The author ended up creating a strawman. Allen's argument was pretty clear: if your deltas are small and your deploy system is fully automated, then no one should be afraid of the risk of deploying.
Given that, if I deploy on a Monday morning and there is a bug on the new release, you revert, reproduce the issue in staging and push only new code when it is fixed. Same thing if I were deploying on a Thursday afternoon or a Friday at 7PM.
Every change that isn’t already an active disaster recovery can wait for Monday.
I honestly fail to see the difference between "don't deploy on Friday if this can wait until Monday" and "don't deploy on the evening if it can wait until the next morning".
The idea of CD is that changes are small and cheap. No one is saying "it's okay to push huge PRs with huge database migrations on a Friday", what is being said is "if your team is used to ship frequently and incrementally, it won't matter when you ship and your risk will always be small."
Just seems like everything is "this company did this to their employees" and less about "this novel messaging protocol offers these measured pros and cons." Or similar...
The annoying thing with these reductionist views is that they miss the potential applications.
"JPEGs in the blockchain" is indeed a pointless use case and were so hyped because of greed and a ZIRP world. This doesn't mean that all applications built on top of NFTs are worthless. For example, one could see a well-thought ticketing system based on NFTs that could destroy Ticketmaster.
This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.
This is just another way of saying "having mods enforcing super strict rules", which then leads to an ossified culture and a bunch of mods high on their power trip. This was also seen on Reddit and StackOverflow.
Unfortunately, the way to avoid "lowest common denominator" issues that you mention is by going to the places where the denominator is relatively small, but big enough to have network effects in its favor. My experience was that all subreddits between 25k to 500k subscribers worked really well without excessive policing. Between 500k and 1M it could still go by, depending on the moderators. After crossing that mark, things started to deteriorate fast.
If we were to scale that to Lemmy, it means that all communities with a subscriber count >= 1% of the total network will fall into "deteriorate fast" territory.
Transparent consensus about the data can not be achieved with a few database tables.
You could make the argument that this does need a blockchain and it could be built on another decentralized consensus protocol (like Paxos), but then you'd lose the permissionless aspect of it and such a system would likely end up being control by a monopoly or oligopoly, like the whole ticketing industry is controlled by Ticketmaster today.
whatever system is deciding what is being pointed to.
The ticketing use case could work precisely because a ticket is just a pointer. Access to the actual venue/seat would still need to be verified in person, but the issuing of tickets and transactions in the primary/secondary markets are the nasty parts that are exploited by Ticketmaster and gives them so much moat.
Editing post titles does not count as quality control, in the same ways that some of reddits have such strict rules to the point that mods delete anything that is not exactly within the lines.
HN mods (dang, especifically) don't care about power trips, because they have actual power
HN is not a single-topic community, like a Lemmy group. If you create a /c/technology and say it is a place to post "Anything that good hackers would find interesting", it would quickly derail into a constant meta-discussion.
so vulnerable to buying by anonymous accounts and then reselling.
Make the smart contract that forbids multiple transfers, or make transfer more expensive after the initial purchase (unless authorized by some pre-approved address and/or an address that has an associated real ID)
why is that needed?
Because we'd like to have a system that can not be manipulated or controlled by a single entity?
At any given individual event, yes. But if there is any abuse, it is easy to change said entity.
What I have in mind would be that we can take all these separate functions performed by a large company and break them apart. A centralized organization could be broken apart, but that would require a lot more political power than by simply designing up the system in a way that all functionality is spilt and has to conform to a specific interface.
transfer fees... more expensive
Are you talking about the blockchain fees or the ones established by the "smart contract"? If the former, those can easily be avoidable by using a separate blockchain (specific for the use case and backed/supported by the participating venues, which would be glad to pay anything reasonable compared to the racket run by Ticketmaster), or like I said, not even use a blockchain at all and just stick with a permissioned consensus system.
The extent of how single-topic a community is depends on the community and moderators. I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.
The discussion started because OP wants to have "more hard tech" and less "tech biz news". How do you think you'd enforce that, and how would you avoid splitting the ones that do not agree with that direction?
On HN, it's easy to avoid splittering the community because there is no "sub-HN". The ones that are not interested or oppose the guidelines have no other option but to leave.
On Reddit or Lemmy, it's quite easy to "fork" a community or simply creating another for the more specific niches. So you don't end up with a single /c/technology, but instead we get a "popular" /c/technology (for the lowest denominator) and the more specific "/c/hard_tech" or "/c/true_tech".
If my theoretical approach causes people to leave, that’s OK.
Right, but that will also mean that the community will no longer be "big". That's my point.
If mods started going as far as deleting threads on the basis of "this discussion is already beaten to death and is not bringing anything new", you can bet that this will be taken as an act of "censorship" and will cause everyone to leave to form their own factions - except maybe the ones that are aligned with the mods enough to understand the principles behind the decision.
I think ask_historians is in itself a community with such an specific goal that it makes it hard to be subdivided, but I see your point. The bigger question is how this could be replicated for other communities, if at all.
The mirroring content is targeted at specific communities. You can not call it an "an attack on the network" if you are willingly staying in front of the firehose.
