PriorProject @ PriorProject @lemmy.world

Just an explorer in the threadiverse.

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2 yr. ago

Very true and good points, and when it comes to snap I mostly agree with you. I would guess the "war on Ubuntu" going on is more due to Ubuntu's history of making controversial decisions that go against the grain of what most other distros are doing at the time (creating and dropping Mir, creating Unity instead of using GNOME and then switching back to GNOME when they finally got Unity working well, installing an Amazon app out of the box in one version), many of which angered a lot of Linux community members before who are still angry despite Ubuntu rolling back most of those decisions, and they've found snap a great current scapegoat issue to use to vent their long-standing frustrations with Ubuntu at.

I agree with just about every word here. I lived through all this stuff. Mir and Unity were hugely disruptive to the OSS desktop community beyond Ubuntu and I was as salty about them as anyone. If someone is aware of this history and just fucking done with Ubuntu's bullshit they'll get no flak from me. I rarely see this coherent an argument made though, it's much more often "snap bad, use this other distro that's downstream of Ubuntu and shares all the same foundations but has a different default desktop and disables snap by default", which I think is pretty nonsense and is rampant in the comments of this post.

But I've done my share of distro hopping and if someone wants to use something else for any reason or no reason... more power to them. I will make the counterpoint that no one has to care about snap specifically and if you just pretend it doesn't exist then your life will be no different. And if history is any indicator, snap has about 2y left before they abandon it anyway.

Imgur, for instance, lets me filter in and out loads of specific tags from my feed (also specific use posts).

It's relevant to note that Imgur doesn't have a communities/subreddits equivalent. Images are the rough equivalent of a post, and tags are the closest they get to communities. I'm quite certain that there are tags for both Art and Drawing, and following the Art tag doesn't mean that you won't miss out on posts that are tagged as a Drawing and not as Art. The result is really not that different than Lemmy, you still have to discover all the different tags you want to follow.

Not to be flippant about your tag examples, but those exact communities already exist (edit: ok, admittedly the search for art returns a bunch of unrelated junk):

• https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=%22Science%22
• https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=gaming

Now, of course... those are not the only communities addressing those topics. There's retrogaming as a subset of games, there's photographyas a subset of art, etc. But as previously noted, that's true of tags as well.

A whitelist based subscription method DOES work, and is implicitly what everyone uses on very large community sites like reddit and also very large tag-based sites like Twitter/imgur. Of course you miss out on some stuff, but when you find something you're missing... you add it to your list. It's ok not to find every last post you care about and doing so is an impossibility.

I realize the alternative is to look only at the ones you subscribe to but then how do you discover other communities that were just created without flipping back to Show Me Everything?

Lemmyverse.net. Or browse all periodically but infrequently enough that you don't mind having unwanted posts there because your main feed is your subscribed feed and you're just cruising for 20m looking for new communities.

I realize lemmy is smaller and it's possible to do things here that don't work on something as big as reddit... but... the futility of trying to block every subreddit you DON'T like because you might miss some that you DO like registers right? At some point in the lemmyverse growth curve the same thing happens here irrespective of what blocking tools you have. Eventually one must overcome the fear of missing out and just sub the communities you enjoy.

All that said, lemmy communities don't have more general topic tags. The only tag that exists at all is nsfw, so there's no way to identify and block all sports communities as a group. You either have to play whack-a-mole blocking each unwanted community as you notice it or switch to browsing subscribed and sub to each desired community as you find it.

I have to wonder if NLNet has some process for amending commitments made in light of new lessons learned. By a wide variety of metrics, the impact of the project has been increased beyond all imagination and ambition that people could have had in January. And the technology and quality of the project has improved way way faster as its accrued new contributors. This is really a case where the the right milestones to measure by have changed.

One might also hope that a call for help from contributors on these specific milestones might just get them back on track.

But speculation aside... yeah your description of their funding challenges is accurate.

If you're serious about this, there's a post up calling for sysops: https://lemmy.world/post/2769245

It's somewhat of a commitment, rather than drop-in drop-out... but that's what it takes to make a difference here. There are already several sharp and experienced database engineers working on the Lemmy world team. The problem is that the site is under repeated denial of service attack, and there isn't one bad query to fix... each time one query gets addressed, the attackers move on to a new one.

While it's always possible that someone has missed a silver bullet, it's much more likely that a a series of ongoing independent mitigations and optimizations are needed to achieve a tipping point where lemmy is more or less protectable with some hidden dos-able bits rather than more or less trivially dos-able everywhere.

Tell me more about why I care that snap is setting up loop devices and not that docker is setting up virtual ethernet devices and nftables chains. System tools do system things, news at 11.

I say again, this impacts my life not at all and there is nothing easier to ignore than snap.

... those "pending update, close the app to avoid disruptions" popups are kind of disrupting.

I don't exactly disagree that it's slightly irritating but:

1. No one declares war on an operating system the way snap haters have over a "restart to update" message. It's an irritation, but it's not an irritation proportional to the response snap gets out of people.
2. Restarting to enable an update or complete an update is not something unique to snap. Except for a tiny number of very advanced live-patching systems like the one some kernel updaters use, every updater either nags you to shutdown to do the update, nags you to restart to finish the update, or doesn't nag you and the update just doesn't take effect till you restart (apt falls in this category and it's not unambiguously better than nagging because you're silently vulnerable when security patches are shipped until you restart). So again, this is just an extremely unremarkable thing that tons of updaters deal with similarly.

I do nothing.

• I use the Firefox snap. It takes like 800 extra milliseconds to start up on my 10y old laptop and it moves my profile dir. It otherwise impacts my life not at all and is just fine. If it ever bothers me, there PPAs, flatpak, or a dozen other ways to install Firefox that are all perfectly simple.
• I install other stuff from flatpaks or PPAs or using docker.

