Thanks for all the info and the detailed response!

But it sounds like you only need it to be a wired router, which is good.

Correct, don’t need wifi.

PoE ports as a requirement is what narrows your options considerably I think

I’m happy with doing this through a separate switch, but I’m happier if I can have less things to plug in. It’s not a must have though.

Mikrotik has a lot of routers with PoE out. Their newest model in the RB5009 series can do either passive or 802.3af/at PoE out. Many of their older routers have passive PoE only. Make sure you know what your cameras need.

I don’t have cameras yet, but I’m considering some Reolink ones. Happy to take suggestions. Am I likely to find a lot of difference in the PoE type or are most things compatible with each other?

I’m not overly against keeping them separate. It’s just I have a lot of stuff piling up and consolidating would have been nice 😆

One of the things I use pi-hole for is to set customer DNS entries so anyone on the network will be redirected directly to the self hosted services when the type in the appropriate domain name. So it’s not just about the filtering (which I also want), but also the (network wide) custom DNS entries.

I’m also happy with simple. I’m not overly against keeping the pi-hole and gateway separate but was just wanting to know if combining them would be an option (which is sounds like it is, but not super easy).

It’s a little bit more complicated than I made out. For one, the network is super unstable and restarting the ISP router seems to fix it. I want to replace the router to test the theory that it’s the problem.

Secondly, this is a bring your own router to the ISP situation, but the router came from another ISP, but they are all the same ISP in the end because one company owns a whole bunch of ISPs and sends the same router to all the customers of all the child companies. Long story short, it’s the router they would have issued to me, but they didn’t, because a different subsidiary sent it to me before I changed ISPs to take advantage of a special because I live in a country where the lines are open and anyone can start an ISP using the existing lines but if you get big enough to be competition then the big company will buy you out and pretend it’s still a separate company. But if it doesn’t work well then it’s up to me to solve unless I am willing to pay the ~$10USD for them to send me the ISP router that is supported by them but it will be the same cheap router as I already have. Ok that’s not a very short story but that’s why it was easier to just call it an ISP router 😆

Thanks! I’ll check it out.

Thanks! It seems OpenWRT was the magic word I was needing.

Thanks, so what I should look for is a gateway running OpenWRT, which can run docker?

Well, every time assets get split between their 3 kids, you reduce the assets accumulated in one couple.

I have one of these: http://www.riitek.com/product/254.html

The back has a keyboard, the front has programmible buttons for the TV (mostly just used for on/off), and the rest is a bunch of buttons connected to the PC.

I use it with Kodi but it’s a pretty user friendly way to control it once it’s set up.

I have to admit I was surprised I couldn’t find anything. It seems like the technology should exist, like it should be a relatively common thing people want, and it doesn’t sound overly complicated.

I found a reddit post talking about it and most people used a spread sheet or a notebook!

Perhaps the Energise app might be enough? https://codeberg.org/epinez/Energize/

It’s on F-Droid, but is an app and not self-hosted. It also isn’t really what you’re looking for I don’t think, but I’m not aware of anything like what you describe.

Well hey, sounds like you might be able to help. Lemmy devs are actively soliciting opinions on lemmy votes, maybe you could have a say? Most of the comments are around “votes are already sort of public” therefore either a) make them actually public so we aren’t pretending they aren’t, or b) keep them hidden, a little less public is better than completely public.

Perhaps you can come in with a c) option to make votes even less public?

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

Under activitypub, a lemmy community is kind of like a user (actually an activitypub group). When I post here with my lemmy.nz account to this lemmy.world community, lemmy.nz sends my comment to lemmy.world who then sends it to sh.itjust.works for you to see. The community is the controller of all interactions within the community. In this case, lemmy.world is the official source of how many upvotes this post has. And each vote is validated using the user’s public key to ensure it actually came from that specific user - a standard part of ActivityPub.

