Mentioning Lemmy once got my 12yr account suspended...
The main webapp is giving me the same problems. In Chrome I have to right-click on the image and open it in a new tab. I made a posting about it in !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
I see you edited out all the usernames. Is that required on the Lemmy instance you use, or are you just following Reddit's community conventions about not sharing usernames when posting screen shots?
As Reddit grew older and larger, there was almost no thoughts on the owner's part that accounts of over 10 years old being banned was practically a lifetime ban. My /u/RoundSparrow account was banned during the outbreak of war in late 2021, early 2022 due to street-gang factions fighting over disinformation... lost my 15 year old account.
Same goes for subreddits. 'Ban evasion' gets you site-wide banned if you create a new account and then after 5 years go contribute in a subreddit you were previously blocked from. It's a dehumanizing experience, there is no room for growth as a community nor individual.
There is no sense that people and society conflicts change and that individual persons can be caught up in trending topics. "leaving Reddit" is one of said battleground trending topics...
Yesterday I started an Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS install from scratch posting too. I got stuck with various issues also (the published instructions are for 20.04 so that might account for some of it).
How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances?
I suggest creating some communities like "FindingTech", and "FindingScience" and "FindingPets" with some similar naming convention - that covers this topic explicitly. That Finding* communities be the place people discuss the various instances and their experiences/ideals.
I could also see someone creating an entire magazine-like website that highlights new and changing communities and new owner/operators on the scene. Also present a tree of links that is organized based on reviews and allows bookmarking. Such data could be passed down to mobile clients or even some kind of webapp page of Lemmy sites.
Reddit was one big monolithic system operating under a multinational corporation jurisdiction. Small time Lemmy instances may be following conventions of a nation that end-users have never visited... it is much more of a "World Wide Web" convention, and you can see it much more in your face in how the language choice is presented to you on every posting you make.
Think about it - how long until owner/operators of Lemmy instances have to deal with DMCA takedown requests for images? Court-ordered disclosure of IP address and browser information? Who is to say that an operator won't just put everyone's IP Address out as public record - there are forums that operate that way. With massive websites like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook - a government seeking copies of deleted comments and IP Address is all behind the scenes and rarely disclosed (and even then, mostly disclosed in news reports that police got a copy of social media messages and had an account shut down after a shooting or other crime).
I don't think people know (how end-users will cope with the distributed choices of Lemmy). Reddit 2023 is nothing at all like Lemmy. One could be considered a household name for regular users of the Internet, the other a return to something more like FidoNet.
I come from the BBS days of the early 1980's and even social media radio before that. I come from IRL user group meetings, held at public library and after-hours company meeting rooms. It has always bothered me that current-day subreddits have mostly no identity to the moderators and that moderation is often behind the scenes.
I guess it's like "corporate experience" that people expect this day in society... that you can walk into a generic franchise chain bar and grill and not really care who the owner/operator and bouncers are of your hangout. Anyone can start a topic/ conversation and there is just some anonymous janitorial crew who is supposed to clean up the overflowing mess if (non-venue) spam or hate messages enter into the space.
The mechanisms of who pays for the venue and the moderators also was a topic most people never bothered to think about. Like it was some taxpayer-funded city park and perhaps the admin police might spot check if anyone was causing a tragedy in that there commons. But reality is that it was a profit-seeking venue charging a cover charge in the form of selling copies of your contribution and changing the tone of your meeting space by controlling the jukebox that visitors hear in terms of advertising messages inserted into the conversation space.
Lemmy seems small, owner/operator focused, and you get a sense that each instance is like some small bar and grill where you can come and meet some strangers or friends to discuss some topics under house rules. Your tips help pay for the hosting and the jukebox isn't piped in memes from advertisers.
I remember when Reddit had known owners with known ideals, but that was very long ago. I've found making it big (with the associated wealth) changes people. One owner even committed suicide over his society ideals about sharing information. Ultimately I feel like a lack of topic participation by the moderators and owners alike made people thoughtless as to their own role in building a human community and people often felt like they were fighting machines and code.
sorry if this meandered off topic, but lately I've had some long-time friends ask me 'what is Reddit" since it is in the news lately, and I find it hard to explain what Reddit used to be (before new Reddit and the addition of images/video) vs. the corporate-like entity we know today that our contributions and participation helped empower over the past 17 years. I've used it mostly daily for all that time, and I have been unhappy with society's dehumanizing direction for too many years.
/ramble from a disturbed mind.
The interesting thing about Snowden to me after 10 years is how few times I see the public think about how low-level staff with hardware-level access can bypass all command and control decisions. He was a contractor who just wholesale scooped data off the servers. Nearly 10 years later... Jack Teixeira leaks documents because he has server access to documents outside his immediate need too.
