SemioticStandard

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

It's the enshittification of Reddit, as described by Cory Doctorow

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

Prose! I’m a novelist and short story author. I don’t consider myself a poet, but I did get a piece accepted in last year’s HWA Poetry Showcase, so that was unexpected but cool

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

There's a horror community here that we're trying to revive, come check it out: https://lemmy.ml/c/horror

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

I just edited the post to include a quote from The Verge on exactly this (the…odd, almost dystopian nature of these headsets), and I agree completely.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

I'm interested in getting into this, but I think I'd probably end up abandoning it and having it feel like a chore, then feel guilty about not getting it 'done.'

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

That's helpful to think of it that way, thank you. Perhaps I will reconsider :)

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/27525457-c88c-46f5-b151-5be5dc38e9a3.jpeg

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

Movies, books, art, really anything related to horror. I really like the /r/horrorlit subreddit, but I think Lemmy is probably too small to fragment the different horror interests.

StokerCon is in just 10 days, so a lot of my friends and others in the horror community are buzzing about that right now. I’m attending and moderating a panel on AI, and I have a story in the Mother: Tales of Love and Terror anthology that’s up for Super Achievement, so much to be excited about!

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

Nothing at the moment, but I co-founded Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. I was Director of Operations there until I had to back away (health/medical reasons forced some pretty seismic shifts in my life). That was a rewarding and challenging experience!

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

I’m glad you enjoy it :) They’re following what Red Hat is doing because they’re intended to mimic precisely RHEL. We used to say that Rocky is a “bug for bug” mirror of RHEL. So they have no choice but to follow suit.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

That's Kojima for you. But agreed, the game felt like someone took far too much inspiration from qwop. I've heard it called a 'walking simulator,' which feels apt, lol.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

I want Lemmy to succeed, but I'm highly skeptical of the ability of the instance operators to be able to do so. There's a great deal of technical sophistication that is required to support a large number of users, and from what I've seen, they don't have it. This isn't a slight against them in any way, but they freely admit that they lack SQL expertise, and I think I've seen some significant gaps in their knowledge on how to horizontally scale. This instance, for example, is all hosted on a single virtual server. There are no load balancers, no database sharding, no fanning out of services onto different servers...security is as well also likely in a shoddy state.

Again, no hate from me, nothing but praise so far. But there are some significant technological gaps here, and I worry their team isn't large or technically deep enough to fill them. What's in place at the moment is just waiting to tip over when any amount of traffic starts coming over. For what it's worth, I have offered my expertise to the admins around networking, security, scale, and automation.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

That’s not how this works. Lemmy itself may be open source, but the instance it runs on is not. All the work in work in the world on the Lemmy codebase won’t mean anything if its actual deployment is not built for scale, and that’s not anything anyone but the admins can do anything about.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

I’m referring specifically to Lemmy.ml, which is what the admins (of that instance) have been discussing and posting links to GitHub issues for. You can’t just take ‘everyone’s’ instance and spread it out into one giant working install of Lemmy. Every single instance that wants to handle scale is going to have to be built, managed, and maintained for it. If Lemmy.ml isn’t built to handle scale, then it’s going to go down when traffic spikes. They’re already having problems with their SQL database and traffic levels are basically nothing. You’ll end up with a bunch of users attempting to access any of the communities on Lemmy.ml and being unable to. They will need to go to a different Lemmy instance, which will have all of the same issues that Lemmy.ml will have regarding traffic load, and interact with threads there. The good thing about federation is that they’ll be able to keep using Lemmy on other instances, even if they don’t have access to Lemmy.ml specifically.

I promise I understand what I’m talking about, building for scale on a global level is what I do for a living. I also know something about open source projects, having co-founded Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and serving as its Director of Operations.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

Yes, I understand all of that. I know that it helps all the various instance owners. But that’s a problem that has already been solved. Building for scale is not specific or special to Lemmy. There are already entire automation toolsets—things like K8s or Docker Swarm, Terraform and Ansible, and endless documentation and examples on how to use and implement all of this. You’re talking about the greater whole, and what I’m trying to talk about is Lemmy.ml.

I do agree we’re probably talking past each other, though, and that’s alright, that’s how it goes on the Internet sometimes.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

You could configure something like a Cloudflare worker to throw up a page directing users elsewhere whenever healthchecks failed.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

spy on all the traffic

That's...not how things work. Everyone has their philosophical opinions so I won't attempt to argue the point, but if you want to handle scale and distribution, you're going to have to start thinking differently, otherwise you're going to fail when load starts to really increase.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

Think about everything you hate about Reddit—the kids, the trolls, the spam—and be thankful Lemmy requires a little more effort.

This is the way Reddit used to be when it first came out.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

No, of course not, but the added…intentionality that it requires weeds a lot out. Remember, trolls usually go after that which requires the least amount of effort. So it’s not about being able to navigate a UI, it’s about effort.

Or maybe that’s just a bunch of bullshit. 4chan is pretty arcane from a UX perspective, and look at the cesspit that place is. I don’t know. It was just a thought experiment.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

Right. There is exactly zero fucking chance that UBI will ever take off in today’s world, especially in the US, where we can’t even get universal healthcare.

SemioticStandard, 11 months ago

Speak for yourself.

…oh, wait. Shit.