Kushan

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 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 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.

Yes it is.

I disagree, it’s easy to say that a barrier to entry is good because it keeps out trolls and those that just want to insight hate, but really those people will find a way when anything gets popular enough to bother with. Meanwhile, that same barrier prevents a lot of underserved people joining in and they’re left to deal with the same toxic people we’re trying to avoid ourselves.

The centralised services didn’t succeed because they were centralised, they succeeded because they lowered the barrier to entry drastically. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re centralised, but that’s something we’ll have to overcome if we want this community and others like it to succeed. Otherwise we’ll just slowly die inside our own echo chamber.

With the influx of people looking for a new home, I am sure development of Lemmy will skyrocket.