The angst around snap is inscrutable to me. There are 30 million easy ways to install software and they all work on Ubuntu. There is nothing in my life that's easier to ignore than snap.

It seems like the subscriber count only shows for whatever particular instance you are on, but adding together the subscriber count of the major instances exceeds 10,000.

Fwiw, the community sidebar in the community's home instance shows a rough global subscriber count. So for this community that's https://lemmy.world/c/sciencefiction which when opened in a browser rather than an app shows 9.81k... pretty close to 10k as you estimated.

One can pretty quickly verify that the community's home instance shows more than the local subscribers by looking at small instances hosting bigger communities. For example, the instance sidebar at pathfinder.social shows less than 350 accounts on the server, but their biggest community at https://pathfinder.social/c/pf2general shows over 1.3k.subs.

Docker is a powerful tool to increase confidence in your backups.

• In a VM, the way you figure out which files to backup is to read the docs. If they're wrong or you misread them, the only way you'll find out is by doing a full restore test... which is often painful and complex in home setups.
• In docker, the filesystem outside volumes is destroyed between every container restart. If your volume setup is insufficient, you'll repeatedly lose state during your initial installation process between container restarts. You'll continually test your state management throughout the lifetime of the service during restarts. This leaves a much smaller window for backup mistakes.

The tradeoff with docker is that the networking is complex (well, everything is complex... but the networking is where it often hurts). But if you're able to deal with that one-time pain, it's superior almost all the time for home setups. I think the only things I run outside docker are ssh and netdata. SSH because it's stateless and works perfectly out of the box, and netdata because it wants permissions to everything... and is functionally stateless for me because I don't care if I drop my observability data.

Ah, indeed they are. I would say that is not great UX and there's a useful feature request here to offer a saved comments view separate from the saved posts view, which is a feature in Jerboa and liftoff at least.

I confirm this, if it's possible to view saved comments I'm not able to figure out how.

Really happy to see the image-zoom fix in there. Limited zoom was pretty irritating recently and it's totally addressed here.

Lemmy.world has been under repeated attack recently though, and the behaviors you've described match what I see when th service is down. You can see current status and the history of frequent incidents at https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/.

To relate to your statement about what fails and how, I can say I've seen the failure-modes change as they adapt the setup, and it's a more complex stack than other lemmy instances in order to deal with the attacks and large scale. It degrades in complex ways that are hard to fully reason about unless you're pretty deeply familiar with how things are out together.

I suspect you're seeing a combination of "lemmy world is broken sometimes", "Cloudflare gives weird errors sometimes", and "clients cache things or degrade to unauthenticated connections sometimes". But in any case, seeing lemmy.world be flaky is not weird, it's having a heckuva time.

The Foundry VTT community frequently uses video conferencing for tabletop roleplaying games and initially Jitsi was the recommended self-hosted video option, but the community has since moved on and now recommends https://livekit.io/. I didn't set up either and don't have deep insights into what drove the shift, but it's an interesting data point around a community that tried both shifting focus away from Jitsi.

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-alternative-to-Blackboard

The above link looks like a pretty reasonable answer to this question to me. In short, Moodle, Canvas, Sakai, and OpenEdX are all open-source e-classroom solutions. They are not really targeted toward casual self-hosters though. These packages are typically run by full-time engineering staff on multiple beefy servers at schools where the setup serves thousands of students. If you're quite strong technically, it sounds like Moodle might be at the easier end of things, but I don't commonly see individual teachers standing up their own Moodle servers, but I also don't hang out with technically oriented teachers so maybe I'm not in the right crowd.

There may be something oriented toward more casual self-hosting, but these are what I'm aware of. I haven't used them though.

It's at mastodon.world. Check the lemmy.world sidebar, it states that the servers are run by the same team and share some infra, including that email address.

Edit: My bad, the sidebar suggests emailing at lemmy.world, I misremembered or it's been updated.

I haven't used Tuxedo, but on apt-based distros it's pretty common for an auto-update daemon of some kind to run in the background on startup to either download updates, or at least download package metadata so some UI component can start nagging you to install the updates that are available.

If you wait a few minutes, the download should complete and you can do what you want. You can probably get away with killing it, especially if you use a gentle signal like HUP. I wouldn't risk it though... if you corrupt your package metadata or worse... and actual important package... it can be a significant hassle to clean up the mess. And the cost of waiting 30s-5m and trying again is so low it's hard to beat that as an approach.

If its happening a ton you can probably find and disable the auto-update thing but I don't know what it would be on Tuxedo.

All fair enough. I'm not real convinced about this though:

My guess is: A popular app will implement this feature and it will become mandatory for everyone else who wants downloads.

I suspect some app does do this already, some definitely have ways to interact with specific instances while logged out of them. I have 6 lemmy apps or PWAs installed just to keep up with new developments there... but I couldn't tell you the differences in community discovery between them because the federation and instance discovery problems make it unrelentingly terrible on all of them when compared to lemmyverse.net, which already supports browsing communities by instance.

While I would love for in-app discovery to be good, the journey from where we are to where lemmyverse.net is is long enough that I don't really see any intermediate hacks as being app-defining.

I can't remember if it's enabled by default or not, but it's easy enough to enable pprof and get a helpful performance profile from /debug/pprof. See https://caddy.community/t/hangs-on-reload/12010/18 for an example.

I've found that even being unfamiliar with the codebase, it's often pretty easy to identify what part of the call stack is being slow and file a very useful performance but report in GitHub. Check out the profile and see if it leads to any obvious conclusions about why domains are so much slower. There may be some function that's trivial to cache the results of that brings things back to the expected performance.