The posts are useful by themselves. You talk like I am creating a random text generator. You are pissed off at the fact that the you can not interact with the people, not at the quality of what they are writing. If you really can bring 1 million "bots" that can write something nearly as good as the content from the niche subreddits, by all means do it.
I am not "fine with splitting the community". What I said is that if LW continues with the defederation even if it becomes populated with real people, then it will be on LW for keeping isolated.
"Sacrificing alien.top" means stopping with the bots and just implement the migration on another instance.
The whole premise is that there is a significant part of Reddit's userbase that don't want to be "on" Reddit, yet they can't find their niche communities elsewhere.
Having a way to bridge the content away from Reddit is (or should be) the incentive for them.
This may help bring lurkers over.
By bringing lurkers, you are solving one side of the "chicken-and-egg" problem.
Like I said in other comments: I had ~50 subreddits I was subscribed to, but I was an active participant on maybe 4 of them. Thanks to the mirrors, I could drop all of my Reddit usage and have access to all the content directly from Lemmy.
As an user, my remaining problem is that these 4 subreddits where I was still participating don't have as many "real people", and then there are two ways to solve this:
By creating two-way communication (which is okay, but still works in favor of Reddit)
By promoting Lemmy as an alternative and bringing more people from Reddit (which is ideal)
The former is being worked on, but as many others already chimed in, it puts the project at the mercy of Reddit. This system is a clear a violation of their TOS and they could outright break it.
The latter is a lot harder to do and it basically requires a coordinated effort of as many people in a pool of ~30k people to act as evangelists to reach out to a group of mostly ADHD-riddled and tech-unsavvy users.
Lemmy does not NEED to grow, since there are no profit incentives.
And the point you are missing: the social media networks that do have profit incentives are destroying our society and keeping yourself isolated in a cocoon is not going to save you - nor any of your loved ones.
So, I really disagree with you here: given that it is unlikely that we will be able to get rid of all social media, the next best thing is to have an alternative that is not so harmful. I believe that the Fediverse needs to grow because it's the only alternative that has a chance of replacing corporate-controlled social media and that perhaps can get us free from Surveillance Capitalism.
We got especially the people who think for themselves
There has to be a name for this type of fallacy... Do you really think that the people that joined now are somehow better than the average redditor?
If I am being completely objective, every time I'm opening Lemmy it feels like a extreme version of Reddit's political echo chamber and none of the people who participate in anything remotely productive/entertaining/positive that you can find in the long tail of Reddit's niche communities. With very few exceptions, it feels like just one long stream of negativity and "Two Minutes Hate" displays. It's depressing and mentally draining. With the mirrors from my usual subreddits, I could at least make the experience here bearable. But now that the mirrors are disabled, it just makes more apparent how sterile this place currently looks.
And all of this drama just because people can not be bothered to curate their own feeds and learn to browse by subscribe. It's ridiculous...
The irony of it all is that everyone loved to complain about "The Algorithm", but now that the ability of curating the feed is entirely in their hands, they are "ooh, things I don't like in my timeline, make it stahp!"
The people complaining can't even understand the concept of curating their own feed, do you think they will understand if we start talking about bridges and double-puppets?
As I said, if there is hypothetical post from 49 hours ago with 10k upvotes, you will not see it, but you will see one from 48 hours ago with 1k upvotes.
Not necessarily true. You can build an index and keep a cache of the N posts by each sorting method. Your data store will grow linearly with the number of sorting criteria you will have, which should be small.
But what about mobile?
We are talking about an amount of data that a sqlite database process in a breeze. My K-9 email client can handle all my 20 years of gmail...
Honestly those don't bother me so much as the one that call it "spam bots". I've spent so much time making sure that the bots only post the content that is relevant to a specific community, and I am going out of my way to make sure that no post is going to a community that does not approve of the bots, but somehow what I am doing is as bad as the script kiddie that was posting goatse-style pictures everywhere this weekend.
I have no doubt that this has become a Quixotic quest. It's just that I am so tired of the endless talk about the "dangers of social media" and the general apathy from people, I don't know how to stop even if I tried.
conscious choice to change from the default to All.
First, the default listing is set by the instance administrator so we can't be sure of what is the default in the first place.
Second, one of the most common criticisms carried against open source developers is the tendency to provide too many configuration choices to end-users instead of streamlining the interface, which leads to creation of footguns.
Making it so easy to browse by all is one such footgun.
These "lemmy community syncing" tools is also a footgun. The people running those scripts are basically forcing all content from all communities to be copied across the instances. (curiously, if people were not running these scripts, the likelihood of them getting "hit" by alien.top would be quite small).
"one that’s just copied from reddit with nobody actively commenting”
I can point you to communities on selfhosted.forum that started completely from bots and today have hundreds of organic users. In some cases, threads that get started from a reddit mirror got carried on by users on Lemmy.
What is pissing some (not all) people off is that they only wrote because they didn't know it was a bot. While I understand the feeling of being tricked, it doesn't change the fact that a community with more content (even if mirrored) ends up attracting more real users than the desert communities that people create but do not put out content
I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting the reasons, but in practice what happened is that the largest instance was constantly offline and unresponsive.
then you come ask for favors?
