Watching Beehaw, established more than a year before June 4, 2023 - crash all June - I really regret I took the wrong approach, a crisis of faith it seems :(
Watching Beehaw, established more than a year before June 4, 2023 - crash all June - I really regret I took the wrong approach, a crisis of faith it seems :(
June 4, 2023 is when I felt I had to get involved. And June 8, 2023 is when I crated my own testing-focused experimental Lemmy install that compiled Main from GitHub source and ready to test the changes I thought were surely going to come to the SQL because of GitHub issue 2910. I wanted to test the code that that developers who had been working and running lemmy.ml for over 4 full years - would surely address. It was June 4 with Issue 2910, the June 30 Reddit API cutoff deadline countdown was well under way. Lemmy.ml put in major hardware upgrades on June 13, 2023 - and I was puzzled why such an easy 2 or 3 hour fix for Issue 2910 wasn't put in... but I still had hope that everyone would see the pending countdown to June 30 API deadline and a fix could go in within 10 days - by June 23... for some slack time before June 30..
Watching Beehaw, up and running for 17 months on Lemmy - crashing constantly... I thought, surely the developers were seeing Issue 2910 happening over there... but June 28 came, June 29 came, June 30... nothing. With 4 years of experience on the Rust code base and such, they were the ones to fix Issue 2910.... but from June 4 to June 30, it just didn't happen.
Beehaw didn't really have that much data, they had a well-organized and decorated set of around 10 communities, they had built up a standard of content for over a year... and it just got smashed by the performance problems of even slight growth of data in the post, comments, and federated communities. Tthe site_aggregates UPDATE bug was hammering away too.. with nobody fixing and digging for similar TRIGGER logic problems that June 4's issue 2910 called out.
I regret that I put too much faith in open source ideals, that surely Issue 2910 was explicit enough - and no June 13 hardware upgrade is going to fix such faulty logic. There's two active people who were the ones who approved the code in the first place, they are there every workday, it takes only a few hours - even with testing - to get the faulty SQL trigger entirely removed or fix the logic. I don't know if I'll ever understand how Issue 2910 played out from June 4 to June 30 Reddit deadline, it still seems to be one of the oddest things I've witnessed... to see Beehaw in constant turmoil week after week over what amounts to an easily patched-out or fixed fault in the foundation of the code.
If I could go back to June 4, I would have better focused to this development project had been going on for well over 4 full years of active development and operations of lemmy.ml as an Internet website. I would just keep on eye on that one single Issue 2910 and take on a part of adding some tools to better document the performance of the API.
It crossed my mind, June 4 inspired me to install BulletinTree.com testing main GitHub code merges on June 8, but I painfully see now that should have focused on a small project that came up that most people ignored, but I didn't... right there on June 7.... https://github.com/derivator/tafkars
I regret I didn't take the idea of what tafkars had built and make a proxy agent for the Lemmy API. Start metering the Lemmy API performance response and format the data so that visualization tools could be used. maybe even add nginx proxy log processing as an alternate means to capture data if people didn't want to put an API proxy in place. But there are things the API proxy could do: respond to API calls with a useful error instead of just leave clients with no response or nginx timeout. And the API could even be coded as an emergency-fallback to go pull data directly form PostgreSQL if needed. And building it like tafkars does would require no disturbance of the two developers who had been building lemmy_server for over 4 years.
How did I not see this coming? on June 4 I thought that by June 26 such easily fixed issues like 2910 would be addressed and rolled out... the constant fires burning over at Beehaw were flashing red and the slow-motion train-wreck of it all kept playing out. Beehaw did their best to keep their chins up, but it had to have been a bad experience to welcome people and have it all unfold the way it did.
I canceled my plans for a general purpose Lemmy social media site, the code and network peers were so unstable because of Issue 2910 and similar problems. I had hoped to have a general BBS system, which is what I named Bulletin Tree (BBS reference) for. And instead I saw Beehaw which had been running for 17 months blowing up and having to put up new error messages on their home page...
regrets, no fun :(
My regrets compounded when I sort of forgot about https://github.com/derivator/tafkars like everyone else did by early July... a month after it had been created... and it would have been a way for me to channel my skills instead of hoping the situation with Issue 2910 would turn around quickly. Even after 30 days, a few-hour fix to 2910 hadn't been put in.
Did I get caught up in all the "Fuck Spez" negativity of Lemmy community? Beehaw was the most positive and had been up for 17 months with their positive approach. Did I get sucked into the hate of Reddit and hate of Elon Musk emotions and not see it?
I really regret when I go back and see the June 7 creation of https://github.com/derivator/tafkars - that I didn't either think of it myself or jump in with contributions to a fully independent project that would offer a solution that didn't require the two entrenched developers of lemmy_server to change their pace or focus. Beehaw was on fire, and tafkars project would at least have been a way to view all this from an API perspective.
Did the negativity of hating Spez and corporate power - even the massive hate that everyone was screaming on Lemmy platform about Zuckerberg and "Threads" coming along on July 5... did it get into my head?
- May 20 2023 - a huge amount of hate surging with "Fuck Spez" and mod community planned outages protest
- June 30 the massive community hate towards Reddit
- July 5 - Zuckerberg and Threads. Massive hate response from the Lemmy platform.
- July 23 - Elon Musk pulls another massive change, the Twitter to X rename - a world-wide mind-fuck given how many news organizations have made Twitter one of the most-repeated words on the planet.
I should have been reading my Finnegans Wake and keeping my mind clear. The Reddit HiveMind clashes, the Lemmy platform HiveMind hate towards Threads and Twitter....
Beehaw is like a lighthouse in all the hate-oriented surges of people motivated by anger and hate, and I see now I lost my way in the competing waves of hate-focused HiveMind reactions.
https://github.com/derivator/tafkars
This API proxy approach could be useful for more intelligent rate-filtering than built-in Lemmy has, API redirection for specific calls, and even the basis for spam filtering. I haven't seen people remark about the lack of spam on lemmy. On Reddt, I've seen routine bots hit communities with t-shirt selling spam, etc. I wonder if other parts of the federated network have had to implement spam filtering.