matcha_addict @ matcha_addict @lemy.lol

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677

Joined

2 yr. ago

bringing up RSS feeds is actually very good, because although you can paginate or partition your feeds, I have never seen a feed that does that, even when they have decades of history. But if needed, partioning is an option so you don't have to pull all of its posts but only recent ones, or by date/time range.

I would also respectfully disagree that people don't subscribe to 100's of RSS feeds. I would bet most people who consistently use RSS feed readers will have more than 100 feeds, me included.

And last, even if you follow 10,000, yes it would require a lot more time than reading from a single database, but it is still on the order of double digit seconds at most. If you compare 10,000 static file fetches with 10,000 database writes across different instances, I think the static files would fare better. This isn't to mention that you are more likely to have to write more than read more (users with 100k followers are far more common than users with 100k subscriptions)

And just to emphasize, I do agree that double digit seconds would be quite long for a user's loading time, which is why I would expect to fetch regularly so the user logs onto a pre made news feed.

Sure, but constantly having to do it is not really a bad thing, given it is automated and those reads are quite inexpensive compared to a database query. It's a lot easier to handle heavy loads when serving static files.

Yes, precisely. The existing implementation in the Fediverse does the opposite: everyone you follow has to insert their posts into the feed of everyone that follows them, which has its own issues.

Oh my bad, I can explain that.

Before I do, one benefit of this method is that your timeline is entirely up to your client. Your instance becomes primarily tasked with making your posts available, and clients have the freedom of implementing the reading and news feed / timeline formation.

Hence, there are a few ways to do this. The best one is probably a mix of those.

Naive approach: fetch posts and build news feed when user requests it

This is not a good approach, but I mention it first because it'll make explaining the next one easier.

• User opens app or website, thereby requesting their timeline / news feed
• server fetches list of user's subscriptions and followees
• for each followee or subscription, server fetches their content via their static file wherever they are hosted
• server performs whatever filtering and ordering of content they want
• user sees the result

Cons: loading time for the user may be long, depending on how many subscriptions they have it could be several seconds. P90 may even be in double digits.

Better approach: pre-build user's timeline periodically.

Think like a periodic job (hourly, or every 10 min, etc) , which fetches posts in a similar manner as described above, but instead of doing it when user requests it, it is done in advance

Pros:

• fast loading time compared to previous solution
• when the job runs, if users on the same instance share a followee or subscription, we don't have to query it twice (This benefit already exists on current fediverse implementations) Cons: posts aren't real-time, delayed by the batch job frequency.

Best approach: hybrid

In this approach, we primarily do the second method, to achieve fast loading time. But to get more up-to-date content, we also simultaneously fetch the latest in the background, and interleave or add the latest posts as the user scrolls.

This way we get both fast initial load times and recent posts.

Surely there's other good approaches. As I said in the beginning, clients have the freedom to implement this however they like.

1. I write a post, and send a request to the server to publish it
2. The server takes the post and preprends it to the file housing all my posts
3. Now, when someone requests my posts, they will see my new one

If a CDN is involved, we would have to properly take care of the invalidations and what not. We would have to run a batch process to update the CDN files, so that we are not doing it too often, but doing it every minute or so is still plenty fast for social media use cases.

Have to emphasize that I am not expert, so I may be missing a big pitfall here.

My journal is electronic (offline) and I have been doing it for 10 years or so.

It's just less hyped now compared to days of reddit API change and Twitter going to Elon Musk.

Still waiting for an Arabic lemmy 😔

It seems it does, but when I tried it it didn't work very well. I don't remember why, but it wasn't exactly what I hoped.

Where? Please show me as I'd rather contribute to or fork existing projects

Friendica does

Email is a great addition, I didn't consider that one. Thanks for that!

I'd love to add reddit and other big social medias even, but their restrictive access policies aren't very promising.

Typically Arabs would be very impressed to see you even try to speak Arabic. I have never seen someone make fun of a foreigner for their accent. It's also quite rare for a foreigner to speak without accent.

Who split?

Is this an alternative to bitwarden and keepass? Is it better in terms of security?

For the mid Atlantic area there's "hiking upward", it's pretty awesome.

That's actually what I use as well currently. It doesn't replace all trails completely but it's something

Can you clarify what you mean by Chromecast support? I have a Chromecast device and it has the jellyfin app on it. Works like a charm without issues. I have a feeling you mean something else though?

He most likely isn't the one who did it. The eyebrows from his suspect photo are way off.

They likely wanted to charge someone so the public doesn't get ideas about doing a similar thing and not getting caught.

I agree, but we don't have to convince anyone. A large minority would still be a huge achievement. In fact we don't even need more than that.