Notices by Sean Tilley (deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org)

Reflecting on some conversations I’ve had with @dansup and other people recently…

Be kind with yourself. Be patient. Show the love for yourself that you demonstrate towards other people. It’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to have bad days. You are not a failure.

It’s so easy to get used to the day-in / day-out cycle, and forget the positive impact you have. People love you more deeply and more intensely than you could ever realize. At the end of the day, all we have is our relationships, and our memories - living and laughing and hoping and growing.

Every day, I become a more capable sysadmin. Not because I want to, but because I have to find new ways to solve weird problems.

Today, I had to dig around in Redis to find old, stuck PeerTube jobs that wouldn’t ever clear, that were preventing the server from doing other kinds of jobs.

Random things you need to know to maintain a #PeerTube server for years on end:

✅ Upgrading PeerTube
✅ Changing Node versions
✅ Tweaking nginx configs from one version to the next
✅ Using systemctl and journalctl to isolate error messages as they happen
✅ Using Sentry to capture context around error messages
✅ Reading stack traces
✅ Checking directory permissions when something won’t upload
✅ Troubleshooting ffmpeg for transcoding
✅ Setting up a remote runner to offset video transcoding on a small server
✅ Dealing with Object Storage
✅ Infrastructure upgrades
✅ Restoring from backups
✅ Migrating data to a new server
✅ Using psql to parse the database and manipulate records
✅ Using redis-cli to examine and drop stuck jobs
✅ Searching for weird and obscure error messages
✅ Moderating and managing a community
✅ Taking donations
✅ Keeping everybody in the loop

Make no mistake: self-hosting is awesome, and being able to support a community is also awesome. It’s just that a lot of people get into hosting their own instances without realizing some of the crazy stuff they might have to do to keep things running.

@hypolite @lightone makes sense. I had been considering the possibility of developing a custom Friendica theme, but it’s probably pretty difficult to start from scratch.

Anyway, I’m sorry, I’ll shut up now. It’s just been eating away at me for a long time, and I needed to say something.

Several hours later, the little #PeerTube instance that could is now in a much healthier place. I just had to migrate the entire thing manually, because old versions of Ubuntu have no viable upgrade path.

At least a do-over means that the server is set to whatever defaults were intended for the latest versions of things.

RE: https://social.wedistribute.org/objects/de34bf6b-2d0f-4d19-b35f-7ae496458562

@killyourfm Yeah, no disrespect intended. Sometimes, that’s just how things are.

I think FOSS apps / platforms have come a long way in general, in terms of looks and usability. But, it’s still largely a culture of engineering that has too few designers in it. I’d like to think that’s changing, but so many projects need good design love, not to mention means to pay good designers.

@killyourfm @Linux4Everyone @nextcloud Yeah, it’s frustrating. A good portion of Nextcloud and its apps are phenomenally good, but certain things are still kind of undercooked.

A good example is the Mail app. It’s so, so close to being everything I want out of a web UI for mail, but there are a bunch of little papercuts. It’s getting a lot better, but…sigh 😅

@killyourfm @Linux4Everyone @nextcloud We really like Nextcloud Deck since it ties into the rest of Nextcloud. However, Focalboard is really good, and it’s part of Mattermost nowadays!

Just a light outreach here: I run the #PeerTube instance over at spectra.video. We’ve had a massive amount of growth over our past two years of operation, particularly when it comes to gaming and vlogging.

I’m looking to feature a few channels on our landing page. If you’re a creator on our instance and want to be featured, I would love to hear from you!

@lain Warmler the Cummer 🤔

The @activitypods project released a small boilerplate app and tutorial for people interested in building #Fediverse web clients that work with #Solid. I hope to poke around a bit, and see what’s possible. 😁

https://docs.activitypods.org/tutorials/create-your-first-social-app/

It honestly hurts my heart to see. From my perspective, Diaspora has been in a zombie state for years, slowly drove away several key contributors, and is largely directed by one opinionated asshole on a power trip.

It was the first federated social project that I felt truly involved in, on a day to day basis. I believed in it. I tried my best. I made mistakes. Mostly, I tried to make it better. It was always my hope that maybe someday, the project might turn things around.

This conversation about #Diaspora adopting #ActivityPub has completely degraded into total hostility. It’s very depressing to reflect on, but their project lead basically wants nothing to do with the Fediverse, and states he would actively reject code contributions implementing AP.

https://discourse.diasporafoundation.org/t/lets-talk-about-activitypub/741/22?u=deadsuperhero

@BeAware Some people just love to get the last word in.

I’m always amazed by news articles that are like 90% fluff, and like the 10% of what’s actually news is hidden under three paragraphs and a bunch of ads.

A lot of these get recommended to me by Google News. I’m left wondering if I’m missing something here? Could I make a steady career for myself by writing fluff for ScreenRant?

There’s a certain thing Silicon Valley-adjacent tech people do, where they act over-the-top friendly while casually murdering you with words. Like, they’ll smile, say something nice about someone you know, and then deadass imply you bring nothing of value to the table.

Is this a systemic thing that just happens in certain “dog eat dog” industries, or do those kinds of people just happen to thrive there?

@buru5 having worked in tech before, it really depends. Small startups of tightly-knit people are often really chill and cool to be around, whereas things seem to get gradually meaner the further the startup is in funding rounds.

The last place I worked at was like a revolving door of people getting fired left and right, and I definitely witnessed way less human empathy there. There was surface-level decency, and lots of talk about progressive values, inclusion, and things of that nature. But some of the fake-nice people were power tripping, and seemed to take pleasure in being remarkably shitty towards people under them.

Also, I’m sorry, I realize this probably scans as a lot more hostile than I actually intended.

I care about this place. A lot.

When I first came to Mastodon, the energy was so different. It felt like people were excited to meet total strangers, tell jokes together, share lived experiences. Now, I just feel sick from this unshakable hostility that sometimes emerges, this feeling that there’s just going to be more drama, most ostracizing, more lines being drawn, more vague unspoken rules.

We could build incredible things together and change the face of the Internet as we know it. We could bootstrap a social and technological commons for the good of the world, and make a better form of online communication that doesn’t have the pitfalls that hearken back to Ma Bell and CompuServe and Meta.

But we really need to chill the fuck out about a million and one things, come down from our fiefdoms, and be humans to one another again.

I don’t know what else to say other than, shit’s kind of bad, and refusing to embrace any kind of positive motion to make things better in this aspect is awful. I’m not saying everybody has to pitch in, but some of the most toxic people I’ve come across on here barely lift a finger to do anything other than complain. And they just do that, for years and years.

In my headspace, I just imagine a bunch of pissed-off anarchists that all hate each other because they’re the wrong kind of anarchist, and they’re just content to sit back and complain and be miserable until this network rots into the ground.

To me, that fucking sucks, and I don’t want any part in it.