blightbow

And if they are scoped realistically.

The contraction we're seeing in the tech space this year is in large part a consequence of venture capitalist funding. A significant portion of tech sites were being funded at a loss, with the idea that profitability could be achieved after establishing a userbase. Rising interest rates pushed the VCs to put pressure on the companies they invested in: "no more free lunch, realize our gains now". This is why you see a rash of tech sites abruptly restructuring (Discord) or completely collapsing (gfycat). Reddit falls somewhere between the two, because it's likely they're seeking an IPO and they don't care about the fate of the website once they cash out. Twitter is ruled by an emperor with no clothes. Facebook can't make as much money as it did prior to the added government scrutiny, and the Zuck has been frantically trying to diversify his company these past few years.

This is a long-winded way of saying that ernest deserves a lot of praise here for being realistic and up front with the operating costs of running the largest kbin instance. lemmy and kbin draw inspiration from the social media platforms that came before them, but can't budget for growth the same way that their predecessors did. It's not going to be cheap, they aren't going to get the free lunch that prior social media platforms had, and ernest needs to proceed with the well-being of both himself and his project in mind.

It's a common feature of any demographic that is convinced of their moral superiority. Once you've accepted that you and your leaders are on the side of justice and are presented a designated enemy, you cease having to look inward. Progress requires acknowledging that you are operating inside of a flawed system, and that you have to work with people from other systems who acknowledge their own flaws.

Tangent: "Enlightened centrists" acknowledge the flaws of both sides of an argument while failing to acknowledge that both sides have to play fair.

There are plenty of high volume, non-malicious bots that do. robots.txt is a thing for a reason, and we can see here that lemmy.ml has implemented it. Not all bots that ignore robots.txt are malicious though, just poorly designed. You can basically lump them into three categories:

• Well-behaved bots that announce that they're bots in the User-Agent header and obey robots.txt (note that they may still slam the server even if they obey it)
• Mediocre bots that announce that they're bots in the User-Agent header but ignore robots.txt (or vice versa)
• Bad bots (malicious or otherwise) that announce their User-Agent as other things, often pretending to be other software.

Their logs told them they had a lot of traffic from stuff identifying itself as bots. Throwing that traffic out wouldn't break lemmy but would help them deal with the capacity problems that all of the mainstream lemmy/kbin instances had to deal with shortly after the Reddit exodus began. They fucked up and tagged kbin in the process, which definitely would have been one of the highest volume ActivityPub consumers matching their criteria.

Thanks for the link! Your take is pretty much the same as mine. Nothing for me to expand on, you've pretty much nailed it.

PS. This is apropos of nothing, but I've seen you around and never stopped to tell you. You have just the coolest username and I love it.

lol! It's borrowed from the name of a character I made for Guild Wars 1. As the internet got bigger my older nicks became more hotly contested, but somehow this edgelordy one is never taken. :) The downside is that I can't easily feign ignorance about stupid things I've said in the past, but at least most of the evidence got nuked along with my entire Reddit history.

Like I said, a blind sort by volume of the top n user agents in their logs containing the word bot would be enough to do it. Drop the output of that sort into a text file or a hash table, then create a user agent filter in the nginx config that blocks the specific strings seen in that file.

It is very much the sort of thing that a single admin can do by accident, and the exact sort of problem I would expect to see with rapidly growing instances operated by a very small number of tech enthusiasts.

Basically another Eternal September. Yes, I'm going to keep linking to it in these threads like the lazy bum I am.

That assumes they were using an expression based filter in the webserver config itself. If they were extracting user agent strings containing the word "bot" from their webserver logs and adding them to a static list of user agents to deny (particularly if it's an external file referenced by the config that strings can be easily dumped into), it's a plausible explanation. I can especially see this happening if they did a blind sort by log volume and only inserted the 20 biggest results or somesuch.

Even if this was the case, was someone in a position to observe that one of those strings contained "kbin"? Yes. Was it possible they still didn't notice? Yes, especially if shell pipelines are involved. Was it possible for someone to notice but assume that this wasn't the kbin software itself, but a third-party tool that someone else wrote? Also yes. Still possible that all of this is bullshit? Still yes!

Full disclosure: I've worked in the webserver and webapp adjacent spaces for a long time, and I have a lot of appreciation for how much damage one person's stupid change without peer review can do in massive production environments. :) I am admittedly biased toward applying Hanlon's razor in these situations.

Yeah, your original comment came up when I did my research immediately prior to leaving a note on a niche lemmy.ml community that I subscribe to. ...Which immediately federated over to the original instance, because I missed this developer comment and the other admin didn't reply to the thread you were quoted in until several hours later. Based on the timing of the older comment I don't think it has anything to do with your post, but you can pretend you didn't see this. ;)

In any event, it's dealt with. I think it reinforces the need for proper backchannels between the highest population ActivityPub instances, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the politics is acting as a barrier to this since both lemmy.ml and kbin.social are directly run by their respective software developers.

I've seen a few offhanded references to how kbin originated as an alternative to lemmy without the tankie implications, but I haven't found any links to posts from ernest himself that support this. By actions alone I would say that he strongly favors interoperability over politics, but who's to say what thoughts the developers have for each other. :)

Pretty much this. It still gets a lot of flack for being operated by the developers of Lemmy, but there are a large number of users and communities that exist on lemmy.ml for no other reason than it being one of the larger original instances. Most operators of high-volume instances are unlikely to take action against lemmy.ml unless a situation develops that gives them no other choice.

This user made a terse "status update" post to /m/random on kbin right after this one (with a post language of Afrikaans??), which makes no sense at all. Do not trust any status updates coming from this lemmy.world account.

It's over for reddit, they just don't know it yet.

It's less that they don't know, and more that they don't care. IPOs are about unloading your bags onto someone else.

They've consciously decided that the value of the content they've already captured is worth more than the value that future content will bring them. Now they just have to get out from under the pyramid before it collapses.

The cycle of social tech becoming mainstream and conversational norms being dragged down to a least common denominator predates modern social media. The earliest example I can think of is Usenet (newsgroups):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year. Once ISPs like AOL made Internet access widely available for home users, a continuous influx of new users began, which continued through to 2015 according to Jason Koebler, making it feel like it is always "September" to the more experienced users.

It's the same cycle. Social tech starts off being used by a smaller number of technically inclined people. Communities are smaller and normalized civility is more commonplace. Peer pressure holds people to those norms. Once a social tech balloons from mainstream interest, the norms (or zeitgeist if you prefer) shift toward the incoming population because they outnumber the early population and exert more peer pressure. The new norms become a compromise between the norms of the incoming mob and what the community moderators are willing/able to enforce.

It's tempting to put a label on the incoming demographic and use it in a derogatory way, but removing the label from the equation doesn't change the source of unhappiness; the memory of what once was and the knowledge that it can't last when cultural dilution sets in.

(no, I'm not providing any solutions to the problem, this is just rambling that might provide more insightful people with a starting point)