Spyke

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lemmy instances be going down

Yeah, we need to spread out a little more. Fediverse is not about having centralized concentrations that can be targetted.

Ideally every minor Instance could have one major community located there, that could serve as the central space for that particular community. That's pretty impossible of course, but it paints the picture.

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When you notice Lemmy is quieter than usual, then have a look at the Lemmy.world status

It's been this way for weeks, actually. I haven't seen a graph of the uptime, but I'm sure one would look extremely ugly, based on my own user experience.

This right here is an alt, and despite the fact that I don't prefer to comment from it, since I won't necessarily check in soon to see replies, it's seeing some heavy use.

The attacks a few weeks ago weren't a one-off, they never stopped. It seems down maybe half the time or so?

One of the many ways we (all of Lemmy) are not quite ready for the mainstream yet, we still have basic technical/security issues to resolve. Soon, though.

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Lemmy.world is down because of a DDOS attack

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We're having fun and trying to build a positive space. And we have real potential to succeed in growing large. Can you think of a single faster way to attract trolling on the internet?

It's a lot more likely than someone like spez taking a break from plundering his company to piss off a modest number of internet randos in some internet corner somewhere, which would barely be a drop in the bucket of his problem anyway.

The overall effect of this is so small, it almost has to be someone(s) with too much time on their hands. If they had any kind of real power, they wouldn't be wasting their time on these chump change attacks.

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Lemmy is more left leaning because the rights popularity seen on other social media are driven by bots that are not here.

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This is underrated. I actually close Lemmy a lot easier and more quickly than I did reddit, it's not hooking me with dopamine hits nearly as strongly.

As a result, since I know I'll probably just scroll for a few minutes at a time, I'm more willing to check in more often and toss a few upvotes and maybe a comment or two around.

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What is a technology/gadget you refuse to use and why?

LLMs. Despite how absurdly useful they are, I can recall a time when I had the skills of remembering phone numbers naturally and being able to easily navigate with no maps of any kind.

These skills have deteriorated significantly in the past 10 years, and they're not the only ones. The common thread they all have is my smartphone replaced them.

I fear losing a skill that is less innocuous, from the new tech effectively replacing my need to practice it.

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PSA: Lemmy.world has been compromised! (Edit: Multiple Instances are down)

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Par for the course. This system will never be immune to things like that. That's part of what happens when you decentralize your power. Instead of a single target that can be made highly secure, you have a distributed array of targets.

People should certainly be engaging on here with full awareness of the reality of the Fediverse, not expecting reddit 2.0. We never will be able to offer exactly what they did. We'll be naturally worse in some areas and naturally better in others.

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*Permanently Deleted*

Yeah, all the time. It's the easiest way to identify a troll from a random idiot. I don't have a problem with random idiots, if someone genuinely likes Trump and believes in authoritarianism, that is fine by me. I don't like them, but at least they're engaging in good faith. I can understand and work with that.

But, when their comment history is full of pushing people's buttons or a wide, inconsistent variety of opinions, then it becomes pretty clear that being shocking is the goal itself. That's an obvious troll, and should be dealt with as one.

edit: Note, I don't bother voting while I'm there, so I answered inaccurately. I'm just sleuthing to find out if engaging at all is worth my time. If it is a troll, I actually don't downvote anything, as large downvote tallies amuse them. If it's probably not a troll, I don't downvote then either, but I know I can go back to the original comment and actually talk to this person like a human being without wasting my own time.

So, actually I don't downvote through people's comment history. I do skim quickly through them though, reading for good-faith engagement. Or a lack of it.

I don't upvote very often either, since I'm reading and scrolling too fast to bother. Unless I run into a really good post or something, enough to make me stop skimming for a second.

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lemmy instances be going down

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As possible as anything else, but it would be unusual. I find it strange that people are so eager to reach for unusual explanations when the actual, conventional extremist trolls absolutely exist. This would be 100% in-character for them, and would benefit their goals very clearly.

Occam's Razor.

Additionally, they would try to point the finger at absolutely everyone except for them, as that would clearly serve their goals of general misinformation and distrust.

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lemmy instances be going down

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People are allowed to support whatever political causes they wish, so long as they are willing to engage civilly and fairly with other people. This is how the modern world works, with dialogue and debate instead of censorship, cowardly avoidance and control.

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Can a desert turn into grassland through artificial means? How have deserts naturally turned into other forms of environments, historically?

Naturally this kind of thing happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So, even going back to BC times, we're still only a small fraction of how far we need to go back to find really major, long-term climatic shifts. These things are supposed to happen sloooowwwwllly, not really discernable as changing over the scale of a single human lifetime, which is just the blink of an eye in planetary time scales.

Can we though? Probably. We can certainly dam rivers and use irrigation to make the land more agriculturally productive. But we should have the technology currently to attempt more dramatic geoengineering projects if we wished.

The problem though, is unintended consequences, where you change one thing over here, and you didn't realize it was also controlling something else over there, and that thing changes too now, even though you didn't necessarily want it to.

Like, to make up a fictional example, say we engineered rainfall over the Sahara somehow. But we didn't know some of this moisture influences air currents, and now southern Europe and the Middle East are changing too somehow, by accident.

It's like when you're trying to untie a really tangled knot, and you pull on one part thinking its going to start undoing it, but it just tightens it somewhere else instead.

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To someone who is born blind, how would you best discribe what seeing is?

I would describe it as a cacaphonic symphony that you eventually get used to. It packs as much information into one sense as you can get from your other four put together.

Much like how you can discern an individual instrument type in a symphony, sight lets you discern individual objects from afar, and gives you a mostly accurate summary of its basic properties.

Also much like with sound, it can be very appealing or unappealing, depending. There's an intrinsic beauty to the sense itself though. Every object has color, for instance, and color is more like smell. It can give you hints about what something is, but its mostly an arbitrary blend of different "flavors" that combine to create more complex examples.

It's the super-sense, the one sense that binds them all. When one of your other four detects something, your first instinct is to locate it with sight to determine more information before you do anything else. You "look at it" first. Almost without fail.

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Lemmy is popular nowadays, yet is losing its active users

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We're getting there, still in the very early stages here. One thing I've noticed is how extremely techy the initial community here was, something I personally collided with like a bit of a wrecking ball. People in general, not just techy people, tend to assume others will approach things similarly to how they naturally do. So they don't necessarily always see problems that others might stumble over, ahead of time.

Now that we've started growing more rapidly, these problems of scale, where they now have to anticipate problems they did not have to anticipate before, all are coming due. So, growing pains.

This is why I have not been inviting people to Lemmy yet, I've been waiting until it's more polished for the mainstream. It's also why the graph is trending down. We're literally not ready yet for the mainstream, in many, many different ways.

Also useful to remember, we're only done getting big growth spikes if spez is done pissing off reddit. I doubt he is.