Notices by Ilya Zverev (zverik@en.osm.town)

Many people here advise to self-host. Buy a Hetzner server, install Ghost / Forgejo / NextCloud / whatever. Understandable, though I have problems with that approach, namely, what happens when you skip a year.

But also there's an ongoing AI problem. After stealing all the books and pictures, they moved on to disrupt another public good: open source servers. There is daily ongoing DDoS on every server you know, including personal hosts. Self-hosted got more expensive.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/

JOSM needs a new leadership.

It's currently running on closed infrastructure and subject to whims of a single person. Multiple discussions for moving it somewhere public were shut down by the maintainer. This AI thing just highlights how bad it is.

@thibaultmol I'm having a crisis of faith in My Own Domain TM recently. Like, what happens when I'm away for half a year, or dead? All I ever did would perish behind stopped servers. Or I would burden other people with supporting my infra.

url shorteners lol

TIL big specialized forums have started backdating millions of LLM-generated posts. Now you cannot be sure a reply from 2009 on some forum for physics or maps or flower or drill enthusiasts haven't been machine-generated and totally wrong.

https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/

@hareldan 1.5 years in, I see Overture as a geodata graveyard, not a practical data source. Everybody still uses OSM.

@libreoffice @fsfe

It's not immediately obvious the "Find out more here" is a link to FSFE. It looks like a header to social networks buttons.

It is possible to maybe make some words in the article (e.g. "write") link to the same article?