sam
@sam@cablespaghetti.dev
791 following, 714 followers
https://cablespaghetti.dev/hosting-a-fediverse-instance-on-an-original-raspberry-pi.html
@sam this was fun!
I spotted a typo: `apk install acme.sh`
Should be `apk add…`.
I also wonder if the periodic script actually runs with the .sh suffix? If my memory serves me correctly you may need to drop the .sh suffix or it will now run.
@sam MUST - RESIST - URGE - TO - BOOST. 😁
Also, very inspired domain name for a Homelab. 😂
Musing on various posts, blog posts, and news reports about the #OnlineSafetyAct recently.
* it is incorrect that "no-one was talking about this until this month". Some of us - not many, for sure, but still - have been working on this for quite some time, and trying to help people get to grips with it.
* it is unhelpful to blame people for not knowing about it until recently. People have busy lives, and there is a lot going on right now. People had no reason to think that they might need to check for a significant new regulatory imposition on their tiny server.
* no, it is not just about porn. Porn might be behind recent publicity, but porn is one facet of the Act.
* it is not all Ofcom's fault. Parliament carries a lot of responsibility here, and fixes entail changing the law.
@neil the fact that nobody has been talking about it should be an indictment on our political and media culture.
See also: years and years of press coverage of the Post Office scandal as well as an ongoing public inquiry, but it taking a TV dramatisation to really take hold in the public consciousness.
* it will get worse before it gets better. More sites will geoblock the UK, and more (small, especially) sites will shut down, concerned about liability and risk. Even if there is political will to resolve aspects of Parliament's mess - and that is unclear, at best - that will take time.
* it is of no surprise that organisations with financial interests in age assurance will come out with claims about VPN'd traffic and how sites should apply age assurance to it. Product to shift. Reporting should be critical and objective, mindful of obvious biases like this!
* self-hosting may help some people solve some problems, but is not the answer for most people and does not make all problems go away.
@neil given the response to the repeal petition I think it is pretty safe to say that the political will to resolve the parliament related portions of it is nonexistent.
@smilingdemon Were it me, I would not be advocating for a repeal. I just can't see that happening, politically. But some surgery - targeted amendments - seems more realistic, although even that requires getting over some entrenched positions.
@neil @smilingdemon yes - some of the commentary seems to be in denial about the real harms the act is attempting to address.
Modifying it to adress some problems seems much more realistic than repealing it.
My (limited) understanding is that changes to guidance could help - and that wouldn't need new legislation
@neil I think a repeal will happen, but not until many peoples government ID documents and deep fake ready facial scans are widely available online. The harm will be so obvious it is more likely that everyone will have been always against it than it will have any substantial support.
@neil Whatever you think about Farage/Reform, a member of the government saying the following shows a rather entrenched position: "Make no mistake if people like Jimmy Savile were alive today he would be perpetrating his crimes online - and [someone against the OSA] is saying he is on their side." and "If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.". Given the number of signatures on the petition, that's a bold claim.
@neil re: your second point, I observe that this government places a worrying level of trust in the advice of big business, and banning VPNs was once in opposition a policy of theirs… we'll just have to wait and see.
Do you have a professional overview about the situation in other countries?
Which country would a hypothetical VPN user select to get the best experience?
@tschenkel No, I'm afraid not.
@neil The govt afaik hasn't tried widespread education on online safety for young people and parents. Something like the AIDS awareness & "stranger danger" campaigns, however flawed. I can't help thinking they are trying to solve the problem from the wrong end.
@annehargreaves Hmm... online safety is taught in schools, from a young age, so I think that *children* are reasonably well covered, from a state point of view.
Parents, less so. But then a local school ran an online safety event for parents, and not a single parent attended...
I think the broader picture though is that this should not just be down to user-led defences.
@neil what I don't understand is why it is not applied to all adult sites, lncluding Online Gambling, alcohol sales, vape and tobacco sites.......
@Thebratdragon There are already age restrictions in place for selling those things?
@neil there are age restrictions in place for the online safety ban as well.
It is a puritanical ban that doesn't work and leads to ID cards down the line.
> there are age restrictions in place for the online safety ban as well.
