JustTesting

heck if anything, the Fediverse, as it is right now, is more susceptible to this. You can spin up spam instances on new domains, with spam users, and have them federate to existing instances, faster than volunteer run instances can ban/defederate.

So you end up with not federating by default, but having some trusted web of instances that federate and maybe an approval process for new instances to federate with? But that'll still lead to centralization with "trusted" instances and new instances having a hard time to join the club (there's also the scaling problem of the fediverse, but that's besides the point). So you end up with a few very big instances and the owners of those instances having all the power. Or maybe small isolated islands of mutually trusting instances? Still better than tech oligopoly, but also a far cry from the original dream.

is it?

Maybe with all the social media bullshit platforms being flooded with more bullshit, people will turn to more traditional, trustworthy news and good journalism? Maybe? Please? who am I kidding...

glaub da muss man nichts fürchten, wenn es schon passiert.

I feel Authentik is at the sweet spot between complexity/features (keycloak) and ease of setup (authelia)

It's a symptom of the times. Saw an ad earlier this week "tired, stressed? This will rob your body of important nutrients, get this vitamin pill to replenish them!". Instead of reducing stress.

Somehow, maybe through the societal focus on individualism, we've gotten to this point where it's all the individuals fault. It's all about doing whatever it takes to get ahead, screw your body and peers, if you can't take it, you're too weak and a loser. But we'll sell you products to cope! And people internalize this, are proud of working more efficiently at the cost of their health. That's the really sad part, many actually start wanting this.

The system actively works against people and tries to train them to yearn for more of the same.

Not really, or it will take a long time. We already struggle to do this with social media, knowing full well that there's issues since 2010-2016. And politicians/governments still use ~~twitter~~ unconsensual porn generator platform for communicating with the public

Yes. And that requires the participants to self-regulate and be educated, at least beyond a certain number of participants (and this number is more in the 100's than 1000's of devices in a city size area).

In case anyone is interested, in meshtastic, for a regular handheld device, set it to client if in a less populated area, client_mute in densely populated areas. router/repeater only for really well positioned nodes (think top of a mountain, NOT top of a tall building), router_late for ok positioned nodes where there's other, better router nodes around, but they can cover some dead zone that the better router ones don't cover. And then there's other like client_base for e.g. a rooftop node to help handheld devices inside the house reach outside. And follow the guidelines of your local area group/forum/whatever on number of hops, band to use etc.

None of that is really complicated, but a lot of users will just buy a device, turn it on excitedly with default settings, see that messaging works and not dig deeper, and then worsen then network for everyone.

With meshcore, there's a repeater firmware and a client firmware, it's not just a setting that can be selected in the app. Default is client, and switching to repeater mean reflashing the firmware. And more clients don't really matter for the network, since they don't repeat. So much less risk of an unwitting user worsening the network.

And if anyone wants to play with this, all the devices should support both meshtastic and meshcore firmware, so you can play with both and see which you prefer.

And if you're curious why I prefer meshcore, these are all the nodes I was able to hear on meshtastic and meshcore, respectively, in the same location, with meshcore I can reach twice as far in each direction

I'm definitely not an expert radio operator or anything, but this is how I understood it.

With Meshtastic, no, it actually gets worse beyond a certain point, especially in dense areas. Each radio rebroadcasts messages, so more message fill the air, causing more congestion. setting devices to client_mute (no rebroadcasting of messages) alleviates this to some extent, but most people don't do that. In general, a few well placed nodes are better than a lot of clients.

Meshcore with dedicated Repeater nodes alleviates that a bit, as a node is either a client that can originate messages, or a Repeater that can only rebroadcast. And it has a bit better routing protocol, reducing unnecessary duplicates in some cases.

The radio band is license free in many countries, but there's still some restriction, e.g. 10% duty cycle in my country, which means no radio can be sending more than 10% of the time (so 1 minute in every 10 minute window). That combined with (afaik) nodes only being able so send one message at a time limits how many messages can be in flight at an instant. And more clients increases background chatter from e.g. node announcements and duplicates, leading to further congestion. And in meshtastic, since packets "flood" out in all directions, and each node rebroadcasts again, and it's not directional, all the packets travel all over the place when you send a message. You could have a packet traveling in circles between new nodes for a long time.

E.g. in my region, originally the default for meshtastic was 7 hops on long range fast preset. That led to congestion so they switched to medium range fast, then recommended limiting hops to 5, and now ideally to 3, just so there's less chatter and less utilisation of the channel. 3 hops is barely enough for me to get out of the city I live in. Meshcore also does floods, but also can keep track of paths so you can have a relayed connection along a specific path that does not flood out in all directions, along with putting up repeaters being a conscious and strategic choice by users, so you get something more like a dedicated highway of repeaters that are placed high up and can relay messages much better than some client down at street level could. And the hop limit is more like 64 (I think it can be higher but that's what is set somewhere in the firmware). And repeaters are stationary, so they don't need to announce themselves to the network that often (e.g. every 3 hours in meshtastic vs every 24-48 hours in mesh core). All of that means less channel utilization and longer reach.

I agree, that would be amazing. I also hope it will help with some truly local community building (no troll farms from halfway across the planet spamming shit). Weather stations are already possible with sensor nodes, and most big repeaters have weather data. Though not like weather forecasts or anything.

The main issue would probably just be congestion, not even bandwidth. Once it's used a lot, some packets will just be dropped due to congestion and you don't get a reply at all.

A bit less of a problem with meshcore, with meshtastic in densely populated areas most users still don't set their devices to client_mute, causing unnecessary rebroadcasts and even more congestion. Though with enough adoptions maybe governments might lower their restrictions on duty cycle, allowing for more traffic.

Meshcore might be a bit better suited for this, if you want to reach a forum further than 50-100km away reliably.

With the room servers it almost supports this use case already

Ich dachte ja, erst Venezuela mit dem Öl, das zu aufwändig zu raffinieren ist um profitabel verkauft zu werden bei aktuellen Ölpreisen. Dann Krieg im nahen Osten starten, der die Ölpreise hochtreibt. Aber das wär wohl zu clever für Trump. Anders rum würde es Jahre dauern, die Ölproduktion auszubauen und das wäre viel zu verfrüht, also vielleicht genau das richtige Level an Dummheit?

Wäre so das, was ich erwarte, wenn man Weltpolitik aufgrund von ELI5 Verständnis der Welt macht