Web Developer (I ❤️ PHP). Admin of remy.city kbin instance.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I think that would be worth it, yeah. Of course if you are hosting it on your home network there will be some added security concerns (and that might make it better to only allow signups to friends/friends of friends/etc). The way I see it is that some instances are going to host the largest communities, and therefore those instances are going to need to handle all of the incoming/outgoing updates to posts in those communities. Right now they can’t do that reliably and push updates out to all of their users’ devices.

    So in the long run I think having small/medium instances (say a couple hundred, not tens of thousands of users) will be the way to grow. These smaller communities can push updates to their smaller user count reliably, and then have more resources to handle federated content coming in and going out. I think scaling for the incoming/outgoing federation requests would be easier than for direct user activity. Federation stuff can be queued and then spread over time, but user requests cannot be.



  • This is the problem we are having with fast growth on a few select communities. The largest servers are being bogged down simply because the software has not been tuned for these large types of instances yet. ActivityPub works best (in it’s current state) by spreading users over smaller/medium sized instances. Folks need to take a look at other instances (and I agree it is hard to find them for a newcomer). You can look at https://fedidb.org/ to look at instances that have been indexed running kbin, lemmy, and other software.

    Joining a smaller instance means that your server is not being bogged down by tens of thousands of other users trying to pull updates at the same time. You can still see the content from other instances, and in many cases it is more reliable because your smaller instance actually has the resources to handle pulling in the posts you want to see. In the future I am sure instances like lemmy.world will be able to handle the traffic smoothly, but for now the best way to ensure stability is to join a smaller instance.

    (Plug for my instance: https://remy.city, a general purpose Kbin instance. I set it up for personal use but anyone is free to join me in using it. I have defederated from the more alt-right communities like lemmygrad and exploding-heads, and from lemmynsfw.com because of content hosting concerns. I’m open to suggestions on others.)


  • There are ways to write links in such a way that they should keep you on your instance, but I’m not too familiar with them. I wonder if it would be possible to “precheck” links that load on a page, and if any point to content that can be federated, kick off the process of pulling that content in. Then when the user clicks that link, it would take them to the content on their home instance, where they can interact. That way users wouldn’t need to deal with formatting links a certain way, it would just happen automatically (if your home instance software supports it).



  • Wikipedia is a good example. It is annoying when they ask for the $3 every year, but it’s true that a small contribution like that across the many users can keep a free/libre project sustained. Things like Usenet used to be part of your ISP bill anyhow, so a small monthly/annual amount to your instance host makes sense to me. Of course, we pay ridiculous amounts to our ISPs without services like this nowadays, so it does hurt a little




  • Wow, similar thing for me, I have a 'bicuspid aortic valve’s which means the aortic valve in my heart is a bit funky and doesn’t push blood through as it should. And that makes the FAA also seem me medically unfit. I think there is a process to get a medical exemption, but with the cost of getting a license so high already, I just decided to stick with MSFS. I get to ‘fly’ a 737 like I wanted as a kid, learn all about it, but I’m not shelling out thousands and years of my life (okay, maybe I am shelling out some money but I like pretty airports!)


  • That’s something I want to get into. I want to set up that self hosted software, forget what it’s called, but you can integrate with IoT devices just like you can with a mainstream assistant service like Google Home.

    What I really want to do is automate my blinds, which are the chain loop type, so I can say “house, open the living room blinds” like they did in Smart House, the Disney channel original movie (or maybe that was Home Alone 4, but we don’t talk about that one). I found a little motorized device that integrates with these chain blinds but it was a bit pricey. Of course if I tried to make it with my own Arduino etc it would be an ugly mess.


  • On Lemmy that is. Kbin I believe replicates everything (unless I set my server up wrong). My server at the moment pulls in around 1.5 GB a day it seems. There is a pull request open on the kbin git repo for a feature to auto-remove old media. Personally I’d like the ability to turn on/off media replication. If an instance wants a complete copy in case of defederation/disconnection somehow, they can opt in and mirror all media that comes in. Most servers should just link to the original image source on the originating instance though.