Better battery placement, because the original is a nightmare to get batteries out.
I'm curious about this. There's a little switchy button thing and the batteries pop right out. I'm not sure what makes it a nightmare, I quite like the battery placement.
That graph is so misleading. Makes it look like almost all the users disappeared but the Y axis only covers a small range at the top.
The problem is that a website is generally not served from one domain.
Put a Facebook like button on your website, it's loaded directly from Facebook servers. Now they can put a cookie on your computer with an identifier.
Now every site you visit with a Facebook like button, they know it was you. They can watch you as you move around the web.
Google does this at a larger scale. Every site with Google ads on it. Every site using Google analytics. Every site that embeds a Google map. They can stick a cookie in and know you were there.
Me as an instance admin sitting here reading about how Lemmy doesn't have trolls and Russian bots, while I'm in a chat with other instance admins and mods where we need to actively coordinate to fight the trolls and Russian bots 😐
Haha I remember the days of downloading random EXEs off the internet and running them to see what they do (also the days of CD-rom drives).
My auntie somehow managed to get a virus that played Für Elise through the motherboard speaker and never stopped so long as the thing was on. I don't think they ever solved it, in the end they just got a new PC.
Hey ChatGPT, how can I ...
"Locking as this is a duplicate of [unrelated question]"
A while back I made a post about Lemmy.world federation and a lot has changed since then so I thought I'd do an update post.
TL;DR Lemmy.world posts, comments, votes coming to lemmy.nz have been delayed by a gradually increasing amount over recent months, peaking at about 4 days behind, but we should be back on track soon.
Background
Check the above post for some background, but TL;DR our server is in Auckland, NZ and Lemmy.world's server is in Helsinki, Finland. We are about as far apart as we can get from each other. Because Lemmy can currently only send one action at a time (Post, comment, vote), we can only accept about 4 or 5 actions per second as it takes around 1/5 of a second to make the round trip. Lemmy.world is now creating more than this on average, which means we have been falling behind more and more.
Pre-fetcher
After that post, things continued to get worse. While hanging out on Lemmy Matrix rooms discussing the problem, someone (I'm not actually sure of their Lemmy account) offered to set up a pre-fetcher. Roughly how it works is it monitors lemmy.world for new posts and comments, then sends a request to lemmy.nz to see that content. Lemmy.nz then requests it from lemmy.world because it doesn't exist.
This helps because when lemmy.world sends lemmy.nz a post or comment, lemmy.nz then needs to make other requests. e.g. it might not know about the user, so it needs to request the user from their home instance, it may need to generate a thumbnail, etc. By pre-fetching the posts, this means when lemmy.world sends it's normal outbound federation lemmy.nz already has it so can move straight on to the next one. We can't prefetch everything, notably votes, so for a long time we have had lemmy.world posts show with zero votes until the federation activities start coming through. Unfortunately comments from lemmy.world users on lemmy.nz posts can't be pre-fetched so they were still taking a long time to come through.
Prior to this pre-fetcher being turned on, Lemmy.nz was doing a lot worse than aussie.zone (as seen in the above post). After turning it on, within not too long we were in better shape than aussie.zone, but unfortunately we were both still getting worse.
This is the state we have been in until yesterday. Gradually things were getting worse and worse until we were at about 4 days behind lemmy.world, so if a lemmy.world user posted on one of our posts then it took 4 days to show up (you might have noticed this if you got a notification of a reply to your post or comment that then said it was from days ago).
Batcher
The same user who created the pre-fetcher was also working on a batching process. The basic idea was that instead of lemmy.world sending each item halfway across the world, instead you add an extra server that is hosted close to lemmy.world. Lemmy.world sends their federation items to that server, then that server collects them up into one batch, which gets sent to some software running on the lemmy.nz server. That software then unbundles them into separate pieces again then feeds them into lemmy.
The idea here is that you greatly reduce the lag. Lemmy.world gets a very quick response from the extra server and so can send the next activity almost straight away. The software that passes it to lemmy.nz is on the same server as lemmy.nz so communication is very quick. And collecting up the items into a batch for the trip across the world saves a lot of time in back and forths, so we can keep our goal of receiving things in the correct order while also not having to send one at a time. Receiving in the correct order is important, for example, if you accedentally downvoted then quickly changed it to an upvote, you wouldn't want another instance to receive the upvote first and then the downvote as it would show you downvoted instead of upvoted.
This batcher I have set up (with a lot of help!) over the weekend, and turned on yesterday morning once testing had been completed and I could get lemmy.world to redirect their lemmy.nz traffic to this new server (this was done through a change in something called the hosts file, long story short it tells your server "ignore what anyone says, lemmy.nz is actually over here").
