this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Programming.dev Meta

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Welcome to the Programming.Dev meta community!

This is a community for discussing things about programming.dev itself. Things like announcements, site help posts, site questions, etc. are all welcome here.

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I've gone and made accounts of a handful of Lemmy instances, all of them larger, more popular ones.

... and I can't access any of them directly today, likely due to the influx of users from Reddit.

Programming.dev is alive and well though.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm a software engineer by trade but I figured the instance call programming.dev would most likely be run by someone who knew what they were doing when it came to running a lemmy instance and would most likely be the most stable. :P

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Same exact boat, and also assumed if there were going to be any difficulties scaling this would probably be the best community able to tackle it lol

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Lemmy.world is ran by a pro. Dude runs one of the most used mastodon instances. The fact that Programming.dev is stable while .world is not quite so, is purely due to the amount of users. Get 80k on this instance and you will see what happens..

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

This is 4D chess right here. I didn’t consider this when signing up.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Man, this place definately has the vibe of an old timey BB forum. You recognise people in your replies like you used to. I find that I'm gawking at stats way less and I'm able to just talk to people. Engagement is way less, but maybe that's a good thing.

It's so refreshing. It feels like the old internet

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It really does feel like the old web again to a certain extent. I hope this "age of enshittification" leads to a throwback to the old web but I'm not convinced it will happen. I feel like Lemmy (and other federation platforms) are definitely our best shot at it :)

Anyway, happy to be here :)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would much rather have fewer more engaging conversations than the circus Reddit was. Sure it had more conversation but sometimes that felt more isolating since every comment became transactional noise. Really hoping I can find the sweet spot on Lemmy!

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a Lemmy frontend that fully emulates a phpBB board. It's kind of amazing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Seeing this just felt like unlocking a bunch of core memories.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You recognise people in your replies like you used to.

This is pretty cool. I'm still active on some older traditional forums, but I love this style of threaded discussions in comment trees here. So much easier to reply to an individual in wall-of-text discussions. I think we'll also start recognizing each other by account birthdays, with a wave of folks all having similar ones in June and July. 📅

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago

Ya know; perfect time to shout out the admins here. Thanks for this little terrific instance. I have an account on BeeHaw, I just never leave here.

No drama, just polls about icons. Easy.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Programming.dev with local filter is a good replacement for /r/programming for me. I am loving it here.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And it doesn't have all of the shitty low effort self promotion articles (yet)!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hang on, I need to plagiarize a guide for setting up React and Redux and put it on my blog and pretend it’s mine for job hopping optimization and internet street cred…

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yep, though federation syncing is really slowing down. This post from [email protected] is at 44 comments from programming.dev but 112 comments on the beehaw instance.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So the "true" state of a post is always in it's instance of origin

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

No, federation is directional, so even if everything synced perfectly and instantly it wouldn't be the true version. Take this example. There is an instance that is federated with no one, but every instance is federated with it. Every other instance would see everything there but the instance it is hosted on wouldn't see any. There's no reason to say the version hosted there is the true one when it lacks so much of the conversation.

Also comments can lag when syncing to the main instance in the same way they can lag coming from the main one. All you can really say is that when viewing a post on an instance it has the true version of all of that instance's users comments.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Glad you are enjoying it, though to be honest I do hope this grows to be a decently sized programming community. A lot of the threads are quite dead currently.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

IMO for being a niche instance (programming) on a niche platform (Lemmy) it is doing extremely well. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I never really understood what's appealing about participating in a community with gazillions of users where any attempt to have a conversation is buried under thousands of replies. Not even talking about the amount of trolling or aggressive commenters.

I think smaller places suit me better, and I am grateful that smaller instances like this one have emerged as a result of the latest happenings with Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I find I like having both.

Smaller communities / more quiet threads where I really participate and get in a conversation with people. Other times I just like having a lot of different threads with a lot of different information etc.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's an appeal to having limitless content, but it does become addictive. Having a slower pace is a good thing.

I left Reddit shortly after the spez's AMA before I found Lemmy and for a week I did feel a little out of touch since I didn't like the feeds on other social networks or sites. Lemmy gives me that feeling of being up to date with the internet without being endless which I think is much healthier.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There’s an appeal to having limitless content, but it does become addictive. Having a slower pace is a good thing.

