Theres still browsers like waterfox, librewolf, palemoon, ungoogled chromium. For search engines theres SearX(NG), 4get.ca, YaCy, some more obscure ones like qwant or marginalia.search and a dozen other resellers of google and bing that nobody cares about.
Less danger than OPsec nerds hype up but enough of a concern you want at least a reverse proxy. The new FOSS replacement for cloudflare on the block is Anubis https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis, while Im not the biggest fan of seeing chibi anime funkopop girl thing wag its finger at me for a second or two as it test connection, I cannot deny the results seem effective enough that all the cool kids on the FOSS circle all are switching to it over cloudflare.
I just learned how to get my first website and domain and stuff setup locally this summer so theres some network admin stuff im still figuring out. I don’t have any complex scripting or php or whatever so all the bots that try scanning for admin pages are never going to hit anything it just pollutes the logs. People are all nuts about scraping bots in current year but when I was a kid allowing your sites to be indexed and crawled was what let people discover it through engines, I don’t care if botnets scan through my permissively licensed public writing.
Similar story here! A couple years ago learning about Gemini/gopher/smallnet from mentaloutlaw videos. So I joined a public access Unix server (first SDF later tilde.team) and learned how to write my own capsule site for a few years. Learned some basic .CGI bin and awk processing to create a gemtext to epub converter that made small ebooks of daily post in atom feed. It was like training wheels really helped prepare me for the transition to full self hosting capsule and website
Im a hobbiest who just learned how to self host my website over the summer. I didn’t know anything so I went with what I knew which is a fresh install of linux and installing from the apt package manager. As im getting more serious im starting to take another look at docker. Unforunately my OS package manager only has old outdated versions of docker I may need to reinstall with like ubuntu/debian LTS server something with more cutting edge software in repo. I don’t care much for building from scratch and navigating dependency roulette.
I wrote my own set of tools in python that convert a simple gemtext formatted .gmi file into a static HTML file thats served by apache.
I’m a big fan of the Gemini Protocol project and found that handwriting pages in gemtext was ideal for focusing on text content and not worrying about formatting. Converting it to HTML+CSS with some scripts is pretty easy.
If anyone’s interested I can give a link, currently just hosting source locally on my website, really should get a public github running.
Pangolin.
Thanks for the input! I do eventually plan on making some scripts and a custom web interface to interact with/expose some local services on my network once I have the basics of HTML covered as part of a portfolio thing so would like to cover my ass early and not have problems later
From what Ive seen in arguments about this, Plex generally is more accessible with QoL and easier to understand interface for non-techie people to share with family/friends. Something thats hard for nerdy people to understand is that average people are perfectly fine paying for digital goods and services. An older well off normie has far more money than sense and will happily pay premiums just to not have to rub two braincells together with setup or for a nicer quality of experience. If you figure out how to make a very useful plug-an-play service that works without the end user of average intelligence/domain knowledge stressing about how to set up, maintain, and navigate confusing layouts, you’ve created digital gold.
This isn’t the fault of open source services you can only expect so much polish from non-profit voulenteer. Its just the nature of consumer laziness/expectation for professional product standards and the path/product of least resistance.
I volunteer as developer for a decade old open source project. A sizable amount of my contribution is just cooking up decent documentation or re-writting old doc from the original module authors written close to a decade ago because it failed me information wise when I needed it. Programmers as it turns out are very ‘eh, the code should explain itself to anyone with enough brains to look at it’ type of people so lost in the sauce of being hyperfluent tech nerds instantly understanding all variables, functions, parameters, and syntax at very first glance at source code, that they forgot the need for re-translation into regular human speak for people of varying intelligence/skill levels who can barely navigate the command line.
True! Most browsers don’t have native gemini protocol support. However a web proxy like the ones I shared allow you to get gemini support no matter the web browser. Gemtext is a simplified version of markdown which means its not too hard to convert from gemtext to html/webpage. So, by scraping information from bloated websites, formatting it into the simple gemtext format markdown, then mirroring it back as a simple web/html page, it works together nicely to re-render bloated sites on simple devices using gemini as a formatting medium technology. You don’t really need to understand gemini protocol to use newswaffle + portal.mozz.us proxy in your regular web browser
I think ill email Acidus and ask if they can get something going on. Thanks for the interest!
They are similar and use some of the same underlying technology powered by the readability library, but newswaffle gives more options on how to render the article (article mode, link mode, raw mode), it isolates images and gives them their own external url link you can click on, it tells you exactly how much cruft it saved from original webpage (something about seeing 99.x% lighter makes my brain tingle good chemicals). It works well with article indexes. You can bookmark a newswaffle page to get reader view by default instead of clicking a button in firefox toolbar. Hope these examples help.
Yes it absolutely can! I linked the githubs with open source codes. Unfortunately I don’t think theres any precompiled executables for newswaffle its just source written in vscode. I’m only a hobbyist and not really familiar with compiling vscode but was hoping a more knowledgeable person could figure it out.
Not sure about portal.mozz source I haven’t looked to hard into it yet but hoping its easier.
Not every device with a built in web browser has reader view (like the kobo I showed). I believe firefox reader requires you download the whole webpage first and then post formats. Newswaffle is useful If your limited on data, don’t want your connection touching the servers of the news site, or just like how it formats sites over a reader view.
Would something like this interest you? Gemtext formatted to html is about as light weight as it gets. lots of automatic gemtext blog software on github that also formats and mirrors an html copy. Whenever a news page article gets rendered to gemtext through newswaffle it shrinks about 95-99% of the page size while keeping text intact. Let me know if you want some more information on gemini stuff.
I run kobold.cpp which is a cutting edge local model engine, on my local gaming rig turned server. I like to play around with the latest models to see how they improve/change over time. The current chain of thought thinking models like deepseek r1 distills and qwen qwq are fun to poke at with advanced open ended STEM questions.
STEM questions like “What does Gödel’s incompleteness theorem imply about scientific theories of everything?” Or “Could the speed of light be more accurately refered to as ‘the speed of causality’?”
As for actual daily use, I prefer using mistral small 24b and treating it like a local search engine with the legitimacy of wikipedia. Its a starting point to ask questions about general things I don’t know about or want advice on, then do further research through more legitimate sources.
Its important to not take the LLM too seriously as theres always a small statistical chance it hallucinates some bullshit but most of the time its fairly accurate and is a pretty good jumping off point for further research.
Lets say I want an overview of how can I repair small holes forming in concrete, or general ideas on how to invest financially, how to change fluids in a car, how much fat and protein is in an egg, ect.
If the LLM says a word or related concept I don’t recognize I grill it for clarifying info and follow it through the infinite branching garden of related information.
I’ve used an LLM to help me go through old declassified documents and speculate on internal gov terminalogy I was unfamiliar with.
I’ve used a speech to text model and get it to speek just for fun. Ive used multimodal model and get it to see/scan documents for info.
Ive used websearch to get the model to retrieve information it didn’t know off a ddg search, again mostly for fun.
Feel free to ask me anything, I’m glad to help get newbies started.
Thank you! Apologies for the mistake, it has now been corrected to .ltd.
Including a dildo as a random image is such a power move, no signs of encroaching corporate enshittification or AI here :)