A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things, too.
Mmhm, I’m not sure if I’m entirely on the same page. Admins have complained. Users would like to run their own instances, but they can’t as the media cache is quite demanding and requires a bigger and costly virtual server. And we’re at the brink of DDoSing ourselves with the way ActivityPub syncs (popular) new posts throughout the network. We still have some room to grow, but it’s limited due to the protocol design choices. And it’s chatty as pointed out. Additionally we’ve already had legal concerns, due to media caching…
Up until now everything turned out mostly alright in the end. But I’m not sure if it’s good as is. We could just have been lucky. And we’re forced to implement some minimum standards of handling harassment, online law, copyright and illegal content. Just saying we’re amateurs doesn’t really help. And it shifts burden towards instance admins. Same for protocol inefficiencies.
I agree - however - with the general promise. We’re not a big company. And that’s a good thing. We’re not doing business and not doing economy of scale here. And it’s our garden which we foster and have fun at.
No support for any of the free social media platforms like Lemmy…
Correct answer. There is no general purpose AI model that can fit ino 1GB. These small models exist, but they do very specific small tasks. Sentiment analysis, object detection, word embeddings for vector databases…
For coding, answering questions and generating text, you’d need like 6-8GB minimum. For maths way more than that and they’ll still be throwing dice instead of giving correct answers.
Yeah, sorry. You need an (android) app that does this, or PieFed…
It’s a great feature, though. I’m not one of the people who get offended/annoyed easily… But I also prefer to consume some content and skip some other things…
Use the keyword filter. First of all add the last names of the candidates. And also “voting”, “election”. I’m happy with the amount of posts that remain after that.
Maybe competition will make the Fediverse better? With or without Bluesky in the loop, we could take inspiration from their unique features and what people like about their platform. I certainly didn’t know they take onboarding seriously and offer shared blocklists and useful stuff like that…
Sure it’s the same seller?? I’m pretty sure Amazon does not show different prices to different people. But the same product is often offered by several sellers, for different prices. And if for example one of you has Prime and fast shipping activated, it’ll show the fastest option. Which might be more expensive. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happening here. It’ll say somewhere: Sold by XY, ships from Amazon.com. Make sure it says the same thing there.
Of if she put it into the cart and now Amazon sticks with the exact option… If the specific seller increased their prices over night, the shopping cart might stick to the seller and it becomes more expensive for her… While Amazon will offer you a different seller that’s cheaper today. But everyone can choose which seller to buy from, if there are multiple for a product.
Sure, no need to explain. I think it’s been appropriate to point it out.
And wow, quite some comments you got. I’m not sure if I agree with the negative ones. We’ve been requesting better moderation tools for a long time now. I wouldn’t immeadiately do away with your effort. I share some concern about privacy and introducing “algorithms” and bots into the platform instead of making it more human… But nonetheless -we need good moderation. A lot of the issues are just technical in nature and can be solved. And you seem pretty aware of them. And there’s always a balance and a potential of abuse that comes with power…
I think we should experiment and try a few things. A bot is a very good idea, since we won’t get that into the Lemmy core software. I think mostly due to personal reasons. And that relates to the lemmy.ml situation. I’ll have a look at the code. But I’m using PieFed instead of Lemmy. Which already attributes reputation scores to users. So this might be aligned with PieFed’s project goals, maybe we can take some inspiration from your ideas.
Hehe, good roast on lemmy.ml
You’re probably fine?! We all make mistakes and/or do silly things. It’s part of the journey. And for example being a bigot isn’t something to be proud of. But having the personal strength to get out of a situation like that, certainly is something to be proud of.
Meh. You’re right… However… Most things will run either Doom or Linux (or both). And nobody cares whether they have been designed to do it, or not. 🐧
I have Linux (OpenWRT) running on a router with 64MB RAM and 16MB of flash storage. And it works flawlessy. Also have Linux on a second WiFi router, my TV (LG WebOS), one phone, a laptop and a computer. (And I forgot about the Raspberry Pi and the VPS.)
Since you’re asking for feedback:
Very good intro and analogy to email.
I’d delete the sentence with “focusing on Lemmy”, since you’re going ahead and talking about the Fediverse in general in the next sentence, and then Mastodon. And the article is more broad and not really focusing on Lemmy, one paragraph aside.
There are quite some good paragraphs. Explaining the concepts very well, and without the need for prior knowledge. You also mention protocols, give examples. I think it’s written very well and good to understand.
I’d add a bit more info on how federation works and the consequences. Earlier on in the text to clarify the terminology. That instances are the interconnected nodes that make up the network. In the background the information gets forwarded between them. Every instance can have it’s own rules and perspective on the network. Cater to specific interests or have a unique design.
The paragraph on “Openness and Choice” isn’t entirely correct. Users can miss out on posts. Not all posts are visible from all instances.
I’d add a paragraph that it’s made by the people, for the people. And not for some corporate interests.
I like you also mention the downsides. I think you should rename “Monitization” into “Funding”. And especially the “slow innovation” is some downside that might not be very obvious. It’s nice to mention that.
You could also mention the “network effect” because that’s also something we regularly struggle with.
And that this happens to be powered by Free Software. And we can choose which server software to use and everyone is invited to participate or change things to their liking.
I think it’ll be hard to be successful with that. Lemmy’s userbase is small and not growing. Projects like KBin died. And we already have several frontends. Now someone introduces yet another one, just that it’s not open source, not actively developed unless they pay a developer to fix something. It doesn’t have a community yet. And I don’t see any significant features that’d attract 100k new users or something. They don’t seem to be invested for the same reasons the existing Lemmy community mingles here. And they’re not eating their own dogfood but rather discussing it on Reddit… So maybe they’re good at marketing? I think that’d be the only reason why something like this would take off and be successful.
Sure. I think there are some areas where self-hosting is kinda mandatory because other solutions don’t fulfill my requirements. But I don’t think a password manager is part of that. It stores the passwords encrypted in the cloud anyways, $0-$10 a year isn’t much and I think Bitwarden has a good track record and you’ll be supporting them. Self-hosting is a nice hobby and I think integral part of a free and democratic culture on the internet. But it doesn’t have to be every tiny tool and everyone. Do it if you like, otherwise it’s fine if you support open source projects by paying a fair price if you want convenience and they offer a good hosted service.
Lots of people like and recommend Bitwarden. I think followed by KeePass on second place.
I self-host stuff because I can, because I learn something while doing it and it gives me control. And I’m running that server anyways, so I might as well install one more service on it. If you don’t want to spend your time managing and maintaining servers and services, go for the official (paid) service. That’ll do, too.
If you’re worried about your internet connection going down, either use a VPS in a datacenter or just use software that syncs to your devices. I think Bitwarden does that, your passwords will be available without an internet connection to your server. They just won’t get synced until the server is reachable again.
Sure. It’s constantly pulling all the posts, comments and likes from potentially hundreds of instances and writing it to it’s database to make it accessible to you once you decide to open Lemmy. It’ll get updates from the network every few seconds (unless all the Americans are asleep) and that’ll cause some database operations on your side.
Concerning the requirements: You’ll need some form of server, and probably a domain name. If you’re doing it at home, make sure you have a proper IP address and can forward ports. I run a Piefed instance, not Lemmy. It uses a few hundreds of megabytes of RAM and a bit of CPU and disk. It doesn’t cache media files as Lemmy does so I can’t comment on the storage size. It’s 3GB for me.
Read the ActivityPub protocol and a book on webdevelopment… Also have a look at existing projects and their codebase.