• 19 Posts
  • 235 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Nath@aussie.zonetoFediverse memes@feddit.ukThey deserve it
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    1 month ago

    Oh hey! That’s us!
    We’ve known about this issue since March. OP’s post is a very good explanation of the problem. Lemmy wasn’t designed with one huge instance in mind like this and lemmy.world is the only instance I’m aware of being a problem. Our Kiwi sisters and brothers hacked around the problem five months ago: They set up a server in Finland, slurp up bulk lemmy.world content in batches and then insert that content into their local database. They invited us to share their code to do this, but:

    1. It required us to spend money on a VM in Finland specifically for lemmy.world content - a precedent that made us hesitate.
    2. This is a temporary problem, a new version of Lemmy was meant to come out some months to remedy it. It simply hasn’t been released, yet.

    Had we known in May that this would still be an issue in October, we might have chosen differently.




  • What would be the point? Reddit doesn’t make any content. They’re just a platform. If they go ahead and paywall subs, those subs are going to have a tiny potential subscriber base. Therefore, they will be less attractive to post to (smaller audience, fewer upvotes etc).

    About the only place I can maybe see it working is AskHistorians. And you pay the Historians to answer the questions. Which would of course reduce the amount Reddit takes from the paywall. Doesn’t seem worth it, to me.

    Even then, I think the Historians would rather reply in a new free sub with wider readership than take $20 for putting in three hours of work responding to something. They do it because they’re passionate. Not for money.


  • This works for us:
    Step one: Keep your instance civil. No tolerance for horrible people (racists/bigots etc).
    Step two: Maintain a vibrant local set of communities free from nastiness.
    Step three: Let your users engage with the noise of the fediverse as much or as little as they desire.

    We don’t bother with telling our users who or what they can access, and don’t immediately ban visitors based on their home instance. Will that scale to millions of users? Probably not. But that’s a problem for future Nath - maybe.



  • The issue with a statement like “the population density is waaaaaay different then USA or Europe”, is it shows how unfamiliar you are with the state. Yes, if you average the population over the area of the state, you’ll get an absurdly low number.

    But that would only make any sort of point if we are spread all over the state evenly. We are not. 2 Million of us live in Perth, which alone covers about 75% of WA’s population. And within Perth, our population density is on a par with just about any other mid-sized city. Beyond Perth, about 20% of the remaining 25% are going to be in a collection of half a dozen regional towns. Again, those towns would feel fairly familiar to someone from a small town in lots of places.

    The bulk of that area is nothing. Desert and rocks and the very occasional hole in the ground (mining site).

    In the regions we live, we aren’t that different from other places. What made us different through the pandemic is the policy of closing the border to outsiders. Most places didn’t do that. As a result, we mostly lived through 2020 and 2021 without having to worry about Covid 19. A few times, a case got past quarantine, and we had a mini lockdown for a week or so until it was contained. Then, back to normal.


  • Wouldn’t it have been easier to just Google “population Western Australia” (2.667 Million in 2020) than to dig up a misleading map that tells an incomplete picture? It’s true we are not the most populous state by any means, but you don’t need to be insulting with that level of hyperbole.

    No matter how you spin it, our pre-Omicron Covid response was nothing short of incredible. While the world suffered, we pretty much nope’d out of the whole thing. I would not be surprised if WA becomes a pandemic response case study in future.

    I do agree that the USA probably couldn’t pull together enough to put something like that I to action. The USA is anything but united until someone literally invades. It’s just a pity they didn’t look at the pandemic in a similar light to a foreign invader.




  • Nath@aussie.zonetoFediverse@lemmy.worldThe Death of Decentralized Email
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    4 months ago

    How you can have an article talking about the history of email and it not be about Ray Tomlinson, I just don’t know. Wait - now I know: This person looked up the Wikipedia article on the smtp protocol and decided Mr. Postal was the pioneer of email.

    The conclusion is completely incorrect, also. About the only correct thing was that reputation is important for email transmission.

    No: you can’t just set up an smtp outbound server on your home server and expect the world to trust you. For good reason: we’ve had decades of trojans and viruses taking over home PCs and sending spam. Your ISP declares its “home” IP ranges, and those are immediately not trusted.

    That doesn’t mean you need to use a big email hosting provider. If you set up on a business IP range, configure your DNS Correctly with declared mx and spf records, the world will trust you (until you demonstrate that it can’t).

    Millions of businesses around the world do this.


  • Nath@aussie.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzCockroaches
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    4 months ago

    After middling success putting a modern take on simple rock beats, they renamed the band to The Wiggles and specialized on childrens entertainment.

    Through a combination of record companies wanting nothing to do with them, and a willingness to tour in the wake of the World Trade Center attack when nobody else would, the new band becomes wildly successful and gets to keep all their own money and not share it with a record company.

    (True Story)



  • As I intentionally filter out as much US politics as I can, this has come out of nowhere for me.

    Australia has a couple of really simple things baked into its electoral system to resist something wildly unpopular like this from getting in power:

    1. Compulsory voting. These MAGA crazies are not and will never be the majority. If everyone had to vote, they’d never get in.
    2. Proportional voting. We vote for multiple candidates. If our first choice doesn’t get in, our vote goes to our second choice. Then third etc. we aren’t forced to vote for a lizard just to prevent the worse lizard getting in (it still almost always comes down to two parties, though).

    I know these are total non-starters for our American friends. “You can’t make me vote, that’s against the constitution or something”.





  • The biggest problem I see with this is the scenario where calls are recorded. They’re recorded in case we hit a “he said, she said” scenario. If some issue were to be escalated as far as a courtroom, the value of the recording to the business is greatly diminished.

    Even if the words the call agent gets are 100% verbatim, a lawyer can easily argue that a significant percentage of the message is in tone of voice. If that’s lost and the agent misses a nuance of the customer’s intent, they’ll have a solid case against the business.


  • I did phones in a different century, so I don’t know whether this would fly today. But, my go-to for someone like this was “ok, I think I see the problem here. Shall we go ahead and fix it or do you need to do more yelling first?

    I can’t remember that line ever not shutting them down instantly. I never took it personally, whatever they had going on they were never angry at me personally.

    Then again, I do remember firing a couple of customers (“we don’t want your business any more etc”) after I later became a manager and people were abusive to staff. So you could be right, also.


  • Surely opinions on this are going to vary wildly? Lemmy is full of people installing graphene and de-googling, while I’m happy with stock Android on Pixels with a custom launcher. Samsung, Sony and Asus all have serious devotees as well.

    There’s also different responses depending on what you want in a phone. Some people want smaller than 6", others must have a 3.5mm jack. Some want SD storage. The camera is vital for me, but most of my colleagues don’t really care about the camera.

    How would you sift through all that for a “best” one size fits all phone?