Got an idea for something? Try building it, see how far you get. Like I had an idea while browsing Twitter last year sometime, that it’d be neat to have a threaded conversation view… So I made a site that used their API to fetch and build the conversation. It didn’t look good, but it was at least somewhat functional, and I learned a bunch.

Then Musk threw their API in the trash, but you know, you can’t control the vagaries of the world…

I’m actually seeing a fair number of people linking or mentioning Lemmy, there may be traction…

I’ll admit to a little shitposting in the AMA thread to be fair, but mostly to promote Fediverse alternatives where people are asking where they can go.

Heck, by the time we’d know for sure that Lemmy isn’t working out, there’d be no content left on Reddit to go back to.

It’s already much busier here than it was a couple days ago, though; I think we’ll be alright.

Mm, I use(d) Slide personally, which is more-or-less abandonware at this point. I expect that’ll just get its API user disabled by the dev, so it “doesn’t work” any more.

Mm, I’m a big fan of Decronym on Reddit, the bot that wanders around demystifying acronyms. There was a post by the bot’s creator yesterday where they covered how many API calls it makes, and how there’s been no clarity on whether there’ll be a free tier of API usage etc.

It could shut down all the comment bots on the site.

This comment further down states that the main issue is with the heavy JOIN-laden SQL queries that build the pages; the queries get long enough that pages time out.

Load-balanced frontends for lemmy.ml would hit the same backend/DB, as I understand it, so spinning up a frontend won’t necessarily help with the load. What’s needed is someone who knows pgsql optimization, and that’s not me. (I might be able to help if it were MySQL…)

Can attest: I have a small VPS (docean’s lowest tier, in fact) and in the deep past I had occasions where a blog post was popular enough to throw it offline for a while. I wasn’t about to lock myself into paying more money forever, to keep the site running for a day’s peak traffic.

In the case of lemmy.ml, this isn’t helped by the frontend being Websockets-driven, which holds open a connection for every concurrent user; I hear Dessalines and crew are working on cutting that dependency out and dropping down to something more static, which should help with load.

Kinda cancel out the far-right invasion of Voat? It’s a line of reasoning, certainly.

Might be a silly question, but: does ActivityPub support setting up a subinstance that gets its data from somewhere else? Traditionally you’d probably do that with a pgsql machine and multiple frontends, but having thought about it while typing this out, putting that load on the ActivityPub protocol would mean loading up the master to much the same extent as just having the traffic hit the master directly…

Many thanks, dropped 10mBTC.

Mm, I wanted Voat to work out when it first cropped up in Reddit comments, but the exodus of Donaldites meant abandoning that account.

Let’s hope a moderated and federated version means any communities of that persuasion can hive themselves off.