I was at a small roleplaying convention last week. It was great to meet the others again after about a year and game with them. Unfortunately someone was rather generous with their flu viruses and I got my personal helping. So I’m on sick leave for the second say but luckily, according to the test it’s just a flu and not the big bad C. On Monday I clobbered together a small template for my sister to build fake computer screens as props for TV shows… All in all a mixed bag of some good stuff and some annoying things…

The “gut” might not be an organ but I can’t see a microbe letting go of some tasty piece of food just because it happens to pass from the small incestine to the colon… (wrong terms can safely be attributed to my translation tool)…

Elon Musk supports eliminating rights for people who aren’t Elon Musk… That’s about it, I think…

Several times, sometimes to find out when an incompatibility was introduced in an upstream dependency to find the maximum compatible version, but usually to find the commit that introduced a strange bug.

The process is always the same… Write a unit test, start bisect, check test select next bisect step, repeat. If your last-known-good and first-known-bad are correct, it always worked for me.

Since this was a question about a lemmy feature, I’m talking lemmy here, arguing about fediverse, TCP/IP or electricity numbers/servers/plants doesn’t seem usefull in this context. Providing a link to a server that to your knowledge (you provided the reason) hosts illegal content can be seen as participating in this crime or at least advertizing. (Disclaimer: I’m no lawyer, I just remember whole BBS being seized for providing lists of (international) phone numbers to BBS that hosted warez and there’s stuff that’s worse than warez).

There are a few different things I’d like to mention:

• I don’t think, that there is such a thing as a massively defederated instance exists right now. The most blocked instance is blocked by about 11% of the instances, followed by two instances at 6%
• Even if the die hard scene users would know their instances, not every random troll or spammer would.
• This doesn’t address the possible legal issues of publicly announcing where someone could find illegal content
• If “small queer instance” refers to beehaw… That’s the second largest instance there is as of today according to https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

And lastly: If you’re new to the fediverse you maybe shouldn’t run your own instance in first place. Helping reckless people pull reckless stunts is a bad reason to promote a feature.

Currently it isn’t and I don’t think, that this would be the best idea ever since it could be misused as some kind of index to find bad instances. The defederated-list is available to the public and thus the defederating instance could in fact be “advertizing” the instances they defederated from (“Look, we don’t want this stuff here, but these instances are for [right-wing|transphobes|bots|spammers|porn]”)…

Depending on where the instance is hosted or where the admin lives, it might even be illegal to in fact point people to places where they can find certain things.

I’ve seen the fun of “prints everywhere” in production when a colleague forgot to remove a “Why the fuck do you end up here?” followed by a bunch of variables before committing a hot-fix… Customers weren’t to amused…

Edit: That was a PHP driven web shop and the message endet up on to of the checkout page

I seldom use profilers because I seldom need to. It’s only usefull to run a profiler if your programm has a well defined perfomance issue (like “The request should have an average responsetime of X ms but has one of Y ms” or "90% of the requests should have a response after X ms but only Y% actually do).

On the other hand I use a debugger all the time. I rarely start any programm I work on without a debugger attached. Even if I’m just running a smoke test, if this fails I want to be able to dig right into the issue without having to restart the programm in debug mode. The only situation, where i routinely run code without a debugger is the red-green-refactor cycle with running unit tests because I’ll need to re run these multiple times with a debugger anyway if there are unexpected reds…

What enables me? Well there’s this prominent bug-shaped icon in my IDE right besides the “play button”, and there’s Dev-Tools in Chrome that comes with the debugger for JS…

Running your code without a debugger is only usefull if you want to actually use it or if you’re so sure that there aren’t any issues that you might as well skip running the code altogether…

Let’s pick 2 of my current characters…

First there is Winter, a Tabaxi Warlock in a Strixhaven campaign, who’s full name roughly translates to ‘Starry Ice Night’ (‘Sternenklare Eisnacht’ in German). It’s the only character in the party that doesn’t have a Strixhaven background and originally from a small mountain village on his home plane. Since it’s still first year, he’s still processing the whole school stuff, all these people and that strange idea of learning from books. Even back on his home plane he preferred solitude over the ‘crowded’ village and spent his time hunting and forraging through the mountain forrest. One day he noticed a man fighting a unicorn. Since you just don’t fight unicorns he shot the man in the back without much hesitation, landing a brilliant shot, triggering a magic surge that knocked Winter unconcious. When he recovered he found himself eye to eye with a very angry unicorn who explained that they hadn’t been fighting but were in the process of binding the man to unicorn as its champion and that right now, unicorn was one desperately needed champion short. Seeing that Winter could potentially grow into that role, unicorn persuaded winter to step in, made him a warlock (aka champion) and sent him of to a school he never heared of on a plane he didn’t knew it even existed. So right now Winter is a little homesick, very lost and with way to much to process in a group of people who worked and planned all their life on getting into that very school. He’s trying very hard to do the right thing and safe everyone from everything. Besides him beeing in way over his head one of the most fun things is flavoring all his magic with gold, rainbows and sparkles.

