The two things the hacks required were

1. Custom Emojis
2. a local user on the instance to be taken over

since I know who are the users on this instance, neither of these things were an issue so we were not at risk of the hack such as it is right now.

We've upgraded our lemmy-ui to the very latest 0.18.2rc2 to further mitigate the potential issues, and I ran the postgresql commands proposed in the below thread to ensure nothing bad got in anyway:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1895#issuecomment-1628270766

There were no custom emojis listed, but there were 8 posts including the offending onload command. They were deleted without incident. As a final result everyone will have to log back in.

This is yet another example of how decentralization is strength -- major instances were in trouble as a result of this, but many smaller instances never saw a thing.

Front end and back end are now updated. Took a bit because I made some bad decisions about how to do the upgrade, deleting the old bin before I had a new one in.

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance says something like "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Some people use this paradox as a justification for bad behaviour against the people they deem to be intolerant.

This seems to present its own awful paradox that strikes at the heart of what most people would consider tolerant, because in many cases (not all, of course) western European and American white people practicing a weak form of Christianity or atheism are some of the most tolerant people in the world. To give an example, the attitudes towards tolerance and diversity in the middle east, China, Africa, and expats from those regions who migrate to places like America or Europe are typically considerably less tolerant. This isn't a conjecture on my part -- there's a lot of anthropological literature on the subject, and white Americans for example exhibit some of the lowest in-group preference of any other group.

Tolerance as envisioned by Popper is a cultural thing that's pushed further by white westerners than any other group according to consistent anthropological data. That sort of is a historical accident. It's developed the way it has in part because of the liberalism of the west, combined with the Judeo-Christian concept that all people are created equal by god, but in particular it's a result of a deep trauma caused by the horror of the world wars that showed westerners that within them laid the power and potentially the will to implement horrors like the Nazi party and the holocaust.

Tolerance isn't monopolized by white westerners, many cultures have it to some degree. One of the reasons for the success of the early Persian empire was that they accepted people of all kinds of culture and bloodlines within their borders as relative equals, as well as Islamic Spain. What's different is the degree to which white westerners embraced tolerance as a result of their deep cultural trauma. While the cause I'm stating is a hypothesis, the anthropological data is not -- nobody has less in-group preference compared to outgroup preference than white westerners. The paradox of the paradox is that if we only accept the tolerant, then we will be more tolerant of the dominant culture of the west than of anything else.

The ideal would probably be to just make decisions about people on an individual basis, but using aggregate data to come up with probabilistic conclusions is something humans do in general as a heuristic to reduce the amount of effort required to understand and make useful predictions about a complex world.

The paradox of the paradox of tolerance being that if one uses the paradox of tolerance to define who ought to be tolerated, it means that as a bloc white westerners are generally more deserving of being tolerated than other people.

The concept of being intolerant of a person who has intolerant behaviors I think comes from the concept that people become the avatars for their beliefs. It comes from dehumanizing people who do things you don't like. They aren't people who do some things you don't like, they become Nazis and bigots who are irredeemable, or trolls who are only there to make you feel uncomfortable. In this way. Once a person can be treated as an avatar for bad behavior, then a complex answer of how to deal with someone with many facets in a complicated world is reduced to a single answer: "Do not be tolerant to the intolerant people".

A more appropriate solution to the paradox might instead be to say that rather than dooming any given individual for not being tolerant enough, you talk about tolerating behavior rather than people. If your racist grandpa is a great guy 99% of the time except when he starts spouting off about how he hates Italians, you go "grandpa, I love you, but I don't care about Italians. Let's talk about something else."

I think this also protects against a major strategic blunder I see a lot these days: By focusing on rejecting the action and not the person, you provide a quick and easy path to redemption, try not to do the thing again.

Sun Tzu's seminal art of war says many things, but two things that are relevant is that if your army massively outnumbers their surround them. Another thing he writes is that you need to make sure your enemy feels they can run away, because to rout an army is victory.

In this age where the progressive control nearly everything, it might appear that they should take the advice to encircle their enemy since they seem to massively overwhelm their numbers, but territories are not armies. We should remember that if people are trapped without escape or chance for surrender, they'll fight bitterly to the last man.

It also reminds me of Sun Tzu's advice to try to use the resources of the country you are invading rather than carrying supplies. Resources taken locally are worth far more than resources taken from home, but their cost is much less. To make an ally out of an enemy is almost the greatest victory.

Of course, the greatest victory is to win without fighting. It is said that the general who will fail seeks battle first and then tries to secure the victory. So a strategy and tactic intended to bring people into your fold rather than destroy all your enemies is going to be more likely to lead to victory.

I feel like this is how we used to do things, and it was working. Then a bunch of people came up who just wanted to "fight Nazis", and since then we've seen things get way worse because it's battle without victory.

Still hosted off of parts scavenged from a roadside sign.

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I just set up pg_repack on this instance.

I'm using the basic postgresql 14 that comes with my distro, so I was able to install postgresql using apt

apt install postgresql-14-repack

Then I had to hop into the postgres user:

sudo -u postgres bash

Next, I had to add the pg_repack extension to my database:

psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION pg_repack" -d lemmy

Finally, I was able to run pg_repack:

pg_repack -a

I don't have a very large database at this point so it didn't take much time. You do need to be aware that you need enough space left on your device to make a complete copy of your database because I think it actually does that.

Next, you can put it in your crontab to run routinely:

crontab -e

I like to run it weekly, but ymmv.

The latest version is almost out, and it sounds like it's a pretty major improvement, so I'll likely be upgrading tonight. If you have some wonkiness, that's why. Positive thing is it sounds like there's some big improvements to federation in general.

I reused the hardware for it for my lemmy instance so it’s down now, but for a while I ran an openstreetmap instance. OSM has a big map that shows all the continents. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see countries. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see provinces. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see cities. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see neighborhoods. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see individual buildings.

And this incredibly detailed map of the entire planet right down to individual buildings doesn’t know about the stories of the people in those buildings, it doesn’t know about individual trees, individual blades of grass, of the bugs in the soil, of the nematodes that are to the bugs as the bugs are to us, to the bacteria and archaea, to the viruses, to the molecules, to the atoms, to the subatomic particles. And that’s just one map of one planet in a solar system, in one galaxy, of so many it’ll break your brain seeing all the different galaxies they found out there.

And at every scale, you see what’s in front of you and think it’s the most important thing, but there’s everything you can’t see at the scale you’re at, and all the other things at all the other scales, but it’s easy to become fixated on one thing in one place at one scale and forget the universe as a whole is a lot of things all at once.

One of the biggest risks lemmy carries is that if we allow one or two instances to become our exclusive points of discussion, then we tax those instances, and also put a lot of power and pressure in the hands of volunteers. The best things to do about it are to decentralize: Go out and try to find communities throughout the fediverse, not just on the top few servers.

I was able to find many new servers to join communities in, I'm hoping communities pick up all over the place so we can have a strong, healthy fediverse, and my part in that is making sure someone's listening when they post.

I stuck it out with lotide, but with kbin coming online and not federating with it, and with bugs in lemmy such that lotide isn't federating at the moment, so I decided it was time to set up a lemmy instance. It's running on dedicated hardware, and it's set up with image upload capacity, and a black theme. How much more black can the theme get? None. None more black.

!Screenshot of theme