Sorry, I don't understand?
@neil @Thebratdragon
"there are age restrictions in place for (things explicitly covered by?) the online safety ban as well."
@neil @Thebratdragon none of the other types of site seem to have blocked off their entire contents though - e.g I can go to master of malt or bet365 and browse the whole thing with no age checks, but manyvids won't even tell you what the site is for any more without an age check.
Indeed, and a child can go into a supermarket wine section and browse bottles of wine. The age check comes at the point of purchase, since it is the consumption of the alcohol, triggered by the purchase, which is considered the problem, not seeing the wine bottles.
By contrast, the concern around pornographic content is from seeing it.
@neil
oh the people blaming the act on others not taking action until now absolutely make my blood boil. there was a very well orchestrated campaign by client journalists and client academics to build consent for this act. I remember it well. the public was actively misinformed. to be well informed under the torrent of lies, not just relating to the OSA, but covering just about everything in modern life, is really exhausting. who has time for it? me apparently, but I certainly don't blame other people.
@neil Interestingly, this might be one way to drive home to the UK government that there is no such thing as a “Westminster Effect” (anymore), because post-Empire and post-Brexit, it is simply too small a market for most smaller non-UK providers to force them to adapt.
But like in all other cases, it’ll probably ignore it, hoping that either the EU or the US will hop on the bandwagon soon.
> hoping that either the EU or the US will hop on the bandwagon soon
Yes, and that has certainly been the approach in terms of geoblocking: "better to solve the problem than just geoblock the UK, since other countries are likely to impose similar rules, and you'll end up geoblocking lots of countries/users".
@neil I think there’s something worth saying in the idea that knowing a law was not great but that when it was more fully implemented that the impact was much greater than expected in a way that blindsides people who knew but not of the full extent and scope of the law
@neil It's 100% parliament's fault. A law designed by people who don't understand the tech. Kids that want to, big money and predators will easily bypass it.
The main problems are with sites who are not covered by UK law anyway, and the big sites (meta, tiktok etc) who they are frightened to take on.
@neil So, if I'm reading the tea-leaves correctly it applies where UK people have access to, or can share information? So hypothetically, if we had a supercomputer service in .AU in which a project involved UK researchers, we'd fall under the act? (yes I know they *should* only be working with data relevant to their project). How would we verify that SSH sessions were from Adults? All we require is an institution email address for a researcher to be invited to a project.
@Elwell One would need to work through the details to determine whether the OSA applied to that specific situation / situations or not.
@Elwell @neil no, I'm pretty sure research does not fall under "harmful content"... unless you're documenting things to do with procreation/crime/hate-politics/etc.
This is only about stopping children seeing "certain things" - rather than, say, educating and guiding them to be aware of the world out there...
@neil @Elwell "designate and suppress or record a wide range of online content that is "illegal" or "deemed harmful to children""
Isn't this basically what I said?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
It's a fucking stupid law with ridiculously far-reaching consequences, but that nanny-state sentence is the official aim.
Oh wow. The UK government has finally grown about 1/1000000000th of a pair.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cdrkj810plvt
@tdp_org we'll do the right thing unless Israel stops bombing the crap out of a civilian population? In the unlikely event that Israel complies with our "threat" what happens next? I feel you may have missed several 0's off your denominator!
@tdp_org it's so funny that even just lying about caring is so illegal that it had to be worded as a mostly self inflicted threat with "unless" to make it very clear to the world that they would rather not do it and will bail out at the earliest chance they can get
Eldest starts high school in the fall, and they're supposed to have their own laptop, which will be a first. I have them convinced to go Linux, since mostly what they need for school is access to web stuff, they're fairly used to it from our computers at home, and there's no real reason to be tied to Windows.
Now I just have to decide what distro to give them😀
Curious to know what you'll decide.
I'm close to recommending aurora (ublue KDE Plasma) for noobs, but I haven't tried it myself yet.
Kubuntu is ok, but slightly disappointing. OpenSuSE is powerful, but needs an an experienced user to help you set it up properly.
Debian is kinda perfect, but lacks minor flourishes like a flicker-free boot.
