Scrubbles

Hashtags aren’t discoverable though, server A still needs to subscribe to at least one user from server B before hash tags will start

Very very unfortunately, Pixelfed doesn’t have a way to just start exploring feeds without knowing exactly who to look at. This has been a very longstanding problem with the platform that the engineer has pretty much outright refused to do. Pixelfed-Glitch is attempting to add in better discovery options, but for now it’s a non-starter for me. I turned off my pixelfed server because of the lack of discovery.

I mean, I completely agree but last time I said that people flamed me over it. If it was still 2013 then I’d look more into it, but today it’s such a monolithic architecture

A great example is his handling of Laravel, scaling, and Docker. It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have a huge understanding of Docker - or at least hasn’t managed docker images at scale. A huge thing there that I ran into constantly is that the Pixelfed containers both are 1) Stateful and worse than that 2) depend on each other’s volumes. These are both anti patterns specifically called out in the docker best practices. It ultimately means that the Pixelfed containers must share the same host as it’s workers. He put a lot of time and effort into building scripts that would simplify the setup for a docker compose file, but never thought horizontally - scaling these containers out on a cluster or separating workers off away from the web-api nodes at all.

I spent 3 weeks trying to de-tangle that all and got nowhere. I’ve been watching the guys over at Pixelfed Glitch ( a fork of pixelfed ), and from what I see they’re trying to do the same thing. I wish them godspeed. Until then, I can’t recommend Pixelfed as it just can’t horizontally scale. Sure you can throw a more expensive machine at the problem, but that’s not a fix.

As for the last, I don’t have any examples - and I think that’s because no one else has gone on a press junket like he has. The owners of Mastodon started a foundation a while back, I think that’s the most official news I’ve heard out of them. I think that’s what bothered me - for the vast majority of people that was their first chance to hear about the open web. Instead of saying “We have a thing called the fediverse. I’ll spare you the details but you can choose Pixelfed, Mastodon, even Wordpress or many others, and they all work together”. Instead all I heard anywhere was Pixelfed. Feel free to call BS there, maybe he did somewhere and I just missed it.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you’re both wrong. Here me out.

As other commenters have said, there should never be any expectation of privacy on the fediverse. DMs here and private items are not actually private, they’re quite literally blasted out to anyone who listens. I feel like I have to say that a lot. I actually like how Lemmy handles it, it warns you that it’s unencrypted and that it recommends Matrix (and you can put your matrix handle on your profile).

However. I’m also disillusioned by Dansup. He made a great project with Pixelfed. It got off the ground and has a great following. However, I’ve read through the code, I’ve tried to spin it up, hell even tried to help contribute - but it’s a spaghetti’d mess of unmaintainable code. What irks me is rather than dive in and fix the code, help those who honestly want to spin up his projects, he starts a completely separate project (off the same spaghetti’d base that barely scales), and goes on a whole PR junket talking about it. Then when I see people asking questions of his code or how to do things he usually jumps down their throats - or completely ignores them.

And honestly the biggest thing that irked me was that I didn’t feel he gave credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people who work to make the fediverse work. Pixelfed is a great experience - but it’s one of many all working together, and the developers are a huge chunk, but you have the infrastructure, us admins hosting, those out there vocalizing it, those trying to start communities, it’s an ecosystem, and I just felt like he ignored the fediverse and instead pushed Pixelfed.

Thanks for your insights in gdpr. Jwts though I know can be invalidated, but it’s a few extra steps, and I’m not surprised when companies don’t go the extra mile. It’s usually such a niche case where someone logs in, has a jwt, and the server needs to invalidate it, but it happens.

Using temporary emails is great for this, especially with places that you know you don’t care about, then just break the link. Granted for very nefarious things there will probably still be a link back to you via the provider.

Hate to tell you but 95% of companies do this. It’s common practice. You’re “deleted” account? There’s a column called “DeletedDate” and it’s marked to whenever you hit delete. Their query then just says “Select Account where DeletedDate is null” and yours just doesn’t return until that date is cleared.

Is it asshole design? No. And it’s not for privacy reasons. it’s because the vast majority of people who hit delete will call the next day and yell and scream saying “But I didn’t know it would delete everything”. That’s why Meta keeps it, and Youtube, and Google, and everyone.

Not to mention legal reasons. If someone uses your platform for illegal purposes and the feds come knocking you bet your ass you need that data or your company is liable. That is different in the EU I grant you, but that’s the exception, not the common practice. Over there they can point to GDPR and say “That’s why we don’t have it”. Anywhere else you’re pretty screwed.

So. Not asshole design. The session staying open is bad security though. Everything else is just knowing your userbase and knowing that people will be pissed and need something. If you want privacy stop giving your data to companies in the first place.

Oh well that’s good!

Tbh I’ve just given up with him as an engineer. He goes and does side projects while his core base waits for updates, even while earning actual funding to improve said projects. For that much you could actually hire an engineer or two to build out Pixelfed more if you didn’t want to anymore.

Legends say she was the first person on the fediverse

She really wants to make friends!

Same. Groups were merged a while ago but I’ve never seen them

All of their moves were very much “okay on the surface this seems normal, but what are you actually trying to do”. Then you start seeing what you are pointing out. Who decides what is violent? When does it expand past violent?

And the permission of the peertube admins. A single channel on YouTube can easily be over a TB. Just casually dumping a TB or two of storage onto their wallets is going to cause them to notice.

Not crypto, blockchain. When done correctly and you don’t have every user trying to calculate the next hash for some pennies it works pretty well. Computing the hash when an action happens like a purchase is fairly trivial compared to mining.

Crypto started the concept of the blockchain, at the end though it’s just a distributed immutable audit log. The hash is required, but if done correctly, it’s trivial.

This is surprisingly one of the few actual useful uses of blockchain. Business tried to shove it in everywhere and it didn’t make sense because blockchain is a way to audit federated separate instances - which businesses are not. They’re a single monolithic structure, and they don’t need the trust - they already have it. They’re themselves, they just have to trust their own internal teams.

We, on the otherhand, are the perfect use for it. A way to say X person paid Y person for this product on this day at this time, X person now has the authority to rate Y person for how they did. Immutable, impossible to fake.

Can confirm, I host a very small instance with a few niche communities. Many subscribers, I don’t know of any defeds against me though. Plus it’s how I expect the fediverse to really grow naturally. Join a general one but then smaller instances of more niche topics. Kudos OP!

Wow I was interested to hear what your opinions were but nevermind after that comment.

Honestly that makes sense, they’re probably kicking themselves for it. They could have been the onlyfans or Patreon, and honestly back in the day I would have been for that