Happy to be part of the sudden stress test of your software and infrastructure! June 30 hit and I needed a place to go. Found Lemmy. Found Connect for Lemmy. I don’t know if this is the future for a Reddit-like service, but I’m pleased to see some real activity and I’m glad to be a part.

Running Connect for Lemmy here on Android. It seems nice and minimalist. I was a little dissuaded from trying Jerboa with some of the negative reviews.

Of the places I’ve been, there are a great many more networks I have not been part of arguably because they failed to achieve critical mass. Writing good software is hard. Getting people to use it is even harder in the case of social networks where the value isn’t just in the software but also in the community.

Many subreddits have fled to Discord which I think is a terrible format for their content. I suspect a great many users are still adrift. I hope more will find this island so it can achieve critical mass and really develop the communities that it needs to sustain itself in the long term. I usually lurk only, but I’m trying to be more active just to help promote its growth.

The software is merely the crucible. We are the iron. Reddit continues to make it hot by striking.

I noticed that I don’t have a karma or upvote counter for my account, and I felt free. Let’s keep it that way. It just encourages more ego and skin in the discussion ahead of focusing on the content and further penalizes users who sometimes have an unpopular, but still civil and constructive, opinion. I don’t want an echo chamber effect.

I imagine that implementing such a metric could become quite confusing if it turned out that not all instances permitted all communities in the future. If this is already the case, please excuse me. I’ve been on Lemmy for one hour total. Solving that consistency problem couldn’t be easier than just not solving it.

Another important factor to consider is that it doesn’t need to be perfect to be better. Having options to continue using a platform is better than not having viable options. The fact that Lemmy is open and has some built-in resistance to being owned by a single entity is a huge step forward–even if it’s not without the drawbacks of generalist instances.

It’s really, really smart that it looks like Reddit in terms of page layout. It satisfies the brain that likes its patterns and routines. I even put my favorite Lemmy app right where I used to launch from to satisfy the muscle memory. I really hope this sticks.

If Lemmy gets huge and begins to face this issue, I’ll be glad for it, even if whatever solution has shortcomings. Let’s see those million users.

Those burning circuits I smell? That’s the smell of progress, my friend. Here for the first time, for the unplanned stress test.

I recently experienced this while building an upgrade for my 3D printer. The upgrade kit included a touchscreen. I found out later that the touchscreen was effectively its own separate computer with more than 10x more resources than the actual computer inside the 3D printer that was doing the most important calculations.

The compute and memory resource constraints were basically nonexistent factors in the design of the printer and the upgrade kit. Merely, a simpler computer was easier to design for and characterize, so the printer itself had a very simple computer, and for the UX, a “beefy” computer was much easier to program. It’s bizarre seeing how little the amount of computer resources mattered. It might as well have been free.

Is this to be Lemmy’s future? I tend to believe there’s no practical way to distinguish between real users and bots.

It’s nice at the moment because it’s new, but it seems ripe for the astroturfing. The bots are on the way.