OK, here’s a somewhat famous case of email that could only be sent within something over 500 miles, but no further: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Thank you for sharing this!

I don’t see why not. Again, the resource footprint is so tiny that you can just throw in Mumble anywhere. You can make it tinier still if you limit sending pictures via that chat and allocate a maximum bandwidth via the config.

If pi zero, you’re serving 12 users low latency over wifi? Does it route the actual audio?

Yes, it’s sufficient. I wouldn’t advise it due to the extra overhead of wireless packet loss, but it’s absolutely technically possible. Don’t overestimate how little bandwidth voice chat really needs. It’s like 10-50kB/s per person and you’re unlikely to ever have more than 2 or 3 people talking at a time.

So, I’ve been having issues with voice chat on Discord and I’m looking for alternatives. In my search, I came across Mumble, here. Does anyone here have experience, or information regarding Mumble, or a better alternative to Discord with better latency? Is it relatively easy to set up? Is it safe? Any advice and help is greatly appreciated.

Been running a server for my friends for over a decade now. Can recommend. It’s just one apt-get to set up, runs on a Pi Zero for a dozen people, has clients available for pretty much any platform and doesn’t really require any maintenance. Latency will depend on the routing between you and your friends’ ISPs, of course, but the whole purpose of the software itself was to provide a low-latency voicechat server for gaming.

But: That’s it. You don’t get anything else. It’s a barebones voice chat server. You can set up rooms and have basic text-functionality, but you don’t get any fancy user management, no full-fledged chatrooms, no persistence beyond the room setup and only limited backend options. Keep that in mind.

I have no way to gainfully apply this in my life but I am glad you made it!

I do a presentation of the Fediverse to my college students and will soon be giving short workshops to organization as well. I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle. We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking, events, groups

Well if you want decentralised solutions, there’s Mattermost and there’s just a plain old Matrix server. Both are better-suited to collaboration projects than Facebook ever was. I’d argue the only reason it ever morphed into that role in the first place was because everyone was on there, it had little to do with features.

Basically what the title says. I know online providers like GPTzero exist, but when dealing with sensitive documents, I would prefer to keep it in-house. A lot of people like to talk big about open source models for generating stuff, but the detection side is not as discussed I feel.

I wonder if this kind of local capability can be stitched into a browser plugin. Hell, doesn’t even need to be a locally hosted service on my home network. Local app on-machine should be fine. But being able to host it as a service to use from other machines would be interesting.

I’m currently not able to give it a proper search but the first glance results are either for people trying to evade these detectors or people trying to locally host language models.

In general it’s a fool’s errand, I’m afraid. What’s the specific context in which you’re trying to apply this?

I read about OLLAMA, but it’s all unclear to me.

There’s really nothing more to it than the initial instructions tell you. Literally just a “curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh”. Then you’re just a “ollama run qwen3:14b” away from having a chat with the model in your terminal.
That’s the “chat with it”-part done.

After that you can make it more involved by serving the model via API, manually adding .gguf quantizations (usually smaller or special-purpose modified bootleg versions of big published models) to your Ollama library with a modelcard, ditching Ollama altogether for a different environment or, the big upgrade, giving your chats a shiny frontend in the form of Open-WebUI.

Curious to know what the experiences are for those who are sticking to bare metal. Would like to better understand what keeps such admins from migrating to containers, Docker, Podman, Virtual Machines, etc. What keeps you on bare metal in 2025?

If it aint broke, don’t fix it 🤷

Apples and oranges.

Package managers only install a package with defaults. These helper scripts are designed to take the user through a final config that isn’t provided by the package defaults.

Whether there’s a setup wizard doesn’t have anything to do with whether the tool comes from a package manager or not. Run “apt install ddclient”, for example, it’ll immediately guide you through all configuration steps for the program instead of just dumping a binary and some config text files in /etc/.

So that’s not the bottleneck or contradiction here. It’s just very unfortunate that setup wizards are not very popular as soon as you leave Windows and OSX ecosystems.

There’s literally no good reason to replace it with a shell script on a website.

I fully agree that a package manager repository with all those tools would be preferable, but it doesn’t exist, does it? I mean… content is king. If the only way to get a certain program or functionality is a shell script on a website, then of course that’s what is going to be used.

Yes, it hurts discoverability. How can you have a community without people?

I’d like to ask it the other way around: How many people would it need until you’d say “Yep, that’s a community alright.”?

US applicant: “How many sick days do I get?”
German HR department: “I’m sorry what do you mean?”
US applicant: “How many days may I call in sick per year?”
German HR department: “Er… that depends on how often you get sick?!”
US applicant: “Wat.”

nah, it’s better for information integrity to reply in the language you understand imo, comments translated using translator services are very obvious anyway and some people are multilingual

Sure, I agree? Maybe there’s a misunderstanding here and I should add that it simply would never even occur to me to enter a conversation if I didn’t natively understand the language that’s being used.

I often reply under Japanese posts, and I always assume users will use a translator as I do, but maybe in the context of a Japanese this may look rude?

Can’t speak for others (obviously, as this is about individual etiquette perceptions) but I would consider it to be polite to only enter conversations with unknown parties in languages that the parties have shown to be capable of speaking and understanding.
Using a new language entering a conversation would therefore signal either familiarity (“I know they understand me”) or rudeness (“I don’t care if they understand me”) to me, I suppose.

How do you find out about it? Try to view the threads while logged out and not seeing your comments, I suppose?

What’s a bad upvote?

It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.

Unbelievably so. Mumble is… basically one setup command. Don’t even need a domain. And it needs absolutely no resources, can run on a Pi Zero.
Setting up my own Matrix server was honestly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever attempted in decades of non-professionally using computers and I’m still not sure I’d be able to properly take care of the installation if it breaks. Sooo many moving parts. All the federation-oriented projects that rely on adoption rates reaaaaally desperately need setup wizards before any other additional feature.

We need to stop discussing server costs without including actual numbers.

Why? The premise is that the costs might be too expensive for someone. Whether someone finds paying 12€/a too expensive or 1200€/a too expensive doesn’t really make a difference. Either way it’s too expensive, isn’t it? 🤗

Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo

Doesn’t that just mean federation instance maintainers are self-selected among those members of the community who can afford them in the first place? It’s just a less distributed form of a donation system. Instead of relying on 50 people making a 1$ donation each to pay a 50$ hosting bill, you rely on one person (the maintainer of the instance) making a single 50$ donation. That the maintainer wants to donate is already established, how much they can afford to donate can always be reflected by how much they’re willing to let their instance grow.
That doesn’t bode well for the longevity of any single instance, but I’ve always assumed the general idea was to have as many small instances as possible anyway instead of few big ones, otherwise what’s the point of federation. And if you avoid big instances then there will never be a need to funnel funds into big hosting bills.