@rl_dane I suspect I'll end up with something Debian based, mainly because most of the stuff I use at home is some flavor of Debian or another.
What are you thinking for debian-based? Something also not Ubuntu-based, or no?
#SparkyLinux seems neat, I should check them out. Almost feel bad for calling them out publicly on Fedi for having an X account link prominently displayed on their webpage. XD
Why do they have such different distros just for different desktops? Is it because the immutability aspect of things has to be treated differently between Gnome and KDE?
I'd imagine there are a lot of things in the KDE System Settings utility that has to be tweaked or just simply might not work at all on an immutable distro, as it's somewhat exhaustive in what you can tweak.
The idea of Bluefin and Aurora (and Bazzite, the gaming focused one) is that they take the atomic fedora base and make an opinionated “just works” out of the box experience on top of it. Obviously that kind of customisation is going to be quite different between the different desktops.
Bluefin has received the most attention as it is the focus of the overall project, and Aurora is an offshoot with a smaller team. Both are really good though to be honest.
‘Death Of A #Forum: How The UK’s #OnlineSafetyAct Is Killing #Communities.’
Riddle me this.
What's got 4 doors, can hold 2 adults, 3 kids, and a weeks worth of luggage for a road trip, fits on a ferry boat, gets 40 something mpg and can still pull a u-turn in the middle of a city....
With 221,000 miles?
A 2010 Honda Fit, of course!
@codemonkeymike I so wish they were still making it!!
@stephanie I know. Blows me away they don't make it anymore. It seemed so successful
@sam @stephanie stupid America. Can't handle small sensible cars
@sam I mean crossovers are fine, but they dont replace these fantastic hatchbacks...
Oh humans..
@codemonkeymike we still have an '05 Toyota Echo hatchback. I love that little thing.
@hugo the Eco.. now theres a name I haven't heard in a while
@codemonkeymike Congratulations, Mike. All things considered, this is probably the most environmentally sound choice you could have made. It looks fabulous!
@mikesax thanks. Yeah it was just supposed to be a cheap second car. Cost $5k and done. It's been great
Pen-pineapple-apple-pen
Odin says good morning #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon
In some ways I am impressed. On the other hand I wish it didn’t take so long for him to admit it and give the money back…
🤣 senior devs or sysadmins on the weekend be like …
Would it be very childish of me to find this incredibly, incredibly funny?
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/25/home_office_antiencryption_campaign_website/
Mechboards.co.uk are having a Dutch auction for all the random stuff they need to get rid of. I scored a Keychron V6 Max for £80 which I’m pretty happy with!
Here’s the link if you want to do some shopping yourself: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ufXOf61idIShPMEnA9FUXJj0m7J4pmNiFCszuZkWLRE
Ooh YouTube are removing the monetization option from ai voiced videos. Heaven be praised.
I don't use YouTube but I'm pleased to see a slight pushback against ai .
YouTube to demonetize AI-generated videos starting July 15 - Tech Startups
Here’s a summary of the policy changes starting July 15:
No AI-generated voiceovers
No Low-effort slideshows
No recycled or repurposed videos
No mass-produced reaction content
No copy-paste or minimally edited uploads
If your channel leans on AI voiceovers, repurposed clips, or low-effort uploads, this update could hit your bottom line fast. YouTube is tightening the rules with one message in mind: real people, real content, or no payout.
https://techstartups.com/2025/07/09/youtube-to-demonetize-ai-generated-videos-starting-july-15/
@Tattooed_Mummy how does this square with, for example, them plugging Veo3 into Shorts? https://www.theverge.com/news/689474/youtube-veo-3-ai-videos-shorts
Very confusing
I thought big tech like Google loved AI slop! I guess they only like AI when they are using it to get rich quick.
@Tattooed_Mummy This is good. YT is drowning in AI generated content now and it's awful.
@BonehouseWasps it's awful. They even just make up entire 'true crime' now. My husband was telling me about one so I researched, it never happened.
@Tattooed_Mummy Wow. Not heard of that one. I've seen lots of entirely made up music videos though, with both the music and visuals AI generated. Neither bears much scrutiny, of course. And the way VO mispronounces names - often several different ways in one vid, can be unintentionally hilarious.
