Maroon

I love the fact that fediverse was built from the ground up to be free, federated and interoperable. I have two questions that may come from my lack of expertise / knowledge, so I apologise in advance if they are dumb.

1. Bots can disrupt smaller instances:

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone's posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI? What's stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities? When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there. It's safe to say most Lemmy users are not going to spin their own instance and start communities from scratch. Meanwhile, the onslaught of bots can overwhelm these budding communities and instances.

2. Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:

Threads comes to mind on this point and how many instances have chosen not to defederate with them. Besides, they can create bridges, and have repost bots in all instances to flood major them with ads. With generative content, it is so much easier to make a seemingly casual post about a product and mask it as an advertisement.

I've seen previous posts about people wanting to come because of their opinion about how certain countries behave. I feel the true evil are the corporates.

I have an old OnePlus 5T that has LineageOS installed. I don't really do anything with it and I thought it would be cool to host my first ever website (static) on it.

What I've done so far:

1. Got the HTML file for my website.
2. Got the CSS style sheet for that site.
3. Purchased a domain name.

I request help/guidance with:

1. Minimal install of Debian, nginx, Docker, and Fail2ban. (I feel I need help with the Debian installation because the rest is seems easy enough).
2. Hosting my website from my home, so like if I should consider subnet or vlan for my home to protect other devices when I expose port 80 (http) and 443 (https) of my router so other servers can access my server phone.

I know this sounds like complicating matters for something I have never done before, but any help would be greatly appreciated. I have hosted stuff at home (pihole, LibreTranslate, etc) but I think this website project may not be straightforward.

After I install Linux Mint (which is the distro I have settled on), I replace:

1. Thunderbird with Betterbird
2. Firefox with Librewolf (I also install Brave for web services that need a chromium browser).
3. Celluloid / Rythmbox with VLC player
4. Default Libreoffice with latest Libreoffice from source.
5. ClipIt/Parcellite with xfce4-clipman

I find this to be my optimal setup and these software give me the extra quality of life that make my workflows easier.

What software do you replace and install on your distro of choice?

Edit: I forgot to say I replace sudo with doas. That's something my friend told me to do although I personally don't find any immediate working advantage with it.

I want to capitalise on the current "X-odus" momentum, and convince my university (or at least my department, which is quite big) to have its own Mastodon server.

My rationale is that if I can convince my uni/dept that they will have better reach, control and experience with Mastodon, it will help populate the Fediverse and bring more academics on this platform to disseminate their research.

The reason I am asking the self-hosting community for help is because I know nothing about hosting my own Mastodon server, but should I manage to have a talk with my IT head or the dept head and convince them to come to the Fediverse, I might need to spin up a server for them.

1. How easy is it to get Mastodon up and going?
2. How costly a hardware do I need to ask for?
3. How expensive is it to run the server annually?
4. Any other points or aspects I need to keep in mind?

A while ago, I had requested help with using LLMs to manage all my teaching notes. I have since installed Ollama and been playing with it to get a feel for the setup.

I was also suggested the use of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation ) and CA (cognitive architecture). However, I am unclear on good self hosted options for these two tasks. Could you please suggest a few?

For example, I tried ragflow.io and installed it on my system, but it seems I need to setup an account with a username and password to use it. It remains unclear if I can use the system offline like the base ollama model, and that information won't be sent from my computer system.