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Salamander

@ Sal @mander.xyz

Posts
38
Comments
208
Joined
4 yr. ago

  • Has anyone used meshtastic?

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  • Ah, cool! I got my 4 devices today and I have managed to play with them a bit. They are pretty cool! I was able to walk over to a park near my house and spoke with people across the world with no data in my phone :D

  • Has anyone used meshtastic?

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  • I ordered four of the simpler devices this weekend (LilyGO T3-S3 LoRa 868MHz - SX1262) and I have been reading about antennas.

    Since I live in a city I am not super optimistic about the range. But I am still very curious about the concept, and I would love to be surprised.

    After doing some search about antennas, I have decided to test the following combination:

    I also have a vector network analyzer (LiteVNA) that can be used for checking antennas, so I will also try to build some antennas myself. I doubt that my custom antennas will approach the performance of the professional ones... But I just find it such a cool concept.

    Have you already gotten to play with it? What is your experience so far?

  • PSA: Image posts and blind accessibility.

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  • I think that you can add captions to images, like this:

    ![image caption](image url)

    I wonder whether these tools would identify and read out the caption.

  • How are we going to pay for all this?

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  • This is what I think, but if anyone understands it differently please correct me.

    Vertical scalability refers to scaling within a single instance. More users join and they post more content, increasing the amount of disk space needed to hold that memory, network bandwidth to handle many users downloading comments and images at once, and processing power.

    Horizontal scaling refers to the lemmyverse growing because of the addition of new instances. The problem in this form of scaling is due to the resources that an instance has to use due to its interactions with other instances. So, you may create a small instance without a lot of users, but the instance might still need a lot of resources if it attempts to retrieve a lot of information (posts, comments, user information, etc) from the other larger instances. For example, at some point a community in lemmy.ml might be so popular that subscribing to that community from a small instance would be too much of a burden on the smaller instance because of the amount of memory required to save the constant stream of new posts. The horizontal scaling is a problem when the lemmyverse becomes so large that a machine with only a small amount of resources is no longer able to be part of the lemmyverse because its memory gets filled up in a few hours or days.

  • How are we going to pay for all this?

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  • I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they’ll give up because the bigger instances are closed.

    (This is purely my personal opinion, of course!) In the scenario in which a few large instances dominate, the idea of the fediverse failed. One may estimate the likelyhood of success or failure given how they expect humans to behave, but in the end experiment beats theory. I think that for the fediverse to work a significant cultural shift has to occur, but I don't think that it is an impossible shift. I would like the fediverse to succeed, and so I choose to take part in the experiment.

    This also ignores that the system isn’t horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive

    Yes, that might cause some serious issues. The project is still in an early-development phase, and I don't understand the technical aspects well enough yet to be able to identify whether there is obviously a fundamentally invincible barrier when it comes to scalability. My optimistic hope is that the developers are able to optimize horizontal scalability fast enough to meet the demand for scale. If it turns out to be impossible to scale, then only rich enough parties would be able to have viable instances, and that could be a reason for failure.

  • How are we going to pay for all this?

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  • A small cloud server + a domain name costs less than a Netflix subscription. The developers have taken care to package lemmy in ways that are relatively straight forward to deploy, so a dedicated person with a small amount of experience can have an instance up and running in an evening. As long as a few percentage of users are willing to pay a netflix subscription to keep a server running, the financial burden would be spread.

  • Google will determine and store the location of any Wi-Fi access point whose SSID (name) does not end with "_nomap".

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  • This feels like one of those chain messages that we would get on Facebook asking us to do something like posting "I don't give permission to Facebook to use my data". Except that this time it is actually true!

    I have added "_nomap" to my SSID and now I have to read the manual for the wifi extender, which by default appends _EXT to the SSID 🙄

    I would much rather see a "_yesmap" opt-in policy!