@Tattooed_Mummy YouTube clearly doesn't believe AI has any value but yet the owner of YouTube seems to be jamming Gemini in every open orifice it can find, seems a little like mixed messaging to me...
@Vonskinnback I'm hoping its the beginning of an awakening
@Tattooed_Mummy I doubt it, just money & techbros trying to have its cake and eat it...
@Tattooed_Mummy they have too much invested in AI...
@Vonskinnback how much money will they throw into the sinking ship before they realise they are just wasting more and more I wonder.
@Tattooed_Mummy when the bubble goes it's going to take a lot of us with it, just like the.com bubble and the property/subprime mortgage bubble, not to mention the over leveraging of crypto assets within the American financial system, that also relies heavily on GPU powered processing, honestly I can't even imagine what would happen if AI crypto assets went down at the same time, but they are linked, so it is a conceivable risk...
@Tattooed_Mummy This is Google. I am suspicious. If anyone's thinking Kindness of their Hearts, they ARE mistaken.
@bewilderbeast23 oh I don't think it's kindness. I'm just hoping they're starting to realise that people don't want AI. Therefore it won't pay
But will they stop running their ads on that "content" and stop surfacing it above "higher effort" content for the views?
@Tattooed_Mummy Good. Hope it's more than words. I also hope they don't use it as a way to squeeze real creators harder.
This means nothing if that content continues to be highlighted by the algorithm.
The problem is that it's eating up all the views and it is nonsense with no value.
@Tattooed_Mummy But they're also adding a feature to generate videos with AI! These are very mixed messages.
@Tattooed_Mummy This is such great news! I was horrified to find my parents watching YouTubes that were basically AI slop.
But this will prevent Google from being able to monetize their own AI on the creation as well as the consumption side, so maybe they'll allow it once again if the numbers don't look good.
@Tattooed_Mummy I use Youtube constantly and I never interact with AI content *unless* it's ads. I wish more people would only watch videos from their Subscriptions tab and not Recommended like most people seem to do. In fact, I turn off the tracking of my watch history so I can't even use the Recommended tab.
The next step is to heavily police the recommendations in the recommendations below a video. In addition to AI garbage there's a whole world of hate and fear content on Youtube to avoid.
@Tattooed_Mummy interestingly one of the most common AI slop videos I've encountered are "instrumental" music, so no AI-generated voices. I wonder if they'll demonetize those too. I must have blocked a hundred different channels which kept popping into my suggestions
@Tattooed_Mummy huge sigh of relief. YouTube has become almost unusable for a lot of stuff, because of all the AI garbage. I'm surprised they're willing to admit there's no good use of AI for YouTube videos, though, which is what this sounds like they're saying (and I agree).
@Tattooed_Mummy If this is true... It may end up being the beginning of the end of AI. It won't go away, but people not making money that way, will mean they will stop doing it. I can't imagine a lot of "fun" comes from creating those videos. I could well be mistaken that it will make any impact.
@Tattooed_Mummy Not a decision that I'd expect from a Google company. Huh. It'll be a decision taken with profits in mind, so I wonder if it's something to do with people using AI to produce large quantities of crap videos clogging up YouTube servers, or maybe they know from the stats that people don't watch or engage with AI driven content anywhere near as much as they do human content.
in our efforts to make the linux desktop more gay, i'm pleased to announce that we're probably moving wayback to freedesktop.org imminently
@sam sounds like the theoretically unlikely* situation of two independent devices trying to use the same v6 address.
*Unlikely given the depth and breadth of the namespace, but...
Have you set a static address on this one?
@sam
While it's in faulty state, can you run tcpdump to see if traffic is actually getting to it?
Via a v4 connection, obviously! Something like this:
tcpdump -n -i eth0 '(tcp and port 22) or icmp'
Make an SSH connection and see if the inbound SYN packet reaches the interface, or the interface itself responds with an RST or ICMP port/host unreachable.
No packets? Provider.
Packets and ICMP? Your problem!
@WiteWulf
One slightly weird thing I had is that inbound #ipv6 traffic on both SSH and HTTPS was returning a "connection reset by peer" for a while. It seems to be working now, but if some IPv6 folks can check https://cablespaghetti.dev loads properly over v6 for them now, it would put my mind at rest.
