More technically there’s two ways to move data between two separate services. You can either pull or push the data.

Assume for both scenarios that the client is your phone and the server is some machine in the cloud.

With pulls the client calls an API and the server returns a response. Generally the www works this way. You ask a server for a wab page and you effectively pull the source down to your browser.

Pushes work the opposite, in that a server has data for the client and needs to push or otherwise give it to you. Pulls are relatively strait forward because every server has a well known name (the domain name and url). But your phone’s IP address changes constantly. So how does a server know how to contact your device? There’s generally two ways:

1. Your device can poll (make repeated pulls to a server checking for new data)
2. Or you can register some identifier and your IP address with some central server every time it changes. And then the server can essentially call a URL on your device directly. This is essentially what Google and Apple are doing as it doesn’t waste CPU resources and your battery.

You could in theory implement either of these yourself but because of the way the OSes work on both Android and iOS there’s no guarantee that you can keep a process running in the background forever. As the OS can kill your process if the OS needs more free ram, etc … The built in notification APIs are exempt from this because they are part of the OS.

If you’re worried about your IoT devices on your LAN the problem isn’t necessarily that they can access WAN but rather that there’s a security vulnerability and that they can be accessed by the WAN. Once a device is compromised and attacker can then use it as a “beachhead” to access other devices on your network.

So for example, with my setup every IoT device is on a separate VLAN (the guest network acts similarly) which can’t get access to WAN, can’t be accessed from the WAN and can’t initiate any network calls to any other VLAN. Now my primary VLAN can talk to my IoT VLAN, and IoT can talk back, it just can’t start the communication.

This does pose a problem for TVs though that need to talk to Jellyfin as hinted at in the original post. So what you could do is create a specific firewall rule that allows the TVs to at least initiate communication to Jellyfin but not any other device on your primary VLAN. This will probably require a more sophisticated router though than most of the consumer ones out there. Just be mindful that if n IoT device is compromised they can then try to attack the jellyfin server to jump to your other VLAN and then the rest of your network.

Just wanted to add… After reading your initial post I did some more digging on adding tracking headers, etc… especially by T-Mobile.

While it’s definitely a thing, it only applies to HTTP traffic. Even HTTPS blocks their ability to add those headers. So any traffic that’s using any other protocol (DNS, email, ssh, or just gaming, etc…) would be safe from your ISP from at least trying to add these tracking headers.

Yes but while the service is targeted for home use there still is remote work which generally requires a VPN back to the company network. They wouldn’t be able to block this. Now sure they might be more inclined to block Mullvad but they’d impact too many businesses by blocking wireguard as a whole.

And assuming they did block Mullvad but not wireguard… Just rent a VPS and install a wireguard server and client there to bridge back to Mullvad.

I know this doesn’t help much but I use T-Mobile cell towers with an always on VPN with no issue. But I don’t see why they’d block Mullvad. (I’d be more concerned that they’d block them than wireguard in general). But there’s completely legitimate reasons to use both so I don’t see them really bothering to block either.

To also add to the other comments: because the government doesn’t want or even need to have a balanced “checkbook”.

Assume for example you want to buy something from me. But you only have “don bucks”. So you buy a widget from me and I charge you 10 “don bucks”.

Problem though, through taxes you’ve only got 5 bucks left. So you just create 5 bucks and add it to your pile. (Deficit spending) Now if you don’t balance that with a loan, your “don bucks” are now worth less because why would I want one of your “don bucks” when tomorrow you could just create a million of them for no reason. (Hyperinflation) So you instead borrow 5 bucks from a friend of yours with a promise to give him back 6 tomorrow. (Bonds)

I still sell you my widget for 10 “don bucks” but now what can I spend my newly acquired “don bucks” on? Well, since everyone has their own currency I ultimately have to spend it on you. This means I end up giving you those 10 bucks back in hopes that you’ll either give me more in return (another loan/bond) or give me back my own currency from money I’ve traded to you.

So in the end spending more than you make (at the nation state level) can be a net boon on the economy as you effectively create a vendor lock in, similar to how companies push their gift cards, etc … because that money is only good in one place. You just have to make sure not to spend too much beyond your means because every dollar you create this way adds to inflation a little bit. So if you create too much then inflation gets out of hand and you end up with hyperinflation and now every one of your citizens wants to get rid of your money because they’ll lose too much before they can give it back.

Because of changes in how the lemmy API works I had to abandon the project awhile back.

The GitHub page is still up and if anyone wants to take over they’re more than welcome. But the project would need a complete rewrite in order to function and even then there’d still be limitations.

Yes, but Google at least innovated and tried to increase customer value with Android. They also make better phones (from some people’s perspective) than Apple. I’ve seen nothing from Epic that tells me that their product is better than Steam. Sure they have free games, but that business model isn’t sustainable and for the non free games, why would I buy from them vs Valve? Sure, if I was a developer I might get a better deal with Epic, especially if I can sign an exclusivity agreement), but I’m not a game developer I’m a gamer just looking to play my games on my PC as easily as possible.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I can at least share why I didn’t care for it.