You know that's a great point I hadn't considered..

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I think the fediverse will function the best if everyone is split across many instances. As soon as one or several become dominant, the way they do things becomes the norm, for good or bad. That and the server load of course.

[–] normalmighty 14 points 1 year ago

The problem is most people are confused and overwhelmed by all the instance business to begin with.

It's a UX thing. Users can't be expected to read up on all the technical details of instances and the pros and cons of different ones before signing up. I don't know how it'd work exactly, but they really need a nice and simple "sign up" page that they don't need to think about.

Maybe a list of all the decent instances to use - meaning pretty much all instances that are not catered to a specific niche, open to new users and don't have any defederation drama ongoing - and then a global lemmy signup page can just randomly assign new users to one of those instances.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

People just seem to flock to a few popular instances. The join Lemmy website needs to push harder for joining the instance that fits your interests.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does it make that much of a difference which instance you’re on? I created an account here, but I’m subscribed to communities across the entire fediverse. Defederation can of course come into play, but unless you create an account in each instance that fits your interests I don’t see it making too much of a difference where your account has its home.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It doesn't really matter where you sign up, of course unless your instance is defederated. Users just tend to funnel towards a few instances, putting some strain on the instance's servers instead of everyone being more dispersed. Lemmy.world is pretty slow right now due to the influx of users going there.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Could you explain a bit more? I am new to lemmy (reddit exile) and I thought the instances are like servers and they communicate between each other.

What do you mean by instance that fits your interest?

Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It's more of a way to try to spread out the users and communities by interests. Also decreasing the server load for the instances. Instead of having 90% of the users and a majority of the communities on Lemmy.world that is basically having everyone centralized again and the website goes dark if their servers fail.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I cannot explain the exact details but I remember during the first great Twitter exodus some people discovered a drawback in the ActivityPup protocol that seems to cause performance issues when very influencial users post on a small/under powered instance.

Because communicating all that stuff to many other instances is more costly than spreading it only to people on the same instance. So technically speaking large instances have a performance advantage and must just scale accordingly to the user number.

Everyone agreed that this need to change in oder to ensure a healthy federated ecosystem but I don't think it was be fixed by now.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I am noticing a lot of comments from lemmy.world communities can't be seen from my other accounts like lemmy.ca or programming.dev.

Aside from that, I think it's nice to be on a smaller instance.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I can't even access the lemmy.world instance. It just always errors out for me.

But I like the idea of smaller servers that specialize in a specific hobby/interest/topic and then all the /c/ communities can be centred around that topic and moderated appropriately. I think it leads to better discussion between people looking for programming topics.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

This is my favorite place on the internet.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When will the first Lemmy instances permanently shut down again because of high resource usage/costs?

[–] Saint_of_Illusion 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was thinking if an instance owner cannot afford to keep upgrading servers, it could close its doors to new registrations. This will create a need for more instances and users will be more evenly distributed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But it's my understanding that resource usage will keep increasing even if you keep the number of users constant on a server (as more content is posted in the communities that users are subscribed to, and that content needs to be synced and stored).

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

If anything, this is the month where we'll find out... A lot of medium/large instances have made the jump to dedi servers and keeping those up isn't cheap

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Happy to be federated with you, good sir.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

this instance has been a beast, so solid

[–] luffyuk 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a way to synchronise or migrate followed communities between accounts on different instances? I'd quite like to sign up to others, but I'm way too lazy to re-follow every single community.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Is there really such a big influx of users migrating specifically TODAY, of all days? I guessed most interested users, like us, did in advance these last 3-4 weeks.

I wish there was a way to see the traffic of different instances in (mostly) real time.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The 3rd party apps are shut down. We're (You and I) are the "first movers" of this initial migration. Basically the choices are to move to the Reddit App, stop using anything like Reddit, or here.. (ActivityPub like sites)

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Not a member of programming.dev but i find it nice to be on a small homeserver too

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Programming.dev is a nice home base!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Me over on pawb.social: uwu

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I’ve migrated from a tiny one to this one, I don’t know why, but I always gravitate towards the smaller communities.

Runs smooth here too :)

^Edit:^ ^typo^

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

This is the way (in the fediverse)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Reddthat here ~ we are alive and well too

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