It wasn’t always followed on Reddit, but downvoting there was supposed to be for comments that don’t contribute to the conversation.

Here the guidance is looser – the docs don’t address comments, but do say to “upvote posts that you like.”

I’ve tried contributing to some conversations and sometimes present a different viewpoint in the interest of thought exchange, but this often results in massive downvotes because people disagree. I’m not going to waste my energy contributing to a community that ends up burying my posts because we have different opinions.

That’s true on Reddit to, so I’m kind of being tangential to the original question. I guess what I’m saying is that some people might feel like I do and won’t engage in any community, be it Reddit or Lemmy, if it’s just going to be an echo chamber.

I’ve been doing this for 30+ years and it seems like the push lately has been towards oversimplification on the user side, but at the cost of resources and hidden complexity on the backend.

As an Assembly Language programmer I’m used to programming with consideration towards resource consumption. Did using that extra register just cause a couple of extra PUSH and POP commands in the loop? What’s the overhead on that?

But now some people just throw in a JavaScript framework for a single feature and don’t even worry about how it works or the overhead as long as the frontend looks right.

The same is true with computing. We’re abstracting containers inside of VMs on top of base operating systems which is adding so much more resource utilization to the mix (what’s the carbon footprint on that?) with an extremely complex but hidden backend. Everything’s great until you have to figure out why you’re suddenly losing packets that pass through a virtualized router to linuxbridge or OVS to a Kubernetes pod inside a virtual machine. And if one of those processes fails along the way, BOOM! it’s all gone. But that’s OK; we’ll just tear it down and rebuild it.

I get it. I understand the draw, and I see the benefits. IaC is awesome, and the speed with which things can be done is amazing. My concern is that I’ve seen a lot of people using these things who don’t know what’s going on under the hood, so they often make assumptions or mistakes that lead to surprises later.

I’m not sure what the answer is other than to understand what you’re doing at every step of the way, and always try to choose the simplest route (but future-proofed).

I set up LinkWarden about a month ago for the first time and have been enjoying it. Thank you!

I do have some feature requests – is GitHub the best place to submit those?

I’m a big fan of netdata; it’s part of my standard deployment. I put in some custom configs depending on what services are running on what servers. If there’s an issue it sends me an email and posts into a slack channel.

Next step is an influxdb backend to keep more history.

I also use monit to restart certain services in certain situations.

I wish it was database agnostic. And I’m slightly concerned about the version three rewrite.

It does look awesome, and I’ll revisit it to see where things are in six months.

We had fiber at our previous house for about six years, and it was great. The prices were lower, the speeds were greater, there were no limits… It’s kind of funny, because it was a college town of about 200K people in the middle of nothing else.

Now I’m up in the suburbs of Chicago where a single town can have a 200K population, but fiber is nowhere on the horizon. Instead we get terrible service that’s constantly showing packet loss with slow transfer rates. We do still have unlimited, but with these transfer rates it doesn’t really matter. :)

As far as monitoring traffic goes, I guess it depends on how you’re doing things. If your DNS requests are still hitting your ISP or aren’t encrypted, then yeah, they might know. I don’t know if they’ll care, but of course not all illegal content is treated the same.

So basically a non-answer to your question, along with me saying I liked having fiber.

I have one set up as an irrigation controller. I was going to build an OpenStack cluster to test configuration settings on (I run a production cluster at work), but gave up when the supply chain problems happened and prices skyrocketed.

Thank you. I hadn’t considered the payment part. The cloud system that I manage is in education, so everyone pays in advance.

This makes sense, and I’ll start with a lower number and ask it to go up later. It will take a couple of months to migrate everything from Linode anyhow, so I don’t need them all at once.

My identity infrastructure alone uses a whole bunch of servers.

There are the three Kerberos servers, the two clusters of multiple LDAP servers behind HAProxy, the rabbitmq servers to pass requests around, the web servers also balanced/HA behind HAProxy… For me, service reliability and security are two of the biggest factors, so I isolate services and use HA when available.

I told them everything that I wrote here in my original request – I need 25 now, but would like a quota of 50 to maintain elasticity, testing, etc.

They followed up with the request for actual resources needed.

I haven’t answered since then.

I loved Reddit until I realized they were just going to do whatever they wanted and the community, apart from creating free content and work, didn’t matter. But the lying about discussions with the app creator was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Suddenly they weren’t just a bully, but they were a proven lying, dishonest bully. Everything that they say going forward will be suspect, so I decided to walk away. Who knows what they’re doing with my data/content. I know what they’re telling me. I don’t know what’s true.

I deleted most of my posts from my nearly 14-year history except for a handful that I think need to stay up and a couple of others that I’m testing something on. I log in every once in a while to leave any groups that might have unlocked since I was last there and delete those posts too.

I don’t hate them. But they’ve lost my trust, and I don’t see any way to regain it.

There could have been other, better solutions. The biggest problem right now is that the only tool in Steve Huffman’s toolbox is a hammer.

I kept my account, but deleted most of my posts/comments from the past thirteen years unless I felt it was super important to leave them. Some I’m leaving while watching to see what happens with the subreddit.

I’m done with Reddit though. I didn’t care so much about the API, but when they started lying about talks with the developer and then running roughshod over everything it became clear that they can’t be trusted. How do I know that I’m even being presented with an accurate view of the world – are the moderators hand-picked by Reddit to push an agenda? Can a corporation/government/political campaign buy moderators brokered through Reddit now?

Too many questions with no good answers. So I’m glad I’m gone.