I’m not sure if ActivityPub allows for an extension like that. And I mean if you open up a separate direct channel via TURN… It’ll be incompatible with something like Mastodon anyways, so I then don’t see a good reason for why to bother with the additional overhead of AP in the first place. I mean you could then just send the status updates in some efficient binary representation as data packets directly do the other players. So why use ActivityPub that needs to encode that in some JSON, send it to your home instance, which handles it, puts it in the outbox, sends HTTP POST requests to the inboxes of your teammates where it then needs to be retrieved by them… In my eyes it’s just a very complicated and inefficient way of transferring the data and I really don’t see any benefits at all.

So instead of extending AP and wrapping the game state updates into AP messages, I’d just send them out directly and skip AP altogether. That probably reduces the program code needed to be written from like 20 pages to 2 and makes the data arrive nearly instantly.

I suppose I could imagine ActivityPub being part of other things in a game, though. Just not the core mechanics… For example it could do the account system. Or achievements or some collectibles which can then be commented and liked by other players.

Probably for European users if Europe decides to force gatekeeping platforms to implement such a feature.

Port forwards in the router + DynDns.

Though those leaks showed they actually did it on a large scale. I don’t think they stopped for some arbitrary reason. Why would they? And technology developed further, surveillance is only getting easier. I’d say even without a tin-foil hat on, it’s more likely they do it than not.

Well, centralization and giving up your freedoms, letting someone else control you, is always kinda easy. Same applies to all the other big tech companies and their platforms. I’d say it applies to other aspects of life, too.

And I’d say it’s not far off from the usual setup. If you had a port forward and DynDns like lots of people have, the Dns would automatically update, you’d need to make sure the port forward is activated if you got a new router, but that’s pretty much it.

But sure. if it’s too inconvenient to put in the 5 minutes of effort it requires to set up port forwarding everytime you move, I also don’t see an alternative to tunneling. Or you’d need to pay for a VPS.

Ah, nice. Alright. Thanks again. I’ll see how I can do it. Unfortunately I’ve already set everything up, joined Rooms and connected a few bridges. I hope it doesn’t break. I’ll do a backup first. Seems reasonable and not that hard to upgrade.

Oh well, seems both reasonable. Maybe I should switch before the projects diverge too much. Conduwuit seems pretty active. Hope it stays that way.

Do you happen to have a link where I can read the backstory myself? Thanks for the info anyways. Seems to be a good call.

I found that. Seems it mainly addresses caching and database performance, adds some admin and moderation commands. I’m not sure if it addresses any of the shortcomings I have.

My main question is: Which one is going to be maintained in the years to come and have the latest features implemented? And secondly: Why a fork? Why don’t they contribute their fixes upstream to Conduit?

Ah, well I only read the official documentation on https://docs.conduit.rs/

I’m gonna take a look at this later.

Depends a bit on how much images and videos get shared. If its mainly used for chat by a bunch of people and a few gifs and stickers in-between, it shouldn’t consume that much storage. But sure if you frequently share all your vacation photos, the cache is going to grow fast.

Definitely the whole server name. Other servers and clients can’t guess that information. I think it’s properly documented how to do it.

I installed it like 2 weeks ago. As of now it’s still running and has a really low memory footprint compared to Synapse. But a lot of things aren’t implemented. Chatting works fine. I get a lot of warning messages about not implemented things, though. Like my client (FluffyChat) trying to query some profile status … I’d say try it. I’ve done so. But I can really only give some good advise after a few more weeks of using it. Maybe there is a dealbreaker.

Nice, didn’t know about HomeBox. Are there other good inventory systems for home use?

Yeah, you’re not doing it right. On Github you have to click on “Insights”. And alike Lemmy which is split into two parts, llama.cpp also has a backend called ggml that does the (tensor) maths. Combined, the git stats are as following for the last four weeks:

• Lemmy (+UI) 207 files changed, +7,841 additions and -6,472 deletions
• llama.cpp (+ggml) 707 files changed, +157,754 additions and -95,611 deletions.

