• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.

    That is true, but it’s never been a problem in my relatively long experience with XMPP: some server software can be used as a cluster and distributed, making it highly available (basically, the whole of WhatsApp runs on a fork of ejabberd), and the comparatively tiny resource usage of XMPP contributes to its stability.

    XMPP does have a spec for F-MUC (distributed rooms somewhat like Matrix, many years before Matrix) and my rationale as to why it never picked up despite a whole decade of “competition” from Matrix is that it’s a problem that just doesn’t need solving. The price to pay for it is hefty: Matrix resource usage (bandwidth, CPU, RAM) is insane, its protocol complexity makes it a single-vendor implementation (which is risky on very practical grounds), and it’s not even bulletproof for the niche use-case it set to tackle: in the end, your identity server on Matrix remains centralized.

    You can tell that I’m partial to XMPP, but that’s only after having been a service operator for years, with my original expectations largely favouring Matrix.


  • I think you should give Trilium(Next) Notes a try:

    • it has the hierarchical notes structure that you are familiar with in obsidian

    • it has better ways of keeping things organized (attributes can be values or references, can be shared and inherited, which provides a flexible framework for having notes “types” as templates that can be extended, e.g. people vs. colleagues, businesses vs. companies, etc)

    • it has the concept of note hoisting (which lets you focus on a note and its sub-notes, so other projects/spaces don’t come in the way of autocomplete and placing references), and workspaces that builds further on top of that

    • it can be used standalone (local client/offline-only, like obsidian) but coupling it with a remote-server opens more interesting use-cases (synching, sharing notes with others by public URLs, one-user/multi-client editing) which gives the best of both worlds (local-first/online-first) and lets you access your personal notes on devices you don’t necessarily own (which obsidian doesn’t). The mobile app story isn’t great (it’s a PWA with limited offline capabilities at the moment), but isn’t worse than the alternatives either (I can’t really work and think long form on a handheld, no matter the editor experience, but perhaps that’s just me).











  • I’m not a cryptographer, and so I can’t really emit a judgement on the poster’s abilities or reputation, but what’s for sure is that this piece reads more like a bingo card of a person’s favourite “crypto stuff” and how partially it overlaps with some characteristics of OMEMO, rather than a thorough and substantiated cryptanalysis of the protocol and its flaws for real-world usages and threats.

    Some snarky remarks remarks like

    OMEMO doesn’t attempt to provide even the vaguest rationale for its design choices, and appears to approach cryptography protocol specification with a care-free attitude.

    are needlessly opinionated, inflammatory and unhelpful, and tell more about the author and their lack of due diligence (in reaching-out to people and reading past public discussions) than build a story of what the problem is, why it matters, and how to remediate it.

    Don’t get me wrong, I would love this piece to have been something else, and to reveal actual problems (which incidentally would have been a great boos to the author’s credibility and fame, considering that OMEMO underwent several audits and assessments in the recent history, including by several state agencies in the German and French governments…), but here we are, with one more strongly opinionated piece of whatever on the internet, and no meat in it to make the world a better place.



  • I don’t think our views are so incompatible, I just think there are two conflictual paradigms supporting a false dichotomy: one that’s prevalent in the business world where “cost of labour shrinks cost of hardware” and where it’s acceptable to trade some (= a lot of) efficiency for convenience/saving manhours. But this is the “self-hosted” community, where people are running things on their own hardware, often in their own house, paying the high price of inefficiency very directly (electricity costs, less living space, more heat/noise, etc).

    And docker is absolutely fine and relevant in this space, but only when “done right”, i.e. when containers are not just spun up as isolated black boxes, but carefully organized as to avoid overlapping services and resources wastage, in which case managing containers ends-up requiring more effort, not less.

    But this is absolutely not what you suggest. What you suggest would have a much greater wastage impact than “few percent of cpu usage or a little bit of ram”, because essentially you propose for every container to ship its own web server, application server, database, etc… We are no longer talking “few percent” of overhead of the container stack, we are talking “whole new machines” software and compute requirements.

    So, in short, I don’t think there’s a very large overlap between the business world throwing money at their problems and the self-hosting community, and so the behaviours are different (there’s more than one way to use containers, and my observation is that it goes very differently in either). I’m also not hostile to containers in general, but they cannot be recommended in good faith to self-hosters as a solution that is both efficient and convenient (you must pick one).



  • I don’t care […] because it’s in the container or stack and doesn’t impact anything else running on the system.

    This is obviously not how any of this works: down the line those stacks will very much add-up and compete against each other for CPU/memory/IO/…. That’s inherent to the physical nature of the hardware, its architecture and the finiteness of its resources. And here come the balancing act, it’s just unavoidable.

    You may not notice it as the result of having too much hardware thrown at it, I wouldn’t exactly call this a winning strategy long term, and especially not in the context of self-hosting where you directly foot the bill.

    Moreover, those server components which you are needlessly multiplying (web servers, databases, application runtimes, …) have spent decades optimizing for resource pooling (with shared buffers, caching, event scheduling, …). These efforts are all thrown away when run for a single client/container further lowering (and quite drastically at that) the headroom for optimization and scaling.



  • I don’t think containers are bad, nor that the performance lost in abstractions really is significant. I just think that running multiple services on a physical machine is a delicate balancing act that requires knowledge of what’s truly going on, and careful sharing of resources, sometimes across containers. By the time you’ve reached that point (and know what every container does and how its services are set-up), you’ve defeated the main reason why many people use containers in the first place (just to fire and forget black boxes that just work, mostly), and only added layers of tooling and complexity between yourself and what’s going on.