Notices by Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿 (lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz)

@_elena I got the impression it's a pretty automated process once you've got it set up, so I don't think it matters that much when you do it...

@_elena @robin started from scratch... although I did investigate the migration process when someone asked about it here (perhaps you?), and though it's poorly documented (because why would a commercial entity want to make it easy to migrate away from its service **eyeroll**) it looks fairly easy... I got the impression it's as easy as "use the 'migrate to Ghost hosting' but in reverse"... but I haven't tried it...

@robin I've done that too (self hosting Ghost) - and yeah, it's quite straightforward, eh! And am doing the same with Matrix and Pixelfed, although I have some work to do to tidy things up after the latest Pixelfed upgrade... but yeah, the savings in hosting is massive. All my external systems are running on Hetzner's 7 euro/month instances. Crazy cost-effective. (hosting a lot of other services besides those 3)...

@robin where/how were you hosting previously? Fully managed services? I've found moving my work off AWS & Azure, we lowered our costs 95% across the board. Paying trivial amounts for cloud hosting now. We have grandfathered server at Hetzner with big disks and back up to it, otherwise storage is a minor cost for us. We don't use object storage, all block storage. I back personal stuff up to home servers w/big disks at home & I host stuff here, too.

Now just need to play with Ghost more.

@robin nice.Yeah, I moved a lot of stuff from DO to Hetzner, and saved 60%...

@dentangle I'd refine that to say 'without effort' rather than 'sacrifice' - because sometimes doing the right thing takes effort that is both fun & fulfilling, like a job-well-done. It doesn't have to feel like sacrifice.

Most of the time, doing the 'right' thing is harder than doing the 'easy' thing. I find it fascinating that people simply don't 'get' that when it comes to tech. They fail to realise that the 'easy' thing has been made easy by people who're spending a LOT of money to get far more in return, and that fleecing (in some way) those choosing the easy path is the source of that return. It's not rocket science, but people fall for it again and again. "But the farmer feeds us so well!", said the pig.

@kfogel I've had relatively few rejections from the big players - when i have, it' been for a short period (a day or so), due to their lazy policies of blocking deliveries from entire network blocks based on one spam host... but hasn't been major. Of course, the more of us there are, the less the behemoths can ignore us and get away with lazy practices...

I wish more people capable & confident to do so would run their own email services, and provide access to them for their communities (who would hopefully realise the great benefit of having a family domain). That'd help to undermine the current cabal of mostly ill-intentioned email providers out there. Email's too important to trust to a colossal corporation that sees you (and your correspondents!) as a resource to be data-mined. Plus, it really isn't nearly as hard as people make it out to be.

I'd be happy to share my notes - I'm no hosting genius, but I've been running email services that are great to use, full-featured, and provide user-friendly delegation to others wanting to manage their own domains &/or mailboxen. Happy to share my notes.

So the cyclical spectre of #onlinevoting has entered my sphere of awareness again today, after a blissful break of a few months. After rearing its ugly head yet again, I've decided to finally try to write a short-but-sweet explanation of why it's still a really bad idea (with references): https://davelane.nz/onlinevoting

Back in the old days, when the US government pursued an anti-trust case against the Microsoft Corporation, every single court document written by the prosecution.. was authored in MS Word. The figures were displayed in MS Excel spreadsheets. Interestingly, despite the fact that MS was found to be abusing its monopolies in many ways on a massive scale, MS was never penalised in any useful way, and nothing was ever done to break their monopolies. 1/n

@ensslen @civillibertynz Huh, that's disappointing. In my responses, I've couched my slurs (traitors, betrayers of constituents) under the terms 'MP who support this bill are...'.

Seems likely that the IT failure affecting the Treaty Principles Bill submission process yesterday was caused by the government's use of foreign corporate proprietary technology, namely Google's 'reCAPTCHA' service. They were using the 'free' version which features a limit on the number of uses per day. It seems likely that limit was (unexpectedly from the public service's perspective) hit, blocking further submissions. We need better gov't tech decision makers.

The Treaty Principles Bill is ACT's wilful mischaracterisation of the huge and growing inequity (much of it due to multigenerational race-based bigotry) in our current society and exists largely to ignite a class and race war. It's cast from the perspective of those happy to put their boots on the necks of everyday NZers. It also exists to distract us all from this equally horrible bill: https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/the-dangerous-bill-flying-under-the-radar/

Huh - after a bit of messing around, my #HomeAssistant journey has begun... Something I've been meaning to do for ages.

Wow, cool.

@os_sci @strypey @element the only reason it's difficult to sustain some larger #libre projects (e.g. Copyleft) is because the market is stupid and continues to pay a mint to be monopolised by proprietary software vendors. Libre software would be quite sustainable *if the market rejected proprietary software*... or if regulators did. As a proxy for this, gov'ts could regulate to require open standards compliance for all software purchased by gov't. I wrote this about it: https://openstandards.nz

@os_sci @strypey @element yes. A weak 'open source' (as opposed to Copyleft) license is essentially saying "we want the option of closing this codebase at some future point"... or pandering to someone else who might. That should greatly limit community participation in a project.

@strypey @element big sigh. Sad. Tom Preston-Werner's 'open source almost everything' https://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html is one of the most depressingly self-serving things I ever read. It assumes that only proprietary software has value. Which is flat out wrong. My career attests to that.

Wow, just heard about these folks: https://www.netcup.com/de/server/vps even better pricing than Hetzner.com... (Haven't tried them (yet), so can't vouch for quality of service)