Like helping to find a bug, discussing about how to setup an application for a certain use case or anything like that? Answering questions on Stack overflow is an example but is that the best way?

Generally the best way to help out is to do a thing that’s needed and that you can figure out how to do. Your list includes a bunch of good options, and I’ve been thanked for doing all those things at one point or another. Some common growth paths include:

1. Using the software
2. Encountering bugs, problems, or small opportunities for improvement.
3. Discussing those informally in forums and helping people find workarounds.
4. Identifying some of those issues as common things other things experience as well, so filing bugs for them with clear explanations and links to related forum discussions.
5. Reading source code to better understand bugs.
6. Discussing potential fixes in developer bug threads (or in GitHub or whatever).
7. Submitting small fixes for simple bugs as pull requests.

Another path might be:

1. Using the software and reading forums/docs for help.
2. Answering basic questions on forums, looking to old threads and relevant docs.
3. Learning about common questions.
4. Writing blogs or forum posts about common questions.
5. Submitting improvements to official docs to clarify common areas of confusion.

There are other paths as well, the main thing is to use a thing so you learn about it and then use that knowledge to make it a little easier for the next person. Good luck!

I had a look through the comments on this HN thread the other day and came away more intrigued by https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve than hyperdx. Hyperdx is built on top of clickhouse whereas open observe has it’s own storage engines based on parquet files that can be accessed from local disk, S3, or a few other protocols.

I haven’t tried either option yet… I’m, currently using netdata for metrics and don’t do anything special for logs or tracing, but at tiny self-hosting scale I often find software with it’s own storage engines (often sqlite) to be extra hassle-free. I’m curious to kick the tires on openobserve for that reason.

For the latest version of lemmy, hot sort works in the new fashion. There is a pull request with further implementation details linked in the GitHub issue.

Ah, fair enough. My response doesn’t apply then.

You misunderstand what the Hot rank is doing. It’s not balancing newness vs hotness, it’s scaling hotness according to community size. This might feel like newness if you’re focused on vote counts as a proxy for post age, but it’s a different approach. See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622 for details.

There’s a couple ways to think about this:

1. There are a handful of Lemmy communities that are just WAY more active than everything else. The main feeds are kind of lame if you have to scroll 300 posts it to find anything other than a shit post from the same 3 communities. Scaled Hot rank shows a greater variety of communities by making it easier small communities to get ranked hotly.
2. Or you can consider Hotness to be a rough measure of what percentage of people who have seen the post interacted with it. A post with 500 upvotes in a community with 10,000 active users is kind of popular, but only 5% of the people likely to have scrolled passed it cared about it. A post with 50 upvotes in a community with 200 active members is much MORE popular relatively even though the absolute numbers are smaller.

At any rate, this preference toward smaller communities in hot is a recent change and deliberate. While they might further tweak the scaling factors, I wouldn’t expect it to be drastically different. It sounds to me like what you want is Top, Active, or Most Comments. All these are unscaled according to community size and will get you top posts by their absolute metric rather than posts that are doing well relative to their community size.

This is a very strong explanation of what’s going on. And as a follow-up, I believe that ZeroTier present a single Ethernet broadcast domain, and so WoL tricks are more likely to work naturally there than with Wireguard. I haven’t used ZeroTier, and I do use Wireguard via Tailscale/Headscale. I’ve never missed the Ethernet features of ZeroTier and they CAN result in a very chatty wan if you’re not careful. But I think ZT would make this straightforward.

Though as other people note… the simplest/least-disruptive change is probably to expose some scripty thing on the rpi that can be triggered via be triggered over a routed protocol and then have the rpi emit the Ethernet broadcast packets from the physical network.

I don’t think titles directly transfer between companies, and yet the industry allows it. It’s a very useful tool for advancement.

This may be true on some corners of the industry, but at the more competitive end (both in terms of competitive pay, and a competitive pool of candidates)… I believe it’s common to relevel on hire. I’ve seen folks go from director to senior and from senior to junior at my org. The candidates being offered those seemingly big “demotions” often seem to be somewhere between unphased and enthusiastic about the change, presumably because the compensation package we offer at the lower level beats what they were getting with an inflated title and because they know their inflated title is nonsense and they’re frustrated with the other aspects of organizational dysfunction that accompany title inflation at their current company.

What you say is real, and sometimes a promotion in one org can help bridge you into an org that would have been hard to get hired into as a junior, or harder to get promoted in. It’s not without risk though. All things being equal, I’d much rather spend my time working on a strong team and learning a lot and being challenged than to be in a weaker org that’s handing out inflated titles. Getting gud isn’t a guarantee of advancement, but it’s at least as reliable over the long haul as title inflation.

