I know what I said. Linux upholds the “don’t break userspace” contract pretty well: most kernels, particularly those from generalistic distros built with modules, are compatible with whatever userspace binaries you throw at them. Major version changes in glibc (or equivalent) is where incompatibilities start, but those happen quite rarely, and you can often still force multiple glibc versions to run side by side.

What @[email protected] said. Switching .deb based distros is little more than changing sources, maybe some pinning, doing an upgrade, and optionally a cleanup pass to remove any stranglers.

My main Linux box is a Debian-Ubuntu-Debian upgrade, that hasn’t seen a proper reinstall for like 15 years (switched all the hardware several times, still no clean reinstall).

Switching between non-deb distros is also possible, with a chroot. Like, Gentoo to Fedora. As long as the kernel is compatible with the glibc, it’s basically like running containers, just on slightly hard mode.

Not really, I’m not new to containers.

This might blow yours though: I once booted up from a Tomsrtbt disk, installed Debian, added some RedHat packages, and topped it up with some pinned downgrades from Ubuntu.

On bare metal, no containers, no rebooting.

Debian would not create and maintain a “core debian” variant just to be installed then receive the extra packages

Debian server minimal, is kind of a “core Debian”. There are netinst versions that can be even smaller. The Debian base image for Docker is even smaller than all that.

There is also an Ubuntu minimal install that you could call “core Ubuntu”.

But more importantly, and I can’t stress this enough: YOU CAN SWITCH DISTROS WITHOUT REINSTALLING. Might need to do some cleanup afterwards, but it’s perfectly doable, more so between Debian based ones.

Could you link some examples?

Also keep in mind that people can release their work under multiple licenses, so they may upload the same work with a different license (like a privative one) to other markets.

[pi@raspberry]# sudo su

Just saying, not everyone needs session management…

“do one thing well”

Arguably, Systemd does exactly that: orchestrate the parallel starting of services, and do it well.

The problem with init.d and sys.v is they were not designed for multi-core systems where multiple services can start at once, and had no concept of which service depended on which, other than a lineal “this before that”. Over the years, they got extended with very dirty hacks and tons of support functions that were not consistent between distributions, and still barely functional.

Systemd cleaned all of that up, added parallel starting taking into account service dependencies, which meant adding an enhanced journaling system to pull status responses from multiple services at once, same for pulling device updates, and security and isolation configs.

It’s really the minimum that can be done (well) for a parallel start system.

SearXNG. It’s a meta-search aggregator, you can use any public instance (the config is all in-browser) or host your own for kind of extra privacy.

Reddit also cited 3rd party apps, bots and extensions as a reason to not develop many of the features on their own… and here we are now.

IIRC PageRank was patented, so it’s public, and at this point the patent is surely expired.

Some Reddit posts are already at an all time low in quality. Places like r/worldnews, r/technology or ELI5, where you used to find “at least” a couple decent comments, have already seen top posts with 0 useful top comments… and I’ve looked through all of them out of morbid curiosity, but no, not a single one.

Could it be a subdomain, though? What if a spammer started a “Lemmy instance as a service” on “legit.ml”, and started creating instances on “lemmy.u<number>.legit.ml”? What if some of the instances were actually legitimate, while thousands of others weren’t? What if… oh well, the rabbit hole goes deep on this one.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Think of it like this:

• Instances: define some ToS and Code of Conduct
• Communities: define a theme and a sub-Code of Conduct

By having multiple instances, you aren’t bound by a single ToS or Code of Conduct, you can pick whatever instance you want that matches the content you want to post to a community.

For example, the same “Technology” community could be on:

• an instance directed to kids
• an instance that allows visual examples of medical procedures
• an instance that discusses weapons technology

Having the community limited to a single instance, would never allow the different discussions each combination of instance:topic would allow, even if the topic is technically the same in all cases.

Forcing communities from multiple instances to merge, would also break the ToS of some of them.

So the logical solution is for the user to decide which instance:communities they want to follow and participate in, respecting the particular ToS and Code of Conduct of each.

On Reddit, the r/Technology community needs to follow a single set of ToS and Code of a Conduct. If you try to discuss something that meets the topic but is not allowed, then you will get banned, possibly from all of Reddit.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Think of it like this:

• Instances: define some ToS and Code of Conduct
• Communities: define a theme and a sub-Code of Conduct

By having multiple instances, you aren’t bound by a single ToS or Code of Conduct, you can pick whatever instance you want that matches the content you want to post to a community.

For example, the same “Technology” community could be on:

• an instance directed to kids
• an instance that allows visual examples of medical procedures
• an instance that discusses weapons technology

Having the community limited to a single instance, would never allow the different discussions each combination of instance:topic would allow, even if the topic is technically the same in all cases.

Forcing communities from multiple instances to merge, would also break the ToS of some of them.

So the logical solution is for the user to decide which instance:communities they want to follow and participate in, respecting the particular ToS and Code of Conduct of each.

On Reddit, the r/Technology community needs to follow a single set of ToS and Code of a Conduct. If you try to discuss something that meets the topic but is not allowed, then you will get banned, possibly from all of Reddit.

I just came from a Reddit r/tech thread where all the upvoted comments were people making fun of the title, without realizing the title was descriptive of the linked article.

Make a website for idiots, and only idiots will stay on it.

I know how to program, I also know how to wonder how many instances are running off the docker-compose with publicly exposed postgres… that would make import/export really easy, wouldn’t it? 🙄

Anyway, would you say this isn’t the right place to discuss this stuff?

That’s kind of wrong though, isn’t it? What about stuff like GDPR data exports? Users should be able to export their data, then import it into another instance, effectively migrating instances.