Ah, the great granddaddy of Sourcemage, and I believe “Lunar Linux”, if it’s still around, was very dear to my heart - Sorcerer Linux, from which they both were forked.

Kyle eventually came up with an odd license for Sorcerer, probably due to his feelings following those forks, and Sorcerer may even predate Debian (but not Slackware - still the oldest extant and quite relevant distro), while SuSE began affectionately as 'the German Slackware fork, so maybe it predates Sorcerer too?

Anyway, if you look at all of the distros I’ve just mentioned (I should include Arch Linux in this list) they all have a source, or at least a rolling distro philosophy at heart. Debian is certainly package based, but Debian Testing (Sid too, and LMDE is or was) a true rolling distro along with Arch, which is more directly source based.

I don’t mean to leave out Gentoo (or Funtoo), but it’s very well known as a source based distro - moreso when you d/l’d it as Stage 1, 2, or 3 (methodology abandoned a long time ago).

People think that Slackware is package based like Debian too, and they would be correct, but everything after a full install is source based, SlackBuilds actually d/l the source from the various repos, then compile and make the package. You use one of a number of tools in ‘package tools’ to simply install the package, which takes a few seconds.

At the higher level you have dependency management and resolution (to your particular liking, too) using completely automated solutions like ‘sbopkg’, which uses customizable queue files for your deps and then downloads and compiles the source, creates the package, and installs it or a boatload of packages on one fell swoop while you make s sandwich.

The entire core operating system from a full (the recommended method) install can in one command, be completely recompiled and installed one your system in place - that means it’s also true too day that Slackware is equally a source based distribution too… But that’s not all.

Slackware -current is a fully rolling distro, and you can follow the daily changelog here:

http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64

You can also quickly create packages and install them from rpms and .debs, but most systems have those sorts of utilities, and people do maintain package repos, but the Slackware crowd has always been a but hesitant about installing packages that other people have made - you can read a SlackBuild though, in a very few lines you see the fetch, compile, and packaging. You can even add the line to install the package - it’s all just shell script.

Sorcerer was a different breed however, after you install it once or twice (much like installing Gentoo from a stage one CD) that part of it no longer really much fun. Maintaining it can be, and the coolest thing about doing it back when on say, a 486DX2-66, is that your get to come home from work in the afternoon and your PC is still churning away like crazy, instead of just waiting very quickly - it would be such a shame for it to just sit there, lolz.

Sorcerer was all Bash, everything was a bash script. you could scry and cast spells, a lot of thematic corollaries to what Sourcemage is like. And then one day he just said he was done and that was it. I talked to him a few years later but yeah, kinda melancholy when a fav distro fades away. I felt that way about Mandrake Linux too. Mageia never really stuck with me, although I did work with it until the official general release. Mandriva is still going too.

Well, i just thought that I’d relate a few things about Slackware and I came across you mentioning Sourcemage and thought that was kewl 😎

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I know you had lamented the fact that this wasn’t so Arnold, but the project lead related to me that #Flarum federation isn’t going to happen anytime soon, which I had been hoping would either happen with that product, or with Node.bb

I’ve never been especially happy with the stack chosen, but it’s really just a matter of how non-trivial self-hosted installation and maintenance is, and it really is s great platform otherwise. It also happens to be what powers #Social_Coding and the ActivityPub . Rocks site already, so it will be a big boost for exposure of both, which is, IMO, awesome!

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Perhaps… this?

https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-support-for-discourse/90921/87

And maybe not with very long to wait 🤘😎🤘

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Doesn’t GPLv3 endeavor to prohibit Tivoization on consumer devices?

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Where is the Lemmer current at this time? F-Droid?

I’ve just finished installing the newly released Lemmur client (F-Droid) and currently familiarizing myself with it.

Why but call your client Orgasmatron? That’s a kewl name, and it adheres to the theme too :)

🤘😎🤘

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That’s not actually true. <ahem… cough, cough!> The one reason they are citing for doing this is to “improve user data security…”

“As part of Google’s efforts to improve user data security, we are removing access from Chromium and Chromium OS derivatives that used google_default_client_id and google_default_client_secret on their build configuration to Google-exclusive APIs starting on March 15, 2021”

Yah, if you can believe that. Yo Google, You no can haz #Cheezburgerz! :hamburger:

What servicess, if any, are going to be affected in Kiwi Vivaldi, and the Brave browsers? For the most part, they’re using their own services for syncing and the like.

Well one thing is certain, not doing anything about it (Like the simple workaround below) will mean death to the 32 bit Chromim based platforms, for which there is a huge user base. So… Good news for Firefox, yes?

As AlienB0b said, he’s contemplating just including documentation in the packaging about, …the public availability of Google’s own API keys, plus the fact that you just have to export them in your shell environment as values for the GOOGLE_API_KEY, GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_DEFAULT_CLIENT_SECRET variables before you start Chromium.