I dunno how to hotlink, but if you scroll to the active users graph at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy you can see there’s been like a 25% dropoff in active users since the peak in July. Lemmy has still grown 50x since May, and it’s much MUCH more active than it was then. But we’ve definitely crested a peak and not everyone who gave Lemmy a shot then is sticking around in a monthly basis.

This isn’t necessarily bad. Lemmy is still young and has many rough edges, it wasn’t realistic to win all the users that tried it on ease-of-use in a head to head with reddit. And Mastodon has had multiple growth waves interspersed with periods of declining usage, but with the spikes has grown ie remained stable overall. Early-stage commercial social media have big ups and downs in engagement and growth as well, and just like lemmy those ups and downs are often externally driven… when competitors mess up, when a big global news story hits, when a major sporting event happens… these can all be catalysts for one-time growth. It’s not a straight line.

Time will tell what user level we stabilize at in the short-term and what events spur new growth, but it’s normal to have a big expansion be followed by some degree of contraction.

With the refrigeration, which do you consider the canonical community to follow now? You mod both, right? Are you going to keep the bit posting to both?

No no, sorry. I mean can I still have all my network traffic go through some VPN service (mine or a providers) while Tailscale is activated?

Tailscale just partnered with Mullvad so this works out of the box for that setup: https://tailscale.com/blog/mullvad-integration/

For others, it’s a “yes on paper” situation. It will probably often not work out of the box, but it seems likely to be possible as an advanced configuration. At the end of the line of possibilities, it would definitely be possible to set up a couple of docker containers as one-armed routers, one with your VPN and one with Tailscale as an exit node. Then they can each have their own networking stack and you can set up your own routes and DNS delegating only the necessary bits to each one. That’s a pretty advanced setup and you may not have the knowhow for it, but it demonstrates what’s possible.

Yeah, but how much downforce does it generate?

To a first approximation, Tailscale/Headscale don’t route and traffic.

Ah, well damn. Is there a way to achieve this while using Tailscale as well, or is that even recommended?

Is there a way to achieve what? Force tailscale to route all traffic through the DERP servers? I don’t know, and I don’t know why you’d want to. When my laptop is at home on the same network as my file-server, I certainly don’t want tailscale sending filserver traffic out to my Headscale server on the Internet just to download it back to my laptop on the same network it came from. I want NAT traversal to allow my laptop and file-server to negotiate the most efficient network path that works for them… whether that’s within my home lab when I’m there, across the internet when I’m traveling, or routing through the DERP server when no other option works.

OpenVPN or vanilla Wireguard are commonly setup with simple hub-and-spoke routing topologies that send all VPN traffic through “the VPN server”, but this is generally slower path than a direct connection. It might be imperceptibly slower over the Internet, but it will be MUCH slower than the local network unless you do some split-dns shenanigans to special-case the local-network scenario. With Tailscale, it all more or less works the same wherever you are which is a big benefit. Of course excepting if you have a true multigigabit network at home and the encryption overhead slows you down… Wireguard is pretty fast though and not a problematic throughout limiter for the vast majority of cases.

You were banned from the community and are no longer allowed to post or comment there, there’s a public record of this in the modlog: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=29397

The best practice is for the mod to put a comment in when they ban someone about why they did so, but there’s no such comment in your case. You’d have to look back through your post and comment history to try to guess what you did in that community around 2mo ago when the ban happened.

It’s also a good practice IMO to do temporary bans for first offenses, but the mod in this case appears to have issued a permanent ban, so you’re done interacting in that community unless you can message a mod to request being unbanned.

Some mods tell you when they take action, but many don’t. It would be cool if Lemmy itself notified you, but it doesn’t… you have to search the modlog to see.

Have a read through https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

You, and many commenters are pretty confused about out tailscale/Headscale work.

1. To a first approximation, Tailscale/Headscale don’t route and traffic. They perform NAT traversal and data flows directly between nodes on the tailnet, without traversing Headscale/Tailscale directly.
2. If NAT traversal fails badly enough, it’s POSSIBLE that bulk traffic can flow through the headscale/tailscale DERP nodes… but that’s an unusual scenario.
3. You probably can’t run Headscale from your home network and have it perform the NAT traversal functions correctly. Of course, I can’t know that for sure because I don’t know anything about your ISP… but home ISPs preventing Headscale from doing it’s NAT traversal job are the norm… one would be pleasantly surprised to find that a home network can do that properly.
4. Are younreally expecting 10gb/s speeds over your encrypted links? I don’t want to say it’s impossible, people do it… but you’d generally only expect to see this on fairly burly servers that are properly configured. Tailscale just in April bragged about hitting 10gb speeds with recent optimizations: https://tailscale.com/blog/more-throughput/ and on home hardware with novice configd I’d generally expect to see roughly more like single gigabit.

