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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2025

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  • Email chains and mailing lists are not really a practical way to develop anymore, and it is increasingly anachronistic (as is the idea of tying your identity to an email which is also baked into basic git). This was the only realistic democratic and federated option when git was designed, but it was never the ideal one. Forgejo is trying to build a better, more ideal, also-federated alternative that is really designed for code collaboration from the ground up. Once the design is stabilized, there’s no reason it couldn’t get built into git also. I would love to be able to create a PR with git itself and have it automatically submitted to the origin repository.




  • Find something on craigslist or local pickup on ebay, check government/police surplus, or do some freecycling. At least in my area a lot of people leave their e-waste computers at Best Buy, often in the doorway, nobody cares if you come and pick them up. Even if they’re broken (and they’re often perfectly functional and sometimes surprisingly powerful) it likely only takes a few before you’ve got some functional combination of parts.

    It’s likely not as much of a picker’s heaven anymore since I imagine the huge wave of windows-10-obsolete computers being thrown away for no reason has probably mostly subsided, but there is so much old and perfectly functional stuff out there it’s really unjustifiable to be buying something new especially at today’s modern prices.


  • The only problem with something like Revanced is that it can go away at literally any time. It could be shut down tomorrow and you’d lose access to everything it provides. That’s fine, or at least tolerable, if you ALSO have something self-hosted you can rely on in case that happens. If you don’t have downloaded music self-hosted, then you’re totally relying on Revanced permanently and you lose everything if it goes away. Maybe for something like music that’s an acceptable risk, but you have to consider it and decide where it is an acceptable risk. What are you going to do if those services you’re relying on go away?

    Self-hosting, like you said, is about the independence, and the knowledge that once it’s up and running on your own hardware, it won’t just go away on its own, and it can’t just get “shut down” unless you choose to. You might not need that for every service you rely on, but there are probably at least some you would struggle without, and those are things you should consider self-hosting. The more you think about it, and the more comfortable you get with it, the more likely you’ll decide other things are important enough to self-host after all.



  • Gitea is developed by a corporation. If you trust corporations not to enshittify eventually, maybe Gitea will be the exception to the rule, but I doubt it, for sufficiently long definitions of “eventually”. Forgejo was forked specifically because the governance needed to be detached from the corporation, and that wasn’t going to happen with Gitea. The community of open-source developers mostly voted with their feet. Forgejo is, in my humble opinion, going places. Gitea is not. Nothing specifically wrong with it, per se, but it doesn’t really offer a sustainable development path forward I don’t think.






  • The simple, maybe unhelpful answer is that fail2ban needs to have two things at once: the logs, and a way to block the network traffic.

    Where exactly you want those things to coincide is really up to you, there might only be one point that simultaneously has access to both those things, or there might be multiple points depending on how your systems and services and network is configured, or if you’re in a bad situation you might find you don’t really have any single point where both those things are simultaneously possible, in which case you’ll need to reconfigure something until you do have at least one point where both those things are again coincident.

    As far as best practices, I can’t really say for sure, but I know that one of the more convenient ways to run it is usually on the same system, I usually run it outside of docker, on the host, which can pretty easily get access to the container’s logs if necessary, and let fail2ban block traffic on the whole system. For me, any system running any publicly accessible network services that allow password login gets a fail2ban instance.

    A whole-network approach where you block the traffic on the firewall is fine too, if that’s what you prefer and what you want to work towards, but it’s probably going to be significantly more complex to set up because now you need to either figure out how to get fail2ban to be able to access your firewall or a way for your firewall to get the logs it needs.


  • It’s literally the core foundation of my entire self-hosting configuration. I could not live without Forgejo. I can’t imagine being shackled to Github or some other hosted provider anymore for something as important as my git repositories.

    Gitea’s okay too in every practical respect, but Forgejo is the more community-led fork and in my opinion less likely to be corporatized and enshittified far in the future, so I’ve hitched my wagon there and couldn’t be happier. The fork is starting to diverge slowly, so it seems like direct migration is no longer possible. That said, git repositories are git repositories, and they have most of the important history and stuff inside them already, so unless you’re super attached to stuff like issues and whatever you can still migrate, you’ll just lose some stuff.



  • You don’t have any great options but you do have some options. You’ll need dynamic DNS, which you can get for free by various providers. This will manage a “dynamic” DNS entry for your occasionally changing, non-static IP at home. The dynamic DNS entry won’t be on your own domain name, it will be on the provider’s domain name. But wait! That’s just step one.

    You can still get your own, fully-functional domain name, and you can have all the domains and subdomains you want, and set them up however you want, with one important restriction: You can’t use IP addresses (because yours is dynamic, and changes all the time and you would have to be constantly updating your domain every time it does, and there would be delays and downtime while everything gets updated).

    Instead, your personal domains have to use CNAME records. This substitutes the IP from a different domain INTO your domain. So you CNAME every entry on your own fancy domains to point at your dynamic DNS provider, which manages the dynamic part of the problem for you and always gives the real IP you need. Nobody sees the dynamic DNS name, it’s there, but it’s happening behind the scenes, they still see your fancy personalized domain names.

    It’s still not going to be perfect, it won’t work well or at all for certain services like email hosting (self-hosting this is not for the faint of heart anyway) that are very strict about how their DNS and IP addresses need to be set up, but it will likely be good enough for 99% of the stuff you want to self-host.



  • This is actually really important. The dollar figure is not the important part, but the signals of both confidence and ambition are going to be heard, by the groups already in the field, by small business, by investors and industries, even by other countries. This shows vision that has been lacking in Canada for decades and it’s a vision that I think many people will be able to get onboard with, if we can overcome the trust issues that come from the fact that so often things like this end up getting sabotaged and burned.

    This is a strategic investment, and while it’s small by national standards, it both consists of and requires strategy. We have to acknowledge we are starting from behind, and we are probably not going to be a real leader in this field anytime soon, but instead of admitting defeat and laying down in submission and supplication to the existing leaders, we are saying that we are going to join the race ourselves and participate anyway, maybe we’ll find a niche we can succeed in and maybe we’ll continue to fall behind but at least we can say we are trying, as long as we continue trying and don’t just throw away the whole investment and everyone involved in it under the bus in 5 or 10 or 20 years and completely give up again until next time we decide to wastefully start over from scratch. Where this is really going to succeed or fail is if we continue supporting it into growth, even when it gets hard to justify, or if we just forget about it in a few years and let it die.

    Don’t listen to and give airtime to the people who will inevitably tell you that it’s a waste of money, it’s learning and self-improvement and development and that is never a waste. And the other maybe is that, over time, maybe we can start steadily making up ground and gradually eroding the lead that others have, and trying to do that is absolutely the right decision. Existence is an endurance race not a sprint and none of us know what the future holds besides the fact that whatever it does hold, we want to be a part of it.