You got a lot of heat in this discussion, but let me be one of the few to applaud you for actually making a proposal. Saying No is easy, but suggesting something and writing it down and putting it out there is hard.

I am a Principal Engineer by trade, and i do what you did here all the time. I put out suggestions to my team and let them absolutely wreck it. This is how you advance and enhance your idea. Listen and learn from the feedback and suggest another thing based on what you have learned. Rinse and repeat.

That's how you get to a great proposal. Keep at it. Well done.

This happened to my ~770 people subreddit r/ntfy too. They really lost their marbles, didn't they? I turned it back to "Public" out of fear that they'll delete my Reddit account. I fear even "Restricted" won't stop them. So instead, I'll manually delete or lock new posts and direct them to the Lemmy instance. I may assign another dummy mod account too and unassign myself. Maybe that'll give me a way to close the sub in the future.

Thank you for contributing to the magic if the old school internet.

My question: How does one get to write an RFC? Do you have to become part of a certain group, or just be known in certain circles, or do you just start writing and then submit it somewhere? If I had a great idea that I think should become an RFC, what is the process to make this a reality?

There are about 35k active users on all instances combined (according to https://the-federation.info/platform/73, note that I mean "active" users, not total). That is a minuscule amount compared to even average-size subreddits. Give it time, and be part of the content-producers.

I will say, that while I like Lemmy (despite its bugs and all that), it severely lacks stupid GIFs and videos, from interestingasfuck, damnthatsinteresting, PublicFreakout, aww, etc.

Maybe that'll come, but I doubt it.

Use ntfy.sh. It's open source and has a free server.

Disclaimer: I made it ;-)

Related question: is "Hot" super buggy? I am on 0.18.0, but I still often see really really really old posts (1 year old, 2 years old) sprinkled in with new stuff, and I often see clusters of 5-10 posts of a single community grouped together.

I have to pay extra attention to the post age because of this.

A developer of an open source application being attacked my an entitled user. A story as old as time, yet very sad to see over and over again.

Dear user, you are getting something for free. Open source even. If you don't like how it works, fork it and develop your own, or do your part in helping out debug and investigate. Or just stop using it.

This is not a big corporation with dozens or hundreds of devs working on an app that you pay for with ads or premium subscriptions. This is a free app, developed by volunteers. Please be nice. You can complain, but be civil about it.

WebSockets ... causing live updates to the site which many users dislike

I appreciate all the work in this release. It's insane how much you packed into one release. Well done. I am most excited about the live updates going away. It was quite disruptive. Thanks for that.

That said, WebSockets can be implemented very efficiently. I run an open source notification service called ntfy, and the public instance ntfy.sh currently keeps 6-8k WebSocket connections and thousands more HTTP stream (long polling HTTP) open, all on a 2 core machine with 4GB of RAM. My point being that WebSockets can be implemented very efficiently. Though in Lemmy's case it's likely not necessary.

-- Another thing I wanted to notice is that I am missing mentions of security issues in the release notes. There are some tickets that sound really really really bad, like this one: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3060

Isn't that more important than anything else?

I'd buy at least 10 snickers and a bottle of wine or something, right?

This has been my go to answer if the hair stylist asked what I'd do. I'd go to different jewlery stores, because they'd still call the cops if you wanna buy stuff for a million.

(I forgot to add the "no returning items" rule; but since you added the "selling it off" part I think it's fine, hehe)

The privacy stinks you say? Did you know that Likes and Dislikes are public too? That was the most shocking to me. Because it is very much not like Reddit or others.

It's still a fantastic piece of software, with all its flaws, though.

Related to another Reddit app, but not RIF:

The Relay for Reddit dev (u/dbrady) is bravely working on Relay. I got an update yesterday. The changelog said "further reduce API calls". I think he actually wants to make it a paid app, which I'd gladly pay for.

I hate the Reddit change as much as the next guy, but if the Relay dev can actually make a profit from it that'd be awesome. The app cost a one-time $4 or something, which I'm sure he never made bank with. Having like $3-5/month for it would probably be sustainable.

I'll be sure to remind everyone that it was you who started the trend.

This is neat, but it should really be part of Lemmy to be able to link between instances in a way that rewrites the link to your own instance, and makes subscribing easier.

I host an instance for myself. I have subscribed to many communities (10-20), and I run it on a 1 CPU + 1 GB RAM DigitalOcean droplet. However, the Lemmy instance was OOM-killed already once, and I expect that I have to upgrade eventually.