@sam Works for me.
@sam
Are you telling me that your mastodon server was on a pi?
In preparation we’ve been doing a lot of cleaning and purging of junk. The number of bags of stuff that has come out of this house is truly spectacular! I wish I could say we’re finished but the work will continue next week.
I really need to start selling some computer stuff as well. If anyone in the UK happens to be after a AMD Ryzen 3900XT based workstation/gaming PC let me know…
If you’re a UK resident and/or a UK citizen, please make sure you sign this petition. It’s at almost 80k signatures and it’s got 3 weeks left to get to 100k.
‘Legally enshrine the right of adults to physically transition using NHS services’
I've boosted this toot. Will they do anything besides discuss this in the parliament?
p.s.: you'all will need more than 100,000 votes to counteract any invalid ones. From 14,000 to 40,000 extra votes.
@clacksee Dont remember signing that one but it says I have (mentioning just in case its a problem and other people are getting the same message)
@RavenLuni
It was the same for me.
@clacksee possible problem with the site then - that would stop it getting signatures
@clacksee Seems to work.
Now at 78951 signatures
Or " 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 , 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 0 signatures" as copy/paste would have it.
@clacksee wait, did it mean anybody will be able to do a transition for free? Cool.
@nikhotmsk
I mean, they can. The problem right now is that the wait list is multiple years long. This is just to ensure that the government doesn’t remove that right.
@clacksee Extremely sad that whoever made this petition felt they had to compromise by including "aged 18 and over", but I guess sometimes one step at a time is the correct approach.
@mcc
Yeah, one step at a time. I think this was set up in response to Streeting announcing kids couldn’t transition. So it’s very much, ‘Please don’t take the right from the rest of us.’ But yes, it should include kids.
I may have to move it to slightly more powerful hardware for my own sanity…
@sam Is the entire OS dying or won't your init system handle the restarts?
Folks who had websites in the year 2000, how/where were you building websites then? Someone I know is writing a book and the protagonist (non-techie type) builds a website. I was thinking Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod, but maybe that's more late-90s? (I def had a GeoCities site, but I can't remember if it was in 2000)
@sophie I had a GeoCities site in the 90s. In the 2000s, my ISP (Comcast) offered free space for a personal website, so I had it hosted there. I want to say that ended in the mid 2010s, but TBH I just can’t remember.
@sophie I was teaching computers to teenagers in 2000 and we did a mix of HTML, CSS & MS Frontpage
@sophie That was peak Myspace. That was probably the last time the most popular social media platform expected or allowed people direct access to the HTML.
@mistersql In 2000? Myspace didn't launch til 2003
@sophie Ah, thought you meant the decade. 2000 exactly, final days of FrontPage. Lots of tiny webhosters that let you upload html to an ftp site.
@sophie I clearly remember making a geocities site in 1999. I think I got MS FrontPage in 2000, possibly 2001 though. I would say that some people were still using notepad, typing in code from books at this point.
@sophie Local ISP offered hosting under tilde dirs, so put text-edited html there for a while. Think I got my own domain around then and quite possibly ran the site off a linux box at home? Geocities was definitely still a thing tho
@sophie mine was basically all static html, hand-rolled like some feral woodland creature
@beep In notepad, I trust?
@sophie Same as Ethan, though when I discovered PHP and includes it felt like magic. 🤯
Originally in Notepad, monochrome...but Notepad++ came along with syntax highlighting! This was 2003/2004 for me I think, if that helps!
@sophie @beep May '98, me with notepad + my colleague with Photoshop 4 = first web site for the company we worked for back then. Once I showed it can work and there's no black magic in web design, I got back to Borland C++ Builder 3 and some video programming that was my real job and the crew quickly dove into Macromedia.
@sophie @beep I dunno what's going on, but I like it. And to answer this question. Jekyll + GitHub CI/CD + Oracle FOREVER FREE instance regularly pull and pin the dist repo on IPFS + Cloudflare Pages for Web2 + Fleek.co (Web3 GitHub CI/CD + Oracle pinning + private gateway) + IPNS update for DNS Link. Good thing I didn't spend $120 for a WorldWideWeb.box dunno-web2-or-web3-vanity-thing. I wrote half of 130k+ words and no one bothered. Nuked my cloudflare account last week. I will be fine.
