It's been said to death but at heart, I've always felt that when it comes to piracy, it's a service issue, not a cost issue.

Except for you Adobe. That's a cost issue.

I see this upcoming election will be the final one. Nice work.

No one could have predicted this /s

Underrated comment. I picked it because I had no idea what I was doing and it sounded all-encompassing and I wanted access to everything. I didn't even know what an instance was. I just picked it because it sounded like a good guess to get access to all of Lemmy.

It's part of the migration plan to help users move away from the platform.

I noticed that I don't have a karma or upvote counter for my account, and I felt free. Let's keep it that way. It just encourages more ego and skin in the discussion ahead of focusing on the content and further penalizes users who sometimes have an unpopular, but still civil and constructive, opinion. I don't want an echo chamber effect.

I imagine that implementing such a metric could become quite confusing if it turned out that not all instances permitted all communities in the future. If this is already the case, please excuse me. I've been on Lemmy for one hour total. Solving that consistency problem couldn't be easier than just not solving it.

This sounds like a bug to me. At a minimum, it should be renamed to local subscribers rather than imply that it's the total count.

I love that a service that isn't making a buck off of us gets levels of engagement that for-profit social networks would kill for.

This is happening because:

• Novelty, because new is fun. This will go down over time.
• The most passionate users are more likely to be early adopters. More casual users are coming.
• Smaller network means your content is less likely to be covered before. This factor will go down over time.
• Fediverse encourages multiple related communities, which means your specific contributions are more likely to be seen by other users.
• Lack of bots/astroturfing leads to more positive interactions. Bots will likely increase over time.

Therefore, I expect engagement will go down over time, but I am hopeful it will reach a higher point of stability because the fediverse design seems better at getting more varied content seen by its users, and it makes it harder for a small group of people or posts to dominate the discussion space.

PS: Anybody know how to add a space after the last bullet in a list?

But it's Unix-like!

Uses a Linux VM for all the assignments anyway.

Happy to be part of the sudden stress test of your software and infrastructure! June 30 hit and I needed a place to go. Found Lemmy. Found Connect for Lemmy. I don't know if this is the future for a Reddit-like service, but I'm pleased to see some real activity and I'm glad to be a part.

Running Connect for Lemmy here on Android. It seems nice and minimalist. I was a little dissuaded from trying Jerboa with some of the negative reviews.

It really helps that the official Reddit app is so awful. The bar is quite low for acceptability!

As someone who has lived in the plains all his life, the idea of hills being a real thing that actually exists outside of movies seems strange.

Absolutely magical!

It is annoying, but at least it makes sense considering the few orders of magnitude growth they've experienced in two days and given that we are not the customer nor the product. Nobody is making money from this. Instead, we are benefiting from the generosity of those who host the service, much like Wikipedia.

I have a love/hate relationship with desktop web apps on Linux. They are a great blessing in some ways because I get to run apps that just wouldn't be available to me otherwise because Linux typically isn't a priority for consumer-focused services. Often support exists as a convenient bonus because it came with the web app platform choice.

On the other hand, you get a web app, which looks nice (hopefully) but gobbles down your resources.

Just not using the app is better than using the app.

I'm experiencing a bizarre glimpse of humanity in the Internet, before the bots have been written and move in, the experience of communicating with actual people without the influence of karma, business, or astroturf just yet.

They will come, but Lemmy sets the new terms of engagement.

Very cute! The grooming must be a task.

The purpose is backward and forward compatibility respectively.

The minimum version is the easiest to explain: any older, and your app just won't run. Don't even try. I (app) don't have the compatibility code to work with you if you are older than my minimum version because I didn't choose to include it, and you (Android) don't know the changes that were made in the future platform versions, so you can't help me.

Target version is a little more complex. This is the version of the API that I am designed to run with. You can use this information to set compatibility parameters for forward compatibility. For example, if I try to use API that doesn't exist in your version or that would have had different behavior, you would know what I'm expecting because I declared to you what it was designed for at the time. This allows the system to tolerate your outdatedness better.

However, that compatibility feature sometimes leads to security issues because the new API tends to be more restricted or improved in ways that enhance security and privacy, hence the argument why there should be a minimum target version to express that you cannot use the less secure API even for the sake of compatibility.

I think that the problem you describe is self-limiting because users can easily make accounts to get around an instance that limits the content users can view or just add an account for a more permissive instance. However, consider the following: humans tend to fixate on loss, and users aren't tied down to using any particular instance or even just one, so they don't have to compromise. You don't lose anything by adding another account on another instance to your client. There are already clients that let you pull from multiple instances automatically.

Defederation that hurts users, by the judgment of those users, on a platform where it's easy for your users to just join any other competing instances on a whim, tends to select against instances that defederate excessively. That is my hope.

We, the users, the community are the lifeblood. It's people that had the good times, and people that made them.

Hello, and thank you for taking the time to compose this response.

I think that I may have conflated the choice of language with the choice of distribution. I believe the choice of language is independent of the choice to distribute apps as native or not, for at least Java because Java has solutions for AOT compilation not the least of which was actually used before in Android 5 according to another response, and it was used prior to Android 7 according to this resource.

For the sake of discussion, I propose that this existing AOT compiler for Android Java applications (used today in the hybrid solution) be run in its entirety on a server instead of on the user devices. I don't see a motivating reason to have the compiler on every user device to include a complex profile-guided optimization framework and hybrid JIT compiler (described in my third link in the original post) when we could ship the finished code and be done with it.

