Prerequisites

• Internet-facing web server with reverse proxy and domain name (preferably SSL of course)
• Server behind the reverse proxy with Rust environment

Installation

• Don’t bother downloading the source code to your server; installing it that way gives you a big debug executable
• Instead just cargo install mollysocket
• Move the mollysocket executable if desired
• Run mollysocket once so that it will emit the default config

Configuration

• Fish the config file out of .config/mollysocket/default-config.toml and copy it somewhere.

config.toml

• In the new file, replace the allowed_endpoints line with allowed_endpoints = ['*']. The default 0.0.0.0 config appears to be a bug; this setting controls access to endpoints within the app, not IPs from outside. Leaving the original value causes mollysocket to reject everything.
• Put a proper path in the db = './mollysocket.db' line rather than just having it land wherever you’re sitting.
• Delete the mollysocket.db that was created on first run (even if it’s already where you’re intending to put it). This is just to make sure the web server creates it and has the correct permissions.

Run script

• The environment variable ROCKET_PORT must be set or the server will sit and do nothing. It’s best to create all of the environment variables mentioned in the README, whether that is in a user profile script or in a shell script that wraps startup. You can change any of these values, but they must exist.

• export ROCKET_PORT=8020
  export RUST_LOG=info
  export MOLLY_CONF=/path/to/your/config.toml
  

Proxy server

• You’ll need to proxy everything from / to your mollysocket server and ROCKET_PORT.
• Exclude anything that you may need served from your web server, such as .well-known.

Things to know

• I get this warning on startup: “Forced shutdown is disabled. Runtime settings may be suboptimal.”
• I also can’t stop my server with any sane signal; only SIGKILL brings it down.
• Some discussion here: https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket/discussions/1880

deleted by creator

you probably already found this, but for others who might be curious:

https://molly.im/

https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android

in the settings if you change notification method from websocket to unified push, the UP settings come up, including a server address (which is what they intend to be used) or some air gap mode that i can’t find documented

i’m shopping for mp3 players for precisely this reason - a friend has an ipod touch that abruptly stopped scrobbling. the last.fm app is stuck in a loop sucking battery. and she needs bluetooth anyway. she has always kept music and phone separate but now we have to ask the five whys on that before getting her a new unfamiliar gadget.

well i feel stupid now for not doing the obvious. but…

Blocked Page

Your organization has blocked access to this page or website.

on the PPA box, this is what it showed me (meanwhile it was attempting to connect to incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org). another symptom of displaying respect for enterprise policies but in fact ignoring them. (as i had mentioned, on this box all of the settings look locked down as they should be, but it’s still attempting to send telemetry.)

thanks, i’ll look again. it’s not that i love the idea of being fingerprinted; i just think that five mylar bags, four tin hats and a partridge in a pear tree won’t save me from that. i need my password manager, and once that’s in, enforcing a generic screen is silly - cow’s out of the barn. but not having the arms race against pocket and telemetry would be a big bonus.

i did try that but the never-dark mode blinded me. i understand the reasoning, but absolute anonymity isn’t my own threat model; i’d like to be able to use themes and resize the window

an interesting oddity: on my non-rooted xperia, signal thinks that i don’t have play services and so it falls back to… polling. every five minutes. killing my battery and my logs.

i had to put signal into the restricted battery group, which means no notifications. i anxiously await the new molly, as i already have a unified push environment. it looks like the migration will be a bit delicate.

neo store refuses to run if you don’t grant it the right to send notifications and bypass battery optimizations. if an app demands a permission and doesn’t have a plausible explanation why it needs it, i don’t keep it :/

imo magic earth is a navigation app, full stop. it does that amazingly well, including live traffic, but i wouldn’t use it for anything else. organic maps is a better general-purpose map but isn’t a patch on magic earth for nav.

appimages just got less easy…

i don’t know which update did it - i think it must have been os-level (i run pop_os, derived from ubuntu) - but appimages silently stopped working. double-click, nothing. finally i looked in the log out of desparation, which said ‘appimages require fuse’.