So would lemmy.world assign a token for your votes? If your instance assigned the token, Lemmy.world would not be able to validate against your user’s public key. If Lemmy.world assigns the token, it would only be valid in lemmy.world communities, as other instances would have to assign their own token. And both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world admins could still see the real association.

Also, changing how votes work would break compatibility with other ActivityPub software (e.g. Mastodon could no longer interpret an upvote as a favourite, Mbin would’t be able to retrieve any data about the votes unless they specifically changed to work in the Lemmy way instead of using standard ActivityPub).

How does this work? The community issues federates votes but with a linked token instead of a linked user? How do you track vote manipulation across different communities on different instances?

Admins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content is ranked.

This is a very real problem right now. Admins that are on to it use the votes to identify swarms of users that follow each other around upvoting each other’s spam/troll posts.

Just to be clear, I think registration applications are necessary for anyone without a team of admins across the world.

I’m not saying these instances requiring applications are doing a bad thing. Just that it’s a barrier to entry and given the non-commercial decentralised nature of Lemmy we will never be able to hire thousands of staff to handle reports like Facebook does.

It’s a new problem requiring a new solution, and while I think Mastodon hasn’t solved it yet, I think they are ahead of Lemmy.

I explained in another comment to someone else, but to recap Lemmy.world has lemmy’s registration applications feature turned on, but behind the scenes they run a bot to approve everyone who types the requested thing in the box. You sign up, type the thing in the box, and you get immediate access.

Compare this sign up process to the instance that the Lemmy devs run on Lemmy.ml.

Now to be clear, I’m not saying it’s unjustified. Trolls and spammers are a problem on Lemmy and we need more tools to help. Most instances require registration applications and I think that’s necessary for anyone without a team of admins across the world.

But that doesn’t change that it’s a big barrier to entry. Facebook has thousands of people able to respond to reports in a short period of time. Decentralised non-commercial Lemmy instances can never meet this, so we have a problem that needs a solution.

Yes they are a good candidate I think. Curious about their sign ups though. Lemmy.world asks people to write “I agree to the TOS” in the answer box. If you do, a bot automatically approves you, if you don’t, a bot automatically declines you. There’s no waiting time.

Lemm.ee states In the “Answer” box below, please state that you agree to follow the lemm.ee instance rules (found in the sidebar of our front page), which has no specific phrase you need to answer, so I’m guessing they manually approve them?

I honestly think registration applications are a huge barrier to anyone not already on the fediverse.

We are fine, but it’s not fixed. I have a second VPS running in Finland, using this queue batcher. The Lemmy.world team kindly set up their server to point to this VPS instead of the actual Lemmy.nz server, then the VPS collects all the events and sends them to the Lemmy.nz server in batches of 100.

It keeps us up to date, but it’s cheating 😆

Last I heard Aussie.zone doesn’t have this setup, but they do have a prefetcher (or rather, Nothing4You, who made the queue batcher, is running a prefetcher for them). This basically takes the new comments and posts from Lemmy.world, and sends a request to Aussie.zone to fetch that post. Because this happens outside the normal federation queue it can be done in parallel. It means when Aussie.zone receives the federated activity from Lemmy.world, it already has it, so it can reply quicker and process more events per second. Lemmy clears out activities older than a week in a weekly scheduled job, which is why you will see Aussie.zone’s backlog drop a bit once a week. They won’t get that content from Lemmy.world, it’s just lost. Because of the prefetcher, it’s likely just up/down votes (which can’t be prefetched).

Oh definitely some. At the time we were still in the tail of the reddit surge, we were getting plenty of valid registrations and spam was only starting to take off (which was the reason for closing registrations).

But to my point, I think back to my first Lemmy experience and remember trying to work out which server I should join even though I already had a basic idea about the Fediverse from Mastodon. And I just chose the biggest in the end bpecause how do you choose? Even today I would be wary about joining any server that didn’t have lots of people.

And later I remember hearing about Beehaw then finding a registration application page and not creating an account.

These happened well before the reddit exodus, and I never really got into Lemmy until that happened and I joined Beehaw.