It honestly makes me concerned about the broader security risks of using lemmy. There’s a lot of opportunity for them to target users they don’t like by serving them malicious content via lemmy.ml, and they have shown nothing to indicate that they are above this kind of thing imo.
Not really. Well, instance admins can defederate from it, but as a normal user you have a pitifully small list of all not easy choices. First, a couple apps like Sync and Connect can (but for them I don’t know if they would block e.g. images from there); second is move to PieFed or Mbin (I moved to PieFed myself, but could not find this post there so had to come back to my previous account, as an alt now I guess, to be able to reply here - so it’s got issues); third is move to one of only 3 tiny instances that I’ve ever heard of that have blocked it; fourth is spin up your own instance, and defederate from them. The long version.
Edit: oh, there is a basic Lemmy “instance block”, which blocks only communities on those instances - but not users, their posts, replies, votes, etc., and even that much was rolled back somewhere between 0.19.3 and 0.19.5 so that they can now send notifications to you. So it is very misleading named. The last one there is what almost caused me to leave the Fediverse entirely when I accidentally replied to one comment in ChapoTrapHouse and another somewhere in lemmygrad.ml. The replies to each kept coming in for WEEKS and WEEKS, long after I wanted it to end. The rule “remember the human” seemed to not apply to them.
I think a lot of people are going to switch to piefed once that gets more fleshed out. It federates with all lemmy but has a different and more open dev team working on it. They already have a bunch of cool features lemmy is currently lacking.
In many ways they already are ahead. The front end is a bit wonky though, and some of the foundational features are still catching up (it’s fully functioning though).
For one thing, they have “categories” of communities, and for another I can block all users from any instance I choose - though there is really no easy way to accomplish that while still on Lemmy proper.
But like when you upvote something, later it remembers that but won’t show you the color. The interface is really pretty though, and solves several of the issues I had with Lemmy, like another one is that you can turn on viewing or both the upvote and separate downvote counts, which for Lemmy iirc you can only see that for comments, but for posts that only shows on the mobile site yet not on the desktop for some reason.
The PieFed devs are super responsive, quite extraordinary so imho. It’s like they care or something (uh… cause they do, ofc!:-).
So especially since Lemmy is not perfect either, check out both Mbin and PieFed and just see them in action without an account, just for the fun of it.:-)
The DB is all that matters. Python can scale very well through parallelization. So long as one doesn’t restrict themselves to one process, there’s really little chokepoint.
Nope… CPU and memory usage matter as well… if they get exhausted, you get throttling. This also has an impact on server-costs… Why run 2 instances of something that serves 4k requests/second over one instance that serves 9k/s (just an over-exaggerating example)
That’s why I say if you don’t restrict to single process. As to why something which might be slightly more inefficient (it’s not going to be that much), it’s because of ease of development and pool of potential developers to help you with it.
Once a Piefed instance is mature enough, I could consider asking a few communities I mod if they would be okay to migrate to it.
!casualconversation@lemm.ee for instance doesn’t really need to be able to edit past posts, and we already moved from LW to lemm.ee. Moving again to another instance wouldn’t be that different.
Yeah unfortunately it’s not quite ready for mainstream yet. I’ve noticed over the last several days that I’ve been using it a bunch of small UI things that would really frustrate someone without a high level of tolerance to such. e.g. you get a notification telling you that you have a message, you click it, but there’s no message; so you do a control-F to try to find it… nope, still no message; next you have to hunt through the entire page for every “expansion block” and “Continue thread” (which takes you to another page) and those “auto-collapse” (based on comment threshold), and I disabled “auto-hide” but surely that might really be a problem if there’s a Notification for something that becomes impossible to see later without changing your configuration settings.
For extremely basic things it’s fine… mostly. Just never edit your messages and someone will be fine. I say that b/c you can’t edit comments in-line in the page where they are at, and once you are done editing one, it doesn’t take you back to it but rather to the OP thread instead. Whereupon again you have to hunt for your comment all over again as mentioned above. Which is especially annoying when you have to do it multiple times, b/c there is no Preview feature to let you know what is coming after you submit it - did you insert a space between your [alttext] (link here)? did you mess up your "quoting" rules? does an image not render?
