operation 'to hell with discord lol'
May. 28th, 2023 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavso I got another rasp-pi for a thing!
(mom thinks it's a little funny, the 'starting to amass an army of 10+ computers' habit. i really do need an actual cart/tech bench to put all of these dang emulator controllers and computers.)
anyway sketching out the context, discord is a super popular chat platform that really rose to prominence around 2016 (basically when I started using it to talk to the gf). it also feels like the clear winner of 'what site is fandom at large on' post-twitter and post-tumblr; the privacy of smaller servers with like minded friends was too good to pass up for most people who had been bruised by harassment online (understandably). it's basically the only site that I use daily, and I've been starting to rankle at the idea that there's this corporate-owned platform that's known to engage in AI scraping your private chats, scraping your data, you can't export chats with other people (even with their consent), and that's just the shady shit that's known.
discord's also been making some very concerning moves in the last year especially with censorship - will not upload some R18 art (eg, they're also scanning everything you're uploading), has been known to nuke entire servers in fallout of banning certian people, and there's no transparent appeal process with either (an acquaintance of mine has already gone through this). There's two small art servers I deeply enjoy at much higher risk of this (one of them being JD's uniform fetish/anthology server), which is making me start this initiative ahead of schedule.
so! cue, operation 'to hell with discord' aka going back in the mists of time to ..... IRC :P
from my light reading/research, IRC is an open-source chat platform that's functionally the same, and because it's been around since the late eighties, feels like a perfect use case both to (a) escape censorship, and (b) have a lightweight backup chat platform in case if discord shits the bed. (fun fact, did you know it was used to report on the USSR coup attempt back in the early 1990's because it was that good at circumventing censorship?)
Anyway, I've used IRC like, once back about 5 years ago on my old mac, and it was a lot of fun/pretty natural (felt a lot like AIM), though that didn't go anywhere because I didn't know the good chat rooms (these days i think i'd know of a few more, if only for evesdropping on open source gossip). The best part? it can be self hosted, oh yeah baby. (ironically, i think it wasqueenlua ages ago that suggested dicking around self hosting as like, baby's first learning step to being a sysadmin, so I'll have a lot of fun with the nuts and bolts there even if it falls through halfway through.
My plan is:
1) use a tutorial (something like this, though i'll probably read through a few) to set up mIRC on the pi for proof-of-concept self hosting a server.
2) use matterbridge to bridge between self-hosted IRC rooms <=> a private discord test chat of mine and the gf's.
3) once confident of that process, ask permission to the small at-danger kink art servers if they'd be okay with the bridge/backup, and bot needed for that. if consensus approves, set up the bridge and start the education process so everyone can seamlessly jump over if need. (even if people think it's more work than worth it, at least we can rest easy knowing the backup tech is there if a server got nuked)
4) Document the process from start to finish (in a tone that's a little less casual and a little more accessible) because I have a sneaky feeling this is going to be a move that more and more kink artists are going to have to take.
hoo-ah!
(mom thinks it's a little funny, the 'starting to amass an army of 10+ computers' habit. i really do need an actual cart/tech bench to put all of these dang emulator controllers and computers.)
anyway sketching out the context, discord is a super popular chat platform that really rose to prominence around 2016 (basically when I started using it to talk to the gf). it also feels like the clear winner of 'what site is fandom at large on' post-twitter and post-tumblr; the privacy of smaller servers with like minded friends was too good to pass up for most people who had been bruised by harassment online (understandably). it's basically the only site that I use daily, and I've been starting to rankle at the idea that there's this corporate-owned platform that's known to engage in AI scraping your private chats, scraping your data, you can't export chats with other people (even with their consent), and that's just the shady shit that's known.
discord's also been making some very concerning moves in the last year especially with censorship - will not upload some R18 art (eg, they're also scanning everything you're uploading), has been known to nuke entire servers in fallout of banning certian people, and there's no transparent appeal process with either (an acquaintance of mine has already gone through this). There's two small art servers I deeply enjoy at much higher risk of this (one of them being JD's uniform fetish/anthology server), which is making me start this initiative ahead of schedule.
so! cue, operation 'to hell with discord' aka going back in the mists of time to ..... IRC :P
from my light reading/research, IRC is an open-source chat platform that's functionally the same, and because it's been around since the late eighties, feels like a perfect use case both to (a) escape censorship, and (b) have a lightweight backup chat platform in case if discord shits the bed. (fun fact, did you know it was used to report on the USSR coup attempt back in the early 1990's because it was that good at circumventing censorship?)
