I hope it’s just growing pains.

Dunno if it’s related, but the instance seems to be having issues receiving federated contents from some instances for nearly 2 months now.

Summit is dead for several hours now too, at least for me. Have fallen back to the piefed PWA.

cross-posted from: https://flipboard.video/videos/watch/c0dfea13-7f2a-402c-b47c-50ccd151554b

AltStore co-founders Riley Testut and Shane Gill are the perfect example of necessity being the mother of invention. When Apple denied the launch of their retro video game app, Delta, in 2016, they realized that indie app developers needed another solution — one that could bring apps to communities without Apple dictating the rules and taking a cut.

Founded in 2019, AltStore is that solution. The creators of the first decentralized app store share their journey, including what an open app store means for developers and how they’re investing in the fediverse.

The conversation includes:

1:11 Genesis of AltStore
3:00 Getting Delta in Apple’s App Store
5:34 The Fortnite factor
8:10 The value of an alternative app store
12:04 The difference between putting an app in AltStore v App Store 14:41 Indie market for apps
18:03 Ecosystem safety
21:30 Is my butt increasing the total number of apps out there?
22:45 Vibe coding and paths for app distribution
24:42 Fediverse and eureka moment
32:26 People-powered discovery — a broader movement 34:29 Building communities around apps
36:44 Patreon integration, supporting developers directly 38:38 Curating apps and source collections
40:07 Solutions for in-app payments
43:27 Pieces of the next generation ecosystem
45:56 Decentralizing app innovation
46:32 Relationship with Apple now
51:23 What’s on the horizon for AltStore
54:21 How to experience AltStore

Referenced:

Explore AltStore: https://explore.alt.store/
Riley + Shane’s Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/cw/rileyshane

🔎 You can find Riley and Shane at https://altstore.io/.

✚ Connect with host Mike McCue at @mike@flipboard.social and @mmccue.bsky.social.

🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the open social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new product from the people at Flipboard. https://about.surf.social/

Disclosure: Dot Social host Mike McCue serves on the board of AltStore.

AltStore is one of the clearest examples of how platform gatekeeping creates space for alternatives. Apple says no, so now there’s a way around it.

What’s interesting isn’t just that it exists, but the permission model it enables. Developers retain control. No App Store review board. No 30% tax. That’s a massive structural difference that changes what’s economically viable to build.

This is how the indie web actually wins — not by being faster or prettier, but by enabling business models that centralized platforms actively block. When the default path is hostile enough, enough people carve new ones.

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I run OmniOS on an Aoostar WTR PRO as my NAS and for most of my self hosting needs. After installing a new fan, I wanted to see if I could read and control the fan speed from the OS instead of just the BIOS. Using Claude chat, I got a working kernel driver that gives me fan speed, PWM control, temperature readings, and even (incorrect) voltage readings.

I wanted to share as an example of what’s currently possible. I’ve even seen people vibe code ethernet drivers for freeBSD.

What do you all think of using LLMs to cobble together drivers like this?

🤣

First I asked it how to create a dump file. I hooked up ADB debugging to my phone, then used the scooter’s app as normal, with the logging turned on in Android developer tools. It created a very long and complex dump file of hex that I could not understand.

However, then I had Claude get to work. I describe that in that I had opened the scooter’s app, and turned it on, paused a few seconds, then turned it off and closed the app. It started attempting to mimic the commands through the computer’s local bluetooth device, to get a successful response. Eventually, after something like 20 attempts it found a hidden clue that was basically a pattern that it had detected, and it was able to finally get an ACK from the scooter. Something I would have never been able to do. From there we have a plan on how to map out all of the other commands, but it was a huge win for the day.

Going by experience, it helps greatly to block news communities, or at least the domains or users that have a predilection for sharing misery, fear, envy, and all the doom “goodness”. Also requires being able to identify such places and people, but I’d imagine a small pain at the moment is much better than to have your filter polluted and grinding your gears slowly enough that when you get to have enough, you’re at the verge of snapping. And if using RSS feeds, since those usually don’t have custom feeds applied¹, Ublock Origin for hiding the whole post based on who posted or what site it links to helps too.