So they definitely touch a lot more code regularly. Whichever PRs you clicked on, they added 50 times as much new lines of code in the same timeframe. And coding things like that is maths heavy and you also need to read the scientific papers and implement the maths. And they did quite some maths themselves and contributed their quanitzation techniques and benchmarked and studied them in addition to the coding. I’m really impressed by the guy. And he seems nice and attracted quite some contributors with his excellent and fast software. Reviews and comments their ideas and integrates them fast. And now it’s a flourishing project that leads in its field. And the project isn’t even that old…

I get it. Software development isn’t that easy. Especially the ‘touching different parts of the code’ is something I don’t really like. I mean it is like it is. And having architectural patterns like this is fairly common (logic, database, UI) and you have like 2 models of the data, one for federation and then the internal representation. I’m not that familiar with the Rust frameworks and how cumbersome it is to deal with them. With the correct database abstraction toolkit and other frameworks it gets better and you can often tie the stuff together. Also helps with the bugs. If it’s really bad, maybe the architecture isn’t optimal. Or the chosen frameworks suck. Other than that it’s the job of a programmer to tie those aspects together, deal with the complexity and combine it into a working product.

I’m not even sure if you can assure that Lemmy has no bugs… I mean unit tests, integration tests and reviews won’t cut it with distributed or federated software, right? I mean you’d need to roll out a small cloud of instances and do end to end tests, check if everything federates and if there are performance regressions… I’m not sure where Lemmy is regarding this. I occasionally observe when something big happens like federation breaking.

Sure. And UI programming is also something that is not really fun to me. I’m also not sure why it hasn’t more contributors. Maybe the atmosphere isn’t that welcoming to new people. Or the userbase in total is just too small. I mean fediverse observer reports like 50k Lemmy users, and that’s not that much people if we’re talking about the subset of people who learned programming and have the spare time to contribute. Maybe it’s too interlinked with the rest of the code or not documented enough. I’d say it’s probably not that attractive to get involved because it’s mainly small bugfixes that can be implemented without also getting involved with the rest of the project. And apart from drive-by pull requests, people usually have some bigger vision when they join a project.

That makes more sense. Thanks.

I think it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem if the revenue depends on the product. Lemmy needs to be shiny, grow and be attractive to attract more money. And they need more money to do it. Currently the userbase is stagnant at a bit less than 50k active users. I’m not sure if the community will jump in and provide the required amount of money if the situation stays as is.

Thanks. So the number on join-lemmy.org already includes the NLnet fund? I suppose that means you get ~600€ a month from the other (independent) supporters?

I’m confused. Liberapay 1.679$ + Patreon 1.165€ + OpenCollective 935$ + Crypo

adds up to the ~3.600€ but in which category are the NLnet bank transfers?

Kinda depends on productivity. I’d say 45k to 60k€ is alright for an average coding job in some company. I don’t know the details here. For self-employed people that varies a lot and developing Lemmy propapbly doesn’t compare to a salaried job at all.

Since I’m dabbling in AI at the moment: What about llama.cpp? Dude handles like 50 pull requests a week, coordinates everything and codes himself. And it’s really complicated stuff and not the only project. And I mean there is lots of Linux software I use, (web-development) frameworks, smarthome stuff and electronics projects that I participate in and I’m always fascinated by their pace and how they manage to do that in addition to a day-job?! And they regularly push new features… I’ve had contact with some, filed bugreports and sometimes the next day they solved my issues and pushed a new version.

With Lemmy, my UI bugreports from a year ago are still open and not fixed. And it feels like contributions and bugreports are more a burden to the devs here and not that welcome like I’m used to from other projects. And yeah, I’m glad the last release was a bit bigger. But I mean it took 5 months… And moderation tools are traditionally an issue here. I’m glad something gets implemented. But we’re still far from where we need to be. Same with the image handling and proxying.

I’m not sure what to make of this. Sure, software development ain’t easy. But every new release I check the changelog and usually it’s just some minor bugfixes. And twice a year a bigger release like this month with new features, yet the last bigger user-facing feature I can remember was instance blocking in december. And this is more or less adding the ability to hide posts and change how voting is displayed, if you’re just a user.

Edit: I appreciate the work, though. And I like the idea of the platform. It’s just that I’d like it to grow and flourish. But to me it seems we’re often taking baby steps. And in the meantime stuff breaks and admins complain they barely cope with everything with the tools they have.

I’m not sure about the numbers but it should be like 6,600€ a month?! join-lemmy.org shows 3,656€ per month from donations, plus ~750€ a week they said in their last AMA from the NLnet fund.

I’m not sure if I’d consider that low… Sure it’s not much compared to the revenue of a commercial platform. But still, you can build something with like 2x40h weeks. (plus a community)

Maybe they already factored in the 3k from NLnet and it’s just 3.6k in total, I don’t really know. But they’re always talking about two full-time developers plus one more they’d like to pay… So that makes me think it’s probably 6.5k€. Maybe someone can fact-check it.