No, just scour HN or any discussion board for threads about touch typing. I know I’ve read it often and see a lot of coworkers do it. Relatively fast, not looking at the keyboard and definitely not using 10 fingers :)

So yes, anecdata. Maybe many was misguided, sorry.

But that’s part of the point I guess. If it’s a work phone and you -like the author- don’t really want to customize it 100% to your needs (with your apps) why bother with flashing another OS?

On the other hand looking at what the end result of that phone was - how will the author use it? Only websites? Only phone calls? Then it really wouldn’t matter to me, with that usage pattern I wouldn’t even have a preference of Android or iOS or Windows Phone I guess.

Thanks, especially that second point makes sense. What I usually do is make a bookmark on my bookmarks bar for that and delete it again after a week or month. But I do that so rarely that it’s a good enough hack.

Also I wonder if now (hey, it’s 2018) the amount of people actively using NNTP isn’t such a low number that this is kinda moot. Also I always get the vibe of ML-hate not from people old enough to be staunch NNTP fans, but from younger people. So are the “MLs are ok, but NNTP is better” folks really even less than the “I only use NNTP”, both hardly noticeable against something else? ;)

Really? Last I checked Mastodon didn’t really support it and also, how would you even find an instance that accepts your “hostname” and thus would automatically host your users (sure, sometimes it’s only one).

I’m running pleroma now but used to run Mastodon and even if it’s theoretically possible I’d still say it’s miles more hassle than email. Sure, if I had friends I could just ask to “care about my domain”.. but hardly anyone runs those. So, yeah, maybe it’s “just” a numbers game and everything’s not shaken out or still badly documented, but especially the forwarding part would be nice and afaict doesn’t really make sense in this context.

I’ve been hosting email myself for 15+ years. Postfix made it easier to configure (Sendmail was… complicated, in comparison, in my opinion.) Dovecot works really well for IMAP/POP3. Finally Let’s Encrypt allows you to get a nice certificate relatively easily.

Greylisting helped a lot to reduce spam, but spam is still a nuisance - especially if you don’t have good filtering in your mail client (I’m using crm114).

Setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC can be a little complicated, but it seems to work fine, as long as all email from your domain is sent from a well defined set of IPs.

I’ve not had many problems, but there’s a bit of luck of the draw in getting a clean IP. I have SPF and DKIM set up (not DMARC), with the self-signed certificate that Debian auto-generated, and that seems to be enough to get mail delivered to the big providers.

For incoming spam, I reject hosts that: 1) lack valid RDNS, or 2) are on the Spamhaus ZEN RBL. This seems to catch >95% of spam. Minor config hint if you’re using the free Spamhaus tier: you need to set up a local DNS resolver (I use unbound) so you query directly, otherwise your usage gets aggregated with whoever else is using your upstream DNS, which probably exceeds the free tier.

Like the other commenters, I use Postfix, which is reasonably nice, and has good documentation.

Mostly positive. I had that discussion this morning on IRC, so I’m gonna quote myself to not retype everything:

[...] on a "decent" hoster blacklist-wise and not DO or something
and it's been running for 10 years, I don't seem to have the typical 
"gmail thinks I am spam"-problem
usually.
interestingly I had it yesterday when sending something to myself
but dunno, empty body, 25mb-video.. who knows
I hardly use my gmail-account

But thinking about it, sending a job application in November ended up in the spam folder for 2 people and I only got a reply once I pinged them out of band. That was a shitty experience, but as I hate using GMail I prefer this to a years-long shitty experience using it :P

If I was to “start over” these days I might go to a dedicated email hoster like FastMail, but I think it’s just too expensive. I have 4 people with their main email addresses on my server and it costs me 10 EUR /month and I get to host other “communication” services as well. For FM it would be 15-20 USD per month and I still haven’t found out if I could use “a low amount of” domains and not just “use your own (one) domain”. Sure it takes some maintenance work, but it’s part hobby, part learning experience and part keeping in touch how stuff is done as it touches on my dayjob, depending on which role at what company I do. (Been running my own mailserver for roughly 15 years I guess)

Generally, problem free since I started doing it in the mid 2000s.

From the client/user point of view, riot is certainly as optimal as it is subotimal. It is fairly usable and nice, but also incredibly ressource hungry and slow at times. I would like to see more native clients (in particular console clients), but this would certainly increase friction in terms of client support for features and changes.

This also extends to the operational point of view: It’s not just that matrix/synapse is simply slow at times, it’s that the design is by default way more ressource intensive than IRC. An ircd requires basically nothing in terms of ressources to serve quite a seizable number of users. synapse on the other hand requires quite a lot of CPU power in addition to metric ton of space in it’s database (especially if your users join large rooms). Joining the main matrix channel is almost certain to cause hours of full CPU usage and increase the db size by a few hundred MB.

