PriorProject @ PriorProject @lemmy.world

Just an explorer in the threadiverse.

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2 yr. ago

Apparently female cows (it's redundant yeah, but trying to be clear) DO grow horns, they just get cut off in captivity when they're calves: https://www.online-field-guide.com/do-female-cows-have-horns/

Whether Larson knew this and was drawing an anatomically accurate horned cow or was under the common misconception that cows lack horns and was trying to make a double layered joke about "someone has a stupid question about everything, even a simple picture of a cow" in conjunction with "but actually if you look closely enough there's something to question about this particular cow picture" I dunno.

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.

Some tips on posting to lemmy from mastodon for your consideration:

• Use a line break in your toot. I believe multi-line toots use first line for the title and the rest for the body.
• Move the at-mention to the end of the last line. The lemmy community still gets mentioned but it gets the mention out of the post title, which looks exceedingly weird in lemmy clients unless you understand how the mastodon integration works.
• Make your own call on hashtags, but yeah... they serve no purpose on lemmy and they make a post looks a bit like a sales pitch. If you're speaking primarily to Lemmy users I'd omit them. If you're getting similar engagement from Mastodon users watching those hashtags as you are from lemmy users on the post then they may serve a purpose. Again, I advise to get them out of the title and limit them to the body though. The look a lot less ridiculous there.
• Use !test@lemmy.ml if you want to play around with formatting and see what it looks like. High-volume test posts with no useful content are welcome there.

Lemmy world is under persistent denial of service attack in recent weeks: https://lemmy.world/post/2923697

The admins are aware and responding daily, the technical specifics of the attack keep changing as they close off one avenue of attack, the attackers switch to a slightly different approach in a game of cat and mouse.

There's nothing you can do but wait, it will come back online... or use alts on other instances. Lemmy world has a competent admin team who is working hard to weather these attacks, but lemmy the software is not prepared for this kind of adversarial resource consumption so it's a very hard job to both layer protections on top of lemmy and also to fix underlying issues so it's natively more resilient.

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.

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.

New communities don't automatically federate. Someone who is logged into the instance has to interact with them to cause their instance to discover the new community.

1. Someone needs to search for the community in a specific way for the community itself to be discovered.
2. Someone needs to subscribe for posts/comments to get federated.

See https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827 for more details.

But your community will show up on lemmyverse.net, and will show up for people on your instance. Beyond that you have to advertise it in new-community communities and in juggling adjacent communities where interested folks might hang out.

In the vast majority of cases, one can support variation in admin preferences by exposing a configuration parameter. Your downvote example is perfect because Beehaw doesn't run a customized lemmy codebase. There is a checkbox exposed to lemmy admins that enables/disabled downvotes.

Running a custom-codebase is generally the highest-hassle method of achieving some custom-config goal. The absence of communities around this approach isn't an accident, the people who develop customizations generally try to work with the upstream unless the devs give them good reason not to.

Are there instances that run modified versions of the base Lemmy software? For example, that use their own sorting algorithms, or provide users ways to block instances or specific users, etc?

If one had developed code to do these things, why would one not upstream it so it's released in core lemmy and all instances can benefit from that capability?

The idiomatic way to query communities in Lemmy is to interrogate your instance, not to interrogate the instance hosting the community. I think there are some sensible reasons for this:

• Large instances hosting lots of communities want to delegate read workload to the many instances out there hosting users. They don't WANT everyone coming to query the communities instance directly. That's rather the whole point of federation. Now, will one app doing direct community-hosting queries bring down the threadiverse? No, it won't. But it's not how community discovery is envisioned to work, and Jerboa being developed by the lemmy devs means that it's unlikely to employ non-federated community discovery hacks.
• If you offer community discovery by directly querying the instance, you create another discovery problem which is equally hard to solve... which is instance discovery. OP may have a particular instance in mind already that they want to query, but as soon as querying communities by instance becomes a commonly used feature... people WILL immediately begin asking how to search instances to put into that list... which again is generally a problem that is supposed to be addressed through federation. Also if you don't build instance discovery, you'll have tons of reports from people who mistype instance names and can't figure out why it's not working.

All of which is to say that while there is an approach that involves directly querying a specific instance... it's a partial solution that doesn't build toward a comprehensive one. I don't expect the devs to move this direction, but rather to focus on fixing the community browser in lemmy and exposing those capabilities through jerboa. This is the larger job I was referring to, and although there is a shorter path to OP's specific request, I don't think it's a likely one to be followed in Jerboa.

I don't use it, though I would check it out if I had occasion. My impression is that they intended to deliver card support primarily to system developers. The idea was that system developers would use the card APIs to built something more system-specific, but I haven't seen huge adoption of it. They did expose a minimal generic user interface, but yeah it never seemed all that polished.