a shittier app/service and drop it.

I’m a little surprised the drop in activity was that low. What the fuck were people browsing when most of Reddit was blacked out?

The goal of Bluesky is to turn social media into a shared public commons.

I agree with most of their blog post and it sounds like they’re taking a very measured approach to building out federation, but I really want everyone to stop trying to insist social networks be “public commons”. Moderation tools that do anything more than the bare minimum of blocking forms of speech that are not protected free speech by definition transform the social network into a place that’s not a public commons. Being able to block individuals, communities, topics (via keywords and hashtags), and entire federated servers makes it so that if you really want, you never have to see viewpoints you strongly disagree with. The same is not guaranteed in real public commons. Every day you walk down the street, you have the potential to be confronted with ideas you never considered and your only recourse is to engage, drown out, try to ignore, or walk away from those people, which is not analogous to blocking and thereby deplatforming them online.

That said, I do not want my social network to be a public commons (and from what they’re describing, it doesn’t sound like Bluesky actually does either). Online, I want to be able to block and deplatform e.g. Nazis and MAGA trolls pre-emptively and with extreme prejudice because I want to enjoy my time on social networking sites, not raise my blood pressure.

You’re probably good, then 👍

If Reddit were to reach out privately to this group, the first thing they’d probably do is ask for proof. It’s trivially easy to provide proof you’ve carried out a hack; you just present some specific information that was not public and describe what all else you have in specific enough terms they know you’re not bluffing. (Or, I suppose you could just send them your whole dump if you really want to make it clear what all you have). The only way the rest of us will be able to validate these claims is if they leak and it either matches users’ own private account info or Reddit issues a disclosure about the hack (which I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to do regardless).

Unless you have a pretty beefy server, you really do not want to try to process and store all the federation events and data from everything on all the big instances. I would recommend just using one of the Lemmy community indexing tools to search and discover communities across instances and only join ones you and your users are interested in.

Lol, they’re 100% going to lose me as a customer. The only reason I used them as a registrar was because it was quick and easy to integrate into Google Workspaces and manage everything like DNS from one site. This is honestly a pretty annoying move.

I’m really interested what that would look like because much of their business depends on their ad revenue.

And nobody’s used Xvid for at least the last like 10 years. And even back when the Xvid codec was used, ffmpeg was the way to do it lol

I’m curious if this is guaranteed accurate information or if GPT gives hallucinations here too lol