Polaris strikes me as the retelling of a fever dream. I did enjoy The White Ship more than Polaris because it seemed to be a little more cohesive. Either story could easily be the basis for a concept album by Rush or an epic song by Iron Maiden.

I have to admit that I don’t much care for these early writings. They are brief and somewhat disjointed, a little too dreamlike to hold my interest. I do hold them in some regard since they show the beginnings of his Dreamlands ideas that take on fuller form in his later writings.

The Doom That Came To Sarnath was my first introduction to the writings of HPL many many years ago. I enjoy re-reading it as much as I did the first time. This time I opted to listen to it on HorrorBabble, the narrater was very good.

I always find myself thinking about little side stories in the same setting. What did the “people” of Ib ever do to deserve the hate of Sarnath? The beings that inhabited Ib seemed to just keep to themselves. They are described as having “bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voices”. Is it just simple pure xenophobia that drove the people of Sarnath to kill them all, or were there unstated incursions into Sarnath? The story does does not describe the denizens of Ib as anything other than ugly, and maybe that was enough for the people of Sarnath.

In the end the people of Sarnath got what they deserve, which is a somewhat surprising result considering how deeply xenophobic HPL was at the time of the writing. One would expect a Sarnath apologist viewpoint.

I always feel like Doom has an almost cinematic feel to it. Even though the story is brief the setting is lush and very interesting.

Welcome!

Feedly is the closest thing to Google Reader that I’ve found.

I do appreciate your feedback, but I think at a minimum that anyone trying to run a Lemmy instance in Docker should know how to install docker and docker compose and how to run basic commands like docker compose up -d. There are many tutorials out there for doing just that and I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. Once you have gotten that part done my document kicks in and picks up where the official documentation is currently lacking (in my opinion).

I do explain a lot, but I did my best to explain it in terms that most anyone could understand.

I will take your feedback to heart and maybe try to write a step by step tutorial for people who are completely new to Docker as well.

I don’t use unraid, so I’d have no way to develop and test it. But I think all you really need to do is install docker and docker compose and then just follow my guide.

Thanks for your comment, but I don’t see much value in pulling a new copy of the docker-compose.yml from the Lemmy GitHub. The only things I would be updating when Lemmy updates is the tag/version. If they added new environment variables some time in the future I could certainly take a look at their updated compose file to see the changes but I wouldn’t want to pull it down and replace my custom compose.

I specifically don’t care for their (Lemmy devs) choices for logging, docker networking, and the built in nginx, so removing and simplifying all that was my main goal. Everyone has their own way of doing things, and this is mine.

I will probably take a look at your Traefik configs and add them as a separate document for those that don’t want to use NPM. My goal is to add a subsection for most of the current revproxy choices.

I do not recommend using Ansible. It adds additional requirements and complexities that are unnecessary. Ansible is a great tool for managing multiple servers and software installs, in my opinion it is not the right tool to install Lemmy on a single instance. My install instructions require only that you have docker and docker compose installed.

That said, you could easily replace the docker-compose.yml that Ansible set up for you with the one I am providing. Just don’t run Ansible against your server again or it will wipe out your changes.

Seems like the best thing to do would be to run that on a daily schedule and also ideally something done in the ui. I worry for those admins that just “followed the recipe” to get a Lemmy instance up and running but lack any real sysadmin ability.

I think theres probably a big overlap between the novice admins and the instances where the admins are unaware they are getting flooded with bot registration.

I only have com/net/org domains, so I never noticed that. But you’ve provided good information. There is a list of CloudFlare supported TLD’s here https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/

I have most of my domains on Google, but also have a couple on CloudFlare. I suppose I will just move them all to CloudFlare. They offer free WHOIS privacy and several other features for free. For those of you self hosting on a dynamic IP, there’s a pretty good API that you can use for DNS updates.

Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a website people have to go to and search.

Peoples are lazy. They don’t want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn’t know it exists, its wonky at best.

If a user cant type “Stephen King community” in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn’t exist OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.

Of the themed instances that exist now, I’d be willing to bet that in addition to their local communities they host that they also subscribe to other communities that aren’t strictly related to whatever theme they are going with.

For example, I’m sure the Star Trek instance also subscribes to the lemmy@lemmy.ml community so the admin can stay abreast of Lemmy news. And probably also follows other technology related communities as well.

I think most people would just want to gravitate to whatever they want to be identified with. There’s nothing stopping you from joining a music themed instance and then adding some non-music subscriptions to your list. It doesn’t force those subs on anyone else on the instance.

And if you don’t want to be identified with any specific topic or community, you can always join a general Lemmy instance like Beehaw or Lemmy.world and subscribe to whatever you like piecemeal.

That’s not how Lemmy works. You just need an account on ONE instance. And then subscribe to all the communities that interest you, some may be local to your instance and some may be hosted on other instances.

Honestly, I hope not.

For example, if all the “programming” communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn’t take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.

There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps. And ideally, I think that’s what should happen.

I was never insinuating that an instance owner should limit their scope. But just because you run an instance doesn’t mean you have to be the home node for all the communities you are interested in. It goes against the idea of federation. If a community already exists on another instance, as an instance owner you should subscribe to that community rather than making your own. That increases resilience.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to create a new community. I’m saying that due diligence should be taken BEFORE creating a new community, to be sure that community doesn’t already exist.

Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I’d prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could hopefully at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There’s a reason why every community shouldn’t be on a single instance. It’s a single point of failure.

If you are familiar with Docker, you can easily run it in your existing VPS. It doesn’t use a lot of resources.

If you are not familiar with Docker, you should look in to it.

https://docker-curriculum.com/

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/a-beginners-guide-to-docker-how-to-create-your-first-docker-application-cc03de9b639f/

I guess at the end of the day that I don’t have many concerns for privacy. I am not searching for things that might get me on a watch list. Searching from my private instance is no more/less secure in terms of privacy than it would be if I did a Google search. The search endpoints (Google, Bing, DDG, etc) all know the IP that the search is coming from even if its passing through SearXNG first. So if I was doing something shady, I could easily be tracked down that way.

The main reason I run my own SearXNG is so I can strip ads and search multiple search providers from a single search.