@sophie definitely built my first website using Microsoft Front Page and Tripod.com in maybe even as late as 2001 :D So Tripod definitely tracks.
@sophie Text editor (!Edit on my RISC PC at the time) and then upload it via FTP to my ISP's provided free 100Mb web space.
@sophie My ISP was Albatross, in Norwich, and they gave customers a bit of webspace. As for writing it... hand authored, angle bracket by angle bracket, in whichever text editor I was using at the time (either BBEdit if I had the old Mac IIci then, or FTE if my machine was Linux; can't remember) and then uploaded either by command line FTP or with Fetch. But I was a techie type even back then, so I suspect this isn't necessarily normal :)
https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-btinternet?sort=-date
@sophie Geocities and Livejournal in 2000, plus work for first clients on basic hosting, but prior in 98/99 was handcoded HTML on my university server.
@sophie Some Microsoft Front Page definitely, then an early version of dreamweaver. Before eventually just using notepad to edit stuff.
@sophie Geocities aside pre-2000, some dude I knew from IRC (EfNet?) had a web server and gave me some space in return for some (fledgling) design/dev work - I've had the same domain since June 2000 (25 years!). Homesite / PhotoShop / FTP were the weapons of choice.
@sophie by 1999/2000 I had moved on from writing table layouts in notepad on Geocities/Anglefore/Fortunecities etc to subdomains on cPanel shared hosting or my own domain on cPanel shared hosting and writing table layouts with rounded corner gifs in CuteHTML, transferring files with CuteFTP. CPanel hosting opened up the world of server side includes and eventually php includes 🙌
Sounds like a sweeet project!
@sophie hand-built using Joe, the Linux command line editor. Running on Apache on my own machine. Dynamic stuff was Perl as CGIs (programs you hooked into the web server that received the request and output the html, which got sent back to the browser.)
@sophie I had a Geocities site in 2002, as did some of my classmates. Angelfire and Lycos were still in use too IIRC 😊
@sophie Static site generator that was a bunch of hand written Ruby scripts, and a LiveJournal to post emo poetry to.
@sophie Geocities, both using the web portal and FTP.
I was working on a project in sixth form in ~2001 to create a website for AS-Level Computing. Geocities’ portal stopped working for some reason, so I learned to use FTP on the Windows 2000 command line.
I watched the VNC server switch on, and the head of IT spying on me. He came down to the library to ask me what I was doing 😄
@sophie I too used the space provided by our ISP. I still have the page, iframes and all 😍
(I had it on Tripod as well, for some reason. Not sure which I considered the main.) Anyway, that’s what I used 1998-2002.
@sophie Hand-rolled in emacs and possibly hosted on Demon, or maybe I’d sorted out an actual server at that point. I wish past me had actually made a note of these things.
@sophie, static HTML mishandled in Dreamweaver or HomeSite FTPed to shared hosting hooked up to a free domain from NameZero, or some such.
@sophie I bought a domain name and maybe 50mb space from a UK host in 1998, that I was still running in 2000. I hadn’t got to grips with any server side language, so I was just uploading HTML files I was writing in Notepad along with images I was making in Paint Shop Pro.
@sophie I started building in 2000 and it was mainly on Geocities. I also tried Angelfire and maybe Tripod more briefly but I didn't learn html right away so wysiwig was easier for me.
A couple to several years later I'd learned enough html that I got away from Geocities and was always looking for free hosts that didn't force a giant banner ad. I remember using Awardspace, might've used HostRocket, and I think there were others I don't remember. Much later (2015?) I used Jolly Leaf for a bit.
@sophie Probably 3 or 4 years later, but using then (and still using now) Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Although some of my pages (local startup homepages full of all my 'useful' websites) was written in Notepad++ using HTML and CSS (modified from on-line examples).
@sophie ISP offered a massive 10MB hosting; everything coded in SimpleText.
