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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • From my own experience as someone living in the UK, probably two reasons, for those countries at least.

    1. Early adoption of the iPhone in the US vs UK
    2. Different price structures between US and UK

    In the 2000s, most people who liked to message a lot in the UK (generally young people and teens) were on pay-as-you-go ‘top up’ plans where each individual message had a cost. SMS messages cost anything from 1 pence to 5 pence, and I remember on my plan, MMS (picture messages) cost a ridiculous 12 pence each! It was expensive. Most people (and especially younger people) had Android phones, and so as soon as a credible Internet-based messenger became popular, people flocked in droves to jump to it. It was WhatsApp in the UK which won that race, and it remains the de-facto messenger to this day.

    Things were different in the US. The iPhone got a huge early foothold in sales, and iMessage became dominant simply by being first to market and gaining critical mass. It was also more common (versus the UK) for people to be on contract plans that had SMS and MMS included as part of the plan cost, so even for people who didn’t have iPhones there was less financial incentive to dump those technologies, and SMS remained prevalent.


  • My biggest problem is security updates.

    The “x years of upgrades” model is okay when it’s for an app, where you can just keep using it with the old feature set and no harm is done.

    But Unraid isn’t an app, it’s a whole operating system.

    With this new licensing model, over time we will see many people sticking with old versions because they dont want to pay to renew - and then what happens when critical security vulnerabilities are found?

    The question was already asked on the Unraid forum thread, and the answer from them on whether they would provide security updates for non-latest versions was basically “we don’t know” - due to how much effort they would need to spend to individually fix all those old versions, and the team size it would require.

    It’s going to be a nightmare.

    Any user who cares about good security practice is effectively going to be forced to pay to renew, because the alternative will be to leave yourself potentially vulnerable.





  • I agree as far as the feature set is concerned, but software unfortunately doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

    A vulnerability could be discovered that needs a fix.

    The operating system could change in such a way that eventually leads to the software not functioning on later versions.

    The encryption algorithms supported by the server could be updated, rendering the client unable to connect.

    It might be a really long time before any of that happens, but without a maintainer, that could be the end.


  • The clue with Unraid is in the name. The goal was all about having a fileserver with many of the benefits of RAID, but without actually using RAID.

    For this purpose, Fuse is a virtual filesystem which brings together files from multiple physical disks into a single view.

    Each disk in an Unraid system just uses a normal single-disk filesystem on the disk itself, and Unraid distributes new files to whichever disk has space, yet to the user they are presented as a single volume (you can also see raw disk contents and manually move data between disks if you want to - the fused view and raw views are just different mounts in the filesystem)

    This is how Unraid allows for easily adding new drives of any size without a rebuild, but still allows for failure of a single disk by having a parity disk - as long as the parity is at least as large as the biggest data disk.

    Unraid have also now added ZFS zpool capability and as a user you have the choice over which sort of array you want - Unraid or ZFS.

    Unraid is absolutely not targeted at enterprise where a full RAID makes more sense. It’s targeted at home-lab type users, where the ease of operation and ability to expand over time are selling points.


  • Been using unraid for a couple of years now also, and really enjoying it.

    Previously I was using ESXi and OMV, but I like how complete Unraid feels as a solution in itself.

    I like how Unraid has integrated support for spinning up VMs and docker containers, with UI integration for those things.

    I also like how Unraid’s fuse filesystem lets me build an array from disks of mismatched capacities, and arbitrarily expand it. I’m running two servers so I can mirror data for backup, and it was much more cost effective that I could keep some of the disks I already had rather than buy all-new.




  • A central account instance rather defeats the point of a federated system.

    With federation it’s ensured that any single instance is only a small part of the whole, and that if any instance goes down (or worse, goes rogue and becomes a bad actor) then the impact of that is minimised. All users being registered on a single instance is akin to putting all your eggs in one basket.

    I do totally understand from the perspective of new users that it’s hard to understand what to do or how to do it but that is a problem that could be better addressed with clearer onboarding. e.g “Choose any one of these recommended instances to sign up. It doesn’t matter which - you’ll be able to see the same content and communities across all of Lemmy no matter which you pick”*

    *mostly, but close enough