Salamander

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • I have been running an instance without a slur filter for about a year and a half. It is not a big instance, but big enough to have some experience in the field.

    In case you are curious, 100% of the many times that I have encountered the n-word in my instance it has been in the context of a very banable offense, and it often requires spending some effort investigating and purging images from the database. The slur filter would block many these federated posts and comments from reaching my instance without the troll/spammer getting any feedback about this.

    The filter can be a useful practical tool. The reason I keep it off is because I’m stubborn about not policing the words that people can and can’t say. But when I consider what I have experienced and reflect about this, I become more and more skeptical about my choice. The problem is still manageable for my small instance, so I can keep the slur filter off. But I can see that when dealing with this problem at a much larger scale one would want to use any tool at their disposal to make the job easier.





  • My view is: I don’t like this cultural element, and I am glad that I live in a country without it. But if I am a visitor from abroad I would not resist the local culture and try to impose my own values. If I am aware of this cultural element and I dislike it, my options would be to either avoid restaurants and other tipping situations as much as I can, or simply account for the tip when making my financial decisions, and pay it.

    If I live in the country then it is different, because then I am more entitled to be a driver of change. Personally, my approach would be to support businesses with explicit no-tipping policy, and to refuse receiving tips myself.



  • Salamander@mander.xyztoAnnouncements@lemmy.mlLemmy v0.18.0 Release
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    1 year ago

    In the admin settings there is a tab that allows admins to add an icon. So far I added :lemmy_hearts: and :mander: to test. I am posting from Jerboa now and the custom icons did not get invoked. I don’t know yet if you can also invoke them from a different instance.

    What I did notice is that the icon gets fixed to a size that is bigger than a normal icon, and the upload button doesn’t seem to be working - i had to feed the form the direct url to an image.





    • The comment thread began with a user in lemmy.world, and the instance was defederated from beehaw, so that comment and sub-comments were not fetched
    • The ‘comment ID’ is not shared by different instances, so each instance will assign every comment its own ID.
    • If you want to fetch the comment from a third instance, you would need to click the colorful ‘fedisymbol’ to get the original link, which is the one from the instance that the original user lives in.



  • This is what I think, but if anyone understands it differently please correct me.

    Vertical scalability refers to scaling within a single instance. More users join and they post more content, increasing the amount of disk space needed to hold that memory, network bandwidth to handle many users downloading comments and images at once, and processing power.

    Horizontal scaling refers to the lemmyverse growing because of the addition of new instances. The problem in this form of scaling is due to the resources that an instance has to use due to its interactions with other instances. So, you may create a small instance without a lot of users, but the instance might still need a lot of resources if it attempts to retrieve a lot of information (posts, comments, user information, etc) from the other larger instances. For example, at some point a community in lemmy.ml might be so popular that subscribing to that community from a small instance would be too much of a burden on the smaller instance because of the amount of memory required to save the constant stream of new posts. The horizontal scaling is a problem when the lemmyverse becomes so large that a machine with only a small amount of resources is no longer able to be part of the lemmyverse because its memory gets filled up in a few hours or days.


  • I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they’ll give up because the bigger instances are closed.

    (This is purely my personal opinion, of course!) In the scenario in which a few large instances dominate, the idea of the fediverse failed. One may estimate the likelyhood of success or failure given how they expect humans to behave, but in the end experiment beats theory. I think that for the fediverse to work a significant cultural shift has to occur, but I don’t think that it is an impossible shift. I would like the fediverse to succeed, and so I choose to take part in the experiment.

    This also ignores that the system isn’t horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive

    Yes, that might cause some serious issues. The project is still in an early-development phase, and I don’t understand the technical aspects well enough yet to be able to identify whether there is obviously a fundamentally invincible barrier when it comes to scalability. My optimistic hope is that the developers are able to optimize horizontal scalability fast enough to meet the demand for scale. If it turns out to be impossible to scale, then only rich enough parties would be able to have viable instances, and that could be a reason for failure.