Idk man, it seems pretty irresponsible to me to write a blogpost with stuff that you got from ChatGPT without understanding it. People will assume that if you wrote a blogpost on this then you know what you’re doing. ChatGPT gets stuff wrong all the time, and we’re talking about firewall configuration here. If it misconfigured some stuff it could leave you and your readers vulnerable to all kinds of shit.

In this case it seems to me that (luckily) there’s just a bunch of redundant routing, but the next time it could be leaking your and your readers’ torrent traffic out of the VPN tunnel, leaving you vulnerable to legal repercussions for piracy.

Please don’t authoritatively post stuff that you got from the automatic bullshit generator without understanding it.

Nice, I recently went through the same struggle of setting up this configuration based on that LinuxServer post. My main nitpick on this is that automating the ip route configuration for the qBittorrent container is a pretty important step which is not explained in the post. Leaving any manual steps in any Docker setup is pretty bad practice.

Since you’re using LinuxServer’s QBT image a good way to do this is to make use of their standard custom init scripts. You can just mount a script with the ip route commands to /custom-cont-init.d/my-routes.sh:ro on the container and it will be run automatically on each startup.

Another nitpick is that the PostDown commands in the wireguard configs are useless since you’re running them in Docker.

I believe you need root to access those, plus a file manager that supports it (I use Mixplorer which does). Otherwise, as someone else suggested, you can access them from a computer over ADB or MTP.

Other people in that thread have pointed out that it isn’t showing posts being delivered to Threads despite the block. That should be testable with other instances, but not Threads since it’s not receiving any content from Mastodon at the moment. The concerning thing there is the user still being able to view content from people they’ve blocked, but that seems to be a bug if it’s reproducible.

In the EU companies can’t scrape personally identifiable information without consent, even if it’s already publicly available. IANAL, and there’s probably ways they can sneak around the GDPR, but at least it’s not a free for all. It’s unclear though how it works for federation. It’s definitely not the same legally though.

The reason for not directly federating content to Threads isn’t so nobody there can ever see my amazing posts, it’s so Meta can’t easily profile me. Scraping public posts on a different platform would probably be illegal, at least in the EU, and reposts don’t give them a lot of data about me. Federating content, however, would give them most of the same data that Mastodon has on me without even having to ask.

This post from Eugen Rochko mentions that blocking Threads at the user level “stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads”. Basically, the user-level instance block is bidirectional.

Limited federation mode is a different feature, at the admin level. It doesn’t really affect the delivery of posts in either direction, it just hides the blocked instance’s content from the global feed. Defederation on the other hand is indeed bidirectional, but again it’s on the admin level rather than users’.

Mastodon instance blocks are already bidirectional AFAIK: if you block an instance your content does not get federated with them. I was actually surprised that this does not seem to be the case for Lemmy. I don’t think this break any core abstraction of AP…

I thought I heard they were rolling out some material you theming in beta a while ago. Did they revert it?

Backed by who?

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a recent history of questionable investments…

I’m aware they’re not using a generic model, but that’s not much better. Current custom-made models still fuck up significantly more than humans, and in less predictable ways.

Even if their custom model is slightly incorrect 1% of the time, that’s still a major problem in critical systems like those.

Legacy COBOL code is largely used in critical systems like those of banks and airlines. What could go wrong with having that code rewritten by stochastic parrots who get programming answers wrong half of the time?

Interesting demo! Does this use the user agent string for identifying clients?

Oh I mean, sure, but I don’t think IP logging is the main privacy concern with spy pixels.

I’m assuming this trick uses the user agent string and other request metadata to identify clients. Even if it didn’t recognize Jerboa as a client, it did guess that I was on mobile. That’s not possible just by tracking IPs, unless they’re cross-referencing it with other datasets. Also, I was on VPN anyway, so the IP would have been useless.

It should be possible for clients to obfuscate/fake the metadata of image requests to make tracking with spy pixels less effective.

Can countermeasures be implemented in the clients to mitigate privacy risks, while not having to proxy images?

Awesome work folks, thanks!

What you’re trying to do is often called “domain delegation” or “well-known delegation”. Here’s an example of the documentation for the same thing in matrix-synapse. I don’t know if the Lemmy server supports this yet, my suggestion would be to join the matrix chat for the development and ask there. You should find a link to the chat room on the github page. If it does support it then most likely the process is the same as the one I linked for matrix.

Sure, but this isn’t finding new instances, just new communities on known instances. Indeed, this is not difficult to implement. The reason it’s not done already is for resource economy. A lot of instances are already struggling to scale, making them process and store a lot more content with little value for most users of the instance isn’t feasible for a lot of servers right now.

Social media and torrents are pretty damn different. There’s a reason no federated platform has implemented automatic discovery, even ones with much more resources than Lemmy, like Mastodon.

I don’t know why you folks keep pointing at missing features and saying “Lemmy doesn’t have this pretty advanced network feature, so it’s not really decentralized”, or “it cannot organize”, or “it’s useless”… It’s basically two people’s passion project that only blew up in the past month because reddit fucked up. You’re not paying for it, are you? So I really don’t see how this attitude is warranted.

Yeah what’s being described there is basically a P2P model. I still think it wouldn’t make a huge difference in the chattiness of the protocol. At best it would redistribute the load for outgoing federation messages, but not for incoming ones. An instance still has to receive each message individually, regardless of where they comes from.