I run fedia.io. I also run Infosec.pub. Which is lemmy so I know a lot about both. Lemmy is much more robust, but I personally find the interface for Mbin much nicer and the development of it seems to be headed in a direction I like better than that of lemmy. At least for now.

There’s a reason for that. About a year ago, Reddit started to implode. I set up Infosec.pub and Fedia to give people an alternative. There was a huge influx of people here creating all sorts of magazines, the same that you would see on Reddit. Fedia ran kbin at the time and it had all manner of problems, and over time people sort of wandered away. Either because they were tired of the problems or because they went back to Reddit.

In any event, what we see in the local magazines is the remnants of that initial migration. I really need to go and clean them up.

Now that Fedia is on mbin, things are much better. We still have issues now and then, but generally things work well.

A tariff can be helpful if, for example, the Chinese government decides it wants to dominate the world market in widget production and so subsidizes the production of widgets by Chinese counties. This has happened in the past with steel.

But the downside is so much worse. And we experienced it not that long ago. Good read is here: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2022/march/retaliatory-tariffs-reduced-u-s-states-exports-of-agricultural-commodities/

Basically, the US applied tariffs on a bunch of stuff from a bunch of counties. The stuff we bought produced in those counties or made from things produced in those countries became more expensive. (I remember washing machines becoming substantially more expensive as a result of the tariff since I had to buy one at the time).

But that’s not the end. Those countries applied retaliatory tariffs to stuff the US exports - mainly agricultural goods. Those things are commodities produced by many countries, so a bunch of them simply stopped buying the tariffed US products, and instead started sourcing them from places like Brazil. I’ll leave it an exercise to the reader to figure out whether there’s a link between US tariffs the accelerated destruction of the Amazon rainforest to satisfy sudden new demand for produce.

And here we are years later and while many of those tariffs are gone, the US agricultural industry never recovered much of that lost business.

The servers are hosted in a datacenter and it comes with bandwidth. I costs about $100/month today and will be $400/month after the expansion. I do pay what ever isn’t covered by donations.

I’ve been in the business for about 25 years. I have a hard time recommending people jump in at this point, or at least to understand the market now. While there is constant talk of “unfilled cyber jobs”, the reality is that many people with experience are struggling to find a job in the field.

If you can get in and find a stable spot at a good company, it’s a great career, but those are getting hard to find I fear. Anyhow, please do a bit of reading about the job market for cyber security before making a decision.

my apologies everyone - it was working rock solid for a few days and I got lulled into a false sense of security and took my eye off the site for a few hours :/ I am still working on some alerting to tell me when rabbitmq dies, but it's obviously got some room for improvement.

In any event, I am aware, I've fixed the current problem and the queues are draining now. I'll work on a better monitoring and response automation system tomorrow.

Also, I am about to head out to my youngest son's wedding, so will not be able to babysit fedia until much later this evening easter time.

This is turning out to be even more fascinating than twitter

The fediverse has existed for much longer than lemmy has. I can put you in touch with the designers of the activitypub protocol, which the fediverse uses. I’m not sure what you need though

Can you shoot me an email at [email protected] and I’ll track it down for you? My apologies for the trouble.

There is something very wrong happening. Last week was challenging for me. I will have time in the morning to figure out and fix whatever is wrong. Hopefully.

I fixed it a few hours ago, but it takes a while to catch up.

The cause is unclear to me, but the processes that manage incoming and outgoing federation were "stuck" until I manually intervened. It's running now. I'm adding to my to-do list for after my job ends in 10 days to implement some sort of detection and hopefully automated restart for when this happens again.

Mbin has some rough edges still but I like the interface much better than lemmy (I also run a lemmy instance so feel ok comparing them)

I activated your account. I will figure out email when I get back home in about 90 minutes.

I’m trying. It’s a bit of a goat rodeo right now, though.

I put in a super ugly fix while I'm at the wedding. Hopefully that keeps it going till I can do a better job tomorrow.

thank you again for your help! I was at the end of my rope and you gave me the idea that solved it

just to be clear - this problem is causing error 500's in random spots, including the home page. If I had to guess, it's because I'm tracking the development repo and I picked up something that wasn't fully baked in an attempt to fix something else that wasn't fully baked.

Thanks. Just trying to give people some alternatives