Kushan

I’m all for this. The big argument against it is that it makes it harder to waterproof but I’ll take that over a phone I have to replace every 18 months because the battery is shit.

Big instances surfing up content from smaller instances is invariably going to cripple them unless larger instances start locally caching that content.

That’s true if of any power plant though. It’ll still be cheaper and safer (if it ever works).

The main goal of these sites is link aggregation. It wouldn’t be overly difficult for a federated server with its own /c/Technology community to see other posts from other communities linking to the same thing and combining the discussions into a single view.

The tricky part there is moderation, but even that’s manageable by allowing moderators to remove content from a federated view within their own instance, it’ll just be difficult when a small instance is dwarfed by a larger one.

This won’t be possible. Best you can do is use something like waybackmachine to get a cached version of the page.

I know you’ve written off home assistant, but I’d strongly recommend reconsidering it. You can get something like Home Assistant yellow, which will serve as a hub for just about everything you could ever make smart. Home assistant is good for just giving you a dashboard of all your smart home stuff, you don’t have to lean into the heavy automations or anything like that.

Freedom of speech is never freedom of consequence. And if that consequence is that nobody wants to listen to you, well that’s on you.

What could be more important than being a shitty person?

I think this is true but I think it has always been the case. The question is were there more bots than usual and I’m unconvinced there was.

https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/

There’s a bit of a gap in the data but despite some subs coming back online, it seems the number of comments has more or less stayed at the levels of the last 2 days.

I’m aware, what I am getting at is that there’s multiple “Right” answers to solving what is essentially a very difficult problem.

Nobody really knows, but I personally don’t think there were any more bots on Monday than there was a week earlier. It’s a nice story that users dropped with the subs going dark, but I think it might be wishful thinking on our part. To my knowledge there’s zero evidence to suggest that they were mostly bots.

I did similar, I swapped my shortcuts/apps for ones going to Lemmy. The muscle memory has worked in my favour.

The subs going dark should have only been half of the protest. Users should have also stayed away from the site but I don’t think that was really coordinated.

The number of new posts didn’t drop much, the comments dropped a bit more but only by like 20%, which isn’t a lot given the amount of subs that went dark. Reddit doesn’t care about subs, they care about users and it seems engagement was still pretty high.

The next protest should be to all users to stop using the site. Drop the users and they’ll start to listen.

I think this has always been the case, though. Engines haven’t just suddenly got better, they’ve been getting better and better for decades now. Some of those improvements give you features “out of the box” that you used to have to implement yourself. One of the reasons Unity became so popular with smaller developers is because it lets you focus on building your game - most of the tech is there, you’ve got an asset store for additional models, plugins, etc. so save you time but ultimately making a (good) game still takes time. Making a game is a very iterative process and a lot of the quality of a game these days is less to do with developing the engine and more to develop the mechanics of the game itself - the way your characters move, the responsiveness of the controls, the UI layout and so on. All of that stuff is hard to be given to you by an Engine, because it’s specific to your game.

I don’t know a lot about Lemmy’s implementation but a difficult thing to deal with is how do you “rank” a post? Like you have a small community of a few active people, but there’s federation with a massive community with lots of users - which posts are “better”?

Worse still, there’s an inherent lag/delay with the federated posts, a post that was very active in the last hour might have only been federated to the server in the last 5mins - so what do you do, do you bubble up all those posts or ignore it because there’s more recent and relevant things?

The kicker is that these decision points aren’t instant either, any system that’s doing this kind of ranking will have an algorithm as you describe, but that algorithm will take time to process all the data, while the data is coming in batches as each server federates with each other. It’s a difficult problem to solve.

But as defences go, it’s a pretty braindead one - the very people Spez is trying to demonise is his userbase. Why would you invest in a company that has such dangerous users?

And he’s another example of the classic Reddit moment. Prior to him they had a CEO everyone hated and Steve came in after she left, except it later transpired that she wasn’t the cause of the issues the community revolted about.

Oh no! I’ve got an instant pot and quite like it. I have had mine years though, maybe that’s part of the issue.

Yeah, that kind of abuse prevention really shouldn’t be client side at all. It’s one thing to prevent a user accidentally causing harm, but if a bad actor can deliberately do it then we’ve got bigger problems.