Yeah, with the current “everything replicates everything” model Lemmy is close to the workable limit of users.

Currently, there are roughly 50k monthly active users on Lemmy, and the hosting cost is approaching unsustainability for hobby instances with a decent amount of users. Monetizing Lemmy is close to impossible with donations being the only real revenue stream, so there’s pretty much no business case for anything but a hobby instance.

If for some reason even just 1% of Reddit users were to migrate to Lemmy (that would be ~10mio monthly active users) Lemmy would instantly crumble under that load no matter how many new instances would be added since every instance stores everything.

Moderation would also all but collapse since each instance needs to moderate everything as well, due to legal reasons. (If someone posts something illegal on a remote instance and it gets replicated to your instance and you don’t delete it, you are legally liable for it since it’s stored on your server.

Nice, thanks for the explanation!

The design choice to hard-bind an instance to a host name still baffles me. It’s an incredibly brittle choice. It makes it pretty much impossible to ever move an instance to another hostname.

Sadly, the fediverse is full of amateurish design choices because it was designed by hobbyists who apparently don’t have anything but a very basic understanding of distributed systems.

Also the concept of “Every instance needs to keep a full copy of everything” and “Every instance has to re-moderate everything to not be legally liable for illegal content” is really bad for scalability.

What’s that?

Actually, dial-up in Germany died 2 years ago: https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/

And since dial-up just uses a regular phone connection, there’s nothing stopping you from dialing up a dial-up provider from a different country, so dial-up still works in Germany.

In fact, you can host your own dial-up gateway at any time. All you need is a PC with both a dial-up modem (which are still readily available on places like Amazon or Galaxus) and an internet connection. Set both interfaces to bridge mode and you are your own little dial-up provider.

In some places this is still used in place of a VPN. Just put a dial-up modem inside the private network, connect it to a phone line and dial-up from the outside to get into the private network. Add a phone number allow-list to prevent access by unauthorized people.

The technology is ancient and not in wide-spread use anymore, obviously, and hasn’t been in a long time. But that’s the same pretty much anywhere. The main reason why AOL still had the service running (and why German providers did until 2023 too) is because it costs almost nothing to keep the service running for the handful of people who are still paying incredibly expensive internet contracts from the 90s.

Similar story with analogue telephone lines. In Austria there are only ~4000 customers left who use analogue telephone. But it costs nothing to keep it around and the people running it haven’t updated their phone contracts in 20+ years and thus pay crazy prices.

There are many hostile countries in this world

And the USA is one of them.

Thanks for the explanation!

Tbh, AI isn’t even the biggest issue here. The decline happened much earlier and like in pretty much any industry it happened when the MBAs took over top-level management.

What is this?

Other languages handle that easily:

Implicit cast from number to string, explicit parsing in the other direction.

For comparisons as number, parse the string to a number and compare two numbers.

The main point of the implicit cast from number to string is to concattenate number to string, e.g. print("testValue: " + testValue).

Another option (e.g. taken by Python) is to acknowledge that there’s no pure 1:n mapping in any direction between string and number, so any conversion between those two needs to be done explicitly. That’s probably the most correct implementation, but it makes string concattenation annoying. But then again, f-strings and similar techniques make that problem pretty much obsolete.

Sure. You totally weren’t out of control when you were recklessly driving and endangering yourself and everyone else around you. That’s was a totally reasonable thing to do, right?

“Out of control” when being angry doesn’t mean that you feel out of control. It means that your frame of reference shifts so much that you do idiotic things while fully believing that you are in control. That’s what you call an anger management issue. You don’t even realize that you are out of control with anger and feel totally justified in the idiotic things you do while angry.

Might be, but getting so angry while driving that you drive like an reckless asshole as some kind of weird revenge on an unrelated third party is an anger management issue.

One that should disqualify you from driving.

Your anger management issues.

So what happens in reality is that once you draw the gun, you and your family are dead. By drawing a gun you doomed them.

If you value your family, you get out early. Pack up, move to a different country. It might be difficult, it might take a while, but if you start early enough you might just make it.

The Jews who moved out of Germany in 1933 could still sell of their homes and belongings, get a passport and visa comparatively easily and got out. The Jews who tried that in 1939 were in a much tougher spot and a staggering amount of them didn’t make it any more.

So if you expect that there is a realistic chance that your family is sent to a concentration camp, get your family to safety instead of hanging around until it’s too late and then get them and yourself killed. You don’t become a hero for killing a few low-level grunts while dooming your family.

Ruby Ridge happened in a relatively free country. It was a huge misstep of a government agency and this went through the media.

If you kill some ICE people, then the telling will be that you are a crazy leftist terrorist who harboured illegal criminal rapists and that you then murdered some officers in a terrorist attack. The USA is not a free country any more.

Look at German newspaper reports from 1933 through 1939 to see what you can expect within the next months and years in the USA.

I have to switch over to debian some time. I sadly followed the many positive recommendations of Fedora and now my laptop crashes every time I wake it up from sleep.

Radio: “Watch out, there’s a wrong way driver on the highway!”

Listener: “One? I see hundreds!”

and drove right up his arse to force to get the fuck out of the way

Sometimes the one complaining about asshole drivers might be one themselves.

To be fair: People used to argue that Nuclear would get much cheaper and so cheap and safe that you could even power your car with it. They thought that everyone would have their own nuclear reactor at home giving them close to infinite cheap and clean energy.

That didn’t exactly turn out that way.

That’s the issue with using future developments as an argument. We don’t really know where the future leads the technology and which limitations will be overcome with development and which ones won’t.

There are thousands of cool things that were posed to become the future revolution. Some of them did, many more of them didn’t.

20 years ago, hydrogen fuel cell cars were to become the future. Now the technology is completely dead.

From a current tech standpoint economy of scale is not nearly enough to get the price of lab meat to the price of animal meat. The ingredients are just much more complex and thus expensive.

From a future tech standpoint, who knows? Could be that some revolutionary breakthrough happens. Or could be that it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, it won’t get cheaper.

This. A company paying for 100% effort shouldn’t expect 150%.

And most companies don’t even pay 100%.