# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 901
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://yarn.andrewjvpowell.com/user/eldersnake/twtxt.txt&offset=201
# next = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://yarn.andrewjvpowell.com/user/eldersnake/twtxt.txt&offset=301
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://yarn.andrewjvpowell.com/user/eldersnake/twtxt.txt&offset=101
The UK has some "interesting" ideas when it comes to how they view cyberspace. Isn't it the UK that is campaigning hard against E2E encryption?
@prologic They would probably use Yahoo or Outlook email π
π€¦
@stutteringsteve noticed in the comments saying some countries, including governments, rely almost exclusively on WhatsApp for communication. How fucking stupid !
Also the old school shells like dash or rc really make me appreciate auto-completion. It's why I use Bash as an interactive shell, but try to use POSIX shell in scripts. Good compromise I think.
@adi I thought it was essentially the "copy" function? Not sure why it's called that, they still call 'cut' its normal name.
Good stuff π\n 
I ran Plan9 (9Front port) in VirtualBox for the hell of it \n 
\nAlways interesting getting to know different and somewhat unusual interfaces, but man, the heavy mouse reliance is giving me some major wrist cramps π€£ I also found it very amusing there's a program out of the box that spits out Nietzsche quotes.
@prologic Huh, I didn't know that. Not that I need to use it, but where is the Mute on the web interface? π€ (knowing my luck, it's right in front of me and I'm somehow missing it)
@prologic On the plus side with the way that works, if on the off-chance you want to essentially put someone on ignore, you just unfollow them. No ignore list needed, and it's like they don't exist.
Ohhhh gotcha π Well, I mean that's exciting that the number of pods has gotten to the point where this is noticed!
I think my Followers list broke some time ago, probably when I force deleted the database and re-imported my profile feed manually to correct my base URL gaffe, so my own fault. I know for a fact the list is higher than 5, for example the one and only @prologic isn't even listed yet DOES follow me 
Interesting, just installed it.
@jlj Also most of the modern generation can't focus on one thing for more than 5 minutes in lieu of checking their online feeds or TikTok, so good luck getting everyone en masse to just sit back and have meaningful reflection for generations π€£
I shouldn't laugh but... I couldn't help it.
@movq I think renting a server, especially a VPS, is still considered self-hosting if you're controlling it. It might not be the absolute control and self-hosting of a home server, but it's the next best thing.
@fastidious Essentially nothing, and I guess it's even designed to do much less. That's kind of the point of it I suppose, and my experience with it is still only a matter of days so far, but the idea is a totally stripped back experience. I guess one could argue one of the 'features' is a complete lack of being tracked, because there's no way to implement cross-site tracking as we know it on Gemini. Anyway it's not meant to replace HTTP, it is its own thing.
It's interesting some of the Gemini detractors point out there is only static content and no way to do anything dynamically... and yet, CGI is still a thing in Gemini if you use a server that supports it. There's literally dynamic search functions and comments sections on some capsules. Very unrefined and still developing, yes, but it's there.
I dream of a world where self-hosting is more the norm. If someone wants to pay a service or rent a server elsewhere for certain reasons like uptime guarantees, performance, features etc that's fine, but we're currently in a landscape where it's considered the norm to just look up any online service and throw our data on there willy nilly, often free ones at the cost of our privacy.
@darch @laz @jlj @xuu @antonio @prologic I would. Funds are very tight but I could give something, and honestly I was going to ask about how one could possibly donate at some point, so good timing :P
It seems my SSH (gemini forwarding) client is usually fine at quitting when network drops (or power loss means a machine reboot anyway), but the server tends to keep the hung connection open for some time, making reconnects a problem. I think I have a solution with a loop that works, but Iβm not the best at shell, so if anyone sees anything I should do better, do let me know https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/pastebin/1633167261/
Hmm so one downside to SSH obviously is that it doesn't handle dropouts well (I'm using SSH port forwarding for my Gemini instance). On my setup that can be a problem, and means I manually need to kill and restart SSH if I have even a momentary outage. Something to ponder...
well yes, it's only just starting out, I hope they'll have more content in future. Maybe also contributors.
@adi Morning! Or evening for me :)
@prologic @slashdot If I can don my tin foil hat for a moment, I can't help but think all this 'AI this', 'AI that' news we're bombarded with is just meant to feed into our minds that AI is 'good and trustworthy' and set us up for the next evolution of Big Tech.
@prologic No, definitely not. I guess being newer and having a bit of a hype train behind it recently means it was the one that people like me notice, who never experienced anything other than the WWW, but one shouldn't forget the OG π (Gopher)
@eldersnake What is depressing (on the web) is going most to even fairly simplistic blog pages and still having multiple trackers showing up in a lot of places. It's a huge relief to come across a website that has no trackers at all come up, but it's far too uncommon.
Regarding Gemini, I do agree with @mckinley that it's not a replacement for the web as we know it, and in fairness, it doesn't try to be. To me it's a nice little alternative online space that demonstrates simplicity and ease of use in terms of content and that along with a lack of tracking etc can be refreshing. We definitely need to encourage these paradigms on the World Wide Web.
Must admit, Lagrange (Gemini) is a rather nice web browser.
Okay so I got a basic Gemini instance going: gemini://gemini.andrewjvpowell.com\nThe site is not complete and is just a starter, I haven't got an auto-generating mkws version of it yet or anything. I had to use SSH port forwarding and HAProxy to make it work on my RPi, but I got there in the end.
They not a fan of bagging out Google?
Soon as I saw this, I just knew who would have posted it :P
@prologic ahh, so some organized trolls basically.
@prologic I'll bite. _Why did you have a poor perception of it?_ :P_
@prologic yeah this morning I've been thinking of making a Gemini rendition of my site. Not sure how I'll go with reverse tunneling a Gemini server but I'll try.
