I mean, the real answer is that most open source developers aren’t here for freedom at any cost. They’re here like a startup… Waiting to be acquired for big bucks. Open source doesn’t pay bills, and if a megacorp pulls up in a Brinks truck full of cash, I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of open source projects sell

Oh I’m not saying what your doing over at programming.dev is wrong or insufficient… Honestly I don’t know what your doing to ensure the lemmy server exists long term (though its great to hear you’ve got some policies in place already).

I’m more thinking the rust community should evaluate options and vote, or some rust subgroup of the leadership should set criteria to ensure that another reddit-type event doesn’t happen again (the home of this community must be open-source, with data backups publicly available, with a governing body and a line of succession or something, etc).

If programming.dev meets those things today, I’d say sure lets move there. I think its better to have a lemmy instance for a concept (computer science) than a specific topic (rust), but that’s just me

I’ve replaced some “non replaceable” batteries in phones before… Only to find that after about 5 years of medium use the flash storage goes to shit (which causes massive slow downs), the chips begin to desolder themselves, the USB port gets janky and stops charging, etc.

Batteries are a great first step, but damn these $1000+ devices just are not built to last more than 3 years

It’s not the tech here. Postgres can scale both vertically and horizontally (yes there are others that can scale easier or in different factors of CAP).

The problem is how the data is being stored and accessed. Lemmy is doing some really inefficient data access and it’s causing bottlenecks under load.

Lemmy (unfortunately) just wasn’t ready for this level of primetime yet… It has a number of issues that are going to be quite tricky to fix now that it’s seen such wide adoption (database migrations are tricky on their own, doing so on a production site even harder, doing so on 8k+ independent production sites… Sounds like a nightmare)

Idk. I’m conflicted on this. While I agree… For bigger/broader topics, I can definitely see that the quality of discussion and the repetition of topic is already really bad for smaller/niche communities.

When the subreddit had maybe 2k subs worldwide, and now is comprised of 50 subs spread across 3 instances… It’s rough. That community is just dead and that sucks.

I guess I’d rather have one centralized community on one big (yet open source) instance where I know we can leave and move again, than have the community just for entirely

It’s not that they’re for this specifically… It’s that they are self centered. They’re the same 75% of the population that is willing to cross the picket line at Starbucks cuz they want their coffee. They don’t think about the workers rights, they only care about coffee.

The same people just want memes and football and porn. They don’t care about what’s behind the scenes unless it directly impacts them. And let’s be honest, the reddit changes (for now) impact like 10% of reddits user base. That’s not enough for them to give up some dumb memes for

It’s just amazing really. Had they rolled out a reasonable rated plan, and maybe even a discount to highly known apps, and even set a “the price will go up each 6 months for the next 2 years till we reach this higher, but still reasonable price”… All the apps would have added a subscription model for like $0.99 a month and none of us would have really complained.

Like, honestly most of us would have paid and maybe grumbled slightly but said “that’s the cost of maintaining this huge community, and I get more than $0.99 in value from it” and just kept shit posting on Reddit all day.

If they wanted to block AI models, limit the API keys to only well known apps or those that are manually verified to be not-an-AI by reddit admins.

It’s amazing how dumb a corporation can be sometimes (or has some nefarious endgame ala Twitter)

Not exactly the same but similar… There’s 4 major providers who service my area, but only one of them extends down my block. So I can choose from DSL (which to be fair goes up to like 35 Mbps), but if I want higher, I’m vendor locked to Xfinity, who charges at least 2x the price of the local companies.

Ive asked several times, but they quote hundreds of thousands of dollars to trench fiber down my street, and it’s just not worth it.

Except, you know, there’s already fiber from Xfinity… They just wont share.

The physical cabling needs to be government owned and rented out to the companies, not exclusively owned by one single company. We’ll never have competitive pricing unless it’s nationalized infrastructure

Yeah, apparently I was wrong about this (still learning lemmy and fediverse stuff…). Text content of posts and comments are “synced” to your server and stored in your database there. Then future requests for that content are served from your instance. So its not as bad as I thought it was (the network load should be lower since you aren’t acting as entirely a proxy, more like a cache), but database bloat will be a huge problem (its already a big problem in other federated things like mastodon and matrix, where every server ends up saving everything they want into their own database).

I’m not sure what happens when the original server goes down, does the federated servers discard that data? Or do we each maintain a forever copy until we want to get rid of it ourselves? There’s also some notes I’ve seen about how servers only incrementally cache federated content (only posts and comments that are viewed by someone are fetched, and new comments may not be fetched until someone wants to see it)… so not everybody has a “pure and full” copy of posts necessarily.

But overall I wonder how all the various sysadmins hosting these lemmy instances will deal with the expotential growth they’re going to see, or if smaller instances will start defederating to save on hardware costs (no reason for my tiny instance that only talks about blue shiny rocks to federate with lemmy.world and store all that content)

Yes. If you run the server, then you are the source of truth of that community. All other servers that federate your community query your server to access the community and show it to their users.

So if you run a server and a community explodes there, you might only have 500 users on your instance, but you might have 50k users reading that community and interacting with it from other Lemmy instances, thus your server needs to scale to 50k users worth.

And ever more essential, your server is the source of truth of that community. So if your server is hacked or corrupted or deleted, that community is gone. Other instances don’t mirror it (except for temporary caching), so the Lemmy network essentially is a trust network of other people maintaining servers long term (and each inventing a monetary system to pay for it). I still think the network might be better than a centralized system like reddit, but it definitely has a lot of growing and policies that need to be sorted out very soon

The downside to individual servers, and micro-communities, is the cost and maintenance of lemmy instance. Its more scalable, reliable and cheaper to have a bunch of relatively low-churn communities exist on one bigger instance.

The upside is that the rust community gets to own its own data. If programming.dev decides to shut down tomorrow, and posts and comments made there are gone. Lemmy doesn’t mirror or cache… all that data lives solely on the server ran by somebody.

I’d vote lemmyrs at least for now until a governance and stability model is figured out to ensure these conversations don’t go into /dev/null like /r/rust (sort of) did.

If say the Linux Foundation or a similarly large open source foundation (Apache, FSF, OSI, etc) decided to host a larger “open source” server, I’d consider moving there to improve discoverability and lessen the burden on the rust community itself

I think they’re saying that they like using the local view as a /r/all type replacement (a view of the highest voted content across all communities). But they’d like to be able to selectively add an entire other instance to their local view.

The only way to do this today is to subscribe to every community on your main instance and every community on the other instance, and use Subscribed as a mega view… But then that ruins the Subscribed view as a selected subset.

To put it another way, I want to view all the best content across N many instances at once, so I can discover new communities.

What’s really the difference between a federated Lemmy instance for hosting vs a 3rd party anyways?

If another Lemmy instance goes down, all the content on it is gone anyways. Federated != Mirrored. Just because you can browse the content doesn’t mean it’s safe from going away at the whims of one person