The benefit would be lower maintenance of the Android platform through a simpler design. (This benefit might shake out, but I get to that later.)

The migration process would consist of doing nothing for the typical app developer making this change quite cheap. The same languages would be supported as they are now. Indeed, this transition has already happened before and shows that this approach works, except with the build process happening on the device in earlier Android versions. I don't understand why Google did not go a step further and ship the binaries, instead choosing to take a step back and ship a JIT compiler with the AOT compiler. Why ship the intermediate bytecode representation and insist on a complex on-device build and optimization runtime?

From the responses that I have received so far, I think the true answer as to why distribution isn't native is likely composed of a combination of the following factors:

• Android's heritage and if it ain't broke, don't fix it mindset (very respectable IMHO).
• Android practically supports more platforms than arm64 even if not officially stated, such as Chromebooks and some x86 tablets. Shipping native would make this cross-arch support a lot more complicated.
• Loose coupling between hardware and software platforms as a good design decision.
• JIT performance can actually exceed AOT because more information is available at runtime.
• Backwards compatibility is very important to Android, and the impacts of not shipping bytecode to these old versions could be profound or practically impossible depending on how far back we wish to consider.

I'm sure that I'm making further assumptions, and surely there are oddball apps out there that really depend on having dynamic optimization to be performant, but I suspect these apps are in the minority. At a glance, the current solution seems too complicated, but I think understanding the history of the platform and the selection of devices that are supported today mostly answers my original question. Briefly, arm64 is absolutely not the end of the story even if it's listed as the supported CPU architecture, and officially committing to just one now and forever could come home to roost.

Thank you; I will definitely add this to my reading list.

This is definitely a sink-or-swim moment for Lemmy. If this is going to work, this is the chance. Twitter and Reddit are imploding. Users have a reason to try something new and are willing to deal with young, buggy platforms because it's better than the alternative and they needed an Internet home. My upvote taking ten seconds to register is itself the knife's edge of creation, a new birth.

How do we know this post isn't fake? Perhaps it's all part of the ruse.

Somewhat, but it's just the "how's the weather?" of this community because most everyone is here from Reddit, so it's a starting point to me. I don't think Lemmy exists just to spite Reddit, and I participate in discussions having nothing to do with the subject.

Thank you for the insight, however, I think that my question is somewhat different because I'm interested in the implementation choice rather than the language choice. To answer your question, I don't think Android should switch to C/C++. Instead, I don't understand why Android goes to such great lengths to avoid compiling whatever language is in use in advance. Naively from the outside looking in it appears this would greatly simplify the platform.

For example, I think it would be an improvement to use Java but compile the whole thing to a native image in the cloud and distribute the compiled binaries. We already have Java AOT capabilities in Android, therefore this appears to be technically feasible. Only one ISA is targeted officially. It's not a great academic leap to think apps could be built off the phone instead to avoid the complex optimization problems.

I am ignoring Chromebooks a bit. I did not know that you could run Android apps on that platform and didn't think to consider it because I didn't see x86 listed on Wikipedia as an officially supported architecture.

Sorry that's the European version I only upvote the American version of the can.

We do have privacy laws today (USA user), but they are so weak that near my office I regularly see ads advising businesses to treat it as a liability problem and instead buy insurance as a faster and cheaper alternative to good practices.

And it works! This approach should not be feasible to address the costs of violating user privacy. It reiterates to me that we are far too lax.

So often I've pulled up my phone while it's connected just to try looking up a destination while I'm parked. Being forced to use only the car interface for Maps while plugged in has always been awkward.

Shame that my single USB port that supports Auto is wearing out! Soon I'll be reduced to Bluetooth only, and maybe a mount for the phone to keep the screen in arm's reach without having to look away from the road.

Of the places I've been, there are a great many more networks I have not been part of arguably because they failed to achieve critical mass. Writing good software is hard. Getting people to use it is even harder in the case of social networks where the value isn't just in the software but also in the community.

Many subreddits have fled to Discord which I think is a terrible format for their content. I suspect a great many users are still adrift. I hope more will find this island so it can achieve critical mass and really develop the communities that it needs to sustain itself in the long term. I usually lurk only, but I'm trying to be more active just to help promote its growth.

The software is merely the crucible. We are the iron. Reddit continues to make it hot by striking.

That's what I'm using here. It has a few bugs (I can't turn off swipe gestures, and pull down to refresh never works), but it's minimal, to the point, and easy on the eyes. I think Boost for Lemmy has a good shot at being the popular client when it's ready, but for now, Connect seems to be stable on my device. I do like the web desktop UI.

I can't be too critical though because the whole community and user base is so young. If the Lemmy.world stats are any indication, the app userbase must be exploding too, testing paths that just haven't been tested much before.

Oh cool, thanks. I have friends in Texas and they make it sound like it could never happen.

As you mentioned, that in and of itself isn't a bad thing. Sometimes it's good not to have people who are really casual users in your community. They can take their time coming over as long as the people who are here are having a good time.

QED, I think this response completely addresses my concerns. I often miss the social aspect of systems that involve people. I can't think of any further questions.

I reverse native binaries across a few different platforms for a living, but I'm just getting into Android. I will definitely take a look at those systems!

Do you know where this post is when it's time to pay up?

This might be the wrong place for this question, but I have heard criticism that real rust programs contain lots of unsafe code. Is this true?

Snowballs chance unfortunately. I understand getting a Democrat to win in Texas is effectively impossible.