• 2 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • So, I’m new here, but I’m still struggling to see the advantage of smaller and more focused instances.

    One benefit of focused instances is that we can sort of insulate ourselves from de-federation conflicts amongst the larger, user-focused instances. I’m not sure if you we around for the beehaw.org defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works but those were 3/4 of the biggest instances and those users can no longer interact. Users from lemmy.world were basically blocked from all new content on the communities they were subscribed to on beehaw.org and vice versa.

    I host a sports-focused instance fanaticus.social where all we talk about is sports. It’s a non-controversial topic (most of the time) and because we’re focused on that one topic, users from all the instances like beehaw, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, can still interact with and create content for sports without worrying about losing access to the communities they’re a part of. That’s the major advantage as far as I see it.

    I don’t care about user registration counts because most of our content comes from users on general instances. In the future we will probably disable registration altogether. I have only left it open for now to reduce the friction for new fediverse users if they happen to find our instance first and want to make fanaticus their home instance.




  • 😆 sorry about that! Baseball season is still very much on.

    This issue was caused by the websockets replacing the current thread you were on with newly updated or created posts. Our game threads get updated frequently so they were constantly popping up in people’s faces. We decreased the frequency of the updates pretty substantially in order to be less annoying to unrelated instances but it was still happening occasionally.

    Now that we’re all through with websockets it won’t be an issue anymore!











  • I’ve posted about this before as it relates to mod tools.1

    The search part isn’t all that difficult, there are open source search engines that are easy enough for admins to configure a decent search feature. The more difficult issue is aggregating the data from all our instances to a single source where we can make queries with those existing search engine tools.

    I am going to spend some time this weekend working on a proof of concept for a search engine for mod tools. Big picture solution is:

    1. Instance admins regularly dump anonymized (i.e. no PII) post and comment data to a public source (possibly torrent, possibly sftp)
    2. Other instance admins download each others data and feed it into their search db (e.g. Elasticsearch)
    3. Mods & users create tools using this data

    BTW: this isn’t a novel idea:

    • This is what pushshift is for reddit (check out their FAQ/wiki). We’re missing mod tools big time and searching/aggregating is huge part of mod tools.
    • Up until recently, like last week, Stack Exchange provided a regular dump of their data to the Internet Archive for posterity’s sake

    EDIT: Linked my OG post on the subject [1](https://fanaticus.social/post/1955)