Ben Matthews

Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral. So it’s good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years. I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer ‘hot’, and folded away … Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.

I agree with most of what you say. I’m a long-time fan of calculating more complex things client side, as you can see from my climate model (currently all calcs within web browser, evolved from java applet to scalajs).
Also, in regarding social media, keeping the data client side could make the network more resilient in autocratic countries (many), and thelp this become truly a global alternative.
On the other hand, some ‘trunk’ server interactions could also doing more not less, bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json, and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?).

Thanks, that makes sense if I think about it, but maybe users shouldn’t have to - i.e. the Mdon part-conversation way still seems confusing to me (despite being a climate modeler and scala dev), although haven’t used Mdon much since I found Lemmy. And I still feel that both ways seem intrinsically inefficient - for different reasons - if we intend to scale up the global numbers (relating OP).

Combined with topic of trains, this reminds me of the famous movie Dil Se with the Chaiyya Chaiyya song on the roof of the steam train - itself in the SW, but of which the core plot was also about an rebellion in Assam… i.e. it reminds that this problem is older than current government …
But maybe they will be motivated to catch up, as China will soon have a direct railway from Sichuan to the frontier of Arunachal…

That makes sense, to store only popular stuff, or temporarily - especially for ‘heavier’ images (although as we see with lemm.ee, that leads to issues when an instance dies). Yet I also wonder about the scalability of just the minimum meta-info, whose size does depend on the protocol design.
For example with Lemmy every upvote click propagates across the network (if i understand correctly, mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency, but this can make it seem ‘empty’). Maybe such meta-info could be batched, or gathered by a smaller set of ‘node’ instances, from which others pick up periodically - some tree to disperse information rather than directly each instance to each other instance ?
As the fediverse grows, gathering past meta-info might also become a barrier to new entrant instances ?

I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage …

That’s my hunch too, although haven’t studied in detail - so I wonder how we can fix it ?
Is there an forum that discusses this scaling issue (in general, across fediverse) ?

For many of them it’s still far away. But I note the ukrainian counter of russian casualties is about to pass a million. While there is ‘fog of war’ it’s easier to say people are missing, so friends and relatives can keep hoping that theirs is the special case. During any prolonged ceasefire, it would become clearer who’s gone forever - which is one reason why P avoids this situation (and also bans NGOs like soldier’s mothers, who used to help connect these dots).

What happened to Assam and beyond ?

I’m more interested in distribution of users and local-focus of communities than country-based instances, nevertheless the map does illustrate that Lemmy has huge gaps - no country instance in all of Africa, hardly any in Asia… What can we do to make it a more global conversation ?

So how about the Cahill Butterfly projection, …

For info: this track is SE of Zagreb, en route towards Belgrade, openrailwaymap shows it was rather slow. Maybe they are concerned that the new fast line from Budapest - Belgrade competes with their route Salzburg - Ljubljana - Zagreb - Belgrade, to be the main line from Germany to Turkey.

Many Ukrainian women are still in exile further west in europe, especially those with or expecting young children, for their safety. Their children are not included in this data (it says ‘on the territory’) but these are potentially the next generation of Ukrainians, if conditions become good for them to return.

The point is to encourage more to surrender, their outlook needs to be better than meat waves, and this info needs to spread behind russian lines. These guys come from a very-low-info world, if the mass-lies collapse, so would the war effort (this happened before).

Good, but I hope they also get the option not to be exchanged, poor chance of survival if they go back. Should stay, but work on communication to the other side.

Fine map, good to see the old names. But some of these routes are pretty impassable even today - for example I doubt the Wakhan corridor was ever a major route, even the bottom of that narrow valley rises above 4000m. And note Torugart pass (been there…) is north of Kashgar on the way to Issyk Kul (missing lake), not on the way to Osh. So, considering the mountains, I guess a larger fraction than indicated crossed the steppe further north - horses wouldn’t need roads or cities, but it’s easier.

Strange that Genoa controlled off bits of coast (yellow) all the way to Crimea, Azov sea (is Tana now Azov?) , and Circassia, how did they manage all that? And who’s in that purple-coloured “Theodoro”?

Indeed trade links relevant, so navigable rivers played a big role - before railways, our main transport was either boats or horses (or camels). Horses needed a lot of grass, which thrives in drier mid-continental climates where trees don’t survive wildfires. For example the Mongol empire was good at trade and connecting cultures, covered a huge area, but not (for long) near coasts, and still demanded intense tribal loyalty (elements of such culture was absorbed by the next empire which gradually pushed it back…).

Can anybody here tell us more about India, e.g. is the government promoting this, which are their favourite distros - are there local variants we don’t know about in europe, what other foss is thriving best there (and if so, why not fediverse ?) ?

Maybe add some major tributaries - eg the Inn, Sava, Tisza … ? Sometimes, depending rain on the mountains, these have greater water flow.

I think if you plotted political inclination as a function of distance from coast, globally, you might find quite a good correlation. Various plausible explanations. For example, in tougher mid-continental climates you need to store and protect stuff to survive the winter / dry-season, so people there evolved (including self-filtering migration) to have more tribal loyalty.