Almost everything has seen significant improvements. Technology has improved at an astounding rate. The only down side of improvement is higher expenses for more complicated tech. Phones are so much better than they used to be. We don’t have to carry a brick anymore but they cost a fortune now
I’m still amazed at how many people I know still think cars are better before because they were “harder to break.” Yeah, you can sit on the hood of an old car and it won’t do anything to it, but try crashing at 80km/h and you’re gonna wish that unbreakable object broke. Anything higher and you might not have a chance to wish for anything. Lol.
What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?
You register your account on sh.itjust.works, that’s where all the info you care about resides. Your list of subscribed communities resides there. When you read a post, it gets fetched out of the db on sh.itjust.works (irrespective of where the home instance for that post’s community is… when you read it it comes out of the database on your home instance), and when you comment on a post, that gets written to the db on your home instance. Your home instance a standalone fully functioning thing.
When you subscribe to a remote community like this one, you tell your home instance "keep up to date with posts and comments for this community and let me know about them. Your home instance asynchronously gets all those updates while you’re asleep or whatever so it can show them to you out of its local database when you come back. If more users on sh.itjust.works subscribe to the same community… there’s no incremental overhead. All ya’lls instance is ALREADY subscribed to that sub. So other users on your instance can sub to it for free, it’s already in the instance’s database.
Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail?
If lemmy.ml (where this community is homed) falls over from being overloaded or just is broken for whatever reason, your instance is unaffected. You can still read posts and make comments. This community however… is affected. New posts and comments for this community might come through intermitently or not at all for you (and everyone in the lemmyverse) because the community’s home server isn’t working well enough to reliably deliver them over federated replication. You can still read older posts and comments that have already been synced to your home instance, but new ones might not arrive. You might also see weird stuff like being able to see new comments from other sh.itjust.works users on this community, since those get written to your db before getting federated back to the community’s home server. But mostly updates from other instances stop or get unreliable.
If sh.itjust.works falls over for some reason… well… that sucks for you. You can’t log in or browse anything on it. You can still visit this sub at lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy/ as long as lemmy.ml is working and you’ll be able to see the posts and comments that other accounts make. But you’ll be an anonymous read-only browser, you won’t be able to post or comment until sh.itjust.works comes back online (or you make a new account elsewhere and lose all your comment history and subscription list).
Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?
I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs?
I don’t think that’s a good assumption. lemmy.ml is hosted on OVH, a cloud provider. My home instance on lemmy.world is hosted by admins that run something like a 32 CPU mastodon instance. Most instances with over 100 users are running on some kind of probably modest but “real” cloud instance. The admins are volunteers, but often smart technical folks paying for small but real compute infrastructure.
The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.
Anticipating growing pains isn’t wrong, it’s probably gonna happen. But the devs are gonna find and work on the biggest performance problems so that people can viably run bigger instances, and instance admins are gonna run bigger hardware and ask for donations or run patreons to cover the cost. In my opinion, the bigger worry is that Lemmy will fizzle… not that it will spectacularly explode. As long as people join and contribute and are interested, we’ll find a way to improve scalability and performance. The death knell would be if people get bored and leave, but compute capacity won’t be the problem in that scenario.
I’ll start by saying that GUIs have gotten a lot better since the 90s. Many people seem to think Windows 95 or 2000 was the pinnacle of the user interface design, but it was clunky and terrible and I much prefer literally any contemporary GUI.
A lot more is understood about how users interact with GUIs and how to best make them, but this is often exploited for monetary gain rather than end user experience.
The current thing that’s annoying me is discords new paid for super reactions. Absolutely by design they have been put in the spot the regular reaction button used to occupy in order to trick you into pressing it.
Because the main instance is a drop in the ocean that the lemmyverse should be, so it makes sense to call it a “millilitre” (ml). [inb4 I’m making shit up.]
Maybe~~ r/iwatchedanoldmovie ~~ Some game specifics sub’s like r/MetalGearSolid, r/MetalSlug and r/HalfLife, r/moddergearsolid is a particularly obscure one.
From my own feed that’s about it, with the exception of some piracy ones like rCemuPiracy r/LinuxCrackSupport and r/SteamDeckPirates, among others. And a couple in particular that push a bit closer to the work unsafe side, so those wouldn’t be here.
I’ve thought this since I was young. Background music? Cool, keep it quiet so we can talk.
Does this mean loud music is bad? No, I’ve been a put my head in the PA speakers metal head since I was young too. But I don’t expect a waiter to serve me then.
Beyond that, it’s a known problem that as you get older audio distractions become more severe, and I’m sure there’s a neurodivergent dimension to it too, so it’s one of those things where we are actively punishing people for wanting to be out and socialise. Also sure it’s one of those things where everyone thinks they have to do it but don’t
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