Of course matrix and irc provide different featuresets, but right now I feel that matrix may never be ideal for large group chats simply by design. I can’t quite see how rooms like the matrix main channel will ever be “ok” for a matrix server.

All this being said, matrix works nicely for one-on-one and small group chats, which is what most of my users do.

The actual design of the Matrix spec doesn’t have any issues that I have seen but the current software seems more like a prototype in production. Hopefully dendrite and some updates to riot can speed everything up because thats one of the main issues I see with it now.

You might also be interested in checking out Exodus for quickly getting access to newer versions of tools like that. It automatically packages local versions of binaries with their dependencies, so it’s great for relocating tools onto a server or into a container. You can just run

exodus git tmux | ssh my-ubuntu-server.com

and those tools are made available in ~/.exodus/bin. There’s no need for installing anything special on the server first, like there is with Snap, Flatpak, and Nix.

It’s free, it’s very easy to setup and understand, and there is a lot of documentation out there on how to integrate it into different popular systems like Wordpress. It’s definitely invasive, but it’s hard to deny that it’s easy to integrate.

End-user-facing SaaS products are one thing. On a site I run on infrastructure that I run myself I can just look at the httpd logs¹ and doing so is way faster than looking at GA², but if I also bought a dozen other random SaaS products then the companies that run those won’t ship me httpd logs, but they will almost always give me a place to copy-paste in a GA tracking <script>. If I have to track usage on microsites and my main website, it’s nice if the same tracking works for all of them.

It has some useful features. I believe offhand that, if you wire up code to tell it what counts as a “conversion event”, GA can out the box tell you things like “which pages tended to correlate positively and negatives with people subsequently pushing the shiny green BUY NOW button?”

There’s a populace of people familiar with it. If you hire a head of marketing³, pretty much every single person in your hiring pool has used GA before, but almost none of them have scraped httpd logs with grep or used Piwik. (Though I would be surprised if they didn’t immediately find Piwik easy and pleasant to use.) So when that person says that they require quantitative analysis of visitor patterns in order to do their job⁴, they’re likely to phrase it as “put Google Analytics on the website, please.”

(¹ GA writes down a bunch of stuff that Apache won’t, out the box. GA won’t immediately write down everything you care about because you have to tell it what counts as a conversion if you want conversion funnel statistics.)

(² I have seriously no idea whatsoever how anybody manages to cope with using GA’s query interface on a day to day basis. It’s the most frustratingly laggy UI that I’ve ever used, and I’m including “running a shell and text editor inside ssh to a server on literally the opposite side of the planet” in this comparison. I think people who use GA regularly must have their expectations for software UI adjusted downward immensely.)

(³ or whatever job title you give to the person whose pay is predicated on making the chart titled “Purchases via our website” go up and to the right.)

(⁴ and they do! If you think they don’t, take it up with Ogilvy. He wrote a whole book and everything, you should read it.)

For me it was probably ego-stroking to find out how much traffic I was getting. I’ve been blogging for more than a decade and not always from hosts where logs were easily accessible.

What gets me is why people care about how many hits their blog gets anyway. If I write a blog, the main target is actually myself (and maybe, MAYBE, one or two other people I’ll email individually too), and I put it on the internet just because it is really easy to. Same thing with my open source libraries: I offer them for download with the hopes that they may be useful… but it really means nothing to me if you use it or not, since the reason I wrote it in the first place is for myself (or again, somebody who emailed me or pinged me on irc and I had some time to kill by helping them out).

As such, I have no interest in analytics. It… really doesn’t matter if one or ten thousand people view the page, since it works for me and the individuals I converse with on email, and that’s my only goal.

So I think that yes, Google Analytics is easy and that’s why they got the marketshare, but before that, people had to believe analytics mattered and I’m not sure how exactly that happened. Maybe it is every random blogger buying into the “data-driven” hype thinking they’re going to be the next John Rockefeller in the marketplace of ideas… instead of the reality where most blogs are lucky to have two readers. (BTW I think these thoughts also apply to the otherwise baffling popularity of Medium.com.)

Also, it’s invasive, sure but it’s also fairly high value even at the free level.

You get a LOT of data about your users from inserting that tracking info into your site.

Which leads me into my next question - what does all this pro-privacy stuff do to such a blog’s SEO?

(I know, I know, we’re not supposed to care about SEO - we’re Maverick developers expressing our cultural otherness and doing Maverick-y things…)