Are you saying I was being silly?

You might be onto something

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said “Hey Google’s doing that and they’re super smart, we should do that too.” So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don’t really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don’t worry they’re all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who’s not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they’re concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said “Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they’ll just hit the button and make it go.”

And so now everyone uses Docker and it’s a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it’s all in this weird virtualized box, and the “from scratch” instructions are usually out of date.

The end

I know it’s only vaguely related, since they’re not US-funded, but at some point I think it would be hilarious (in a particularly poignant way) if the Lemmy developers’ funding got cut off by the process of the explicitly rabid governments they are fans of finally succeeding at destabilizing the friendly Western countries where they live to the point that NLNet wasn’t funded anymore. As I understand it, NLNet is already facing some headwinds because the friendly liberal elements in EU politics are getting replaced by the same kind of “fuck everyone just give money to rich people and also anyone who disagrees with me dies” elements that Russia likes to give money and social-media-shilling campaigns to support.

Surely Russia and China will jump to the front and fund basic infrastructure work for the good of everyone, if that happened. They could count on it happening, instead of having to get jobs.

Surely.

I’m not trying to be overly self-promotional, but rss.ponder.cat + piefed.social’s “feeds” could probably do this very well. I actually really like the combination of having aggregated RSS feeds I can control, along with other people voting on them so particularly interesting stuff from them get surfaced more than other stuff.

Ah, I got it. Yeah, it makes sense, WP.com is moderately likely to keep working fine probably, it’s just that it would make me nervous at this stage. I just don’t think he can do anything to really “punish” Bluehost if they’re using his software in some way that displeases him. WPEngine’s mistake was getting tangled up into a business relationship where they were depending on listings and APIs and things. Although, it probably seemed like a good idea until their business counterpart went off the deep end.

Yeah but why would the company run by the crazy person be the only safe place?

It’s open source. Just find a different host that isn’t run by a known unstable human. Literally any other. That would be my feeling on it, at least.

Yes yes this is a very good point, stay well clear of Wordpress.com, Automattic, or any similar nonsense. All I meant by “Wordpress hosting” was managed hosting from some third-party place like Bluehost or Hostinger. The software is fine, it’s all open source and the worst that will happen is 6 months from now, it’s not getting a lot of feature updates because the core company that was making it has imploded completely, and someone from the community has taken over security updates.

But yes you need to stay clear of the clusterfuck while it’s going on. Don’t use Wordpress.com or anything adjacent to it.

Edit: Wait, I didn’t even read closely enough. Why would Wordpress.com be safe? I had some vague impression it was connected with Automattic in some way, although I’m not sure, maybe it is just one of the third-party companies. I just feel like anything that’s in any way adjacent to Automattic or anything “official” about Wordpress would be best avoided for a while.

Yeah. I’ve run plenty of services from a computer sitting in someone’s office, or in my living room, while they’re in-production-while-in-development. Sometimes it makes sense. But it’s just not something you want to deliberately aim for as the solution. What if the power goes out? What if your motherboard dies? What if the toilet overflows when you’re not there, and floods the place?

Just get a dedicated service and pay them their $10/month and have them worry about all that crap for you.

It’ll be vastly cheaper and easier to just get hosting somewhere.

Wordpress hosting (edit: THIRD PARTY Wordpress hosting, Bluehost and Hostinger are decent I think, see below) is fine for most small businesses and starts at about $10/mo. You can go fancier and more reliable and go up to $30/mo or something, or if you really need your own VPS you can go with Vultr or Hostinger and get a pretty similar price range for pretty much whatever you want to do.

I think the only reason to self-host is if you have some crazy special hardware or legal issue, or your own dev stuff that you don’t want/need to push to “the cloud” to put it online. Otherwise it’s such a buyer’s-choice market that it’s hard to justify.

It’s hard for me to tell if I’m just set in my ways according to the way I used to do it, but I feel exactly the same.

I think Docker started as “we’re doing things at massive scale, and we need to have a way to spin up new installations automatically and reliably.” That was good.

It’s now become “if I automate the installation of my software, it doesn’t matter that the whole thing is a teetering mess of dependencies and scripted hacks, because it’ll all be hidden inside the container, and also people with no real understanding can just push the button and deploy it.”

I forced myself to learn how to use Docker for installing a few things, found it incredibly hard to do anything of consequence to the software inside the container, and for my use case it added extra complexity for no reason, and I mostly abandoned it.

Borg borg borg

You can combine it with a FUSE mount of the Google Drive, I’m not sure if that works but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.