I think it would need to be a mechanism similar to how user moves are handled where the old thing sticks around forever but has a field that says “the new one is over here” and then the new one has a field that says “yes, I am the same as that old one”. At least I think that’s how e.g. mastodon handles moves of users (just the person/actor, not any of their content. AFAIK nothing in the fediverse can do something like this with anything other than a person/actor at the moment)

The problem is the thing has already been federated. Changing the ID in the db will appear to the rest of the fediverse as new things, not as those same things.

Snappymail is simple and awesome if you want better webmail than roundcube, I switched and didn’t look back. I am also a big fan of native apps, I’m using thunderbird on my PCs and and Fair Email on Android, both of which I am quite happy with.

Pretty sure it needs to be https://$user:$pat@github.com/username/repo.git#branch.

1. You host it yourself
2. You can get a cool domain name
3. It’s pretty low maintenance

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin several years ago and haven’t really looked back. Overall I just didn’t like the direction plex kept going (pushing shit streaming services, central auth, paywalling features), and dropped it even though I grabbed a lifetime plex pass back in the day. The only thing I miss about plex was the ease of developing a custom plugin for it since you could pretty much just drop python scripts in there and have it work, though their documentation for plugin development was terrible (and I think removed from their site entirely).

Docker isn’t super necessary, there are some scripts out there that hide a good bit of how it works like the official ansible playbook or lemmy-easy-deploy.

I use docker to easily run many pieces of software in isolation from each other, it’s like VMs if you’re familiar with those, but different in some key ways that don’t really matter for this discussion.

I would still go with one that isn’t one of the biggest. My general advice is to find one that fits the vibe you’re going for, communities you’re interested in (e.g. some are focused on art or cybersecurity, etc), or is somehow tied to your locality. It shouldn’t matter that much, though some servers will be a little more (or less) strict with things like federation, content warnings, alt text, etc. Usually the server will have some info telling you some of this, and their admin should be linked and likely has a post or two pinned to their profile explaining some of this as well.

I am partial to kind.social, though have opted to run my own instead of joining up anywhere.

Honestly it depends on what your experience level with running software is and what you want out of it. For me things have been rather smooth sailing as I already host a number of things for myself (so know all about domains, DNS, servers, reverse proxies, docker, etc.) and I am the only one actively using my instance right now so (local or admin-level) moderation isn’t really an issue either.

I am very aware of what it takes to run a small instance, you are indeed correct that domain registration is not the hardest part.

Just run your own instance, I say… that way it’s your fault when you forget to renew the domain name instead of the poor soul running vlemmy.

It depends on what specific thing you want to add geoblocking to, but often something like the MaxMind GeoIP database, which then can feed into a firewall to pre-emptively geo-block at a connection level, or as part of e.g. nginx geolocating the IP a of the connecting IP then making the blocking decision at request time.

There’s a project that works with Traefik’s forward-auth middleware to do this, which is probably how I would go about it if I wanted it at an HTTP level.

No, these issues are pretty much by-design. In ActivityPub IDs are inherently tied to the domain on which they were created. Based on the nature of federation it is safe to assume someone somewhere will still go looking for that thing via the outdated URL.

If you’re taking that approach make sure you shut down the stack before you copy the data over so everything gets copied over consistently (e.g. the DB isn’t in the middle of a write), and yes it should pretty much be that easy.

Nope, not from a DNS level. All the posts you are reading are cached by whatever instance your account is on. Basically the only thing served from the remote instance is full-size media uploaded to that instance. Even thumbnails are served from whatever instance you use. Mastodon/Akkoma/etc can be set up to even proxy full-size media for users, which is a feature I imagine will eventually make its way into Lemmy. Your best bet at the moment would be to find an instance that defederates those you don’t want to see (or run your own and do so yourself). I know “blocking” an instance is an often-requested feature, so that may end up a feature in Lemmy itself at some point.

Things don’t get backfilled, so until a new action happens on an old post/comment/etc they won’t show up on your instance. New things should make their way in eventually though.

Taking the link of a specific post/comment from the community instance and searching for it from your instance should populate it on your instance, just like you probably had to do to get this community to show up so you could subscribe/post at all.

There are backfill tools/scripts, but unless you really want old posts I wouldn’t use them. It unnecessarily increases the load on already struggling popular/overloaded instances like lemmy.world.

If you find a decent alternative let me know. I have been looking for a while and not found anything that supports the full feature set I want (including Twilio).

Agreed, I recommended filtering to only http(s) links in the github issue, I just made this x-post. I don’t see a strong reason to let people link to weird things like file: and data:, or deeplink to installed apps on your computer/phone. Filtering the scheme to just http(s) is how Nutomic seems to have fixed it in the backend from what I can tell (I am not a rust dev).

May the Lord have mercy on us all.

As someone who hosts a bunch of other stuff already including my own email (because I am a madman), does stuff like this as a job, has developer experience, etc. it was simple.

Figuring each of these things out (and how they all work together) for the first time was a hell of a journey.