I appreciate the perspective. Think I’ll do some instance shopping.

Interesting. Didn’t know that this instance had that reputation. Is there anyone out there archiving and cataloguing removed posts / comments across instances? I’d be curious to see some data around this. Would be a fun NLP project to try to identify who might be running certain instances based on the ideological bent of their censorship interests. Could be fun to try to parse out state propagandists from the religious extremists, from the single-issue warriors, from the non-ideological power-trippers, etc.

you misunderstand. a Skeloton is a spooky stationary bike that steals your data, but it’s very expensive. You could buy a knockoff skelaton, but it’s more economical, privacy-protecting, and environmentally friendly to just use a dead body you already have lying around.

I’ve never used mastodon and I’m not familiar with mastodon.lol. I’m fairly new to federated platforms in general tbh just figuring it out as I go along. I tend to browse all instances but I made an account on lemmy.ml because that was the one that was recommended to me on reddit. might join a different instance at some point if I find lemmy.ml to be unsatisfactory at some point e.g. if I find out they defederated from some instance I am interested in.

The peer pressure thing… I mean yeah, people voice their opinions, disagree, and if they can’t reconcile they defederate. It’s messy but I think that’s kind of the point. The only alternative to peer relationships is some kind of asymmetry.

I mean, kinda. in the Fediverse anyone can set up a town and appoint themselves sheriff. More towns (instances) -> more sheriffs. And because the power is more distributed, there are more checks, which has a side effect of making discussions about power (and the abuse thereof) noisier. If it makes you feel any more at peace with it, the perpetual argument about norms and rules is the only alternative to having a single faction seize control and enforce their rules, so anything that is being argued about in public (and not censored) hasn’t been fully captured by a single thought-policing entity.

Good call, I haven’t yet but I think I should in any case. I got big plans for this little fella and network administration is one of the gaps in my education I’ve been meaning to fill in for a while now.

They’re both functioning as routers at the moment, the topology is:

internet fiber cable <---> ISP Router <---> OpenWRT Router <---> (ideally VPN'd) client devices

Both routers are handling DHCP on their own LANs, and if the OpenVPN service is stopped, clients connected to the OpenWRT router can connect to the internet without any apparent issue.

I don’t think so, I’m not trying to do port forwarding or anything like that, I just want the secondary router to be treated like a regular client by the ISP router (that only sends traffic to the VPN). Thanks for the rec though, if I can’t get the native client working I’ll give Gluetun a shot.

EDIT: I added some rules for UDP ports 1194 and 5060 to the ISP router just in case there was some back traffic that wasn’t getting back to the client, restarted the server and same result, Host Unreachable :(

It came with the ovpn config file I got from Proton, and I can reach it when the openvpn service is down. Not sure why I can’t hit it (or anything else) with the service up but I think there’s something wrong with how the service is capturing traffic from the wan interface. Not really sure but that’s where my head is at ATM.