Datamining thread (Yukinu please respond)

[anon]

Hello Yukinu i wish to learn more about you

1. Why do you run this website?
2. What games do you play, if any?
3. Do you have a job?
4. Make an IRC server/Matrix homeserver and a place there for people to chat

[Yukinu]

Hello anon

1. Why do you run this website?

I remember an era of web when the spaces were much smaller, unique, personal, and vibrant. It used to be common for individuals and small communities to build their own sites so that they could share all the things that interested them. Some sites might start small, with only a few static pages here and there; other sites might be more ambitious, building entire forums and services dedicated to a niche community. Regardless of the size though, each site was unique and a reflection of the people that were building them. Communities started to thrive out of these small seeds, developing their own unique traditions, customs, and norms, and building on top of an ever changing set of code bases that adapted to needs of the community. The web can truly be a magical place.

So I suppose the reason why I run this site is that I want to be support that web, the web that once was, a web that was still big but also small and personal, and to be a part of the change I want to see in the world.

2. What games do you play, if any?

I used to be a pretty avid gamer, would follow the new releases and keep up with the gaming news. I don't play as many video games these days, but still try to make time for them. Here are the ones I've played most recently:

Summer, Cicadas, and the Girl

A very short indie Japanese VN from the 2000s. It was recently recommended to me by the admin and editor of the new leaf journal. Has an interesting mechanic for getting the true ending of the game.

Vintage Story

A 3D voxel sandbox game by the developer of a Minecraft mod called Terrafirma craft. Terrafirma craft added a lot of realistic mechanics for mining ore, smelting, and blacksmithing to Minecraft. To make tools in the mod, you would have to bake your own charcoal from logs, prospect for ore, smelt ore into alloys, and go through an entire progression of metals to create stronger tools. With Vintage Story, the developer essentially took all of their ideas Terrafirma craft and built an entire game around it. I'm currently playing this game, just recently hit the bronze age in my world.

Project Diva Megamix+

A rhythm game starring VOCALOID characters and songs. Has 200+ songs, 5 different difficulties, with some ability to mod in songs as well. I played it on my steam deck, works okay on the hardware, but has some issues with audio desyncing. Last time I played this game was about a month ago.

Ancient Dungeon

A VR rouge-lite dungeon crawler with pixel art graphics. The gameplay and mechanics are simple but very well put together. It makes good use of the strengths of VR without leaning too excessively into VR. The game isn't graphically intensive, so it works on many headsets. A run through all floors in the dungeon takes about an hour. Last time I played this game was about a month ago.

Touhou Luna Nights

A doujin Touhou 2D Metroidvania game. It has an interesting mechanic where you can freeze time in the game. The encounters in the game seem to be well designed around this mechanic, so they tend to be more aggressive and bullet hell-like. I only wish the game was longer and the map was bigger, since by the time I was done with the game I still wanted more! Finished this game earlier this year.

3. Do you have a job?

Yes

4. Make an IRC server/Matrix homeserver and a place there for people to chat

Interesting that you ask this, since I've looked into and tested various protocols and software on my server. My server is currently running a Debian-based distro (Ubuntu in this case), and I typically try to follow the Debian principles when looking for new software (I rely a lot on the package repo, and look for software that integrates with or builds on top of system libraries). With that in mind, here are some of the protocols I've looked into:

Matrix

I actually tried to get a matrix homeserver running on my server last month. Debian stable doesn't currently have any matrix server software available, but Debian unstable does have matrix-synapse server, so I decided to look into synapse and found out that they have a prebuilt deb package available in their own repo. I was able to run synapse successfully on the server, but it took up an enormous amount of CPU, so I had to shut it down. There are lighter matrix homeserver softwares out there, but I haven't tested out anything else yet. Might look into matrix-construct at some point.

IRC

I haven't tried setting up IRC yet. InspIRCd is available in Debian stable and there is documentation on the Debian wiki, so maybe this weekend I'll give it a shot.

XMPP

I have prosody running on my server (available in Debian stable), and could try setting up an XMPP chat room. Right now I mostly use XMPP for the occasional short form chat.

[anon]

hey im the same anon thanks for responding
i came to check on you a week before and saw that the site was down, why the downtime? was worried it was permanent

about the irc/matrix/xmpp, still have any plans? you are correct about the lightweight hs software, its called Dendrite. it is better for low resource usage. back then when i posted this i just started running my hs and found matrix cool, now though, while its still cool i think it doesnt have a good future ahead of it, an think xmpp or irc would be better

what do you think?

[Yukinu]

i came to check on you a week before and saw that the site was down, why the downtime? was worried it was permanent

The site is still going. It goes down every once in a while for a variety of reasons:

• My cert renewal process is a bit clunky and requires me to take down the web server temporarily. All of the applications are behind the web server, so we when web server goes down for the most part none of the applications are accessible.
• Sometimes I test software on the server and have to bring various services up and down while testing. I generally opt to maintain the server and all applications manually instead of using managed services, and host everything on a single box, and this can cause server downtime.
• Some applications are a bit more unstable than others:
  • yukinu.com generally always works (assuming the web server is running) since it's all static pages.
  • I run into some issues with video.yukinu.com and radio.yukinu.com. Both services tend to go down too often or require frequent updates to function properly, need to do some debugging and write a few scripts.
  • stream.yukinu.com, forum.yukinu.com, rss.yukinu.com, and git.yukinu.com are typically pretty stable. I don't have to mess around with them too much.

I'm still motivated to keep improving my site and adding more things to it for the foreseeable future. I still have ample network bandwidth, and a decent chunk of free RAM and CPU. The only major issue I've run into recently has been storage, I'm running low on disk space. When I started seeding linux distros a few months ago, I initially wanted to seed a few more different distros, but the ISO files would have been too large, so I settled on just seeding Debian ISOs.

about the irc/matrix/xmpp, still have any plans?

I'm still interested, although I haven't made any progress yet. I currently have an (prosody) XMPP server running, but don't have any public rooms set up. I should check my XMPP account more often, I've spread my resources a bit too thin between too many things and find it hard to keep up at times.

Anyways, for IRC or XMPP I would also like to set up a web client so that people who haven't used either of the services before can get a feel for them without having to install an application (though ideally if they wanted to keep using the protocols the would download native clients like hexchat for IRC or dino for XMPP). KiwiIRC and Converse.js looked like pretty good web applications for this use case.

you are correct about the lightweight hs software, its called Dendrite. it is better for low resource usage.

I also had a look at a few other home server softwares since we last spoke. I was able to get Conduit installed using the deb file, but could not figure out how to register accounts, the docs were a bit lacking on how to use it unfortunately. Construct also looked like a pretty good low resource alternative as well, but I couldn't get it to build on one of my debian machines.

while its still cool i think it doesnt have a good future ahead of it

I'm concerned with Matrix's future as well. I had been using quaternion as my matrix client for public rooms, but a few months ago ran into issues with formatted code blocks. Quaternion also hasn't implemented E2EE, and these two things, along with the lack of performant home servers, made me realize that the matrix spec has become too large and too difficult for hobbyists to implement without spending a significant amount of time and resources. Now, I think a lot of matrix users expect and are implicitly operating under the assumption that all users are using element or a client with all of the features of element. Also the popularity around the matrix.org hs is a bit concerning, as I don't think its clear to a lot of new users that matrix is federated (like email), since all they see is the one large home server and the one main client application.

Anyways, good to hear from you again anon, have a good day