I think a lot of organizations really don't see how vulnerable they are to deliberate attacks and theft - if the NSA can't protect their data 10 years ago, do you really think your mobile phone network provider or these VPN companies are not subject to internal staff selling off data, etc?
I have some suspicions that the /communities page is dong a live database query to get counts of subscribers and monthly visits (on every hit to the page) and this is putting a heavy load on the SQL database.
Almost every time I hit this page in the past 48 hours I see > 4 second delay before I get the first page of results. I'm also getting internal errors/failures on loading the page. Typical error is a single line of output: "404: FetchError: request to http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site"
I don't have any experience with that specific app, so I don't currently know.
Is lemmy scalable?
Preface: I'm new to the project and still trying to install my first server, and the instructions so far are leading into problems. I'm a professional Technical Editor since the early 1990's, so I'm trying to document the problems over on https://lemmy.ml/post/1160483 about a from-scratch Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS install.
Based on what I have seen, I have big concerns about scale. Using a SQL database for a messaging system like this with all these granular real-time data elements like vote counts and dynamic sorting orders I think is going to prove to have serous scaling problems without some concept of caching results in a simple format (like a plain old disk file or NoSQL database) before returning results to the webapp clients or API. I am struggling with my human languages lately, but I did start to raise some topics over on community !mediascale@lemmy.ml
I understand the desire for a real-time database that has exact up to date information on every vote count and every single latest comment, but I think server operators are going to run into big problems with Lemmy code as it works now once their data starts to get into the thousands of postings per day, tens of thousands of user profiles being looked up for render those postings, and millions of comments. When there isn't enough RAM for those SQL index keys, things will dramatically change in performance.
Pentagon response to story:
EDIT: I'm still learning Lemmy - it seems on the webapp you can't click an image to see full size? Here is a link to full size: https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/f5bbb559-7e4a-45ad-bce5-ba221c13675b.webp
On this posting (you are here), it did it correctly this time. But I've seen this behavior a few times today in opening postings where the vote count rendered on the web browser was wrong.
Google Chrome browser.
On this page, if I start to type into the reply box and choose to abandon it by clicking "Lemmy Support" link, I get no popup, the links just don't work.
NYMag seems bigger: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/ex-intel-official-government-hiding-alien-tech.html
Newsweek has now picked up the story: https://www.newsweek.com/ufo-uap-craft-found-covered-whistleblower-claims-1804733
I'm assuming "Ask Lemmy" is like "Ask Reddit" where there is supposed to be an implied concept that you mean "Ask Lemmy Community", and the word "Community" isn't explicit.
Right now the community description on the right sidebar says "A loosely moderated place to ask open ended questions"... it may be beneficial to make that more verbose: "A loosely moderated place to ask open ended questions to the Lemmy community of users". Not to say newcomers will read that ;)
Right now it looks to me like Lemmy is built all around live real-time data queries of the SQL database. This may work when there are 100 postings a day and an active posting gets 80 comments... but it likely doesn't scale very well. You tend to have to evolve to a queue system where things like comments and votes are merged into the main database in more of a batch process (Reddit does this, you will see on their status page that comments and votes have different uptime tracking than the main website).
On the output side, it seems ideal to have all data live and up to the very instant, but it can fall over under load surges (which may be a popular topic, not just an influx from the decline of Twitter or Reddit). To scale, you tend to have to make some compromises and reuse output. Some kind of intermediate layer such as every 10 seconds only regenerate the output page if there has been a new write (vote or comment change).
don’t necessarily see the complexity (not saying it’s not there
It's the lack of complexity that's kind of the problem. Doing direct SQL queries gets you the latest data, but it becomes a big bottleneck. Again, what might have seemed to work fine when there were only 5000 postings and 100,000 total comments in the database can start to seriously fall over when you have reached the point of accumulating 1000 times that.
Based on looking at the code and the relatively small size of the data, I think there may be fundamental scaling issues with the site architecture. Software development may be far more critical than hardware at this point.
Ok, looking at it after it was committed:
The instructions are not very clear on the proxy setup. It kind of hand-waves a suggested config after the "To make Lemmy available outside the server, you need to set up a reverse proxy, like Nginx. You can use the following simple proxy:" preface, but is not really specific which file this goes in. Is this appended to the nginx.conf?
Thank you
I'm running into the problem mentioned 2 months ago on Reddit with trying to install via docker. I'm on Ubuntu Server.
Based on my own experience operating websites... my guess is that they keep track of browser strings, IP addresses, and login times - and have some kind of offline job that can study all the same accounts that use the same IP addresses around similar times.
I suspect when when the admin looks at an account they can see information about your IP address history, geolocations, browsers, and detected secondary accounts.