Later migrated to PHP, BBEdit, and… probably F2S (c 2001)
@sophie By then? By hand with light automation. My GeoCities site was ca. 1996/1997. By 2000 I was writing it in Emacs and using html-helper-mode. Found a snapshot of my old about page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010210181003/http://www.cstone.net/~mphall/tools.html
@sophie by hand, but less technical people were using Microsoft Frontpage or similar and ftping them to a hosting provider
@sophie your ISP account usually provided space for a website and an email account.
Your username was used in the directory of your site. For instance http://cantv.net/user/~goliath
And your email would be goliath@cantv.net
@sophie I've hosted my own with my own (crappy code) since 2002. I did run a little Web agency with some others, so had my own hosting.
@sophie mostly FrontPage Express and uploading via FTP.
I had some space on my university's server and then, later, on a shared space run by a friend.
@sophie universities would actually allow all CS students to just have these domain.something/~username/ folders open to the world where we could place the HTML that we wrote on a text editor like emacs, vim and the like (and we’d barely bother with CSS) and nobody bothered to consider there was any reputational risk in that
cc'ing @StefanMuenz, who wrote the most popular german language HTML tutorial/reference around that time
@sophie I had a site on Tripod from about '98, then on Geocities from '00-02. Static HTML written in Notepad (admittedly I learned HTML mostly by "view source" and ripping off bits of other sites that I liked).
@sophie
My first website was hosted on the university's servers. They set it up so computer science students could create a directory in their home directory and add the html there.
@sophie Definitely angelfire and writing plain HTML in notepad. Would get HTML books from flea markets for cheap as reference.
@sophie for me it was handcoded html in notepad and ftp'ed it to freeserve webspace that came with my dad's ISP. Might be a bit tech rather than non techie... Live journal was kicking off in '99 which might be more appropriate for the protagonist?
@sophie In 2006 my very first website/blog was built with RapidWeaver on my Mac and hosted on Aquaray. As soon as Apple released iWeb I started using it for my website/blog.
Then I switched on Wordpress for the blog and homemade landing page for the website.
@sophie Frontpage Express and then Macromedia DreamWeaver.
I myself wrote in Notepad and then Notepad++.
@sophie I think around then I was using Dreamweaver and its amazing templating and FTP sync. It was a hair past my Geocities/Tripod phase but I was still on dial-up and using shared LAMP stack hosting.
@sophie I think GeoCities was the go-to for non-techies until MySpace came around in '03. Aspiring techies would have been coding up home pages in HoTMetaL or HotDog (...or - ugh - MS FrontPage.)
(Circa 2000 I would have been moving from Macromedia Drumbeat & Dreamweaver to Allaire ColdFusion & HomeSite. Ahh, ColdFusion was the bees knees.)
@sophie
I used website builders like Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and early TYPO3 mainly as visual aids, but most work was hand-coded in HTML4. Layouts relied heavily on tables and frames. Video and interactive media were embedded using Flash (SWF) or Java applets. Full manual builds were the norm, since CMS tools were limited and dynamic content required custom back-end scripting—often with Perl. And honestly, we couldn’t care less about missing HTTPS or security in general back then!😎
@sophie I had several GeoCities sites in the mid-late 90s, as well as one hosted through my ISP (internet service provider) of the time, EarthLink.
In the early 2000s, I had a personal site on my university student web server. I also started using shared hosting services to host my own domains. I know MediaTemple was one of the big ones, but the name BlueHost (or something like that?) also seems familiar.
Many of those sites were static, but I did use some cgi scripts for managing parts.
@sophie did many sites 1993-2002 writing html in BBEdit text editor, uploading to server with good old Fetch for ftp (still use that). Lots of educators had Unix email which came with disk space what some call tilde spaces for the ~ before the username in a url
@sophie In the 2000's I think it was Geocities, Tripod and ISPs. Netscape Comunicator had an html editor.
@sophie building? Wasn’t ~2000 the years of Dreamweaver, GoLive and Frontpage? Then FTPing to a cheap hoster, who was responsible for domain and email services too…
@sophie I registered my first domain around '98 through Strato, a shared hoster here in Germany. Back then they offered a whopping 1MB webspace in their smallest plan called "Webvisitenkarte" (~online business card). That was enough to upload some HTML/CSS and a few asset images. For larger images I used free hosting at purespace, which was a free tier of Puretec, which was affiliated with 1&1. I had accounts on geocities, tripod, and such, but never really used them because of that domain.
