A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • Yea anything big and mainstream just seems super shallow.

    I’m not on top of things to compare accurately, but it was always kinda like that (and is like that here sometimes too). But whenever I’ve gone back, I’ve definitely felt like it has gotten somewhat worse. Some of that could easily be a shifting standard from spending more time on other less “mainstream” platforms though.



  • maegul@lemmy.mltoFediverse@lemmy.mlAlright, let's Fedify
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    20 days ago

    A few months ago, the “Nazi” presence on substack and substack’s insistence on not moderating them (like at all it seemed) broke as a story, during which Casey Newton (and by extension his “platformer” blog) got engaged with substack about the issue and, after being disappointed with substack’s responses and policies, famously left for Ghost (see their post on the move here.

    Pretty sure that boosted its profile and prompted talks of federating, which they were initially hesitant to do … but here we are now.


  • Ha, yea! If you know rust, then you don’t need to reach for Python (right?!). Plus the main motivation was to contribute to lemmy itself while also learning rust. That another platform is good for personal instances doesn’t change that, though piefed does seem cool and I can see myself wanting to get involved with it at some point.



  • But I get the database thing. Its spiking every couple minutes and a lot every hour. It’s not a big deal if you have 2 threads at least but I can see how it doesnt work for everyone in every scenario.

    Yea database management seems to where the growing pains are right now (with the core devs welcoming help from anyone with DB/PostreSQL expertise) … and indeed it seems to be a perennial issue across the fediverse platforms.

    If I may ask (sorry, probably annoying) … what sort of resources would you recommend for a small personal lemmy instance? (let’s say 1-5 users, ~200 community subs and a few local communities?)


  • Yea I did a quick search through the GitHub issues, and it seems like there are some growing pains with updates they’re making to the way things work and the load it puts onto the database. Sad to hear for smaller instances as my impression was that lemmy had pretty good performance for smaller instances. Architecturally, it makes sense that there are different tradeoffs for bigger and smaller instances. It’d be good to see things mature to the point that you can tune things for your instance size. In the end though, picking the appropriate platform but with the assurance that migration can occur when you need to change platform may be a good way to go.


  • I think there’s a pretty fair argument that more common and easier languages and tech stacks are preferable platforms for smaller more personal instances … just the comfort of being able to modify and debug is probably worth whatever other tradeoffs may be encountered. Python, naturally, is basically a prime candidate. So yea, PieFed seems very cool, especially for personal servers and they’ve got a good performance profile.




  • Without knowing the financial history of the place, it seems a good case study in something that could have gone for the sustainable stalwart of the internet path but instead fell to the dark silicon valley profit/growth side of things. With wikipedia being the only great success (AFAIK) at forging solid and sustainable foundations for the internet, I suppose the lesson is that it has to be non-profit, or open-source (or both) from the beginning.

    In a way, it is kinda on many of us for not realising this and pushing against it sooner.

    One of the great things coming out of the fediverse (and bluesky too at the moment) is all of the open software being developed that will hopefully plant seeds that will last a long time.










  • truth is that everything is scattered. And different alternative social media platforms or ecosystems … fighting and competing looks a bit silly once you zoom out a little. Both fediverse and BlueSky are sitting around 1 million monthly active users … which is nothing compared to the likes of twitter and threads and IG etc.

    It would be physically impossible to say that “all of the scientists are actually on BlueSky/Mastodon”. By any reasonable approximation, they’re all on Twitter/Threads, with some experimenting with alternative social media. And those few are likely on both because they’re still interested in getting their messages out there.