¹Lemmy has RSS feeds for any given user’s feed btw.

#Madblog now comes with support for federated author replies and reactions too. All from #Markdown files, as usual.

Big fan of how this goes. I wish I had something to blog about. :D

(I have, I just can’t get myself motivated to actually write about it)

I have, I just can’t get myself motivated to actually write about it

The first step is the hardest of a journey. Push through the beginning, and you should get it going. 👌

Can’t check if it is or at least seem legit rn, but going by the premise it is legit, I’d imagine there are better places to post it.

1W5yyEvd7kMTZsl.png:https://media.piefed.zip/posts/1W/5y/1W5yyEvd7kMTZsl.png

Preface: I know MediaWiki isn’t part of the Fediverse, but the community is intended to be two parts (MediaWiki/nodeBB forums) and the forums will be federated. I could not find any active communities within the fediverse related to MediaWiki or wikis in general, so I figured this community might suffice, since ultimately this community as a whole will be federated through the forum.

Hello everyone, I have started on the journey to set up a community that focuses on open-licensed projects (open source/creative commons) where members can collaborate and network to help get their projects while contributing to a library of openly licensed projects.

The community is two parts: a MediaWiki & a nodeBB forum.
The idea is to have the wiki act as a hub to build/document open source projects, where individuals can contribute and help each other out in small ways, without necessarily needing to commit to a long term project - the community can work together to make small contributions to many projects to help the collective, rather then requiring individuals to formally commit to one or two projects long term. The forum is there to help people more easily communicate and network, and compliment the wiki as a collaboration platform/community building.

This project quickly got over my head, as it started out as an idea to create a forum to try and build a community for building up my open source projects. But the idea expanded and is now evolving to it’s current state. I am figuring things out as I go, and have managed to get things mostly ready, but I have largely relied on LLMs and forums to get me this far. I am not experienced in wiki’s or moderating a forum. I have found 2 other people who were interested in the project, so there are currently 3 of us that have been working to get this community platform up and running - but none of us are experienced in administrating MediaWiki or its settings.

The request:
I am hoping to find at least one “MediaWiki power-user” who can ensure we are following best practices, not opening ourselves up to vulnerabilities, etc. If someone who is potentially passionate in what we are trying to create, we would love to add another member (or a few) to our team to help ensure we are prepared to launch the community successfully.

In addition to setting up the community, it would obviously be nice you would also be interested in helping us moderate and maintain our community as we evolve.

I don’t have any expectations for commitments, as this is simply a hobby project - whatever & whenever you can help.

Note: this endeavor is purely a hobby project, and I am just one person who is trying to find a few others who want to help contribute - this is by no means a business or intended as a source of revenue.

The wiki has registration closed at the moment, since we are still setting things up (be advised, some of the content may be broken or placeholder text), but if you want to check out more about our project to see if its something you are interested in: https://unfinishedprojects.net/

I hope someone might be interested :) … and if not, I am always open to simple feedback or suggestions if you have any, but don’t have the time to actually help with the project.

If you are interested, please don’t hesitate to reach out, and I’d be happy to discuss it further and details about joining the team. I obviously want to be careful about who I hand out permissions to, but overall, I believe that the more people and experience we have, the better; as long as you’re a team player and want what is best for the project :D

Iirc NodeBB with ActivityPub active federates subforums as communities to thread-oriented forums, so once the forum is live, you could link the subforums with !subforum_name@instance.name, e.g. !fediverse@lemmy.world for !fediverse@lemmy.world.

Exactly - I am hoping to find some smaller, close knit communities that align with our own to federate with. The goal isn’t to create another instance full of news feeds and etc…but instead I want to try and build a community that is focused on collaboration and working to improve and contribute to the creative commons and open source community.

Just a PSA.

See this thread

Sorry to link to Reddit, but not only is the dev sloppily using using Claude to do something like 20k line PRs, but they are completely crashing out, banning people from the Discord (actually I think they wiped everything from Discord now), and accusing people forking their code of theft.