In the last 24 hours or so we have got from 1.5 million activities behind to about 970k activities behind. This puts us at about 2.3 days behind now, a huge improvement!
Pictures
Graph of activities behind lemmy.world
Here we have lemmy.nz in yellow and aussie.zone in green. The hump is from a large number of activities generated on the lemmy.world side, they didn't need federating but the way this is measured means they show up until it's worked out that they aren't needed.
You can see a sharp fall after the batcher was turned on yesterday.
Graph of time behind lemmy.world
Same colours, lemmy.nz in yellow underneath and aussie.zone in green on top. This one shows how long the delay is, or more accurately it looks at the last activity that was received from lemmy.world and checks what time that activity actually happened. So if the last activity was a comment from 4 days ago, it shows 4 days here.
Conclusion
So that's a breakdown of everything that has happened the last few months, hopefully this new batching process will bring us back in line with lemmy.world. If you see anything weird happening, please let me know!
Also this is a shout out to all the people who made this happen, and who are building all sorts of tools that we use. We have a selection of different front-end websites you can access lemmy through, an automod, prefetcher, batcher, and all sorts of help from others! I definitely couldn't do this stuff without help 😆
And as always, if you have any questions or want more detail on any of this, feel free to ask!
Edit:
We are now up to date! Yay!
I though I'd better make a post about recent lemmy.world federation issues, since not everyone sees the daily posts.
TL;DR:
On Thursday last week Lemmy.world began to receive hundreds of thousands of "activities" (actions - comment, post, upvote, etc) from Kbin to their communities. These actions then federate from Lemmy.world out to any instance with users subscribed to those communities.
Unfortunately, this also helped uncover a big issue with how Lemmy handles inbound federation. Actions are sent one at a time, and the next can't be sent until the last is done. This means the number of activities your server can receive depends on the latency between the sending and receiving server. In our case, the fact we are hosted in Auckland and Lemmy.world is hosted in Finland means that we can receive about 4 or 5 inbound activities from them per second.
When the Kbin issue happened, suddenly Lemmy.world had hundreds of thousands of activities to send to us in addition to the normal inflow of content. We got way behind in terms of Lemmy.world content coming to us. At the peak, we were around 28 hours behind, about 550k activities behind. We are now sitting at around 19 hours behind, and will likely remain that way until this afternoon, when it should improve some more (it's now peak time on the other side of the world).
Here is a graph of the progress. Aussie.zone has a similar problem to us, but is closer to Europe where lemmy.world is hosted so the latency issue is less pronounced. We are one of the worst affected instances due to how it's hard to get further away than where we are now.
As you can see, with Aussie.zone being a bit closer, they were hit hard but not as hard as us, and have now managed to recover. We are still probably days away from being back in near real time federation with lemmy.world, but each day does seem to improve quite a bit.
Other than picking up the server and moving it to Europe, there doesn't seem to be a lot we can do except wait and hope the lemmy bug is fixed before lemmy.world grows so large that users are creating content faster than we can receive it.
There have been some suggestions for short term band-aids. One is that we could set up a proxy in Europe, and filter out certain traffic. For example, we could prevent downvotes being sent to reduce the amount of traffic coming our way (since everything is sent one at a time, as per the ActivityPub protocol). I'm not super keen on doing anything that gets us out of sync with the others, though.
We could of course move hosting to Europe, but that gets a lot more expensive (since we'd have to pay for it instead of being free-loaders) and also means the site would feel more sluggish, since then that latency would be for users on every page load instead of the behind the scenes federation.
For now we are slowly getting back in sync with lemmy.world, and as long as there aren't more Kbin bugs then we should be ok for now. Unfortunately doing things like blocking Kbin.social doesn't seem to help, as lemmy.world still tries to send us the content from Kbin.social users. i.e. it's rejected by our server, not prevented from being sent, so it still takes a slot.
Any questions, suggestions, or concerns, reply to this post!
I can't believe Eric stole years of my life!
If he thinks all these free content updates will make up for it, well he's probably right.
To be fair, if you don't know about how gravity works, you would just hold up a rock, drop it, and say obviously things can move without someone moving it.
Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users
Uh oh, some sort of court ruling?
film studios say
Oh right, nothing to see here.
So you're telling me I get free accommodation, free food, and it's protected by a T-rex?
Be the change you want to see!
I've always used rechargeables. While I agree to some extent, the action to pop them out makes it a lot easier to get them out than in the Xbox 360 controller from around the same time. The Xbone ones are easier now but perhaps they will do steam controller 2 in a similar way to the 1 but leave a little extra clearance.