20 years ago, if someone said ‘u’ for ‘you’ then I assumed they were young. These days if I see someone use ‘u’ for ‘you’ I assume they are 60+.

I think Searx is a good suggestion. Can be a bit slow to return results because it runs the search on a bunch of search engines and compiles the results, but that helps to make sure better stuff rises to the top.

Wait, so you get a 4 day week but everyone else has to do 5 days so you can go to your appointments?

I can easily search up people talking about both the Windows and MacOS system wide spell checks. While for Linux you just find people talking about how dumb it is everything uses different implementations: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/hu4ktg/does_systemwide_autocorrect_and_typo_flagging/

As for NZ English words, it would mostly be words that have come from the Māori language including place names and people’s names.

In theory having multi-language spell check would solve most of the issues, but I’ve never seen Māori as a supported language on Linux.

For some examples of words, there are place names like Taranaki, Te Anau, Te Awamutu. People’s names like Hone Harawera or Apirana Ngata. And common words and phrases that have made it into English like Kia ora (mostly used in English as a greeting) and Aotearoa (a name for New Zealand). There will also be company and product names as well.

Haha I get that I can’t really expect better than “English”, or maybe “US English” and “UK English”, but having a system wide dictionary I can add words to by right clicking and choosing “add to dictionary” would be nice.

As I understand it, each program keeps their own.

Linux in general has good language support.

I’ve yet to find a distro with NZ English 😆. I’d love to just start a new dictionary and add words to it for all the spell checks, but I’ve never worked out how to do this. I’m not sure there’s even system level spell check.

Well, every time assets get split between their 3 kids, you reduce the assets accumulated in one couple.

I think it might have come about from the Crowdstrike thing?

You’re assuming that Arch causes the unhappiness. Maybe unhappy people naturally tend to use Arch, so as to avoid further pain from painful distros like Pop! OS?.

There probably will be something. We may not be able to predict it. But reddit will pull a Digg or a Twitter at some point and people will be looking for alternatives. Then we get another surge of users.

Alternatively, one of the federated Lemmy alternatives (Sublinks, Mbin, Piefed) might hit the right audience and push up the platform userbase.

Peak Lemmy users happened, it was in the later part of last year as a result of the reddit API controversy. No one expected that to stay, and users slowly waned after this as expected.

I’d say we’re in a maintenance phase at the moment. Active users is somewhat steady, posts and comments are somewhat steady. There are around 45k active users, but note that Lemmy counts this different than other sites. For later Lemmy versions, you need to comment, post, or vote to be considered. Lurkers that don’t vote (whether logged in or not) are not counted at all (for earlier Lemmy versions, voters are also not counted).

Growing more will probably happen after some other event to dive people away from reddit.

Fascinating, I didn’t realise the latency down there was that bad. How hard was it to get the process working across two distant servers like that?

Lemmy servers don’t send the next activity until the first is received. From memory it was something like 150-200ms for the round trip to Finland and back. That means a maximum of about 5 or 6 activities per second at the best of times. However, when Lemmy receives say a new comment, it then sends a request to retrieve the user details from the user’s instance, and the whole pipeline is held up. The worst I saw was occasional activities taking 8 seconds to complete (I guess whatever data was being fetched was on a slow instance).

At one point, kbin.Social hammered Lemmy.world with duplicate requests which then tried to federate out, and that was when the problem was noticed (though Lemmy.world does average more than 5 a second so even after kbin issues stopped we couldn’t recover). A guy on matrix Nothing4You (I’m not sure of Lemmy username ) built a pre-fetcher to trigger Lemmy to retrieve details of posts before Lemmy.world tried to federate them out, thus helping those situations where it was taking multiple seconds to retrieve all details. It helped but was not enough to turn the tide, and we were still getting further and further behind. Nothing4You was meanwhile building a complete batching solution, which you can see on github.

So for me? It was easy, I just signed up for a server and ran an ansible playbook to set it up, then added a docker container to the Lemmy stack, all the while getting personalised help 🙂. I’m not sure how hard it was to conceptualise a solution, build it, test it, and make sure it was fault tolerant, because I didn’t have to!

I know of people with similar mechanisms who had problems with very sincere-sounding bad actors before ChatGPT.

There are many ChatGPT answers, but I think this more affects instances like Beehaw who ask for an essay and have to pick the AI out from the others. My instance has a short and specific question and works to weed out a lot of this, though I’m confident some spammers still get through (and are sitting on accounts waiting for them to age up a bit).

Hey, unrelated, but do you know if they ever got the database code cleaned up? One of these days that’s actually going to start to bite; my instance already had to do a hardware upgrade once.

I’m not familiar with that specific code, but it probably depends on the last time you looked at it. In the early reddit migration days a lot of optimisation changes were made in a hurry, but there were issues that arose as instances scaled. These were patched up by various releases but on my instance the average CPU usage of the 0.19 versions is 30% or more up on the 0.18s.

Being in NZ we were also hit hard by the issue of federation being concurrent. To this day we are running an extra VM in Finland to batch up activities and send them in bulk to be replayed on the Lemmy server. I’m pretty sure I saw a pull request for that recently though so it might be fixed in the next version (but we’ll have to wait until Lemmy.world updates if I understand it correctly).

I should try and figure out how a list of bad IPs would best fit into ActivityPub. It sounds like it would be easy enough to add.

Perhaps such a thing exists for Mastodon and could be applied to Lemmy?

You can buy valid gmail address by the thousands. Email validation is one part of a multilayered approach. It cuts some out, but you need more layers. Captchas work, they cut some proportion out, but not all.

Probably the most effective is registration applications, but this is a huge barrier to entry. If we want Lemmy to grow, we are going to have to change the current state (most instances require an application to join), or change peoples expectations. You can sign up for a reddit account just like that, and start using it without waiting for approval. Why would people choose Lemmy? On our instance we had a drop in registrations to about 1/10 of what we had with open registrations.

Unfortunately I don’t know the answer. It probably involves taking on strategies like reddit if we are going to scale that big (auto-mod, karma, etc). Unfortunately we will have even more trouble, because in the users host instance doesn’t ban them then an admin on every other instance has to ban them for that instance. So we probably need to be able to follow ban lists to auto-ban users that have been banned on other trusted instances or something like that. As we grow, I’m sure we will have more pain before it gets better, but I’m hopeful that we will solve issues as they arise.

There are already spammers all over Lemmy. There’s a coordinated effort to remove spam, it just doesn’t include IP addresses (which aren’t that helpful because they change and with CG-NAT entire neighbourhoods can share them, and with VPNs people not near each other can - plus if you have a dynamic IP then restarting your router can give you a new one).

To my knowledge, there is no coordinated sharing of IP addresses between instances. Different instances are run by different people, so it’s very unlikely the IP address will matter.

A new username on a new instance is likely enough that no one will ever know, so long as your posts or comments don’t give you away.

Neither! I also had this question. No emphasis on any part, karma-la.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XYkZkpLQUS0

That’s great, thanks!

I’m running Nobara on my laptop and have been for some time, but I do find it crashes a bit. Not sure if it’s hardware or software (I’m using an original Framework laptop, and I know there have been hardware changes to resolve some things).

I’m looking for stability first of all, so I might try Mint first off and change only if I find issues.

Thanks for the suggestion! That sounds really cool, I got my hopes up for a second, but it looks like 5Ghz wifi is required. It makes sense, for speed/latency reasons, but unfortunately the old laptop plugged into the TV is quite old. At least 10 years old, probably more.

I am expecting to replace my current laptop in the next year or so, so maybe I’ll look at this setup at that point.