Steam already exists and there isn’t a lot I feel is missing from the Steam store. Not to mention there isn’t anything that Epic does better than Valve for their storefronts. Epic doesn’t provide any new value that Valve doesn’t. In fact I’d argue that Epic causes negative value for several reasons:

1. They essentially fragmented the PC market as now I can’t access all of my games in a single location. The same reason for example that I hate that Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, etc … exist. It just makes the overall experience less convenient and more expensive.

2. Several features that Steam already has working are either broken or missing in the Epic Store. Especially around the shopping cart, etc … I haven’t gone to look recently to verify if any of these have been fixed and probably won’t until the other points are addressed, if they even can be resolved.

3. There’s no level of trust with Epic compared to Steam. I have a massive Steam collection and Valve has shown time and time again that I can trust that my data is relatively safe with them. When was the last time you saw Valve in the media because of a data breach? When was the last time your Steam account got hacked. Epic is just new here so they haven’t had a chance to earn that trust.

4. Their motives for wanting to create a new store wasn’t to improve the customer experience. Instead it was to improve their bottom line. The court cases against Google and Apple prove this. If they at least tried to have a PR campaign to show how Epic is innovating compared to Steam especially for making the customer experience better, the Epic Store might have sit better with me.

5. Timed exclusives. Similar to point 1, but they were just trying to use their massive cash reserves from Fortnight to buy their way into the market rather than earn the trust of customers. This again resulted in fragmentation of the PC market.

Anyway, just my two cents.

Correct. As I can only provide links to posts that are on your selected home instance. Eventually I’ll change this but you’ll get a 404 page for links that aren’t on your home instance, but see my P.S. below.

P.s. there have been changes to the Lemmy API that have prevented me from getting updates for about a month now. So most of the results you’re seeing are from old posts only. Until I can rebuild the crawler or find a new API there won’t be any new content.

Playing devil’s advocate for a bit… So these are just cross-posts. Which existed even on Reddit. …I assume they weren’t handled in any way in Sync or Reddit?

But let’s say this is fixed… What to do about the multiple comments threads? How would you reconcile them with each other? Especially since the user can choose different ways to sort the comments as well. Would all of this logic normally handled by the Lemmy back-end now need to run on your phone? Also how do you choose which post / instance to actually display and which ones to hide?

Btw, I’m not trying to dismiss the idea. Just want to call out some of the technical problems that might come up trying to implement such a feature. As well as ask questions to try and determine exactly how such a feature is expected to work.

I’m also running Ubuntu as my main machine at home. (I have a Mac and do Android development for my day job).

But at home, I do a lot of website and backend dev.

1. Code in VSCode
2. Build using docker buildx
3. Test using a local container on my machine
4. Upload the tested code to a feature brach on git (self hosted server)
5. Download that same feature branch on a RaspberryPi for QA testing.
6. Merge that same code to develop 6a. That kicks off a CI build that deploys a set of docker images to DockerHub.
7. Merge that to main/master.
8. That kicks off another CI build.
9. SSH into my prod machine and run docker compose up -d

Thank for sharing the results.

I can say one of the most requested features I keep getting requests for is a global search as well. I’m just blocked by a bug in Lemmy at the moment.

A tool to see better recommendations on who to follow could be interesting as well. I’ve recently added a new feature that allows for users to search communities (on Lemmy and Kbin) about what posts are actually talking about. I wonder if something similar could be built for users…

But again thanks for sharing.

Problem is finding the difference between repost bots and bots that are helpful like automod and link redirectors.

Maybe. 2nd idea I’ve got is that if no one is replying after say 24hrs and something like 75-80% of your posts are as such and you have at least 100 such posts, you get added to the list?

Main concern I see about something like this is false positives and how someone real could end up getting blocked.

I definitely want to think on this some more but it might have some legs.

…I wonder if there’s a programmatic way to detect these bots? Some sort of analysis on their posting behavior?

If they’re playing nice they’ll have the bot flag checked in their profile, and then maybe build a list of any bot that creates posts? As most of the “good” bots just reply to comments? Anyway just thinking out loud. But I’m thinking I could easily add a public API to my search engine that just returns a list of “posting bots”…

some query community:!ultralight@lemmy.world would search your community. Now, if this community is less than 24hrs old, it may not have been indexed yet, so you may just need to wait a day or so.

I just tested with https://www.search-lemmy.com/results?query=test+community%3A!ultralight%40lemmy.world&page=1 I was able to at least find 2 posts.

The target folder may be quite large. You can look at the dependencies for my project but my end binary is only a few MB.

I don’t see anything wrong initially. Can you also test with something like postman? It’ll allow you to control the headers etc… that you send.

You can also compare to what I have here and see if that helps: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/blob/b6c88355aba49abca52862473650526821ee165a/server/src/api/lemmy/fetcher.rs#L123

Not that I’m aware of. I already opened a request on the backend to have an API to provide a since= property. But ultimately found a workaround for my needs (not applicable here).