Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.

I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.

UPDATE:

I see Bookstack mentioned a lot, so I decided to try installing it. I took the better part of a day and I still can’t get it working. Pity since it looks a lot nicer than Dokuwiki and has access control unlike Mediawiki.

XMPP doesn’t seem to be well supported in terms of Windows clients

hmmmm seems to deploy fine but when I try to register a new account (per the setup instructions) I just get an unknown error.

The concept is promising, as I said before I’ve been wishing for an integrated forum/wiki for a while now, but it seems like it’s very early days for this project.

The AI stuff has me bristling though. Not a fan.

Will have to look into this. Been saying for a while that a wiki-forum combo would make sense, since a forum slowly becomes a repository of knowledge, if not generally then at least for its members, and a less linear and more browsable way to catalog that knowledge would make sense. You can set up a separate wiki server but then you have two things to manage and moderate.

Oh hey I’ve been looking for “obsidian but with version history “ for a bit now.

It’s already hard enough for self-hosters and small online communities to deal with spam from fleshbags, now we’re being swarmed by clankers. I have a little Mediawiki to document my deranged maladaptive daydreams worldbuilding and conlanging projects, and the only traffic besides me is likely AI crawlers.

I hate this so much. It’s not enough that huge centralized platforms have the network effect on their side, they have to drown our quiet little corners of the web under a whelming flood of soulless automata.

I meant the OP more as a lament about it being hard rather than a quip about it being easy.

Though upon reflection it’s not the voice chat that’s a problem, it’s the fact that Discord is a lot of things, a chatroom, a VOIP service, and so on, and recreating all those things on top bolting on federation (which I don’t see as a desirable feature in this case) is what makes it so hard.

Update: I got Mumble working without a lot of grief. Their mobile client isn’t great though. I might try Stoat.

Federation just complicates things, as it’s just for a myself and a few friends.

I haven’t messed with Ansible in a bit. Do you mean playbook? Or is cookbook some other concept I haven’t learned about yet?

why would you go with a proprietary OS?

I’m happy with my Unifi network and security setup, especially the single pain of glass. I had assumed the NAS would integrate with that system, but it doesn’t seem to.

I have a QNAP NAS in addition to the unas2 mentioned in the OP. Both have WD red drives. I also run Proxmox on an ancient laptop. How does virtualizing a file server work?

Well I have the vpn working but the connection seems to close after 2-5 minutes unless the client keeps talking to the server, at which point I have to ping the server from the client to re-open the tunnel. Is there a way to keep the tunnel open?

You are correct, I want the VPs’s IP to be what people see, not my home IP.

You mean nginx the regular web server, not nginx proxy manager, correct?

I’m fairly confident espeak is all you’re going to get that’s FOSS, local, and with any non English support. Yes every espeak language sounds like a Brittish guy badly pronouncing that language, and this includes the American English voice as well.

None of this may be relevant, but I’m curious what your use case is. I use TTS very extensively to consume media and have my preferences. None of them are open source, but as far as I know all operate locally, though they’re baked into other programs like screen readers and ebook readers.

I prefer older more robotic voices because they remain intelligible at high speed. Eloquence is a favorite, as are the older Apple voices like Fred and Ralph. I think it has gone by other names but TruVoice (spacing and capitalization may vary) is also up there. It was semi popular during the surreal meme era. Another memetic synth that’s a little before my time but I quite enjoy is DECTalk (AKA the Moonbase Alpha voice). I believe Vocalizer was responsible for the OG Siri voice Samantha and that one’s a more human voice that’s still serviceable at high speeds.

How much traffic before the sales team comes knocking?

Building the satellite is affordable. You can do it for the cost of a high end gaming PC. Launching that satellite is where it gets expensive.

The only free wide-area location tracking system I know of is APRS, which is absolutely not private and requires a ham license and equipment.