My understanding is that these groups are separate from the normal Pixelfed feed.

First of all that’s all hypothetical and secondly that thought experiment only talks about an app that uses the PDS as an auth source and data storage. It does not talk about your PDS communicating with another PDS, for which AFAIK a relay is needed.

Hosting your own PDS would be like hosting your own email, but with the caveat that you can only access it through the Gmail interface and need to use the Gmail relay to communicate with others. In other words: completely pointless.

Mostly yes, but people were a bit naive back then and many onboarded friends and family onto the Gmail service and that burned some bridges and good-will as for Gmail users other xmpp users simply ended up as if offline and never responding.

This is not what really happend. Yes initially they added features other XMPP implementations had trouble to catch up with, but the main problem was them not implementing important security features like s2s TLS encryption, thus forcing others to cut them off. Google continued to run their xmpp servers for many years after, but they were so badly maintained and insecure no one wanted to interact with them anymore.

The rest of the xmpp ecosystem continued to grow at a slow pace and is alive and well, it was just an annoying set back going from being able to contact many millions of users on their Gmail linked xmpp accounts to not being able to do that anymore.

Technically true, but since this tool got widely adopted it does mean pretty much a full pipe of everything: https://lemmy-federate.com/instances

I agree, the all feed is commonly misunderstood to mean all of the Lemmyverse, but this is both a technical impossibility and also a false notion.

What the all feed actually means is all communities subscribed to by a member of your instance.

Especially on thematic, not too big, instances this can be quite interesting and definitely more useful that a bland feed of everything mixed together.

Obviously the bigger the instance, the more the all feed will tend to conform to a bland mix, and somewhat controversially a lot of instances are registered with a bot service that actively auto-subscribes each to other communities making the effect much worse.

The Mastodon software seems to be in a kind of anti-sweetspot for this kind of hosting service. It kinda sucks that other better options have so much less name recognition that marketing becomes hard.

Cool. It’s actually still on my long to do list to try this. Thanks for the update!

I use one pod per app more or less. The reverse-proxy conf depends a bit on the specific app so that depends, but it will probably work for most by sharing a network and exposing the ports in the pods

Don’t use the kube stuff. That’s entirely seperate from Quadlets and some sort of Kubernetes compatibility.

If you can get someone else with a local account to open the community they can hand it over to your slrpnk.net account afterwards. Most of the many previous bugs around moderation functions have been fixed in 0.19.8/9.

However there are two main issues remaining:

1. You will rarely get any reports as those do not properly federate right now. A fix is supposedly in the works for the next Lemmy release, but this has been promised a few times with limited success.

2. If de-federated instances differ then you can end up with impossible to moderate situations. For example hexbear.net is blocked by slrpnk.net but it is not blocked by lemmy.dbzer0.com. This means people from that instance can post to the community, but these post are entirely invisible to you as a moderator with an account from slrpnk.net.

My recommendation is that you do not do remote moderation alone. At best you can help someone with an account on that remote instance to moderate a remote community.

I don’t believe that a report will federate to a remote instance that doesn’t meet one of those criteria, even if it hosts a moderator for the community, but I’m not certain about this one.

That’s pretty much the issue with remote reports. In practical terms that means the vast majority of the reports are not delivered to the person moderating. For example I moderate /c/europe@feddit.org and I rarely get any reports from that community on my slrpnk.net account, and it is a popular community with lots of reports according to my co-moderator with a feddit.org account.

Apparently there is a fix in the works for Lemmy 0.20/1.0 but that release is still a while out according to the devs.

I could pretty effectively prevent it from being used for mass surveillance.

And a future you might decide differently.

Generally speaking Trump is not getting into an alliance with Russia, but rather joins the “multipolar” club of imperialists that want to carve out their own sphere of influence without the others interfereing. China agrees with this but there are other reasons why the interests of the US and China still clash.

Woodpecker is more mature and I can control access better since I am not the only one using my Forgejo. But I think at some point the built in ones might reach feature parity.

Experimented with selfhosting a Woodpecker CI as a complement to my Forgejo.

Works quite nicely, I just need to set up a native ARM64 agent as the overhead of cross compilation on x86_64 is quite big.

Hmm yeah, I thought this is about organisation internal discussion. Of course if it is just a mailbox for outsiders to use, you could just configure some forwarders so that multiple people get the emails and can respond from their own account if necessary.

Selfhosting email specifically is quite hard. Not so much technically, but because of how a few large providers have cornered the market and drop most self-hosted emails reaching them with the excuse of fighting spam.

Hosting a forum that requires login credentials (incl. 2fa etc.) is quite easy though. But I guess that wouldn’t work as a way for outsiders to contact you.

I am confused why you would use a single email address instead of a mailinglist.

It is also possible to set up a private forum with mailinglist capabilities.

Generally speaking it is better to find a trust worthy host, or host on your own hardware than trying to repurpose some public service and hope e2ee alone is sufficient.

XMPP also has a working ActivityPub bridge. But I think at some point these bridges are a bridge too far.

Software like Friendica or Hubzilla that can speak multiple protocols including AP are clearly part of the Fediverse, but things that need 3rd party bridges IMHO are not, as the creators clearly do no intend them to be part of it. Otherwise Xhitter would be also part of the Fediverse as bridges exist(ed in the past at least).