(the above on purpose:-)
On the other hand, they can allow YouTube embeds without having to wonder what is on the other side of that sus-looking link and click and leave the page. And personal instance blocks - that actually work - and categories, and like it will tell you, for every comment, both the time something was posted and the time it was last edited, woot!:-) There’s just a ton of fantastic features, more so than Lemmy in many ways, and yet at the same time less too - if that makes any sense at all.
But then again, more people know how to code in Python, so I hope it will catch up soon:-). That might even be what we’re seeing now - the core UI needs to be not monkeyed around with by a bunch of people all working at cross-purposes, but then all these nice little additions could each be someone’s side project? But they need to get the core working too.
That’s a highly specific comm though and most instances/comms would not be okay losing the history. You also inevitably stunt growth and lose some users during such a migration. It would be much better if ActivityPub allowed an instance to change its underlying representation, while keeping all the users and post and data but unfortunately this is basically impossible.
We created those communities here from scratch. What matters is the incoming content and discussions, archived threads are good for information but not much more.
We have no content on any community here older than 1 year and a half except the ones on lemmy.ml, are those more popular than the LW, SJW or mander.xyz ones?
Yeah, it was and is the major issue with lemmy I think.
On the other hand, it’s an open source project amd there are likely other contributors that don’t agree with them ideologically. And as long as you don’t interact with the .ml instance it should not effect you.
I like it here on lemmy. But people like this being main devs leaves sour taste to it
It honestly makes me concerned about the broader security risks of using lemmy. There’s a lot of opportunity for them to target users they don’t like by serving them malicious content via lemmy.ml, and they have shown nothing to indicate that they are above this kind of thing imo.
There is a way to block an instance, no? Or maybe I don’t understand what you mean…
Not really. Well, instance admins can defederate from it, but as a normal user you have a pitifully small list of all not easy choices. First, a couple apps like Sync and Connect can (but for them I don’t know if they would block e.g. images from there); second is move to PieFed or Mbin (I moved to PieFed myself, but could not find this post there so had to come back to my previous account, as an alt now I guess, to be able to reply here - so it’s got issues); third is move to one of only 3 tiny instances that I’ve ever heard of that have blocked it; fourth is spin up your own instance, and defederate from them. The long version.
Edit: oh, there is a basic Lemmy “instance block”, which blocks only communities on those instances - but not users, their posts, replies, votes, etc., and even that much was rolled back somewhere between 0.19.3 and 0.19.5 so that they can now send notifications to you. So it is very misleading named. The last one there is what almost caused me to leave the Fediverse entirely when I accidentally replied to one comment in ChapoTrapHouse and another somewhere in lemmygrad.ml. The replies to each kept coming in for WEEKS and WEEKS, long after I wanted it to end. The rule “remember the human” seemed to not apply to them.
I think a lot of people are going to switch to piefed once that gets more fleshed out. It federates with all lemmy but has a different and more open dev team working on it. They already have a bunch of cool features lemmy is currently lacking.
By “a lot” I’m guessing you mean a steady and eventually declining population of a few thousand monthly users?
We don’t.have a lot of users, even if everyone switches they won’t get a lot of users.
Piefed looks like an interesting project for sure. I don’t know much about it though - are they getting close to feature parity with Lemmy?
In many ways they already are ahead. The front end is a bit wonky though, and some of the foundational features are still catching up (it’s fully functioning though).
For one thing, they have “categories” of communities, and for another I can block all users from any instance I choose - though there is really no easy way to accomplish that while still on Lemmy proper.
But like when you upvote something, later it remembers that but won’t show you the color. The interface is really pretty though, and solves several of the issues I had with Lemmy, like another one is that you can turn on viewing or both the upvote and separate downvote counts, which for Lemmy iirc you can only see that for comments, but for posts that only shows on the mobile site yet not on the desktop for some reason.
