What do we need to do to move forward?

Accept that much or most of reddit will look normal tomorrow. Reddit will proceed by projecting that everything is normal, whether true or not. Lemmy will continue to be an alternative with FOSS benefits and much smaller communities. Your own habits have to reflect what you want and there’s no wrong answer.

I’m personally elated to find the smaller communities with higher-quality content. Thoughtful comments aren’t buried under piles of karma-seeking horse-beating jokes.

At the same time, reddit continues to offer historical reference that won’t be matched elsewhere anytime soon. I’m not going to rant as if the place has no value, or as if it can be replaced in a few weeks.

Lots to consider.

The instance a user joins is quite important. An instance that doesn’t want to store images and video will not want users who subscribe to all the image/video communities (that will federate their content over). A user whose interests are overwhelmingly technical won’t be interested in local communities on an artist server, where a non-technical user might feel at home. Many instance moderation policies are friendly to right-wing and will be defederated by mainstream instances. And then there are loli/shota/koda instances…

Unfortunately, you can’t equate resource usage to number of users.

500 users will use more than 5 times the resources of 100 users, because activity feeds on activity. But it gets worse than being non-linear.

If you judge you’re using as many resources as you comfortably can at 500 users and close registrations, you will soon exceed your resource capacity anyway. Why? Because users who register elsewhere will increase your federation activity and therefore resource requirements.

Sure, image/video is vastly more resource-intense, but it’s not used for successful DDoS attacks and fiber connections don’t stop them either. We need a better answer for horizontal scaling as servers currently aren’t even closing registrations until they’re already noticing performance issues and are vulnerable to relatively small increases in federated activity.

Closing registrations is all well and good, but can’t activity / load still skyrocket as users from federated instances subscribe to, comment on, and post to their communities?

There are sorts by hot and top, yes. I don’t know the details of voting and/or replies that score comment order.

There are actually some legit anti-spam reasons that reddit has been obfuscating vote counts and totals for a long time now. Even if this wasn’t a known phenomenon, I don’t think I’d trust the API call results anyway.

There’s no accumulated karma score though. People should be less sensitive about downvotes and I’m hoping it will mitigate low effort karma-seeking content, at least somewhat.

Pffffft maybe you, but I don’t have cognitive biases! Anchor pricing doesn’t work on me either because, raises nose, I know all about it.

What really stands out from reddit’s statements is the conspicuous lack of disagreement about the alleged charges to 3rd party apps. They can keep trying to characterize it as fair but the factual numbers in the conversation make it plainly obvious that they are instituting a model that makes it impossible for existing 3rd party apps to survive.

Interesting. The regular Salomons pinch me in the front and back so I definitely agree about particularly narrow. My complaint with Salomon wides is that the toe box isn’t that wide but even worse it’s not long enough. I kept a pair anyway until I was able to replace them with a pair of my own choosing.

The Altras definitely have the best overall last for me, but I’m not sure I’d say my toes have enough room to splay. What I don’t like is their support level for use on court or on trails, as I end up with high-ankle strain. I’m a hiker and a cyclist, but not a runner, so for me the platform isn’t stable enough but that’s a wrong-for-me problem not a bad-shoe problem. They fit my foot so well I play flat courses on hot days with them anyway, but my new Hokas may displace them.

I can generally ignore my heel’s fit, focusing on length and toe box. I’m wearing Oboz for work right now and I do have some wiggle room in the heel, but it’s never bothered me.

Based on this discussion as a whole, I’d recommend wide New Balance and Hokas.

Reddit trying to go the slow route, removing one thing at a time, will make it easier for lemmy to scale and grow to accept all the users.

If they did API, old.reddit, and nsfw all at the same time it would be absolutely impossible to accommodate.

This is where the duplicated communities in lemmy’s federation works for you. As the big instances get flooded with content that is low quality but highly upvoted (as happens in big subreddits), you can also subscribe to communities about the same topic from smaller instances.

I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem.

My concern: Are there enough moderators for the deluge coming?

I’ve been thinking about the issue of less-thoughtful discussions from large numbers of users. I think the phenomenon is inevitable. I also think community topics being duplicated across the federation will help with this.

Let’s take technology for example. So !technology@lemmy.ml might end up as the most reddit-front-page feeling, with !technology@lemmy.ml a little less comment-memey, then smaller instances having progressively smaller communities that better reflect the focus of the instance’s overall slant.

The best analogy for communities and instances might be newspapers or TV channels. You’re going to get a sports section on CBS, NBC, WaPo, whatever. They will largely publish the same stories, but with very slightly different feels. As you get into smaller publications, like say the regional publication from your state’s sportshub city, they will tailor to the interests of that particular area.

As users, we not only get to choose how broad the interests of the communities we subscribe to but we also get to subscribe to communities that are redundant (for lack of better word) so that we can stay in touch with very broad looks across an interest while having more focused and perhaps higher-quality discussions at the same time.

The source I linked has a similar water content for potato chips, no dispute there. We could say that stack of 500 Benjies would be like eating 2 full bags of potato chips (an amount that would be 2,500+ calories of chips, for scale) with zero water, if you’d prefer to imagine how your digestive system would fare with that instead? Whether fried or baked, all I’m saying is it would be ambitious. :)

What’s heel-slip?

I’m throwing 350-400 foot drives with golf discs on one planted heel and not having issues with slipping with the mentioned shoes, or Moabs, Salomons, or Oboz (more great daily walkers!).

There will either be an hour of downtime to migrate and grow or days of downtime to fizzle.

I love that there’s an influx of volunteers, including SQL experts, to mitigate scaling issues for the entire fediverse but those improvements won’t be ready in time. Things are overloading already and there’s less than a week before things increase 1,000-fold, maybe more.

You’re right that I’m assuming bank note moisture is negligible or sealed, which may or may not be the case in practice. However, raw potatoes are 79% water and baked potatoes are 75% water (re-reading, I see that I didn’t actually say baked, my error).

I honestly thought you meant a few bills, each worth a hundred, and I was trying to make a joke.

Starchy food is mostly water - around 75% for potatoes. So 500g of zero-moisture would require 1.5L of water to break even not with 500g of potatoes, but with 2kg potatoes, or 80-85% of a 5-pound sack of potatoes for our US readers.

Bottom line, 500g equivalency to starchy food would be to eat 2kg of potatoes with no additional water. Ambitious!