Fair enough

Indeed. But any price decrease is highly welcome, especially such a massive one. It now falls into the “budget of certain small communities” territory

I might assume it could be handy to be alarmed of strikes if there’s a war in your area.

This is, to be fair, mentioned in the article. Cool project nonetheless!

No, I just don’t think enforcement is good at this stage of platform development.

I do support adding alt-text!

With just how many posts don’t have alt-text, the feed may get to look quite empty.

This, in turn, would drive many off the Fediverse altogether, as it will be seen as a dead place.

Besides, we are not at the level of popularity where we can afford to exclude any creators.

Just my humble opinion

Absolutely. I don’t have a leader, but I do have you and others by my side.

Fuck the war. Fuck the so-called “leaders”

Daily life…it depends. Overall, things as running as usual, except for some things that cause everyone’s anxiety.

First is, obviously, heavy Internet censorship. Living without a VPN is so unbearable even older generations call the younger one for help. Government is currently high on pushing the state-controlled messenger Max, but no one, even the older folks, wanna join. So, they do everything in their power, from forcing government services to use Max as a communications platform, to blocking all other options. People keep using Telegram regardless, and find ways not only around blacklist, but even whitelist blocking. Max is nearly universally despised. VK remains a not-much-better alternative for those who didn’t yet find their way around whitelists. Unease grows about plans to use state-controlled apps to monitor VPN connections on Android phones and block respective IPs. iPhones are better protected in this respect, but other plans are devised as well.

Second is war. The last 2-3 years of it were relatively chill for most Russians, but with drone strikes appearing as far as Saint Petersburg, the war knocks back home. The unease is amplified by Russia turning mobile connections to whitelist mode when drones appear. The appearance of circumvention methods (bridging through whitelisted resources into the wider Internet), on one hand, relieves the anxieties of losing last bits of access to the world, but on the other, shows governments inefficiency at maintaining the drone defense.

Third is more broad and globally known - the cost of living crisis, which hits here just as everywhere else. Housing is practically unattainable for most, and rent goes through the roof. Food gets more expensive, and scandals arise about managing the existing supply, such as Miratorg claimed to push government’s hand in exterminating private farms’ livestock under the guise of disease prevention.

Overall, plenty of room for anxiety and sense of instability.

The Putin support has long switched from “go go Putin” to “who, if not Putin?” and then to “if Putin loses, the country is going to collapse”. So, over time it became less of actual support and more of added anxiety about war’s resolution and what it means for Russia going forward. Putin is often seen as a beacon of some, fainting, stability. But even with all that, support does indeed fade.

TL;DR A lot of historically important media is still stored on VHS, never digitized. Over time, VHS tapes can stick to the layer below them, so playing them directly will result in heavy damage to the tape.

Heating them up helps to soften the adhesive and play the tape safely, but there might only be one chance, and some of these tapes are very valuable.

As someone living in Russia, it indeed works to trick complex DPI systems. Unlike classic Wireguard, it works.

Alternatively, you can download Amnezia VPN client app on your phone or PC, and it has this amazing function where you provide the IP and root credentials, and it installs server software automatically.

Obviously, only use it when you don’t have other things running on your server.

Advantages:

• No need to install anything manually, just direct Amnezia VPN client to a blank Linux server or VPS
• You can install all sorts of protocols in this manner, not only AmneziaWG. Options include OpenVPN (basic and over Shadowsocks/Cloak), classic Wireguard, IPsec, Xray.

Disadvantages:

• It doesn’t show the SSH terminal as it goes installing things on your server and goes fully automatic, reducing user control and troubleshooting capabilities.

Alrightie, this worked! I did install Throne. As per sudo before rpm-ostree - it’s not necessary, it just asks for su password if you run it without sudo.

So, Throne came up with another error, it was unable to change file ownership in /usr directory (of course it couldn’t, it’s an immutable system)…and then it got me.

I read into the errors given by v2rayN, and checked it on a non0immutable distro…and indeed, my subscription list got blocked right when I started testing TUN on Bazzite a few days ago. Case closed, Bazzite has nothing to do with it.

But, I learned something about Bazzite repo management, which will be valuable going forward. Thanks a lot for so much effort figuring things out!

I got stuck with Terra atm. Bazzite shows that terra-release is indeed installed, yet doesn’t seem to check the repo when installing packages. And, predictably, fails to install either Nekoray or Throne through rpm-ostree install throne

Assuming it is disabled (as happened in https://github.com/ublueos/bazzite/issues/2580), I wanted to reenable it, but didn’t find any command to do this in rpm-ostree help.

Attempting dnf5 install throne --enable-repo=terra predictably didn’t work as it’s an immutable system.

Any ideas or help here? Your help is much appreciated.

Nekoray in particular doesn’t have .rpm, so I used the universal executable (NOT the AppImage which doesn’t have TUN capability). With TUN mode enabled, it shows outbound and inbound connections trying to be established, and exchanges of up to 300 singular bytes per second. Needless to say, no Internet resources work. The second I close the connection, everything gets back to normal.

V2RayN does have rpm and can be installed using rpm-ostree, but enabling TUN and subsequent connection attempt lead to the following log messages appear (<fields> censored):

<date> <time> from <local IP> accepted <external IP> [proxy-relay-<protocol> -> proxy] <timezone> <date> <time> ERROR [<something> <ping>] dns: exchange failed for <URL>. IN A: EOF

Same continues for every connection attempt. No actual connection is established.

Didn’t figure out how to add subscription lists (if it’s possible at all), so didn’t research further, as this feature is crucial for my use case. Looks like I’ll have to try it again.

You’ll be forgiven

Let’s go sustainable AND reverse the damage already done.

Some opinionated individuals do have programming skills, and in a Linux space, there’s plenty of dev hands.

I see you, Howard

[email protected]

[email protected] (shameless self-promotion)