On my phone so I can’t dig out links, but there are two tools being recommended: Redact and PowerDeleteSuite. Both allow you to edit the comment/post before deleting, because if you straight-up delete the message Reddit reserves the right to the message content as it stood at deletion.

Half of the time spent compiling with -funroll-loops -O6, amirite

Got an idea for something? Try building it, see how far you get. Like I had an idea while browsing Twitter last year sometime, that it’d be neat to have a threaded conversation view… So I made a site that used their API to fetch and build the conversation. It didn’t look good, but it was at least somewhat functional, and I learned a bunch.

Then Musk threw their API in the trash, but you know, you can’t control the vagaries of the world…

I’m actually seeing a fair number of people linking or mentioning Lemmy, there may be traction…

I’ll admit to a little shitposting in the AMA thread to be fair, but mostly to promote Fediverse alternatives where people are asking where they can go.

Heck, by the time we’d know for sure that Lemmy isn’t working out, there’d be no content left on Reddit to go back to.

It’s already much busier here than it was a couple days ago, though; I think we’ll be alright.

Mm, I use(d) Slide personally, which is more-or-less abandonware at this point. I expect that’ll just get its API user disabled by the dev, so it “doesn’t work” any more.

Today’s rant: I mentioned yesterday that I enjoyed the rant threads of a Thursday, but today I don’t have anything to rant about.

Meta-rant?

Oh hey, it’s a casUK.

Are we thinking of using the same timetable for daily posts, or mixing it up? I do very much enjoy Thursday Rants, and I’m not the only one, I’m sure.

Working through Olsen’s Exploring LotR video/podcast series myself, it’s kinda tangential to the topic but there’s a lot of content there, and it’s in the same world as reading the book itself.

Episode 235, only thirty weeks or so behind now…

Mm, I’m a big fan of Decronym on Reddit, the bot that wanders around demystifying acronyms. There was a post by the bot’s creator yesterday where they covered how many API calls it makes, and how there’s been no clarity on whether there’ll be a free tier of API usage etc.

It could shut down all the comment bots on the site.

This comment further down states that the main issue is with the heavy JOIN-laden SQL queries that build the pages; the queries get long enough that pages time out.

Load-balanced frontends for lemmy.ml would hit the same backend/DB, as I understand it, so spinning up a frontend won’t necessarily help with the load. What’s needed is someone who knows pgsql optimization, and that’s not me. (I might be able to help if it were MySQL…)

Can attest: I have a small VPS (docean’s lowest tier, in fact) and in the deep past I had occasions where a blog post was popular enough to throw it offline for a while. I wasn’t about to lock myself into paying more money forever, to keep the site running for a day’s peak traffic.

In the case of lemmy.ml, this isn’t helped by the frontend being Websockets-driven, which holds open a connection for every concurrent user; I hear Dessalines and crew are working on cutting that dependency out and dropping down to something more static, which should help with load.

Might be a silly question, but: does ActivityPub support setting up a subinstance that gets its data from somewhere else? Traditionally you’d probably do that with a pgsql machine and multiple frontends, but having thought about it while typing this out, putting that load on the ActivityPub protocol would mean loading up the master to much the same extent as just having the traffic hit the master directly…

Many thanks, dropped 10mBTC.

New Reddit has a lot more tracing and BI, tracking user behavior in order to suggest ads/content. It’s part of why the New site is so much slower to scroll through, but it does mean a lot more data for Reddit to work with regarding their users.

Not to mention the dark UX patterns like hiding comments behind a More button, which itself is tracked and may serve an ad alongside the comments fetched.

Mm, I wanted Voat to work out when it first cropped up in Reddit comments, but the exodus of Donaldites meant abandoning that account.

Let’s hope a moderated and federated version means any communities of that persuasion can hive themselves off.