Be transparent. You claimed that the instance needed to be defederated based on the mirror bots. Now the bots are gone and real users are coming (like I said they would) and suddenly this is you "making a favor"?
So, just to be clear: the project was from the very first step meant to help people migrate from Reddit and to join Lemmy. Now that it is starting to actually achieve its goals, you now want to penalize it for its success?
Didn’t you ask us to make an exception for your bots when we defederated with alien.top almost two months ago?
No, my exact question was "how many real users will it take for you to stop considering it a bot-instance only".
Lemmy World is too big and bad for the fediverse.
My argument has always been that having one single instance controlling the majority of users is bad for decentralization. The fact that one of the LW mods can be so petty to the point of holding a block against another instance (when the alledged reasons for the block are no longer valid) is kinda proving my point.
It wasn’t for the fediverse, it was to push people to your (failing) hosting company.
You didn't see me criticizing lemm.ee, or beehaw, or programming.dev, or sdf.org, or feddit.*. None of them were working to monopolize the reddit migrants like LW. But sure, I am the one with ulterior motives.
The thread has nothing to do with it. What it has to do with it is that today I got 90 real people signing up to alien.top via reddit and one of them is asking "hey, can we get federation with LW now"?
User counts are only for active users. You should know that quite well.
In any case, please go ahead and make it clear: if you want to act like an arbiter of success to determine if alien.top should be re-federated, how many users should it have?
there is little to no community interaction on the posts
You know what has even less activity and interaction? All the communities that were set up during the protests, but then were left completely neglected.
I accept the criticism that people were feeling flooded by the mirrored content, this is why I turned them off for now. But I fail to see how it's worse for the niche communities that having some content is worse than having no content available, just because people can not (yet) talk (easily) with the original poster.
Lemmy would just be the second class way of interacting with Reddit content
First, it's not "Reddit content". It's about the content from the communities. Second, the idea is to have tools that help them migrate away from there. The two-way interaction is an intermediate step to make it easy for people there to know they won't be missing out by leaving their favorite subreddits and coming here.
The communities I want that aren’t on Lemmy are extremely niche.
And this is exactly the communities that fediverser wants to bring!
Reddit's moat is not on the popular content, it's in the long tail. Reddit knows that people on /r/politics or /r/gifs are mostly to pad their numbers, but their real strength is that you can not find people to talk about Kerbal Space Program and Rain World outside of Reddit.
These "extremely niche" communities are the ones that are being held by network effects. These are the communities that I'd like to have on fediverser.network, and these are the communities that I wish we could get coordinated enough to pull away from Reddit.
No one is going to bridge all the content on Reddit to Lemmy (...) because of the immense computational, storage, and bandwidth requirements,
alien.top was mirroring about 150 subreddits for two months, most of them of the niche type. The database of "1M comments" is taking less than 10GB of disk space. Looking at the last backup, the whole database uncompressed is 18GB. It's running on commodity hardware. Even with the mirrors making copies of the images to object storage, my object storage bill this month was a whooping $0.66.
If we focus on the long tail, it is not that expensive. And by the time that we actually start getting bigger number of users, I'm sure that we can come up with different strategies to deal with the data. We can create a common pool of resources for shared storage, we can divide the instances in "topic-based" and "user-home" (like I've been doing with communick.news and the ones on !communick_news_network), etc.
I guess if you just link the images from Reddit it’s not that computationally intensive
The images are actually copied to the mirrored server.
Perhaps a system to make these opt-in, like a menu in the settings to select which bridges you want enabled could be added to Lemmy,
It's not that simple to do that per user. You'd need:
An actual Reddit client per user
A Lemmy client with OAuth support so that the bridges don't need to hold the user's password.
An "official" map of reddit-to-lemmy communities, so that we know where to point all those bridges for posts. I'm working on such map, but I really don't want to call it official unless it gets significant community support.
Is the opt-out solution aggressive? Yes, no doubt. But I thought that this "aggression" was pointed to Reddit and therefore justifiable. The whole reason that this approach forces its hand to be able to get the data is because Reddit API changes was a clear sign that they want to treat the data from the users as their own. The protests were not effective against this, and showed to Reddit that they can win any conflict against dissenting mods. If Reddit tracked back on their policies and showed to be a good steward of one of the most vast amount of user data, I wouldn't be putting so much effort in this project.
If you can think of any other approach to make this work and is aligned with the clear goal of the project (make it easy for people to migrate away from Reddit, in a way that those that come here can already find their niche communities) I'm all for trying it.
On developer dogma #3 : Never ship on Fridays (www.octomind.dev)
I wish there were more articles about tech not tech biz
Just seems like everything is "this company did this to their employees" and less about "this novel messaging protocol offers these measured pros and cons." Or similar...
Pleroma vs Mastodon vs Misskey
Which do you think is the better microblogging platform? Why?
An alternative perspective on Alien.top and the Fediverser project
Tl:dr: Remember the human, even if the project doesn’t work, it wasn’t as useless as it may seem, resources consumption may be concerning...
alien.top is a new level of Reddit crossposting spam
Whoever is in charge of that instance, STOP....