The droplet costs $6/month.

I think that's the most creative one I've ever heard. Well done.

I asked the same question on r/selfhosted a few weeks ago, and I was downvoted just for asking the question.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/13elu4p/why_downvote_so_much/

Ha. I guess thinking ahead is my trade :-) I'm a Principal Engineer, and much of my job is to think about how a software architecture will look in a few months or a year from now. I often say "It's very lonely living in the future all the time", because people usually think about their current project and current task, not what's ahead of them that far out.

Sorry, I ramble. :-)

Nope. You can't buy a house with cash in 1hr. Unless you just randomly walk up to a home owner and ask them to sell their house to you. And even then, they'd be suspicious if you gave them cash. They'd think it's counterfeit money.

I have noticed that I use it less myself. I think honestly though, at least for me, that it is 90% related to the clunky and awkward UI of ChatGPT. If it was easy to natively type the prompt in the browser bar I'd use it much more.

Plus, the annoying text scrolling thingy ... Just show me the answer already, hehe.

I can’t contribute code because I don’t know coding

Time to learn. Then you can fix things yourself.

Great writeup thank you. May I just say that tmyour original plan was both ambitious and a little insane. And even the current cost and infrastructure is bonkers IMHO.

I do hope you're getting donations to help with the cost. Good luck.

My instance is on the other end of the spectrum: I pay $6/month for it on digitalocean. It has 1G of RAM. It crashes every now and then, likely because of the RAM and OOM killer. But it's only for me and a few ntfy fans, so it's quite different.

That .... actually looks and feels pretty slick. Very neat UI.

You just made it a thing. Congratulations, you started a trend.

I just read this article and what Meta is doing then triggered all the alarm bells!

This tactic even has a Wikipedia page: Embrace, extend, and extinguish

From the Wiki (quite enlightening):

The strategy's three phases are:

• Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
• Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard.
• Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.

Do you really think they are not going to call the cops if a dude shows up with $1 million in cash to buy cars, asking to speed up the transaction? No way are they not gonna.

I thought the post was timely since the alert triggered today. The ntfy server was DDoS'd today and I got alerted pretty much instantly. It was quite nice.

"If you need to use the swap, you're doing it wrong" -- That's what I learned long ago. And it has held up so far.

Except that you can selfhost both healthchecks.io and ntfy.sh; and you can't selfhost reddit or any of the services they advertise, haha

I know this is possibly a little insensitive, but I find it quite poetic for the folks to die similarly, and in proximity to the Titanic. They must have really liked the Titanic, and they died doing something that they've probably looked forward to a long time.

They dress casually, but it still looks freaking fancy.

Sharded MySQL is my nightmare, and my proudest achievement at the same time. I designed and implemented an architecture for a product that is backed by heavily sharded MySQL servers, a total of over 700 servers worldwide, with hundreds of thousands of tables. It's a fun, and a terrible space to live in. You may actually enjoy this blog post I wrote. Not many will: https://blog.heckel.io/2021/10/19/lossless-mysql-semi-sync-replication-and-automated-failover/

As for your actual problem of how to disconnect, I'd suggest to find another problem to solve and think about. Something that is yours, not the company's. Like an open source project, or a side gig of some sort. That's what I do.

Tuna Pizza aka Pizza Tonno.

This is very very very common in Europe (Italy, Germany, ...), but every time I mention it to anyone in the US they will look at me like I just told them I like eating car tires or something. My wife only eats tuna Pizza, but she has to make it herself because it is not sold anywhere in the US.

I concur.

There are install steps here: https://docs.ntfy.sh/install/ and config options here: https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/

Feel free to drop by the Discord, Matrix, or our Lemmy instance.

Thanks. I don't work on it full time, no. It's a side gig project I've been doing for a year and a half. I recently added paid plans to get a little side income, but it's not really taken off. Likely because the free tier is too generous hehe.

Gotify is great, but it can't override DND and wake you up at night. I suppose not many people want to do that anyway, haha. Only crazy me wants to be on call forever and all the time.

Hetzner storage box, and just rsync. It takes care of snapshotting via auto snapshots. I costs like $20 for 1T I think. But there are cheaper options yoo

It's magical money. If you spend the money according to the rules, it will not disappear from the person you bought things from. But if you fake-spend it, like "buying" something from your friend, then it'll go poof.