This surprises me since Cloudflare has AAAA records listed for lemmy.world. Do you know your way around tcpdump? If so, it might be interesting to see what’s happening with traffic to those addresses. My desktop doesn’t have v6 right now (sigh) or I’d be testing that myself …

Have you ever been a developer of a project that has a lot of public comment on it?

On the other hand: Many comments from people unfamiliar with the code base and the project organizers’ plans are unlikely to be useful to the people actually doing the work. Discussions that are low-signal/high-noise are likely to be simply ignored by the people actually working on the code.

Sure, for Lemmy instances who are Cloudflare customers. But I don’t think it can be integrated with the Lemmy code by default.

On the other hand, if the people who want those images can satisfy their urges using AI fakes, that could mean less spreading of images of actual abuse. It might even mean less abuse happening.

However, because they’re terrible people, I have to suspect that’s not the case.

Even without the issue of new AI-generated images, those hash-based scanning tools aren’t available to hobbyist projects like the typical Lemmy instance. If they were given to hobbyist projects, it would be really easy for an abuser to just tweak their image collection until it didn’t set off the filter.

An account is just a small database entry. It probably costs the server less than a post that appears on the front page.

My understanding is that ActivityPub is designed with the expectation that servers can look one another’s names up in DNS and initiate TCP connections to one another.

So even if all of your end-users are on your LAN, your instance still needs to have a public address that’s discoverable in DNS, etc.

You might be able to rig this up via tunneling, but you’d still need a public address on the other end of the tunnel.

The Walgreens drugstore got robbed. Was their competitor, CVS, behind it?

Search engines do indeed index Lemmy instances, just as with any other public web site.

For example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aprogramming.dev+humor

Neither the backend nor the UI appear to treat #this specially; it’s just a piece of text.

A line beginning with # (with a space) is treated as a headline:

Celery predator stalks stalks

Somehow the server has to be able to look up the user’s subscriptions so it knows what posts to show them.

That may not be possible with web technology.

Browsers send URLs to web servers. The web server has to have the URL the user wants in order to serve a response; and it has to know who the user is in order to check permissions (e.g. don’t accept a moderation action from a user who is not a moderator).

This inherently creates an opportunity for the web server to record any details about that exchange.

Technically? Sure, they can retain and read their web server logs; or even put additional logging into the server code they’re running.

If a user submits a comment and doesn’t see an immediate response from the server, they might submit the comment again. Right now there’s no automatic check for this sort of duplication.

If you’re not sure if your comment has been received, check your profile; if your home instance has accepted it, it should be there.

Don’t worry about it. Many heavily downvoted posts are also clearly in violation of either the community or instance rules; e.g. non-news posts in a news forum, or bigoted posts on instances that don’t permit that.

Technology skills don’t work by intuition; they work by learning.

People say “intuitive” when they mean “familiar to something I’ve already learned”.

For example, novice programmers often say that a programming language that resembles the first language they learned “is intuitive”, while a language that looks different “is unintuitive”.

People who learned C first, used to argue that Python was “unintuitive” because it doesn’t use {} curly braces around code blocks.

That’s not intuition. That’s familiarity. Once they become familiar with Python, they no longer talk about the absence of {} around code blocks as “unintuitive”.

Here, there are users coming from centralized services like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. One of the things that they have to learn is that this is not a centralized service; you have to care about what instance you’re looking at, or what instance a community is hosted on.

Here’s what this sounds like to me:

george@aol.com and george@hotmail.com do not reach the same person. This is a problem. When a user sends email to george, they expect to reach the one true George, not some kind of fake George.

It is not helpful to declare that a system is defective just because it doesn’t work in way that a new user initially guessed that it does. Their first guess was incorrect! That’s okay! It’s okay for new users to make mistakes and learn!

There’s no getting around that new users have to learn how to use the service. That takes time and experimentation. It also takes patience, both on the part of the new user and on the part of more experienced users.

Sure, there can be additional signposts and help. But it’s really unhelpful to just declare that the system is wrong and the new user’s first guess must be right.

To be clear, is what you’re saying here that the service that you’re using — which you did not build — is too welcoming to newcomers?

If you want a walled garden, this may not be a very easy place to establish one. I don’t think anyone will stop you from trying; but it’s not clear to me that the people who are actually building the service are in agreement with your values.

Lots of people are enthusiastic for something different from walled gardens. But it sounds like you really want one, or rather you joined an open service and are now complaining that it’s too open for you.

But if you don’t like the policies of your current instance and its peers, because they are too welcoming to people who are newcomers, and to people who are different from you … please don’t pretend you’re being progressive, okay?

To be fair, if you don’t conform with the laws in a liberal-democracy, you might eventually get killed too. Ideas like “property lines” and “don’t drive on the wrong side of the road” are ultimately backed up by force.

If you go around driving on the left side of the highway in a country where the law says to drive on the right, eventually someone’s gonna come stop you and you’re lucky if that is somehow peaceful.

But that’s a far cry from organizing a movement around “that ethnic group there, that sexual minority over there, and those miscegenators over there, must be exterminated for the purity of our nation”.