Anyway, I've used IRC like, once back about 5 years ago on my old mac, and it was a lot of fun/pretty natural (felt a lot like AIM), though that didn't go anywhere because I didn't know the good chat rooms (these days i think i'd know of a few more, if only for evesdropping on open source gossip). The best part? it can be self hosted, oh yeah baby. (ironically, i think it was
queenlua ages ago that suggested dicking around self hosting as like, baby's first learning step to being a sysadmin, so I'll have a lot of fun with the nuts and bolts there even if it falls through halfway through.My plan is:
1) use a tutorial (something like this, though i'll probably read through a few) to set up mIRC on the pi for proof-of-concept self hosting a server.
2) use matterbridge to bridge between self-hosted IRC rooms <=> a private discord test chat of mine and the gf's.
3) once confident of that process, ask permission to the small at-danger kink art servers if they'd be okay with the bridge/backup, and bot needed for that. if consensus approves, set up the bridge and start the education process so everyone can seamlessly jump over if need. (even if people think it's more work than worth it, at least we can rest easy knowing the backup tech is there if a server got nuked)
4) Document the process from start to finish (in a tone that's a little less casual and a little more accessible) because I have a sneaky feeling this is going to be a move that more and more kink artists are going to have to take.
hoo-ah!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-05-28 06:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-10 06:52 pm (UTC)The IRC writeup will be shared on here so you'll absolutely get to see it. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-10 10:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-05-31 09:59 pm (UTC)if you need MORE potential sidequests/distractions, it may be interesting to look into Matrix as well. i haven't looked into it much myself, but i know that, like IRC, it's fully decentralized (so you can self-host, don't need to rely on any central authorities, etc), and since it's a more modern protocol, it might end up being more straightforward to e.g. set up a bridge between it and discord (irc is great but can't gracefully handle e.g. image uploads and the like).
"why not both" etc etc ok i'll stop suggesting YET MORE endeavors now :p
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-01 01:04 am (UTC)you are too right that looks like a fun shiny sidequest XD here's to both of us with our shinies~
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-01 01:09 am (UTC)but that's a total shot-in-the-dark guess. i haven't looked at either protocol in detail, so, if you go find out YOU get to be the expert and come tell ME (yes this is a ponzi scheme bwahaha)
almost kind of like studying technology from how it was first made to get those historical quirks, if you know what i mean?
funny you mention it because that's SUCH a good instinct with a lot of technology. like, depends on the domain, but this was the only way to approach really understanding CPUs, in particular—i got thrown into the deep end of "hey make this new feature on a modern Intel CPU work, kthxbai," and felt like i was constantly wading through this vocab and nonsense i didn't understand...
...then an electrical engineer friend told me to just go find the oldest Intel manual i could find, read and really understand *that*, and then go forth. so much easier! still didn't know everything but it was so much easier to be like "oh this looks like it's a modern version of [x] to compensate for the weaknesses of [y] but i can mentally treat it as filling a similar role" or whatever
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-01 03:15 am (UTC)that advice with the intel manuals is *so great* though. manuals are a bit scary for me, but same reason i was digging through linux history a few months ago as part of getting used to this new laptop lol. kudos to you for having that work!
and hahaha, sneaky work there with the homework! (unironically love this kind of tech homework, and fortunately for you i am more than happy to be the nerd of looking this up :P )
to your point about the resource intensiveness -- just reading through a little of matrix' documentation it looks like images might be the killer of why i might go with IRC first after all, as well as taking a shot with the earlier historical bit; it'd take a lot longer for text to fill up a pi's storage, versus images.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-03 02:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-06-03 06:38 pm (UTC)