It’s a bummer because the app was pretty good… thankfully Calibre-web and Kavita still exist.

what about that convinced you it’s nature?

All those boys were raised in a similar culture with similar influences regarding how boys should behave. You don’t have a control group.

Hey sorry for the delay, dealing with a lot right now, but I didn’t forget about it.

1 - Fixed this, the api key is now only forwarded if the destination hostname matches the plugin’s stored url. 2 - As I was saying, the allowlist is opt-in by design (null = allow all), and plugins legitimately need to make arbitrary outbound requests. Enforcing it globally would break the plugin system. 3 - Fixed this, it was quite simple 4 - I have added an env var (DEGOOG_DISTRUST_PROXY), if set to true it’ll make it so all users share the same rate limit regardless of their IPs, I left it as an opt in as most users currently running it are only keeping it private behind their own in house reverse proxies. This will be handy for a public instance for example 5 - Extension settings modal now correctly sends x-settings-token on save. 6 - As I said, auth is intentionally lax until a more structured auth system is added, may need to be a few weeks after stable is live, after all there’s no real auth and the setting password protected and private view should be secure enough as it is

btw all this is not live yet, it’ll be sent live with the next release ♥

Hello!

I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with Hetzner’s KVM console, there are a lot of problems causing severe issues with settings up passwords and passphrases. I just thought I’d create this “guide” to get things rolling, for everyone who faces the same issues I’ve faced.

Step 1 - Firewall

Set up a firewall and only open port 22 with your IP (you can look it up using ip.me).

Step 2 - Installation

Perform the installation procedure as normal, setting very simple passwords and passphrases for the user accounts and the disk encryption. Set them to something like 123. These will be changed later!

I’m using Debian 13, the steps may or may not be the same for your choice of distribution.

Step 3 - SSH access

Unmount the ISO and reboot. Enter the console again, log in as root with your simple password. Now, if you have the same problem as me, keys like /, CTRL etc. won’t work, so I used tab completion and vi to to modify the config file.

# cd ../etc/ssh/
# vi sshd<TAB>

Inside vi, press o to create a new line and enter insert mode. Add:

PermitRootLogin yes
PasswordAuthentication yes

Press ESC and then <SHIFT>-yy (so holding shift and pressing y twice). This will save the file and exit vi.

Step 4 - Dropbear

ssh into your VPS. Now you have full keyboard access like usual. Install dropbear-initramfs, which is an SSH server that’s placed in the initial RAM filesystem so that you can ssh into your VPS during start up so you can easily enter your encryption passphrase.

Generate a new key pair and add the public key to /etc/dropbear/initramfs/authorized_keys

Run update-initramfs -u and reboot. You should now be able to ssh into your VPS using the key you just generated. The following command lets you unlock the encrypted disk:

cryptroot-unlock

This will probably disconnect you from the tunnel, simply re-establish the SSH tunnel again.

Step 5 - Changing passwords and passphrases

To change the encryption passphrase:

# cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/sdXY
# cryptsetup luksRemoveKey

Lock the root user and change the password of your user (don’t forget to add the user to the sudo group!):

# passwd -l root
# passwd user

Done!

At this point you might want to use some other means to access the server, such as Netbird or Tailscale or Wireguard. Regardless of how you decide to access the server, you should revert the changes to sshd_config.

P.S.

I have no idea if this is a secure or good way to do this. Use at your own risk!

They might care if it’s 69420 since the max port number is 2^16 = 65536

You can fire packets as fast as you like, but if my end can’t process them that fast, either they’ll get dropped or you’ll knock me offline. Neither makes a valid scan.

I’m bored. That’s it. I’m watching the 100 girlfriends anime.

Recently my laptop shit the bed, but luckily I’d set up daily backups with restic! .. It’s been a year and I dug up the archives exactly once, to find some clippings I took from a documentary on badgers. Yeah maybe you should back things up and all but you’ll probably be fine either way.. 😅

My laptop shat the bed not long ago. I just pried my old drive out of it and stuck it in an enclosure 😅

Thats the drive where I back stuff up now lol