BitOneZero @ .world

Hello to you!

  • 6 Posts
  • 56 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • and avoiding link rot

    Lemmy seems built to destroy information, rot links. Unlike Reddit has been for 15 years, when a person deletes their account Lemmy removes all posts and comments, creating a black hole.

    Not only are the comments disappeared from the person who deleted their account, all the comments made by other users disappear on those posts and comments.

    Right now, a single user just deleting one comment results in the entire branch of comment replies to just disappear.

    Installing an instance was done pretty quickly… over 1000 new instances went online in June because of the Reddit API change. But once that instance goes offline, all the communities hosted there are orphaned and no cleanup code really exists to salvage any of it - because the whole system was built around deleting comments and posts - and deleting an instance is pretty much a purging of everything they ever created in the minds of the designers.




  • Nothing like a little bit of corporate sabotage!

    The software developers who created Lemmy openly criticize systems of government and economics. These are nation-state battlegrounds too. The barrier to entrance is very low, as Lemmy doesn’t even do routine tracking of account creation, rate-limiting alone isn’t really defensive. 15 years ago sites like Reddit had major vote manipulation detection logic behind the scenes. This is pretty much unleashed playground for a lot of known tactics.





  • I’ve found there is a culture within Lemmy developers and long-time operators to discuss in Discord or Matrix chat instead of “eating their own dogfood” and using Lemmy itself to openly discuss Lemmy technical and project issues. These chat services are legendary for keeping things away from search engines and newcomers getting up to speed. Lemmy itself isn’t nearly as search-engine friendly as Reddit was traditionally, it seems like feedback needs to be given as to how important it is to keep things about Lemmy in the eyes of those who actually use Lemmy…



  • Some people seem to be interpreting this to mean 11 million comments per day. I think it means the numbers are updated daily.

    The numbers also don’t make a lot of sense to me. Front page of lemmy.world says 620,000 (local origin) comments. And Lemmy sequentially numbers the comments for an instance, mixing both local and federated and the recent numbers look like 2,122,067. Lemmy.ml says 253,000 on the front page, and their index key is showing 2,321,959 for a comment made today. I have to imagine that these two servers are subscribed to a lot of stuff (including each other). I’d be surprised if there were more than 4 million unique comments in Lemmy. And there would be some kbin messages in the Lemmy.world index.


  • Thoughts?

    I haven’t tested with 0.18.3 to see if new features were added to front-end lemmy-ui, but based on my experience with earlier 0.18 releases… the “Sign Up” page of Lemmy needs to have a custom message added for each instance basically introducing the instance from the admins. The experience is pretty bad… on my instance I have registration closed and lemmy-ui still just presents “Sign Up” links and even the form. I think it’s pretty important to get this in the back-end now so that the evolving independent front-ends all support the custom message shown above/below the Sign Up form…

    Seems like something that shouldn’t take a lot of coding to get added (admin screen has place to create custom messages like “Legal”) that would be a good lemmy network-wide focus on the newcomer experience.


  • I can confirm the problem, it’s been gong on all week. It really impacts anyone on another instance with a link, they will fail.

    As I understand the situation, Lemmy.world has been suffering from performance problems and certain comment links were being attacked by distributed clients. So they basically have firewalled /comment links for everyone (I assume using nginx based on behavior, or maybe the front-end cloud distributor).

    Personally I’m interested to know which specific comment links cause the PostgreSQL performance problems as I’m trying to track down and fix those issues. But I haven’t seen anyone detail which specific post/comment threads cause the problems… I’ve just seen the developers reduce loading to 50 and 300 without creating testing scripts to reproduce the issue for other developers to study.

    I’m hoping lemmy.world can implement a less-drastic solution than 100% block of comment links from non-local referral origin… such as a rate limit on those links of 3 per 5 seconds or something low like that. Anyway, I hope you are having a good weekend.