It’s sad, but I think you’re right.
I assumed/hoped that Lemmy’s architecture was more decoupled.
According to the ChangeLog, it hints that the image reverse proxy is built-in, maybe using Pict-rs.
Which certainly reeks of Not Invented Here Syndrome, as image uploading/storing, reverse proxies, and caching is a well understood problem.
Wow, thanks for the full transparency. You are awesome!
My opinion would be option 2 (proxy requests) , but with a higher cache TTL or simple a LRU (Least Recently Used) Cache.
If you’re getting throttled, it could be mitigated by increasing the cache retention period (or improving the cache hits).
Another improvement : Would it be possible to change the proxy, so that if the proxied requests are throttled, it simply sends the user a http-302 to the origin (instead of a broken image)?
Regarding option 1 (full cache) : I greatly appreciate your desire to hide/protect your users ip, but it is outside the scope of what I expect from a Lemmy server. Maybe you could market and upsell this increased privacy as a subscription based feature. However, if I want privacy - I’ll use a VPN.
Regarding option 3 (User fetches content from origin) : From a users perspective, I really don’t want my Lemmy experience to be based on hitting a bunch of (potentially) unreliable services. When I, as a lemm.ee User, request a post from Lemmy.world (for example), lemm.ee will proxy and cache that post and the comments. This is the distributed nature of Lemmy (as far as I understand). Why restrict this caching to just posts/threads/comments and not include images (which, let’s face it, are as meaningful as pure text - especially wrt memes).
All aboard the gold train!
The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.
Actually, with enough interactions from different people (ie: enough data points) Lemmy should be able to determine if a comment brings value to the conversation (either positive or negative) or if it’s noise that should be ignored (and prioritized lower).
If you have 4 comments:
It’s obvious that 1 and 3 are providing more to the conversation than 2. 4 is a bit of an outlier, but probably provides more value than 2.
Regarding 3: The challenge would be that there’s a low chance that there will be such a wide margin of upvotes/downvotes. Due to the hive mind, the voting will probably look like 30 upvotes and 130 downvotes. So, there would need to be a weight accordingly, so those fewer upvotes had a greater impact (in terms of sorting and scoring comments)
Reddit has a “sort by controversial” algorithm that seems to be missing from Lemmy (or maybe it’s hidden in the “what’s hot" - I haven’t looked at the code).
It would be awesome (and resource intensive) if Lemmy could provide the federated instances with custom sorting algorithms. It would allow federated instances to be unique, provide some playful competition, and given the open source nature of Lemmy - I’m sure these algorithms would be open sourced, which would improve the entire Lemmy ecosystem as a whole.
Innevitably whatever public transportation you use the route will end up in the ghetteo.
This is a mindset that many people in the U.S. will need to get over before the “quality” of public transport improves: that busses, trains, subways are for “the poor”.
I’ve been on the subways in New York and busses and trains elsewhere in the States. They’re gross. Especially, compared to most of Europe (Italy, Denmark, Germany, etc). In Asia, they’re also a clean. The mindset in Asia and Europe is “this is what people (not just the poor) take to get from point A to point B”. There aren’t school busses, the kids just take the same city bus/train/subway that all the other people take to get to work.
I’ve spent 45 minutes in the States on my daily commute staring at (and riding on) the bumper of the car in front of me. I’ve also spent 45 minutes, in Europe, peacefully riding the subway to work. I’m able to surf the web, watch a video, relax. I definitely enjoy/recommend the later experience.
Since you asked:
I don’t need a bot to tell me that the BBC is a legit news source. Maybe if you flip it around and only publish a message if it’s a known scammy website, this might be less spammy. However, this “threshold for scamminess” would be very subjective.
Fortunately, most Lemmy clients allow blocking users - which I’ve done and I’m much happier with my Lemmy experience.
Epic gave it away a few months ago.
As others said, it’s heavily story driven (which I found quiet entertaining). The combat had the potential for some strategy, but ultimately I just went with button smashing (it would have been more engaging if there was a meaningful combo system - the one that’s present in the game is kinda awkward)
The big problem, I have with the game, is the game saving bugs. I spent ~20 hours, goofying around, having fun. Defeated “the final boss”…
which ends in a victory lap… Well, that victory lap never completed cause some characters never appeared.
…and I couldn’t find a save game that wasn’t corrupted. So, I just watched YouTube :(
Seriously, your professionalism in handling the situation and in reporting it is fantastic.
It’s totally above and beyond anything we should expect for a service powered by donations!
Thank you!
I wanted to thank you for creating and promoting an agnostic platform, like lemm.ee.
