!lemmy_project_pri
@bulletintree.comLemmy instance Beehaw staff on Monday, August 21 2023....
https://beehaw.org/comment/1018508
"From where I’m standing, I can’t really much has changed unfortunately… which really sucks…
Lemmy.world has grown substantially meanwhile the moderation tools have not improved at all. All I can say about the moderation tools is that we now know that the tools suck more than they used to.
Here’s a list of moderation problems that we have discovered since then:
A banned user’s description is still visible so if they link to a scat image in their description, it is still visible to moderators. Despite these newly known problems, there have been exactly no improvement whatsoever to the moderation tools. It is honestly unsettling and terrifying."
Context: Lemmyy has been on GitHub and in production at Lemmy.ml for over 4 years for the purposes of running and moderating a message forum / link aggregator. Beehaw has been online for over a year before the May 2023 Reddit influx.
These issues have been obvious for months, lemmy.ml wasn't sharing the server logs
Now at least there are multiple sites with a modest amount of data who see these issues:
Is there something special about the 28th day of the month and precisely 90 days?
A very obvious server-crashing / denial of service problem was called-out in Lemmy code two days before the Reddit deadline. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3394
Observations:
Why would anyone think 5 is a good design for production in the first place. It puts into question the developers for over 4 years of experience - they clearly understand the technical issue - it is the same coding / parameter issue for any programming language. What is the motivation / priority here?
lemmy.ml developer-run server (then the Lemmy server with the most data) was crashing from PostgreSQL overloads May and June 2023 every day...
there were active countdowns to the July 1 Reddit API change, This was June 28.
The change takes about 30 seconds to code, by no means is it difficult to understand. But it must be approved by the core developers of over 4 years on the project... and even notify live sites to urgently edit the Rust source code and re-compile. (And why not move this value to an environment variable that can be set without recompiling Rust code?)
June 28 issue opened / code created
July 1 Reddit API deadline
September 28 code published
90 days to change what has contributed to lemmy.ml, beehaw, lemmy.world - and the entire network of Lemmy servers crashing constantly from Lemmy overload. Almost as bad as GitHub Issue 2910 being ignored all month of June 2023!
A change in direction for the project this week?
Maybe the reputation of stability on lemmy.world and people realizing that the amount of activity really wasn't that high - and lemm.ee shutting out images. Most of all, Beehaw's criticism maybe finally resonated.
Beehaw was online a full year before Reddit - and saw just how long-term issues were not being addressed... maybe that is what it took.
It is worth keeping a positive eye on things.
It seems api_tests is unstable, failing around half the time.... been that way for days it seems.
Cambridge Analytica was well underway in 2013, now 10 years ago. People like to think that just because researchers find x on Twitter and y on Facebook - that that is the clearly documented cases - that the tactics and general psychology didn't copy everywhere.
Cambridge Analytica is mostly famous for Facebook... but I don't view their direct targeting of individuals to be the long-term damage. The long-term damage is that they legitimized psycological manipulation, falsehoods, as a form of winning audiences. The were Psychology/Psychiatry professionals who applied human history and experience towards making people believe false things. Like a rebirth of Dr. AA Brill from 1929 on a new scale. The legitimization of it without any ethical uprising...
The only instance with significant creation activity that isn't all bot content... had to resort to cloudflare due to the data performance... and now the problems with that solution have started to be taken on... https://lemmy.world/post/4366376
yesterday .world had to turn off sign-up and even shut down shitposting community.
This is basically the front-door of Lemmy. And as others are starting to notice, 60K users after all the people seeking better and trying out things isn't that many.. And there are seemingly a lot of people who use multiple servers given the technical instability of Lemmy's code... I am one of those people who spends 10 minutes a day on 4 servers, but I'm cutting back because content just isn't there and it's now often gaming topics and news making the rounds as duplicate stories over a 2 to 4 day period (besides memes)
Social media in general... there was so much Facebook hate for the past 8 years... but not much betterment came of it. Today looking over Reddit, it hasn't really changed that much in the past 4 months... there was a group of dissatisfied people who don't seem to want to actually build something better - just want to protest Reddit.
YouTube and TV advertising - that's a huge topic. YouTube does have a lot of small-time original creators, but is the money the reason why? You can''t make money on Reddit or Lemmy unless you have a business shop or something related to specialty topics (such as auto repair in a discussion community about same).