I wish they didn’t throw “think of the children” in there.

Thanks, that’s the missing piece. Ironically I am a software engineer in my day job, but not the right kind of software engineer. It’s fun to broaden my horizons though. I copied the proxy settings from the @jax@lemmy.cloudhub.social’s nginx.conf with the right edits for the hostname into my reverse proxy config and now everything appears to be working!

Yeah, I stuck with Windows Phone very nearly to the end, but the lack of apps just made it totally unsustainable for anyone with any kind of social life that extended beyond SMS and email.

Is there a tipping point where it’s a net loss? If I understand the protocols correctly, the whole back end federation part of the equation is push based, so if everyone was running their own instance, lemmy.ml would have to push every post to every individual instance in the network. At some point isn’t it more efficient to only have to serve posts when people come here to look at them?

You have to make a new account unfortunately.

I’m not sure if I should make a new post or keep this in a single thread, anyway, I’ve managed to get the front page to load, but can’t get any farther.

I used the instructions from @jax@lemmy.cloudhub.social’s branch, particularly their nginx config.

I’m running the whole docker-compose setup behind my own nginx reverse proxy, which is set to proxy requests to the docker nginx (and also handles SSL). I modified the docker-compose.yml to bind the host port on 9001, then my main nginx config looks like this:

http {
    server {
        listen 443 ssl http2;
        server_name lemmy.villa-straylight.social;
        ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/<redacted>
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/<redacted>

        location / {
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_pass http://localhost:9001;
        }
    }
}

The front page loads, but pretty much anything else I do results in an endless spinner. The only possible problem I see is this in the docker terminal output:

WARN Error encountered while processing the incoming HTTP request: lemmy_server::root_span_builder: WebSocket upgrade is expected. NoWebsocketUpgrade

If that’s true about images that does greatly reduce my concern. Text is small and easily compressed. That said, I fully hope to see multiple orders of magnitude of increased traffic if/as Lemmy gains traction.

One related question I have about this: How much ongoing storage would one expect for this kind of instance? My understanding is that the fediverse is push-based, so if I run my own instance that means that all communities I subscribe to are pushing updates to my instance which presumably get stored in a database somewhere. It seems like that could really add up to a lot of data.

Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don’t have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.

Conversely, this is the main thing keeping me from setting up my own instance. You have to do your own backups and keep everything running. If you mess up, you loose your whole identity. I’m a software engineer, but I’m a mediocre sys admin. I have the technical skills to host my own instance but I don’t want the stress of getting it right.

Content longevity: You can do your own backups and don’t have to worry about loosing content when another instance disappears.

Conversely, this is the main thing keeping me from setting up my own instance. You have to do your own backups and keep everything running. If you mess up, you loose your whole identity. I’m a software engineer, but I’m a mediocre sys admin. I have the technical skills to host my own instance but I don’t want the stress of getting it right.

I just tried it. No way I can fit 3 columns on a 16:9 4k monitor, which means the main window area is offset to one side, which would quickly drive me crazy. Same reason I have never understood the ultrawide trend. I have three monitors and it works a lot like your screenshot but way less cramped.

I’m a NASA software engineer writing spacecraft flight software. A few thoughts:

1. I’m not at JPL and I don’t know how religiously they follow these rules, but we really don’t. They’re not part of our official or unofficial standard practice. Indeed, I can’t even find a reference to the rules on nasa.gov
2. Most of these rules are considered obvious these days. Most of the rest we don’t follow either. (at least not absolutely)
3. This video critically misstates the rule about heap allocation, which is perhaps the most significant difference between how we write software and how non-safety critical systems are written. Dynamic allocation is allowed during initialization. This is a massive, massive difference in terms of how easy it is to write code compared to stack-only.
4. The video also misses the mark on preprocessor usage. Especially in C, you have very little choice but to rely on the preprocessor. We avoid it, but the kind of multi-path compilation he describes is necessary to enable thorough testing of the code.
5. We’re still human. Even where the rule is good and we follow it in principle, you will still find all too many exceptions in the actual code.

If you really want to see how the sausage is made, the software framework used by many NASA missions is open source and on GitHub.

I think it could all be summed up with “options”. Everyone has their own idea of what a good UI is, so give use the tools to make the site work for us. For me it would be three things:

1. By far, the front page needs options to make it more compact. My current reddit front page fits more than twice as many links on a single screen (21 vs 9).
2. Make the center content area wider. I don’t want it to go all the way across the screen, but it’s to narrow on my 4k monitor.
3. Make the stuff to the right of the content area go all the way on the right of the screen. It’s distracting in its current position.

The only thing that I find mildly annoying is when using the site on desktop there’s a ton of white/dead space on the left and right margins.

I’ve seen this come up a ton, but what do you want instead? Pretty much every website limits line lengths on comments (for good reason) and it makes a lot more sense for the text to go in the middle of the screen than on the left IMO.

I do wish that the stuff to the right of the comments would anchor to the right side of the screen instead of the right side of the content area though.

Can you explain what the issue is? I think it’s all but inevitable that one server will become the “default” server that most people will create an account on first. As they learn more about how everything works, they may choose to create another account on a server with different rules that suite them better. That flow seems much easier to me than putting pressure on new users to pick the “right” server from them off the bat.

It will happen over time. Lemmy and Beehaw are still infinitesimally small compared to reddit. Trying to push people onto other servers right now is extreme premature optimization.

Maybe it’s just because I never really “got” Twitter, but this seems like a boring tautological argument to me. A more interesting question would be whether we even care? Platforms come and go. For some reason people seem to have decided that platforms have gotten “too big to fail”, but it’s clearly not the case.

Your “hard currency” is inherently deflationary. This may seem good to you since it means your dollar is worth more tomorrow than it is today, but the same is true for everyone else’s dollars too. The net result is to discourage spending across the entire economy and that leads to much worst outcomes. There is a good reason that central banks aim for a small amount of inflation rather than zero or negative inflation.

There’s good reason for setting a maximum bound on the width though. It’s much harder on the eyes to read long lines of text. That said, I do think Lemmy goes a bit overboard, and I would really like to see all of the non-post content on the right side anchored to the right edge rather than centered.

Why not? Granted I only get through 1 or 2 books a month, but it’s a minuscule part of my budget. I can’t say I’ve looked into it, but I assume it’s also the best way to actually support the author.