BlendIT BSD Cafe - Lounge

The slides, the video, and the text behind my presentation at EuroBSDCon 2024 - 'Why and how we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs.'

cross-posted from: https://blendit.bsd.cafe/post/178649

In the morning of the 31/07/2024, starting around 08:30 (CEST), I will be making some changes to the routing of BSD Cafe. This means there will be service interruptions.

I will post updates on https://status.bsd.cafe and will notify you when the work is complete.

Stay tuned!

🎊 Happy Birthday, BSD Cafe! 🎂

It's been exactly one year since I decided to announce my idea to the world: the BSD Cafe.

The name was chosen in December 2022, but the project had been in my mind for quite some time. I envisioned a virtual space of serenity, well-being, constructiveness, and inclusivity. A place where we are all FOR something (the BSDs, exchanging ideas, growth, community, mutual support), not AGAINST something – a sentiment far too common in today's polarized world.

And on 20 July 2023, almost impulsively, I launched the project, migrating my account from my previous private Mastodon instance and announcing it on Mastodon and Twitter.

I never imagined what would happen next.

The reception was incredible – many people joined, numerous registrations, and a lot of encouragement. The BSD Cafe has become a wonderful virtual place. Every time I open Mastodon (I use the PWA on my phone, not an app), or Element, or one of the BSD Cafe tools, I think of something good, constructive, and beautiful.

The BSD community is fantastic – people who are mentally and technologically mature and balanced, eager to exchange ideas and opinions, ready to teach and learn something new every day. Minds thirsty for knowledge.

I believe we have an extraordinary passion and that open source allows us to do everything without significant financial outlays. And this, in my opinion, is truly democratic and revolutionary in this stark world.

My contribution aims to be precisely this: a place where all patrons, BSD users or not, can feel relaxed and fulfilled. There's a table for everyone at the BSD Cafe, and many friends ready to spend quality time together.

After exactly one year, I can draw some conclusions. Managing the BSD Cafe has not been complex. Users are always ready to advise and test, and their behaviour is generally very good. Occasionally, I receive some reports – some exaggerated, others I try to understand and resolve. In a year, I had to, reluctantly, remove only two users. One in the very early days: they had an exclusively negative attitude – even against me – and we risked being defederated by many instances I care about. Fortunately, the admin friends at BSD.network gave me an overview, and I understood the situation well. The second user I had to remove was...a bot. So I feel at peace with my conscience.

Throughout this year, many friends have joined, and now the BSD Cafe hosts many people and projects. The Mastodon instance, Matrix, Brew (git), the RSS readers and other services are fully active and used daily by hundreds of users. The BSD Pub Meeting, managed by @gyptazy@gyptazy.ch and now part of the BSD Cafe menu, has also allowed us to talk and see each other in a relaxed context. Like friends at the Pub. Like friends in a Cafe.

So, happy birthday, BSD Cafe!

Happy birthday to users, friends, and supporters. I hope the BSD Cafe has brought even a fraction of the joy, well-being, and positivity to you all that it has brought to me in this past year. And all this is thanks to you all because a Cafe without people is a sad and lonely place.

Here is a link to the original project announcement, exactly one year ago: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/110746126447161217

Lemmy v0.19.2 has been Released

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-01-10_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.2_-_More_Federation_Fixes

I'm going to upgrade the BlendIT instance tomorrow morning

@bsdcafe

#BSDCafeServices #Lemmy #BlendIT

A few days ago, I updated BlendIT's Lemmy to the latest version, but I had forgotten to update the lemmy-ui (separate component). There were some session issues (having to log in every time you left the page). This morning, I also updated lemmy-ui, and now everything is back to normal. My apologies!

@bsdcafe @announcements

#BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeUpdates #BSDCafe #BlendIT #LemmyUpdate #SessionIssuesFixed

BlendIT (https://blendit.bsd.cafe) has been updated to Lemmy 0.19.1

Dear friends of the BSD Cafe and the entire Fediverse, currently, downvotes are enabled on the BlendIT Lemmy instance. It's not a problem, but should I keep it enabled or disable the option?

Announcing Tech News and Security News on BlendIT

Hello everyone! I have just created two new communities, Tech News and Security News, so that we can better organize the content posted.
Personally, I will also include these communities in the posts I make on Mastodon, so any comments will also appear here and remain well organized. Of course, you are all free to subscribe and share news and information!

The list of our communities can be found here: https://blendit.bsd.cafe/communities

And remember, you can subscribe from Mastodon, too.

@bsdcafe
@announcements

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Lemmy #BSDCafe #BlendIT

On huge lemmy instances, it's almost impossible to follow the federated timeline, in fact the only useful feed is the subscribed one, whereas here, it's a breeze to do so.

Lemmy can be accessed with many external apps and web interfaces

crossposted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1290048

Given the recent attack, I think this is a good opportunity to remind of the importance of using 2FA.

(although it doesn't appear to make any difference in this case as session cookies were being exploited so login credentials were not needed)

But for me at least, this event has made me go back and take another shot at setting up 2FA.

I am happy to report I finally got it working on all my Lemmy accounts/instances, so I thought I'd share some tips:

• I still haven't figured out how to set up via desktop, use a mobile browser.
• Follow these steps:
  • Check the enable 2fa box on your account settings and click Save
  • A message will show about a button appearing when the page refreshes
  • The button usually doesn't appear for me at first.
  • You can simply manually refresh the page at this point to make the button appear
  • The button should now be visible. Click the button.
  • This opens a otpauth:// link which on a mobile device should be handled by a 2FA app if you have one installed.
• Authy does not work: It will generate a code happily but that code will not work when you try to login to your Lemmy account.
• Google Authenticator worked for me. It appears the type of TOTP code Lemmy is using is not compatible with some authenticator apps.
• I think if you can find a desktop app that registers as a provider for the otpauth:// links it may be possible to do on desktop as well.
• You can also pull the secret= value from the link to manually add it to an authenticator on/from desktop.

After several failed attempts previously, I finally figured out Authy was the problem and I have now secured all my Lemmy accounts with 2FA. Annoying that I have to use GA, but that appears to be an Authy issue not a Lemmy one.

2FA might not have made any difference today but it very well might in the future.

Stay safe everyone! 🔐

In the past few weeks, I have been experimenting with various available solutions. Initially, I was inclined towards kbin or mbin, putting Lemmy on the back burner. However, I faced a series of challenges related to frameworks and dependencies. The main issue would have forced me to use the latest FreeBSD packages, but this would have rendered the PECL Redis module too up-to-date and incompatible with kbin and mbin.

Upon closer examination, I noticed that kbin/mbin would offer a different interface compared to Lemmy, along with the ability to manage microblogs. This feature might be useful if one were to manage everything directly through them. However, we already have a well-established and operational Mastodon instance, so employing kbin/mbin would have led to an unnecessary redundancy.

I realized that, like with other solutions, I had to choose between patching and tweaking kbin/mbin or opting for Lemmy - which is perfectly compatible and effortlessly installable on FreeBSD and other platforms that support a Rust compiler.

Lemmy is the ideal complement to our Mastodon instance, Wiki, and other social tools. It replaces Reddit with open standards and broad Fediverse integration, offers effective moderation tools, and is both lightweight and speedy.

Additionally, Lemmy supports Markdown and allows subscribing to a community via RSS, enabling updates without the need for a membership.

Thus, the answer to the initial question can be succinctly put in two words: why not?