The PieFed devs are super responsive, quite extraordinary so imho. It’s like they care or something (uh… cause they do, ofc!:-).
So especially since Lemmy is not perfect either, check out both Mbin and PieFed and just see them in action without an account, just for the fun of it.:-)
There’s no way Python and Flask are going to scale as well as Rust. It’s going to require more hardware to run and be able to handle fewer users.
The DB is all that matters. Python can scale very well through parallelization. So long as one doesn’t restrict themselves to one process, there’s really little chokepoint.
Nope… CPU and memory usage matter as well… if they get exhausted, you get throttling. This also has an impact on server-costs… Why run 2 instances of something that serves 4k requests/second over one instance that serves 9k/s (just an over-exaggerating example)
That’s why I say if you don’t restrict to single process. As to why something which might be slightly more inefficient (it’s not going to be that much), it’s because of ease of development and pool of potential developers to help you with it.
The big problem is that it isn’t really possible for instances to switch from Lemmy to PieFed, or any other ActivityPub software.
Once a Piefed instance is mature enough, I could consider asking a few communities I mod if they would be okay to migrate to it.
!casualconversation@lemm.ee for instance doesn’t really need to be able to edit past posts, and we already moved from LW to lemm.ee. Moving again to another instance wouldn’t be that different.
Yeah unfortunately it’s not quite ready for mainstream yet. I’ve noticed over the last several days that I’ve been using it a bunch of small UI things that would really frustrate someone without a high level of tolerance to such. e.g. you get a notification telling you that you have a message, you click it, but there’s no message; so you do a control-F to try to find it… nope, still no message; next you have to hunt through the entire page for every “expansion block” and “Continue thread” (which takes you to another page) and those “auto-collapse” (based on comment threshold), and I disabled “auto-hide” but surely that might really be a problem if there’s a Notification for something that becomes impossible to see later without changing your configuration settings.
For extremely basic things it’s fine… mostly. Just never edit your messages and someone will be fine. I say that b/c you can’t edit comments in-line in the page where they are at, and once you are done editing one, it doesn’t take you back to it but rather to the OP thread instead. Whereupon again you have to hunt for your comment all over again as mentioned above. Which is especially annoying when you have to do it multiple times, b/c there is no Preview feature to let you know what is coming after you submit it - did you insert a space between your [alttext] (link here)? did you mess up your
"quoting"rules? does an image not render?(the above on purpose:-)
On the other hand, they can allow YouTube embeds without having to wonder what is on the other side of that sus-looking link and click and leave the page. And personal instance blocks - that actually work - and categories, and like it will tell you, for every comment, both the time something was posted and the time it was last edited, woot!:-) There’s just a ton of fantastic features, more so than Lemmy in many ways, and yet at the same time less too - if that makes any sense at all.
But then again, more people know how to code in Python, so I hope it will catch up soon:-). That might even be what we’re seeing now - the core UI needs to be not monkeyed around with by a bunch of people all working at cross-purposes, but then all these nice little additions could each be someone’s side project? But they need to get the core working too.
That’s a highly specific comm though and most instances/comms would not be okay losing the history. You also inevitably stunt growth and lose some users during such a migration. It would be much better if ActivityPub allowed an instance to change its underlying representation, while keeping all the users and post and data but unfortunately this is basically impossible.
I would move !movies@lemm.ee and !dataisbeautiful@mander.xyz too, and I guess the people would still be okay.
We created those communities here from scratch. What matters is the incoming content and discussions, archived threads are good for information but not much more.
We have no content on any community here older than 1 year and a half except the ones on lemmy.ml, are those more popular than the LW, SJW or mander.xyz ones?
Now i recall why there’s a push against migrating to lemmy when reddit blackout happened. I thought it doesn’t really matter, turns out they’re right.
Yeah, it was and is the major issue with lemmy I think.
On the other hand, it’s an open source project amd there are likely other contributors that don’t agree with them ideologically. And as long as you don’t interact with the .ml instance it should not effect you.
There will be assholes everywhere.