TrinitronX

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service) along with a public standard for registering an instance/community on the index?

Sure, this and anything else is possible as long as people have the motivation and knowledge to pursue and implement it.

Something similar to DNS standards could work for Fediverse sites. In fact, why not piggyback on DNS like the SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and even openpgp4fpr / KeyOxide standards. DNS itself fulfills the first two requirements:

  1. Some form of "master index" - check! ✅
  2. Replicated across "instances" - check! ✅ ... in a sense ...
  • If you consider: Zone Transfer / AXFR a form of "replication"
  • If you consider DNS servers a "node" / "instance"... rather than just a Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse "instance"

For the second point about DNS zone transfer... it used to be the case that anyone could issue the AXFR request to a DNS server. However, this basically dumps all the records on a DNS server's zonefile for that domain. So, it's often disallowed nowadays because it discloses all hosts in the zone file, some of which might be considered private by the domain owner. Instead, server admins usually configure this to only be allowed by trusted IP addresses of other hosts. (I guess it's a very crude form of "web of trust" based on IP allow lists and the whims of a SysAdmin.)

Maybe the Fediverse has use for piggybacking on DNS via TXT records for some use cases. However, it's likely that some other decentralized method of replication might be invented specifically for federation with other ActivityPub servers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm sure most folks are aware of the list on Are we Wayland yet?, which has a lot of great apps. Most of the standard desktop ones are already included with Manjaro Sway edition. However, one glaring omission was a calculator app (bc is of course included and usable on the terminal, but can be rather cumbersome for complex calculations).

Today, I stumbled across a very nice alternative: speedcrunch. So far it's been working great natively on Sway thanks to being based on the latest qt5-tools. Nice fast keyboard-based interface with the option to use a GUI keypad, binary ("Bitfield") input, support for expressions, functions, mathematical constants, smart completion, complex numbers, and more!

Really much happier with this app when compared to the more basic gnome-calculator, and even GNU bc ("basic calculator" or "bash calc" as I like to call it).