I once proposed a “toilets on the air” event where you took a QRP CW rig into a bathroom, sat on the toilet, and texted like it was 1912.

edit: someone beat me to it.

When you say it like that, it sounds really mundane.

Ignoring the how of it all, here’s how I imagine it working subjectively. They have a much wider visible spectrum compared to humans, but they can’t perceive the whole thing all at once. They have four pairs of nictitating membranes that act like bandpass filters. Between the bandpass membranes and signal processing in the brain, they “tune” to different spectra, and can even narrow the bandwidth of the received signal. They can sense light polarization by aligning or misaligning their eyes to the direction of polarization, and because their eyes don’t rely on focusing a light to a point, they can stare at the sun without harm or discomfort.

Subjectively, they have no fixed concept of color, as objects appear different depending on how their eyes are tuned. Their languages lack simple color words, and must rely on analogies to objects that are similarly colored, much like most (Western) languages have no simple terms to describe odors beyond relating them to their sources (“earthy”, “fruity”, “floral”, etc).

The low-end of their eyes’ frequency range isn’t set, but they can at least see thermal radiation emitted by living bodies, and the high end is set at the threshold of ionizing radiation. Because their eyes work equally well during the day and at night, they and other species in their clade that share the same eye structure are neither nocturnal nor diurnal, and have active and rest periods that do not sync with the day-night cycle. Upon achieving sapience and developing a structured society with the concept of timekeeping, they do not use different time zones.

This would be a receive-only biological system evolved by a species of alien critters to serve as eyes, so not for any IRL project.

Does fldigi do SSTV now or am I not getting the joke?

At the time of the OP I was testing federating two nodeBB instances. ActivityPub requires HTTPS AFAIK.

an ARES group in a neighboring county set up an AREDN network. They said it worked very well, with two caveats.

First was a jurisdiction issue. They couldn’t send climbers up to replace or repair equipment on their own, they had to wait for another entity to do it, this lead to things going unrepaired for a long time, which leads to…

Second, WISP equipment, even outdoor-rated stuff, isn’t as weatherproof as one would hope. Where I live (gulf coast US) we get a lot of wind and rain, so things broke down often. Combine this with the inability to replace and repair equipment as needed and you get a perpetually flaky network. I think it’s no accident that the most active AREDN mesh is in SoCal where the weather is perpetually clement.

This is all second hand, of course, though I can vouch for the WISP gear not being exactly Ragnarok proof. It seems when it worked, it worked very well, but it often didn’t work for the reasons above. If you can locate equipment in places you have access to, I think it’ll be fine.

I went all in with AREDN but couldn’t get people interested.

Interesting. My AC fan has a noise pattern that revs up as the AC or heater starts. I can hear it on the radio before I hear the fan itself.

I’m attempting to run a NodeBB forum. I’m only assuming that web sockets was the issue because the first search result I came up with that matched my symptoms mentioned it.

Cool. Follow up question: Do I generate the cert once and distribute the same private key to all the servers I’m running? I’m guessing not, but does that mean I run the certbot command on every server?

I looked up Cloudflare tunnels and tried setting one up. Some things future readers may want to know:

1. You have to set Cloudflare as your domain’s authoritative nameservers.
2. You need to set up an account (not a problem) but also have to register a payment method, even for the free tier (no me gusta).
3. Regarding NodeBB specifically, if you set up a tunnel, you can access the forum, even over HTTPS, but it fails when you try to log in. A few minutes of searching leads me to believe it has something to do with web sockets, and the solution requires you to partially expose your IP address, defeating the principle purpose for me to use cloudflare in the first place.

If it exists, a ham will try to bounce radio waves off it, or use it as an antenna.

That’s what I warned everyone about during our weekly net. We’re tiny fish compared to the telecom giants. Everything above 6 meters is in jeopardy.

On Lemmy you can see (and search) a list of all the activity from every instance federated to your home instance. Looking at Ibis, which a few posters have mentioned on this thread, it has a discover page with a list of federated instances and articles on those instances. The current format is hardly scalable, but it’s a start.

But, as I said before, the issue is less about discoverability and more about editing. Just like I can post in this thread even though I’m on a different instance, you can edit an article on one instance even though you’re on another. The alternative as used by Wikipedia, is to allow anyone, account or not, to edit. Requiring someone to have an account on a federated instance would mitigate a fair amount of spam and ease moderation.

In addition to discoverability, I’d say it provides a happy medium between letting every rando with an IP address edit a page and requiring account creation. Part of the point of the fediverse is to have (almost) everything in one place under a single account while still keeping things decentralized.

I wouldn’t doubt it, though MW seems hard to manage.

This looks interesting.

Seems like it’s still early days yet, but are there plans to add things like namespaces and categories?

I’m not thinking of a single distributed wiki, but something more like Fandom where you can edit pages on other wikis that are federated to yours.

Easy hosting isn’t quite the issue. Dokuwiki is trivial to self host. What I’d like something that’s a happy medium between requiring account creation to edit pages and letting literally every rando with an IP address go to town.

I’d like to see a federated, self hostable forum platform. I believe NodeBB is implementing or has implemented activitypub, but while it’s open source it seems even less of a turnkey solution than Lemmy or Mastodon.