Then there’s Ethan Hayle who’s a young Ventrue in a Vampire V5 campaign. When he was still human, he worked as a crime scene cleaner, making crime scenes habitable again after the police was through with them. He was aporached by someone offering him a very well paid gig cleaning a crime scene before the police arrived. Ethan couldn’t resist the temptation and took that job. This led him to be a crime scene cleaner by day job and by night job as well. His new employer turned out to be the mafia who had to replace their former clean up guy after an accident. While the pay was very good this job didn’t sit too well with Ethan’s conciousness and after he found out that he knew one of the victims, he decided to collect as much evidence and turn that in to the police. As drama needs it, he handed the copy to a crooked cop who informed the mafia, iniciating a manhunt that Ethan only survived because of his inside knowledge and because he had help from a stranger. A few months after they went dark and decided to continue to try to expose the bad guys, Ethan learned that the stranger was a vampire and his sire wanted to turn Ethan into a vampire too. Seeing the possibility to kind of survive that way, he agreed. While Ethan doesn’t really have a Ventrue mindset, his sire decided to turn him into one anyway because he could use the skillset of a crime scene cleaner and all the inside knowledge about the mafia, which is controlled by a Brujah who he has a very long standing feud with.

I used “meadia coverage” in a very broad sense here (as in online articles by magazines, blogposts and such)…

• https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-alternatives-lemmy-3335429/ mentiones lemmy.world way before any other
• https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances while not media gets linked rather often an has lemmy.world, beehaw and feddit on top of the “all instances” list
• https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/ for example links to awesome lemmy instances
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software) again not media but in the same ballpark, lists lemmy.ml and lemmy.world

I honestly didn’t keep track I just noticed this during the last few days that if there were instanced that were mentioned or linked it was usually these three, but it might also be confimation bias.

The main difference between these two instances as I see it is that lemmy.world gets a whole lot more media coverage, attention and direct links than sh.itjust.works. You have to do research or visit join-lemmy.org to find a link to sh.itjust.works and then their tagline starting with “A bilingual (EN/FR) general-purpose instance located in eastern Canada! Powered by 99% renewal energy!” might just keep some uniformed (as in how this federation-thingy works) non-canadians from joining (yes, I left out the second part of the tagline, assuming most people who’d be put off by the beginning wouldn’t read any further).

I think it’s a lot less nefarious. About every post or article about Lemmy that links to Lemmy instances has links to (in this order in almost every article I remember) lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and beehaw.org. Of these 3 only lemmy.world accepts new users without vetting. Lemmy.ml doesn’t accept new users at all and beehaw doesn’t really look that welcoming to someone who knows they might stir some shit up in the future and also getting into beehaw requires more effort. So with lemmy.world usually being the first on the list and additionally requires the least effort to join, this is where all the world and their uncle end up on. They just get the biggest unfiltered influx and with that the biggest amount of toxic people. (I want to make sure that I’m not calling lemmy.world users lazy or toxic or anything like or that this is their target audience. It’s just a fact fact that someone who can’t be bothered to do research and/or “write an essay” as someone called it, will most likely end up on lemmy.world)

German it magazine iX has an interview with the mods of r/de. I don’t know if this was mentioned here before…

Interview (German)

Short summary: the mods of the large German communities see a huge issue with reddit not recognizing content creators and mods work and there seems to be growing support for an ongoing blackout or so they say.

That’s an important question to ask. For me (and I want to make very clear that this is exclusively how I handle things for myself) there is a huge difference between things I use (or what I call passive association) and things I work on or contribute to (or what I call active association).

While im ok-ish with using their software if they don’t really profit from my usage, I wont be actively helping them. Given the state of the world and western society, I can’t really escape using products that are unethical and as a software developer working for a company I can’t really decide who gets to use my paid work and since I very much like having a bed and a roof and food and even some comfort in that, I’d rather stick to my job, but I can make a choice on who I support with my free time.

It’s a technical limitation. In very easy (and therefore not entirely correct) terms, beehaw stopped talking to these instances. Beehaw will not load content from there, so you wouldn’t get any new posts or comments on communities that are hosted there, and these communities wouldn’t get anything you’d write because it’s always the hosting instance that keeps the master-copy of all content in it’s communities and only the master-copy is used to copy this content to other instances.

Just check https://beehaw.org/instances Every instance has this list.

Just to put an additional perspective on this. Beehaw has been and/or had to defederate instances before to become and stay the safe space everyone here’s enjoying. The only major difference here is that this time it hit two major instances and not because of actions or goals of the majority of their population or admins but because the sheer size of the instances made the small percentage of their users, who act in what is considered a bad way, made it to much to handle.

According to this list of Awesome Lemmy Instances, there are 5 instances who’s count of blocked instances is way above every other instance (like 5 times more). Beehaw is one of those, in fact Beehaw is on top of that list. While this of course isn’t desirable, it made the communities we have here possible in first place and helped shape them into what they’re now. Just check the blocked instances list.

I think, just closing the valve on certain pipes is a legitimate course of action in a situation where there is more pressure than the receiver can handle, especially in short term while other measures are put into place (like getting better tools to handle the pressure or expecting the general pressure to go down). If the only two options for this valve are “fully open” and “fully closed” it seems to me like the only course of action to prevent overpressure from flooding the whole place.

On your PC you can just have 2 browsertabs with two different accounts on different instances open. Since these have different URLs, your browser doesn’t understand that it’s two of the same (like in two lemmy tabs) and wont interfere with cookies, sessions and such.

I don’t think anyone is calling you toxic (I honestly haven’t read all the comments). The decision was made due to the fact that the two instances in questions have and allow a huge influx of unvetted accounts and with that all those users also can walk in here. With this crowd comes a small percentage of toxic people that sre still to many be filtered out on this side using the current moderation tools.