AtomHeartFather

I’m just an old guy with a lot of opinions. I am a sysadmin by trade. I like Linux, cool gadgets, Sci-Fi, DC comics, bass guitar, prog rock/metal, and annoying my kids with dumb dad jokes.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I don’t hate it. It makes room to tell new “old” stories without just completely dismissing canon. The idea of a “fixed point in time” is a concept that I think originated with Doctor Who. The Strange New Worlds concept is similar, but instead of a fixed point its a fixed event or fixed outcome.

    I do wonder though, how much of this “time pushing back” is actually that? Or is it actually just the “Federation Time Cops” from the far future making sure things happen even if someone successfully meddles with history. I actually kind of hate the concept of time travel being a thing in Star Trek. Leave it to shows like Doctor Who.




  • Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.

    Peoples are lazy. They don’t want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn’t know it exists, its wonky at best.

    If a user cant type “Stephen King community” in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn’t exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.


  • Of the themed instances that exist now, I’d be willing to bet that in addition to their local communities they host that they also subscribe to other communities that aren’t strictly related to whatever theme they are going with.

    For example, I’m sure the Star Trek instance also subscribes to the lemmy@lemmy.ml community so the admin can stay abreast of Lemmy news. And probably also follows other technology related communities as well.

    I think most people would just want to gravitate to whatever they want to be identified with. There’s nothing stopping you from joining a music themed instance and then adding some non-music subscriptions to your list. It doesn’t force those subs on anyone else on the instance.

    And if you don’t want to be identified with any specific topic or community, you can always join a general Lemmy instance like Beehaw or Lemmy.world and subscribe to whatever you like piecemeal.



  • Honestly, I hope not.

    For example, if all the “programming” communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn’t take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.

    There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps. And ideally, I think that’s what should happen.




  • Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I’d prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There’s a reason why every community shouldn’t be on a single instance. It’s a single point of failure.



  • I guess at the end of the day that I don’t have many concerns for privacy. I am not searching for things that might get me on a watch list. Searching from my private instance is no more/less secure in terms of privacy than it would be if I did a Google search. The search endpoints (Google, Bing, DDG, etc) all know the IP that the search is coming from even if its passing through SearXNG first. So if I was doing something shady, I could easily be tracked down that way.

    The main reason I run my own SearXNG is so I can strip ads and search multiple search providers from a single search.


  • I hope to see this community take off and take precedence over the one on lemmy.ml. I have been disappointed the past couple of days because most of the IT related subs seemed to be there and they have only been intermittently available and they seem to be having some trouble with federating their content to other instances. It’s not their fault, they are clearly being hugged much too tightly.

    Also I know its just the nature of things to have competing subs, even on Reddit it happened. But I’d prefer not to have a split-brain situation with a sysadmin community nor do I want to be forced in to cross posting everything to both communities to increase my chances of engagement.



  • If you don’t run your own search (SearxNG) and dont use pihole, you can get the uBlacklist extension for chrome/firefox to blacklist Reddit in search results on Google/Bing/DDG/etc.

    To deter myself further, I even went so far as to block any search results from Reddit in my SearxNG instance.

    If anyone else is interested.

    In settings.yml uncomment the following, they are commented out by default

    enabled_plugins:

    - 'Hostname replace' # see hostname_replace configuration below

    hostname_replace:

    Then add '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$': false under hostname_replace, restart SearxNG and bobs your uncle.