@maya is a time traveller! 
@mckinley I like how they took something creepy and tried to market it as a _good thing_.
@prologic Bugger, rookie mistake. Though I was never too concerned of my own code re: CoPilot etc, none of it would be very useful π, I was more wanting to move to get away from Microsoft and in support of other devs.
@prologic Oh woops, nah I didn't know about that tool. I just went and first downgraded my account to Free and then Deleted it from the account settings. Does this mean that the repos still exist in the backend somewhere? π€
Can't say this is surprising...
@adi Since I had hosting with them, I just use nearlyfreespeech.net. They don't throw all the 'upselling' stuff at you that others like GoDaddy etc do when purchasing a domain, only extra thing they offer is ProtectMyPrivacy which is $3-something. Probably not the site most would throw out there as a registrar option but it's what I use.
@prologic I've gone with Gogs for now, as according to htop Gitea was using 25% of memory π³ Whereas Gogs uses just 7%-ish. But ah well, guessing I won't need a lot of the extra features anyway for now.
I personally am a Dark Mode kinda guy.
@adi Haha, what's that about?
@adi I'm planning on installing Gitea like @prologic, so I guess I'll see how difficult it is
@lobste_rs \n> The result, we see in 2021, is a 50% load reduction on database hosts housing the data that once was on mysql1\n\nAre they sure this isn't just because of the people leaving GitHub? ;)
You know what grinds my gears? You look up how to do something in _shell_ online and most of the results are actually for bash...
@slashdot Lol, fahk off Google π€£\nSome of the content is no doubt valuable but that's on the creators, not YouTube.
@jlj @adi I don't know about the stock Android , I only ran it long enough to enable Developer Settings and install CalyxOS π
@prologic @adi Man, CRUX does look rather nice. Like Slackware on steroids.
@prologic Well basically Steve (the author) created a shell script that blocks all outbound traffic to Google/Facebook from your computer to stop tracking efforts, and that's what the article is mainly talking about. But some nice humour in there too. I loved this line -\n> Silicon Valley, allow me to toss in your direction a friendly vernacular phrase from my hometown of Boston:\n>\n> Fahk you.\n\nπ€£
@adi Yep, I've actually used Void Linux the last few years on my primary laptop, so it's my daily driver. Good distro, not too old packages, yet not too bleeding edge. Been a fairly underrated distro for a while IMO.
@slashdot I would have thought the first idea would be to try reduce the energy use...
Yeah, woops, I _may_ have let a few of those site.webmanifest files sneak into my sites as well...
@adi \n> I use cwm as a window manager.\n\nLooks pretty neat, and minimal. Not sure anything will ever pry me away from dwm, as it's so ingrained in my muscle memory now, thankfully it's easy to run on pretty much any UNIX-like OS.
@adi I've used FreeBSD before. I thought OpenBSD was meant to be somewhat less suitable for a desktop operating system but I've seen plenty of people online using it that way.
@adi BTW I'd be very interested in how you go with OpenBSD as a main operating system. I have an old laptop that is my secondary machine, currently running Arch Linux no problem, but tempted to put an SSD in it. When I do instead of migrating the install I've been tempted to try a *BSD on it. Just because.*
@adi \n> Itβs my motherβs laptop. Iβd rather not mess with it. She still has stuff on it which she occasionally asks me to access.\n\nAh, well yeah that's completely fair enough. Interesting you get the same fan error on all 3 of those other laptops, must be a common fault.
@adi Why can't you remove the Windows install?
@adi That command nets me 5102 from the access.log. So there's some bots, but still well short of the total numbers.
I love how https://dont-be-evil.com is already the second result on DuckDuckGo \n 
\n\nNot surprisingly nowhere to found on Google though π
@prologic Imagine if I was still using rate-limited relays π
Would be thousands of 502 errors...
Well @adi , good job on spreading my article, it certainly got a decent response\n\n 
\n\nNot sure what to make of these numbers though, they seem too high. Not sure if a bunch of bots are included or what, I think the audience would be too niche for the numbers to be right.
Is there a devopts/sysadmin out there who ISN'T a caffeine addict? π
Interesting thing is Pagekite on the Raspberry Pi is using anywhere from 30-70% CPU on 1 core at the moment, which I've never seen before. Obviously the activity puts a load on the tunnel process. Maybe would have been more efficient if they wrote the pagekite library in C or Go instead of Python lol.
Total requests a bit over 33,000, I'm assuming that's including the image requests as well as the page load. So I'm just counting the hits attributed to the URL request (I'm using GoAccess).
@adi About 14,000 π€£ and counting
@movq Ha yes, it was not a joke :P\n\n@https://tt.vltra.plus/user/laz/twtxt.txt> \n> I know itβs a totally different thing, but have you considered using PoE?\n\nHonestly I had not. Mainly as none of my gear supports PoE but then again I believe you can get adapters? Still I am happy with the solar, though I wonder if PoE could be some sort of backup system.
RPi seems to be handling it like a champ. Mind you, I suppose it should. It's the connection itself that would be the bottleneck. But I guess everyone only needs to load the static page and two images once.
@off_grid_living @prologic thanks ! Hopefully I don't offend off_grid_living with my very agricultural setup, I've seen how well set up and organized his stuff is!
@adi Not sure, uncharted territory lol. Its not Slashdot at least.
@prologic Nice one! Happy belated birthday by the way ;)
@mckinley Nah, Australia π So some things will fly over my head.
@prologic Yeah can only hope the Linux phones eventually come to the party. Also the price on the Librem 5... ouch.\nJohnβs Phone looks like it was an interesting concept, never heard of that one.
@prologic I'm honestly tempted to get one of these one day . π Sure its no smart phone, but 4g compatible, build it yourself, completely programmable.