Beehaw is amazing and you make it possible. At least that's what I gather from the fact that I don't understand half of what you said.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Lemmy Project Priorities Observations
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I've raised my voice loudly on meta communities, github, and created new [email protected] and [email protected] communities.
I feel like the performance problems are being ignored for over 30 days when there are a half-dozen solutions that could be coded in 5 to 10 hours of labor by one person.
I've been developing client/server messaging apps professionally since 1984, and I firmly believe that Lemmy is currently suffering from a lack of testing by the developers and lack of concern for data loss. A basic e-mail MTA in 1993 would send a "did not deliver" message back to message sender, but Lemmy just drops delivery and there is no mention of this in the release notes//introduction on GitHub. I also find that the Lemmy developers do not like to "eat their own dog food" and actually use Lemmy's communities to discuss the ongoing development and priorities of Lemmy coding. They are not testing the code and sampling the data very much, and I am posting here, using Lemmy code, as part of my personal testing! I spent over 100 hours in June 2023 testing Lemmy technical problems, especially with performance and lost data delivery.
I'll toss it into this echo chamber.
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Hello. I can help you try to understand, perhaps I can rephrase it. I have brain damage and my mental health is not that great, communication is a constant struggle for me.
- Beehaw has been around since January 2022 running Lemmy - well over a year before the Reddit surge
- Lemmy has major problems with scalability and causing sever crashes, notably I talked about GitHub issue 2910 opened on June 4, 2023
- Beehaw crashed daily - and nothing was done about the underlying problem in the code while critical weeks went by
- I have a lot of regret for watching this happen all June
- There was a small project on June 7 that was about making an API proxy that I feel I was distracted from and I regret being distracted.
- I am trying to make sense of why I underestimated all this and find the problems in my brain so I don't repeat it.
This is sharing of open thoughts... I don't have any faith in these words being something others are seeking out. It's exactly the kind of navel-gazing a lot of people find extremely repulsive. Where I'm living, people find the words of Donald Trump irresistible and repeatable, up to and including every other member of my family. I have no doubts that my perspective on what images and patterns of words people desire is way out from what many are seeking. I know well I'm in an echo chamber...
Thanks for your detailed answer, it makes it a lot easier to understand.
I'm sorry about your mental health issues. Isn't it strange that we are living in such developed countries and yet we struggle to live. People can read and write and yet follow a so called strongman.
Also sorry about your brain damage. Based on your texts here I can't say I've noticed any of your communication issues. You seem reflective, kind, intelligent and I assume caring because you take care of the instance.
About the Trumpets, I must say here in the Netherlands we have something like that too, especially in the conservative area I live in. People here hang the flag upside down. I'm not a nationalist by any stretch but I find that to be rather distasteful. Arguments against climate change that are cherry picked and sensationalist and lacking in nuance. A dislike for foreigners, who do a lot of the actual work around here, and even a dislike for refugees. I'm told regularly that they are the real cause of problems such as the housing crisis.
Well personally I like to argue for solidarity, especially solidarity through reason. I mean if someone chooses to be hateful or selfish that is their choice, but let's at least have the same facts in front of us. And also I like to be active in the areas I care about. For example I'm trying to connect refugees to the wider community by allowing them to exhibit their art.
You know plenty of trumpets & co just scapegoat and complain because it is easy. But it's a lot harder to build something I think, and more impactful than it might seem at times.
I hope you also feel you're working on something positive that you believe in by making Beehaw possible. It's a well moderated safe space for people like me, and I enjoy being here and letting my guard down. So thanks for that!
have a good weekend
Beehaw didn't really have that much data, they had a well-organized and decorated set of around 10 communities, they had built up a standard of content for over a year... and it just got smashed by the performance problems of even slight growth of data in the post, comments, and federated communities. Tthe site_aggregates UPDATE bug was hammering away too.. with nobody fixing and digging for similar TRIGGER logic problems that June 4's issue 2910 called out.