I’d started exploring Lemmy on beehaw, but was confused and frustrated why I couldn’t do “simple things” like downvote (spammy) topics (especially, outside of beehaw channels) . Then beehaw started to do more and more defederations. Although, I respect the transparency the admins have in their communications, I’m not interested in their curated form of Lemmy. As an adult, I can make responsible decisions. Fortunately, the federated nature of Lemmy allows me to easy “pack-up my stuff” and go elsewhere.
Thank you for providing me with a place to go!
One of your questions I didn’t see answered:
And after doing my research I found out americans file taxes every year. I haven’t done it the last 18 years of working. Should I just not file?
You have two choices:
Full Disclosure : you tell the IRS, you haven’t filled and ask them to help you rectify the situation. This could mean penalties and fines for filing late or based on your situation, they might let is slide (as it was an honest oversight). Once you’ve gone through this, then your back in the IRS’ good graces (assuming you still file your taxes and fbar annually)
A “stealth” disclosure : (there’s a better name but I forgot was it’s called) basically, you just start to file your 2023 taxes and pretend that nothing has happened during the last 18 years… if you do this for the next 5 years (or 7 years?) and the IRS does not say anything, then you’re back in the IRS good graces (they can only penalize you for x number of years) . But if the IRS decides to contact you, then they could throw the book at you (more than if you went with option 1).
Ultimately, it’s a gamble with a risk. However, if you’ve recently learned of your citizenship and got a passport. I think it’s quite plausible to get some lienency, both for the full disclosure and the stealth disclosure.
Well… there is also Eritrea, a small country in West Africa.
The U. S. Taxes is based on the country you’re living in. If there are double taxation treaties between the two countries (ie: Europe and the U. S.), then the IRS would tax you on the amount you’ve earned over a certain limit (it was 100k usd, but I think was increased). Meaning, if you earned 110k usd, you’d be taxes on the 10k. If you earn less then 100k, you’d pay no U. S. Taxes.
If there isn’t a treaty, which is often the case in countries that tax their citizens less than the U. S. , then you’d basically be charged taxes in the U. S. (based on your worldwide income) minus whatever you paid the country you’re living in.
OP read this, they’re absolutely right - lawyer up!
Cause in the U. S. if you want to renounce your U. S. citizenship, you must settle your debts - which includes filing your U. S. Taxes.
… and yes, as a U. S. Citizen you need to file U. S. Taxes *even if you’ve never set foot in the U. S. *.
Note: there are double taxation laws between the U. S. and Germany, which prevent you from needing to pay taxes in U. S. (up to 100k / year or so), but you still must file them.
Also, as a U. S. Citizen, you’ll need to file annually a FBAR with the IRS. This is basically a disclosure to the IRS that you have non-u.s. bank accounts (that exceed, in total, 20k usd / year).
The point being is that, in theory, there could be fines for not doing this, which (in theory) you would have to pay before being allowed to renounce your citizenship.
In practice, the IRS is pretty approachable - so you probably won’t have an issue, but you’ll definitely want decide if you want to keep the U. S. Citizenship (and the work associated with it: annual taxes and fbar) or renounce it.
The (only) upshot of filing U. S. taxes abroad if you have kids is that you qualify for a Child Tax Credit. Which amounts to 1000 usd / kid / year (I don’t know if the kids need to have U. S. Citizenship or not)
I expect to have some website compatibility issues with Firefox/librewolf, as it does have a 3% share of the global browser market - so, website development energy is focused on the chrome/safari experience. However, 8+ years ago I felt I needed to use chrome at least every other day to view certain websites - it was frustrating.
I’m hoping (and willing to try it out) to see if this has improved.
Neato, I’ll check it out. I’m also trying out mull for android (as I’d like to keep my desktop/cellphone bookmarks/browser-history in sync)
Thanks for the comprehensive write-up. It convinced me to migrate back to Firefox.
I was on Firefox (8 years ago), moved to Chrome (I liked the non-admin/transparent update feature and Websites didn’t break like they did with ff), then moved to brave (basically chrome + more privacy), and now I’ll go back the Firefox (I hope I won’t encounter too many non-FF websites)
The defederation topic and how it impacts me.
I’m an adult, if I find something offensive I’ll either block it or ignore it. However, not giving me the choice offends me and IMHO goes against what Lemmy and the fediverse was suppose to deliver.
I understand (and read) the reason’s why site owners defederate and I view it largely as “Lemmy isn’t mature enough to support more granular blocking - yet”, so I wait patiently and hope this trend towards defederation doesn’t turn into a powertrip by site owners “for the good of their users…”
I think it’s related to this issue (re: lemm.ee is fetching and caching images (to improve performance) , but often get is throttled (because the Lemmy’s cache implementation was not designed to work with larger Lemmy instances ), which results users seeing broken images).