Presumably a reference to this:

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Call_the_Wind_Maria
• https://youtu.be/ByqYEzugleE

I use k8s at work and have built a k8s cluster in my homelab… but I did not like it. I tore it down, and currently using podman, and don’t think I would go back to k8s (though I would definitely use docker as an alternative to podman and would probably even recommend it over podman for beginners even though I’ve settled on podman for myself).

1. K8s itself is quite resource-consuming, especially on ram. My homelab is built on old/junk hardware from retired workstations. I don’t want the kubelet itself sucking up half my ram. Things like k3s help with this considerably, but that’s not quite precisely k8s either. If I’m going to start trimming off the parts of k8s I don’t need, I end up going all the way to single-node podman/docker… not the halfway point that is k3s.
2. If you don’t use hostNetworking, the k8s model of traffic routes only with the cluster except for egress is all pure overhead. It’s totally necessary with you have a thousand engineers slinging services around your cluster, but there’s no benefit to this level fo rigor in service management in a homelab. Here again, the networking in podman/docker is more straightforward and maps better to the stuff I want to do in my homelab.
3. Podman accepts a subset of k8s resource-yaml as a docker-compose-like config interface. This lets me use my familiarity with k8s configs iny podman setup.

Overall, the simplicity and lightweight resource consumption of podman/docker are are what I value at home. The extra layers of abstraction and constraints k8s employs are valuable at work, where we have a lot of machines and alot of people that must coordinate effectively… but I don’t have those problems at home and the overhead (compute overhead, conceptual overhead, and config-overhesd) of k8s’ solutions to them is annoying there.

The Beehaw admins made this choice, and documented their rationale here: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

This is a great approach, but I find myself not trusting Jellyfin’s preauth security posture. I’m just too concerned about a remote unauthenticated exploit that 2fa does nothing to prevent.

As a result, I’m much happier having Jellyfin access gated behind tailscale or something similar, at which point brute force attacks against Jellyfin directly become impossible in normal operation and I don’t sweat 2fa much anymore. This is also 100% client compatible as tailscale is transparent to the client, and also protects against brute force vs Jellyfin as direct network communication with Jellyfin isn’t possible. And of course, Tailscale has a very tightly controlled preauth attack surface… essentially none of you use the free/commercial tailscale and even self-hosting headscale I’m much more inclined to trust their code as being security-concscious than Jellyfin’s.

… advertisement and push they did on sites like reddit…

The lemmy world admins advertised on Reddit? Can you link an example?

… their listing on join-lemmy.org…

Until recently EVERY lemmy instance was listed on join-lemmy.

And with the name Lemmy.world they did nothing to dissuade anyone from thinking that.

They run a family of servers under the world tld, including at least mastodon, lemmy, and calckey. They’re all named similarly.

I also saw nothing from .world not claiming to be the bigger instance(super lemmy)

They ARE the biggest instance, but that happened organically. It’s not based on any marketing claims from the admin team about being a flagship/super/mega/whatever instance. People just joined, and the admins didn’t stop them (nor should they). It’s not a conspiracy to take over lemmy. It’s just an instance that… until recently… happened to work pretty well when some were struggling.

I think the issue is that .world has put itself forward as some sort of super lemmy.

Citation needed. All the admins of lemmy world ever purported to do was host a well-run general-purpose (aka not topic-oriented) lemmy instance. It was and remains that, and part of being a well-run general purpose instance is managing legal risk when a small subset of the community generates an outsized portion of it.

Being well run meant that they scaled up and remained operational during the first reddit migration wave. People appreciated that, but continuing to function does not amount to a declaration of being a super lemmy.

World also has kept signups open through good times, and more recently bad. Other instances at various times shut down signups or put irritating steps and purity tests along the way. Keeping signups open is a pretty bare-minimum bar for running a service though, it is again not a declaration of being a super-lemmy.

Essentially lemmy world just… kept working (until recently when it has done a pretty poor job of that). I dunno where you found a declaration that lemmy world is a super-lemmy, but it’s not coming from the lemmy world admins, it’s likely randos spouting off.