*Yawn!* Wake me up when they stop requiring phone numbers to sign up.

It never kicks in for me when it should, but I figured out I can force trigger it manually with the magic SysRq key (Alt+SysRq+F, needs to be enabled first), which instantly recovers my system when it starts freezing from memory pressure.

The US bans all of it, while Japan has an exception for drawings

Absolutely incorrect. You are thinking of Canada or UK. In US, drawings are fine. Rather it is photorealistic depictions “indistinguishable from that of a minor” that are prohibited, almost presciently pre-empting techniques like deepfake and stablediffusion by 20 years, a rare win by legislators.

Give it a MathContext with the max precision that you want to allow.

The arbitrary precision may cause your bignums to balloon out of control in memory/cpu usage after repeated multiplication, unless you can prove that it will not. For example:

double x = 1;
while (true){
    x *= Math.exp((Math.random()*2 - 1) / 1000);
}

Would work perfectly fine with floats and x will remain about 1, but with BigDecimal it will grind to a halt.

The article is from 2012. Reddit (and the fake profiles) was started in 2005.

Yeah, I’m noticing a lot of missing posts/comments/votes too now. It’s as if the federation protocol is taking a long time to catch up, even if nothing is otherwise blocked. For now I have to browse the communities I like on their host servers through https://lemmyverse.net/, then copy the fediverse URL of the comment I want to reply to, and paste it into my instance’s search box. That usually syncs it up and I can reply then.

lemmy.ml is defederated from lemmynsfw.com, so they cannot exchange any posts anymore. You can see the federated/defederated list at the “instances” link at the bottom of the page. This is the flip side of fediverse: the power to moderate their communities and to chose whom to associate with is given back to the users, but it has the potential to create a “swiss cheeze” social network. To create a user, look for servers that have “free speech” as one of their community values, which would not defederate for ideological/nsfw reasons, and hope no one would defederate from them for being too “free”.

I agree, hearing about scaling issues so early into adoption is concerning. Lemmy advocates say “horizontal scaling is already built in! just add more instances!”, but that doesn’t explain the problem.

It’s all just text! By my guess too, handling text alone a server should easily support a thousand concurrent users, and hundreds of thousands of daily users. A RasPI should handle thousands. I’ve heard the bottleneck is the database? In that case Rust is not to blame, Postgres is.

But my fear is that the data structures are implemented in a trivial way. If you have a good reddit-sized thread with a thousand comments, but you store each comment as a separate database entry, then every pageview will trigger a thousand database lookups! The way I imagined making a reddit clone is that I would store the comments as a flat list with some tree data on top, such that serving a single page with 1000 comments is no different that streaming a 100K text file. I’ll go take a look how Lemmy does it currently once I get the courage!