I regret that I put too much faith in open source ideals, that surely Issue 2910 was explicit enough - and no June 13 hardware upgrade is going to fix such faulty logic. There's two active people who were the ones who approved the code in the first place, they are there every workday, it takes only a few hours - even with testing - to get the faulty SQL trigger entirely removed or fix the logic. I don't know if I'll ever understand how Issue 2910 played out from June 4 to June 30 Reddit deadline, it still seems to be one of the oddest things I've witnessed... to see Beehaw in constant turmoil week after week over what amounts to an easily patched-out or fixed fault in the foundation of the code.
If I could go back to June 4, I would have better focused to this development project had been going on for well over 4 full years of active development and operations of lemmy.ml as an Internet website. I would just keep on eye on that one single Issue 2910 and take on a part of adding some tools to better document the performance of the API.
It crossed my mind, June 4 inspired me to install BulletinTree.com testing main GitHub code merges on June 8, but I painfully see now that should have focused on a small project that came up that most people ignored, but I didn't... right there on June 7.... https://github.com/derivator/tafkars
I regret I didn't take the idea of what tafkars had built and make a proxy agent for the Lemmy API. Start metering the Lemmy API performance response and format the data so that visualization tools could be used. maybe even add nginx proxy log processing as an alternate means to capture data if people didn't want to put an API proxy in place. But there are things the API proxy could do: respond to API calls with a useful error instead of just leave clients with no response or nginx timeout. And the API could even be coded as an emergency-fallback to go pull data directly form PostgreSQL if needed. And building it like tafkars does would require no disturbance of the two developers who had been building lemmy_server for over 4 years.
How did I not see this coming? on June 4 I thought that by June 26 such easily fixed issues like 2910 would be addressed and rolled out... the constant fires burning over at Beehaw were flashing red and the slow-motion train-wreck of it all kept playing out. Beehaw did their best to keep their chins up, but it had to have been a bad experience to welcome people and have it all unfold the way it did.
I canceled my plans for a general purpose Lemmy social media site, the code and network peers were so unstable because of Issue 2910 and similar problems. I had hoped to have a general BBS system, which is what I named Bulletin Tree (BBS reference) for. And instead I saw Beehaw which had been running for 17 months blowing up and having to put up new error messages on their home page...
regrets, no fun :(
My regrets compounded when I sort of forgot about https://github.com/derivator/tafkars like everyone else did by early July... a month after it had been created... and it would have been a way for me to channel my skills instead of hoping the situation with Issue 2910 would turn around quickly. Even after 30 days, a few-hour fix to 2910 hadn't been put in.
Did I get caught up in all the "Fuck Spez" negativity of Lemmy community? Beehaw was the most positive and had been up for 17 months with their positive approach. Did I get sucked into the hate of Reddit and hate of Elon Musk emotions and not see it?
I really regret when I go back and see the June 7 creation of https://github.com/derivator/tafkars - that I didn't either think of it myself or jump in with contributions to a fully independent project that would offer a solution that didn't require the two entrenched developers of lemmy_server to change their pace or focus. Beehaw was on fire, and tafkars project would at least have been a way to view all this from an API perspective.
Did the negativity of hating Spez and corporate power - even the massive hate that everyone was screaming on Lemmy platform about Zuckerberg and "Threads" coming along on July 5... did it get into my head?
- May 20 2023 - a huge amount of hate surging with "Fuck Spez" and mod community planned outages protest
- June 30 the massive community hate towards Reddit
- July 5 - Zuckerberg and Threads. Massive hate response from the Lemmy platform.
- July 23 - Elon Musk pulls another massive change, the Twitter to X rename - a world-wide mind-fuck given how many news organizations have made Twitter one of the most-repeated words on the planet.
I should have been reading my Finnegans Wake and keeping my mind clear. The Reddit HiveMind clashes, the Lemmy platform HiveMind hate towards Threads and Twitter....
Beehaw is like a lighthouse in all the hate-oriented surges of people motivated by anger and hate, and I see now I lost my way in the competing waves of hate-focused HiveMind reactions.
This is a test comment to see how front-end gets notification.
do you get this comment reply?
https://github.com/derivator/tafkars
This API proxy approach could be useful for more intelligent rate-filtering than built-in Lemmy has, API redirection for specific calls, and even the basis for spam filtering. I haven't seen people remark about the lack of spam on lemmy. On Reddt, I've seen routine bots hit communities with t-shirt selling spam, etc. I wonder if other parts of the federated network have had to implement spam filtering.