Easy peasy.

I think that this would be a good time to mention that complicating you life with differnt sync engines specific to each different browser you use is, well, it’s another complication! To simplify things, I see three attractive solutions, two of which I incorporate into my daily workflow.

1. ) Self-hosted BitWarden Too much hassle for me, although I certainly believe in self-hosting any services that I can for myself and my customers. Does this mean that using their free service compromises your security? Not at all, there’s no reason to think that your data would be any less secure if you used their free tier subscription

There’s also no reason to expect that you won’t need more for your service in the future, at which point you’ll have to pay, or that your free service will sunset and you’ll have to pay a subscription fee for your basic service. That seems to be what inevitably occurs, and it just happened with Dockerhub, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you’re fine with paying for what you’re being provided.

2. ) Keepass (.kdbx) Very simple. And there’s a lot of different choices to make based on your own preferences but here are mine:

• KeepassXC - cross-platform desktop Keepass client. Looks good, tastes great, and even smells nice. This comes with a companion browser plugin that works in both Firefox and chromium based browsers like Vivaldi and Brave. I sync mine to a private Git repo on one of my Gitea servers. Keybase private encrypted git repos are also quite functional and convenient.

• KeepassDX - Android Keepass client. Also yummy. Same thing, I sync it to a private git repo.

3. ) Pass This could really require a whole article in and of itself, which is odd, considering just how dang simple it really is but support and the client base available is rather large. Numerous choices for cross platorm clients set up with or without self-syncing to private git repos, etc. but a couple of lesser known Android utilities should be mentioned here which are the combination of two products available at F-Droid:

• Password Store
• OpenKeychain

In fact, All of the above are available at F-Droid (You can get G-Droid there and use that too), except for Bitwarden, which is one of the main reasons I wouldn’t use that product unless I opted for a self-hosted version of it - but why, when all you need is a little db file that you can sync with whatever you already use to sync your files anyway?

I hope that helps! :)

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And herein lies the problem with the mega sites - moderation. You just can’t staff for that many zillions of people without looking toward automation to protect the bottom line.

Historically, even larger communities - forums and such, would enlist mods who were actually members of those sub-forums/SIGs, to perform the less than enviable task to maintaining order in the community. Mostly from trolls and list bullies, because politicization has created a mostly newer dynamic in super large communities policed by the proprietors.

Problems such as these exist even here in the Fediverse, on instances like mastodon.social and many of the huge asian instances, although the latter are generally more focused, rather than generalized, and the members generally better behaved.

The beauty of this all in the Fediverse has been touched on several times even in this thread:

One can move instances, one can filter undesirable actors as well as instances, and instance admins can apply policy of what that particular instance will tolerate from other instances. Theoretically, if there are bad actors at one instance, the admin seeing this in the feeds on another can contact the admin of instance that is home to the bad actors - and this is indeed the recommended approach. Too many naive admins are quick to pull the trigger however, and end up disenfranchising themselves from instances that have many friends interacting with their own userbase. But it the remote admin doesn’t engage when requested, there is little choice and the instance can be blocked.

In my ToS’s for most of my platforms, the FAQ lists a question, “Do you allow Porn?” The short answer for most instances is yes, but media is blurred, with options to filter media, block actors that don’t mark content NSFW or receive reportings from my users, and ultimately, just whack a whole instance - a combination of all of those in several of my MRFs are present.

Heck, I didn’t even block Gab at first (I thought, it can’t be as bad as they are saying), when they initially came online, but then I started seeing swastika shit coming through the pipe and thought, "fuck that, my users don’t want to see that, and I didn’t want to deal with the (and I believe very few when compared to the huge userbase they have) plethora of bad actors spewing things just because it will incite anger from folks combing through the fedi streams. The whole decision took about a week and then I was like, “Oh no fuck that shit”.

There’s some pretty militant hate sites on the other side of the spectrum too, and after giving them opportunities for their admins to reign in their bad actors, what was needed was a “Complete defederation” with them too.

Basically, I’ve found that simply setting, “Media is forced NSFW” along with, “Posts are removed from the federated timeline” usually does the trick, and still permits local users to engage with people they wish to.

The way I’ve seen it for the past 30+ years is that, if I’m not getting complaints from my users or admins of other systems then I’m doing my job and it’s all good. And I still run an active FidoNET node (1:102/127) from decades ago when I first started offering dial-up Internet access (to the NSFnet) and nobody even knew what that was.

Everyone needs a place for them to go. And they should have it. Maybe not in my town square, but the Fediverse does indeed serve to accommodate all in a decentralized network that can look accordingly different from where you’re peering into it from, and that’s a good thing, because it breaks the freaking backs of the FacePlants and removedters and InstaSPAMs of this world, and returns us to a newer kind of network of true communities where people can interact locally as well as remotely with one another - without being nicely packaged for consumption by the privacy invading aggregators of destruction.