paco

@paco@fedia.io

Cloud security geek, cigar smoker, amateur electric bass player, hoping to be an ally where I can. he/him

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

paco, to selfhosted

I use nextcloud for a lot of my home data serving. It lets me have the full iCloud/Google docs experience, but with all the data on my own systems/disks. One service that is a little less known, I think, is ONLYOFFICE. It's a thick-client Word, Powerpoint, Excel, PDF-Form-making office suite. I get a ton of mileage out of it. It's honestly a bit rough around the edges and not as full-featured yet. But their mobile app works, their desktop app works, and I guess it's good enough for me. It costs like $120 once-in-a-while. That is, they do big version upgrades and expect you to pay if you want the new version. But then they do a lot of features and updates on a major version. It works out to about $120 every couple of years or so.

paco, to technology

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

If you were on the web in the 00s, you remember web sites saying things like "This site works best with Internet Explorer" or, even worse, using technology like ActiveX which meant "this site ONLY works with Internet Explorer on Windows, the rest of you can get stuffed." (There was an Internet Explorer for Mac at that time, but it was garbage and couldn't run ActiveX content).

Today, that's Chrome. But this time it's different. It's not driven by web sites who explicitly make a tech choice to only support a single browser. What's happened is that all the developers, testers, and frankly the end users have all just decided they'll only use Chrome. They only test web sites on Chrome and all their users who report problems are reporting them on Chrome.

At work I am increasingly using enterprise software that throws errors if I use Firefox, but magically just works if I use Chrome. It's different this time because the developers don't seem to care (the web site/software doesn't include non-Chrome accommodations the way web sites used to include "if IE6 do X" code) and the business isn't even advertising "this only works if you use Chrome." I don't find this in FAQs like "Q: X doesn't work, A: Try using Chrome." It's just that a lot of stuff breaks in weird ways if I use Firefox, and doesn't break at all if I use Chrome.

Monopolies are bad for the end user/customer. Diversity forces innovation. We need significant numbers of people using something other than the same thing most people use.

paco,

Since you mention you have Nextcloud, it's worth knowing that Nextcloud embeds Spreed which gives you chat, audio, video, screensharing and a ton of other features. The trick with stuff like that is getting people to sign up, but limiting it to only people you want to chat with. The one thing that's valuable about internet-facing stuff like Discord is that anyone can sign up and it's not your problem. With Nextcloud, you can often federate and let people sign in with Google or Github or Facebook or whatever, but—as an individual—you probably don't want to have truly open signups on a personal chat server. So you'll have to sorta invite/accept people signing up. Matrix (already mentioned) is the other good contender.

paco,

I am looking for curation and durable content here.

For me, Reddit was a curated source of information. You have these communities full of knowledgeable people. If you went into that community you'd either find the info you need, already asked and answered, or you could ask and get a good answer. Discord is just real-time chat. It has virtually no search engine find-ability, no categorising, tagging, or reasonable way to go back and find something someone asked a year ago that was answered perfectly. Many of the social media are really personal and 'now' oriented. I'm eating a donut. This person pissed me off. I'm getting married, etc. Video streaming platforms have individual creators, who often have a theme, but they don't have communities or top-down categorisation. And video sucks as a searchable archive. It's really hard to know that 17 minutes into this video with a clickbait title, there's a really useful nugget of information. But Reddit (and now its federated clones) is user-curated and categorised. If I jump into a Windows-oriented community, I won't find a bunch of Linux stuff. If I want to look at a sport or a hobby or politics, there's a place to go. But it's not one creator/curator. It's organic.

paco,

It's not even relevant. The study "surveying 794 employees in all. Over the course of surveys conducted in spring 2021 and spring 2022". So think about the AI and other tools that people had already been exposed to at the time the survey was done a couple years ago. The "AI" they're talking about then is nothing like what we're experiencing now. (e.g., Copilot)

paco,

I’m with you. Same vintage IT guy, self hosting similarly. I dunno. I throw a lot of stuff up on my xcp-ng box. Some is important. Some isn’t. I’m doing all manner of old-school firewall and perimeter security and not worrying a ton about logging in my containers. I guess I’m just fatalistic. If I get hacked to the point that I’m digging through logs to figure out what happened, I’m kinda fucked. So I focus more on backup and restore. Can I restore to a known good state? But I hear you. Kids these days with their containers and their pipelines and their devops. Back in my day…

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