Weeks ago I had my moment of facing the attitude of keeping all this secret.
Just casually mention join_collapse_limit was tried behind-the scenes a month ago, then why are there zero post or comments in the entire Lemmy search for join_collapse_limit? I searched the entire GitHub project - no mention of join_collapse_limit. But Ready on the Spot to reveal the secret private communications tried join_collapse_limit log ago.
You know what join_collapse_limit is telling yo8u? Too many JOIN is a performance problem! The entire ORM Rust code and reliance on new JOIN is going to lead to other unpredictable performance problems that varies when there are 10,000 posts vs 2 million posts! And that's exactly the history of 2023... watching the code performance wildly swing based on the size of communities being queried, etc.
What I see is that pull request for ideas get created only after noise is made on a subject. There is a lack of openness to make mistakes in public.
For me,** the server crashes are what annoys me**, not human beings working on solutions. But for most of the people on the project, what seems to anthem is needing to have proper tabs vs. spaces on source code and even adding layers of SQL formatting tools in the middle of what clearly can be described as an SQL performance crisis.
Things keep getting broken: the HTML sanitation took a few hours to add to the project but now weeks of broken titles, HTML code blocks, even URL parameters are now broken on everyday links. The changes to delete behavior have orphaned comments and that has gone on for weeks now.
Ok... so where to begin?
language choices. I think it's a noble gesture, but it's hard to ignore the overhead factor and all the end user who accidentally hide their posts and comments by getting confused by it.
all sorts but "Most comment", "old", and "Controversial" come down to recent posts. Nobody is complain about a 3 week old post not appearing... with one exception, featured. I think I have some tricks to play with featured. Can some basic sanity be added to the project by putting a limit on time? 3 days? Are most people here to browse the most recent 3 days of content? 7 days? Can all data be divided and organized around this? With the exception being: single community?
Is there a limp mode? Can something short of Beehaw and Lemmy.world turning off their entire front page - need to be built into the app. I think it needs to be done. In emergency / limp mode, you could cut off old data, or cut off personalization.
I think the project has fundamentally misinformed the population that servers are too busy because of too many users. I just don't see that many users!! Everything I see is too many JOIN statements! Moving to new virgin servers starts with zero data, that's why it worked. Lemmy.world has way more data than some empty instance that is 3 weeks old. And the project leaders have failed to understand or communicate this basic issue.