phase_change

Thanks! I’ll try that next time.

I’m old school. Sometimes when I’m doing a deep dive into a new technical topic, I like to print to paper, go off and sit in my back yard with a beer and a pen to make margin notes. Today, I was trying to understand some web framework esoterica. I found what would have been a 14 page very deep dive article with code samples.

I haven’t written code more complex than simple scripting to automate stuff for years. I can still understand code. I wanted to understand this better to make some decisions about security setting in Apache for the devs who are interacting with this framework.

Hit print, and the preview window popped up. As I said, it was 14 pages. Before sending the the printer, I glanced at the first page. There was this big, square blank space on the bottom right, obscuring text. I canceled the print preview. There was a big ad overlay on the bottom right of the screen. I closed it and went back the print preview. I could see the first page.

I scrolled through the preview. Every other page had a different blank section obscuring the text. They were all smaller than the first, but made it unreadable. I’m assuming it’s some other overlay designed to come up as I scroll.

I could likely have pulled up the developer view and started editing so I could get a readable printed copy.

It wasn’t worth it. I closed the page and moved on.

Like I said I’m old school. I absolutely appreciate that someone took the time to do what looked like a very technical deep dive on what I was looking for. I do not want to read that type of deep technical material on a site with constantly popping up animated ads interrupting my conversation. I’m not even that upset, I just see it as another example of why I don’t like the timeline we’re in.

Metformin has a strange history. There was evidence in animal studies as early as the 1920’s that it could lower blood sugar, but wasn’t approved as a diabetic treatment until the 50’s. The US didn’t approve it until the 90’s.

It’s still not clear how it works. There continue to be articles like this hinting that it could have other beneficial effects, including a lower incidence of cancer and longer life, which again no one can explain how. All the research pointing at other effects besides blood sugar are observational and longitudinal in nature.

Lest someone think it’s a wonder drug, all these effects are relatively subtle, and side effects for many include things like explosive diarrhea.

Awesome write up. I appreciate the transparency and the knowledge transfer for others trying to keep their Lemmy instances up under load.

I too use B2 for a restic target in my home network. I’m not delivering any content, but I’m assuming you are aware of the B2 integration with CDN’s that at least don’t incur B2 egress charges? https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html

I’d assume there are CDN bandwidth charges involved. I have no idea how those compare to the VPS charges. I’m also certain the setup isn’t simple.

I’m looking forward to similar posts and can’t express how much I appreciate the transparency.

Isn’t there a big danger of advertising and influence moving in if you have a handful of centralized servers?

Sock puppet accounts to influence the conversation don’t make economic sense when the people you are influencing number in the thousands. They do when you are in the millions.

Paying a server admin for influence or a hand on the scale makes no sense if that server has thousands of users mostly subscribed to your handful of communities on your handful of large instances.

Yes, the user experience is easier, but I think it opens things up to community attack scenarios that a wider federation of of servers with a wide distribution of popular communities makes more difficult.

And to be clear, I don’t mean attack as in taking systems offline. I mean attack as in moneyed interests doing the type of thing moneyed interest does on all popular social media. Things that I believe make the user experience worse.

My fear is that your desire for centralization to make the user experience easier creates a system that makes the user experience worse in a way that makes it much more difficult to fight.

Yep. Threads like this boil down to “Lemmy isn’t the perfect Reddit replacement I want. We need to change things so it will be as close to Reddit as possible.”

Look, I migrated to Reddit from Digg. Reddit wasn’t exactly like Digg. I actually found it nicer. A new user on Reddit a month ago would not have had the same experience I had a decade ago. The default subreddits are different. The types of posts are different. The popular posts are different. The comment sections are very different.

I’ve stayed on Reddit until the kerfuffle, but I doubt I’d ever decide to join if I first found it as a new user today.

The de-federation that beehaw just put in place listed, in part, the desire to keep the comment sections from devolving into current Reddit comment sections. And, as many others have pointed out, it was a reluctant move because of a limit of moderation resources and tools.

I joined the fediverse last week as one of many Reddit refugees. I joined sh.itjust.works because at the time it was a smaller instance and the large ones were overloaded. The de-federation didn’t make me happy, largely for the selfish reason that the more interesting communities I was subscribed to were on beehaw.

The goal of the de-federation did make me happy. I want quality content and engaged and engaging comments. I subscribed here, but also kept my sh.itjust.works account.

I’m not particularly concerned about a split acccount history. I have hopes that Lemmy and the fediverse will make it successfully through the growing pains this unexpected influx of new users will cause. I’m certain this isn’t going to be the only growing pain event, nor do I think it will be the most painful.