They could be upgrading hosting infrastructure - sometimes this requires servers to be shut down or restarted. They might also be applying database changes such as migrating data from one server to another, or updating the structure of the database to improve performance or support new features.

Honestly, there are quite a number of reasons for planned downtime.

Unplanned downtime is a different story. Usually that's because something unexpected went wrong and there will be engineers trying to get things back up and running ASAP.

They can still reject the proposal. Just because they're built upon Chromium, doesn't mean they need to utilise or retain every feature Google adds to it.

For the same reason big hair can make someone look crazy. They make you look unkempt.

Agreed. News about X is not news about technology.

It really does, doesn't it!?

Do people even use Pinterest nowadays?

I'm always staggered by how regularly it appears at the top of search results.

Yep 🤦🏻‍♂️

This isn't even about AI. Regular search engines will also provide results reflecting the thing you asked for.

You weren't wrong. He stepped down as CEO, but remained on the board. Whereas now I guess he's leaving the board.

In the UK it's a "builders' bum"

I do think Firefox gets a degraded experience on some websites.

For example, Google Meet supports virtual video backgrounds and 3D face filters for Chromium based browsers.

And Google Search serves up an older results page design with fewer features to Firefox users. Someone has literally had to create a Firefox addon to make it pretend to be Chrome so it gets the modern results page.

I realise these are both Google-owned websites - but I don't think it's accurate to say that the average user isn't going to come up across these differences.

There's more than one Musk!? 😱

This is worse than the time Elon Musk bought Twitter and ran it into the ground.

Exactly this. In the same way I expect to be able to email the government, but I wouldn't expect to send them a message on Facebook Messenger.

Open platforms over walled gardens.

looking forward to finding a proper solution

To the contrary, I think you have a solution in search of a problem.

Your solution is smart contracts, and you're asking us if we agree that your cloud storage example would be a good use case for that solution.

I'm pretty sure Virgin Media used to do this until recently

Does anybody else find Tom Scott annoying?

I love channels that deep-dive into the details of things, etc. But I've always found Tom to be so smug and patronising.

Is it just me?

Yeah. Honestly, I'm still not sure I understand it. ELI5?

What better way to create the image of a thriving userbase, than for your userbase to literally create the image.

reddit uses a differential for upvotes

ELI5? I'm genuinely interested - just wonder what this means? I'd always assumed +1 on a post meant 1 user clicking the "upvote" button.

One really practical way to learn some new recipes is to use a recipe box service like HelloFresh or Gousto.

They deliver a box with all the required ingredients and easy to follow recipe cards.

For anything that you make & enjoy, you can keep the recipe card and cook it again using store bought ingredients.

These recipe boxes regularly have deals and promotions (e.g. 60% off, refer a friend, etc.) so it doesn't have to be too expensive.

Or if you don't want to order one at all, it's worth knowing that HelloFresh make all their recipes available online for free. So you can download and print off any that you like the sound of, without ever even ordering one of their boxes.

Do you have a sauce for that Google announcement about Reddit? I'm interested!

If only there was some sort of Reddit API that we could use to retrieve & mirror content from Reddit… 🤔

Oh wait! 😅

There are several eras of the web.

I think Lemmy feels very much of the "Web 2.0" era, which came about in the mid-to-late naughties. When MySpace and Facebook and blogging were all the rage.

So not the same "old web" era as Windows 98. If that makes sense!

For me, to 'get shit done' means to enter a state of flow and focus. For that I put on noise cancelling headphones and put this Chillhopmusic playlist on shuffle.

(It's not my playlist, just a public one that someone has created and shared.)

Who are these people that will fund a social network, with no expectations of a return on that investment, so that people can fill it up with memes and porn for free?

Sadly Lidl trollies in the UK doesn't. At least not at my local.

Their trollies used to have plastic hooks fitted to the front of the trolly, but they've been removed for some reason 😪

Search needs to be improved to show communities from yet-to-be-discovered instances

Thankfully it looks like this sort of thing is already on the radar.

Yo ho, yo ho!

Potentially dumb question, but I've seen lots of people linking to this website:

https://browse.feddit.de

What's new/different about https://browse.toast.ooo or https://lemmyverse.net?

Is it because they also show instances, not just communities? Or is it more just a hobby project (nothing wrong with that, I'm 💯 on board with building things for the sheer enjoyment of it - even if it's already a 'solved' problem)

🙋🏻‍♂️ Sony WH-1000XM2 owner here, and I'm equally as happy. They're still going strong after years of heavy daily use.

Nice! I sort of hope these community discovery tools & improvements eventually make their way back 'upstream' into Lemmy's UI over time. Imagine not needing a separate discovery app because Lemmy's built-in one is already the best one available 😄

Thank you. This is what I was looking for.

Interesting 🤔 "intercept" as in to rip them?

And suppose a friend asked me how you do that. What should I tell them?

There won't be any bots if they have to pay eyewatering amounts for API access.

It'll be a ghost town, plus u/spez.

Really? I've been using it for a while and haven't noticed tracking.

What sorts of tracking have you seen them engage in?

They display ads in search results, which they presumably do need to track clicks for. But you can literally just switch the ads off in the settings. And then you'll never see them again. They're on by default, but not mandatory.

To be honest, I think whichever approach you take is unlikely to have a significant effect on how much energy your website uses overall.

For example, servers in datacentres are very powerful and are able to run more than one thing at once. So if you were hosting your own Lemmy/Mastodon instance, there'd be no reason why you couldn't also host a standalone website on that same server. The difference in energy usage would be negligible.

In contrast, you could argue that Lemmy is less efficient than a straightforward static website because the content of your blog posts will inevitably end up being federated to many other instances. That means multiple copies of your blog will be transferred between multiple servers and stored on multiple hard drives, etc. Whereas a static website lives in one place and doesn't end up using so many resources.

At the end of the day, whichever you choose will likely have very little impact. So I wouldn't worry too much about your blog's green credentials.

I'm saying this as somebody who is pro protecting the environment, but also pro prioritising our efforts in the places they'll have greatest impact. You'll probably have a bigger impact by walking to the store instead of driving.

While I haven't spent time looking at kbin, isn't that essentially what it does with its 'magazines'? I believe magazines are an automatic grouping of posts by hashtag, community, keyword, etc.

Yep, I was just about to say this. The next release of Lemmy should remove this.

The pages auto-update using a technology called WebSockets. It's cool tech and very effective for some uses (e.g. chat apps) – but in this case the implementation causes stuff to jump around the page as it updates.

But as has already been said, WebSockets are being removed from 0.18.0. So that'll mean no more auto-updating page content / comments / notifications too.

I saw it mentioned here under the 'Call for testers' heading: https://lemmy.ml/post/1232795

I kinda like that comments and notifications auto-appear 🤔

..but I agree that it's a bad user experience when stuff jumps around on the page when you're not expecting it

Oh, good to know. For some reason I was under the impression that there was something 'more' to a Kbin magazine compared to a subreddit or Lemmy community. I'm sure I read about it somewhere and was sort of surprised at how flexible it seemed – but I can't seem to find it now, so I may have imagined it!

I think the terrible microphone quality on Bluetooth headsets is down to limitations in the Bluetooth protocol itself.

For all the hype around wireless headphones, I really wish they'd fix the potato quality microphone audio. It seems so odd to me that it hasn't been fixed by somebody yet.