@sophie I had a Geocities site around 1996 (I still remember the neighbourhood/number!), but by 2000 I was all PHP outputting HTML and Inlined CSS 😬 uploaded via FTP. No version control whatsoever.
@sophie ISPs typically let you have a web site by uploading it to the public_html directory in your home directory. It would then appear at http://someisp.com/~username/
I wrote in raw HTML.
@sophie another raised hand for Homesite here! I used the snippets feature often when I was coding static HTML, and it was helpful when I started learning PHP.
I had access to Dreamweaver but often switched to the HTML editor instead of the WYSIWYG editor -- although it was good with "onion skins" if your boss said something needed to be "pixel-perfect" and you were building with tables.
For my personal site, I moved from GeoCities to Dreamhost in the early aughts, and been there ever since.
@sophie I went though the Angelfire -> Tripod -> Icestorm pipeline to having a domain with Dreamhost in 99 or 2000 - can’t remember exactly when!
@sophie I was hosting on my ISP’s space I think at the time: BlueYonder domain (Virgin Media in the UK, maybe Northwest Telecom at the time?). At some point I moved to the Mixed Grill plan from Textdrive (later acquired by Joyent) but I think that was a few years later.
My first site was bright orange and blue: I still have the hex code for cornflower blue, 6495ed, burnt into my brain.
Good morning Fedi!!
@alice "I deny the legitimacy of the box, but I actually fit inside it pretty well, more or less." is an actual thought I've thought.
@alice I bet Schrodinger really and truly regretted using a cat in his random example back then. Probably heard no end of this stuff, lol.
@alice My kin! Ferrets are so cute.
Edit: Weasels are also cute but are not ferrets, even if my little racoon eyes mistake them. Lol
It came with a driver CD-ROM! How retro is that! I have some old machines with optical drives, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the norm in 2025…
@sam mini CD-ROM no less :)
@sam Can the cartridges be loaded with marmalade, or would that make it jam?
ICE's current funding is < $3 billion USD.
trump's "big beautiful bill" expands that to over $40 billion.
A passage of this bill creates the American SS.
For those who think that petitions might have some effect (if only discomfort)
We, the undersigned, call on the UK Home Secretary to urgently proscribe the "Israel Defense Forces (IDF)" as a terrorist organisation, under the Terrorism Act 2000. We believe their actions meet this definition and that they pose a threat to the safety and security of innocent civilians.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/yvette-cooper-proscribe-the-idf
#Proscription #Petition #Cooper #HomeOffice #Parliament #SauceForTheGoose #SauceForTheGander #Israel
SpaceX Burnt Up 472 Starlink Broadband Satellites in Last 6 Months https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/07/spacex-burnt-up-472-starlink-broadband-satellites-in-last-6-months.html
@bullivant Well in the UK you can't chant kill Israeli (which should be banned) but Israelis can kill Palestinians
I would which is morally worse? Hmmmm....
@Robo105 @bullivant Well I suppose you can’t just suspend the law just because Israel seems to be able to do whatever it likes.
@mark @bullivant True and much of it is driven by evangelical desire to have nuclear war in the middle east which will herald the second coming. Insane
Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band
A supposed band called The Velvet Sundown has released two albums of AI slop this month.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/half-a-million-spotify-users-are-unknowingly-grooving-to-an-ai-generated-band/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
@arstechnica What a profound, fundamental insult to everything that makes us human. Disgusting people.
@hedders @arstechnica you will see horrors beyond human comprehension but the worst part will be the things you won't even notice.
@arstechnica surprised ai's fell for that given how little spotifies pays.
Project Hail Mary trailer.
If you’ve read the book, watch the trailer because it looks good!
If you’ve haven’t read the book, do yourself a favor and skip the trailer because it spoils a key element of the story. I can’t believe they put that in the trailer.
The book is fantastic and well worth a read. The movie looks good from the trailer.