more accurately, appimages require fuse 2 and the os had just upgraded to fuse 3. the fix is to heat-seek libfuse2, and don’t mess with any other fuse-related package as things can start wrecking themselves:

sudo apt install libfuse2

originally seen on an omgubuntu post

against which kitchen pots have proven surprisingly useful elsewhere. against all odds

thanks to this post, i’m trying out searxng and then kagi, neither of which i knew. hopefully there’s a searx instance configured roughly to how i’d want. i’m not philosophically opposed to paying, but search is a delicate thing to be personally identifiable - and i don’t care what your privacy policy is, if you’re taking my money, you can connect me with my clicks

woah are those negative or slide? we have a place here that i used to hand a hundred or so negatives at a time, but that was in the before times. they’re still here but don’t really advertise scanning anymore, so not clear on what would be possible

is that somewhat new?

it’s somewhat… janky.

you can ‘migrate’ an account, to use the masto term that will make it easier to search. this:

• makes it so your old account can’t post
• puts a ‘pointer’ on that account so that you get its mentions (i think)
• puts a note on that profile that you’re really you-at-new-place now
• causes all accounts following you to auto-follow the new place

it does not:

• remove you-at-old-place from other people’s follower·ing lists; old you eventually shows as dormant, but you’re still in their lists until and unless they clean house
• take any posts with you; you-at-new-place starts with an empty profile
• copy over any profile information
• copy over any post filters

i’m not clear on how long your old posts linger at old-place, and you might have to export/import your following list.

it’s possible, i’ve seen lots of people do it, but it gets more unappealing the longer you’ve been actively using the account. unless you’re like me and have posts set to self-destruct within days. and you can imagine the difficulty of actually moving the posts - if i were an avid shitposter and i moved house to noshit·social, then all my garbage would be dumped in the yard in violation of policy.

this political stuff is a mess that i hadn’t been aware of when i jumped into this ecosystem. the two fortunate things are

• that tankie stuff is stuff i don’t see in /all, and if they’re just unreasonably disappearing content, i wouldn’t have known what was missing; and
• i arrived in an instance whose admin’s main and self-proclaimed myopia is being a swiftie, which completely lacks the global thermonuclear war of tankie, though the incoming could eventually be a different tune

i’ll definitely be watching for this though, and wonder if it will become like masto where they actively try to funnel all noobs into their instance

you can click the recommendations tab from your profile - my recommendations

i have both and i parallel scrobble to both using pano scrobbler (phone) and strawberry player (desktop). you can sync your scrobble history from last.fm into listenbrainz, either one-time or on a continuing basis (though the latter seems to run the risk of duplicates). i chose to do it once and then feed them in parallel going forward.

as a discovery tool, listenbrainz is a bit anemic, except for once a year, and last.fm has declined for me over time.

first the good

listenbrainz does a year-in-music that shows your listening patterns and also top things you might have missed - my 2022 year in music is here. i scooped up a lot of stuff from that list.

now the bad

listenbrainz’s recommendation engine is only so-so, not terrible, not brilliant.

many commercial streamers and scrobblers only understand last.fm, so if you stream a lot you may not be able to keep listenbrainz updated except through manual syncing.

last.fm’s recommendation engine has declined over time for me and its community is stagnant, so i don’t see a lot of neighbour activity. it remains better than listenbrainz week by week, but only marginally.

oss stats

i remix and embed stats from the listenbrainz api on my own websites (profile link). doing this from last.fm requires an existing api key (which it seems they’re no longer issuing), and of course they can rug-pull that api at any time, not like we’ve seen that lately. but listenbrainz stats recalculate only daily.

caveat

my experience of these is different to most people’s, as data geeks don’t tend to listen to the candyfloss music that i do.

pootriarch@lastfm · listenbrainz · popheads community

mastodon struggled with scaling in the beginning, everytime elon strung more than four syllables together. a lot of admins there didn’t know what the spikes would do - this is not a criticism, i would have had no idea either - and most new users piled into one or two big instances, as is happening here.

the more tech-savvy of the initial waves migrated to smaller instances, the instance admins figured out where the pain points were, and i think there were changes to mastodon itself. i expect all of these are coming for lemmy, and it’s going to be lumpy here for a while just as it was in masto.

having lived through that, i came into a smaller instance here immediately. federation issues here are a bit gnarlier than on masto, but i trust that also will be sorted.