Thanks for the information!
I'm not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I'm not sure if they can easily show that information either.
Thanks for the information!
I'm not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I'm not sure if they can easily show that information either.
I'll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won't name)...
The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.
It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.
Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.
There isn't a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to "zombie instances" not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.
One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on "that other server" so it guided me here.
ZoomIt - Sysinternals at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/zoomit
That small free application will notably allow you to press a key combination to "zoom in and out" on your screen and "draw" on your screen with your mouse. When presenting something using an external monitor, you can use that tool to draw attention to specific things or zoom in on tiny details when people are having issues seeing something. The link also show a small preview of what the application does.
If you want to see what various license plates look like from all of North America (as well as what they looked like in the past), there is a website that with a short URL. Strangely enough, the website never gone to https. The link is http://www.15q.net/
MiXplorer - https://mixplorer.com/
A file explorer allowing for me to transfer files over the network. When Solid Explorer suddenly didn't seem to want to do network transfers anymore (likely because Windows updated something), I waited for that app to update to fix the issue. It never did. I found that MiXplorer was a good alternative that transfers files over the network just fine and works nice and fast as well. The interface takes a bit to get used to (meaning it isn't the same as Solid Explorer) but the app is certainly worth using. Importantly, I can transfer files over the network without issue again.
Notably, this app is free to download (from XDA) however the Google Play version is not free. The Google Play version (which supports development) is a one time paid fee.
Someone may want to know if you are a Democrat or Republican (for advertising, for gerrymandering, whatever). That person may not be able to ask you a direct question like that though (or may feel that you may lie about the answer to such a question anyway).
As such, they likely carry out occasional surveys asking people who are Democrat or Republicans for their opinions on something else. Once they find something else that can strongly correlate your political affiliation with a specific opinion, they know of a new question they can ask someone. That new question should generally reveal what your political party is most likely and they can then proceed with that "most likely" answer.
So "who cares" is those who cannot directly ask you something. They will ask you something else and use that answer to deduce the information they cannot obtain directly.
Reddit, about yesterday, started to implement a change....
They have the old Reddit interface and then the one that replaced it ("new Reddit") and the current interface you see on Reddit replaced that. People don't like the most recent interface iteration but had the option to go to "new Reddit" or "old Reddit" by vising the appropriate links.
Notably, each newer interface seems to be more stressful for the servers to run. Still, likely a decent amount of folks don't like the newest interface so likely the load balances out.
Yesterday though, they "pulled the lever" and "new Reddit" is no more. (This was announced about a month ago at this link but they only got around to doing it yesterday.) Those people trying to access "new Reddit" are redirected to the latest interface. You have the option to use the oldest Reddit interface or the newest one but not the "new Reddit" one. Since the latest interface seemed to use the most server resources before, it is interesting how Reddit seemed to have their severs overloaded a bit when they made the switchover.
On Reddit, people have been upset in /r/help that this has happened but Reddit will likely continue on with this change anyway. Old Reddit will continue to be supported (at least for now anyway).
ArsTechnica has a bit more detail. I'll quote the important bit below.
... try to reboot affected machines over and over, which gives affected machines multiple chances to try to grab CrowdStrike's non-broken update before the bad driver can cause the BSOD.
This seems like an interesting application of a "race condition". They are hoping that the update outraces the program starting up enough to crash...
Though others have said multiple states have laws against changing prices during the business day.
Suddenly it makes a lot more sense why Walmart doesn't want to be open 24 hours a day...
Notably, Digg updated which also involved a worse interface and didn't have an "old Reddit" interface you could access. Going to a site that was like the old interface involved leaving Digg and joining Reddit.
That is likely why you can now access older Reddit interfaces. They feel that many people will stay if they can find a way to use the new interface (and they may be right about that). The Digg approach of forcing all to use the new interface was a step over the line for Digg and Reddit likely fears a similar thing could happen to them.
I wonder what’s happening?
In general...
Microsoft is being pushy and has started to enjoy that far too much.
This started with things that could be argued as things that users shouldn't control (like refusing to patch update... you can't really refuse anymore).
It then pushed to things that is a little less defensible (you were asked to update from Windows 7 to Windows 10... but they really don't want you to say no).
Once you are on the newer Windows 10 or 11, features just arrive that you have no say about because Microsoft determined it is better for you (you have AI, now AI on your taskbar, in fact you have an AI key on your taskbar, you will use Microsoft AI... the AI will just sift through your entire computer so that it can jump in front of your face to emphasize that you should use their AI!).
They points all have the same theme. Microsoft knows best, you will do what Microsoft wants, and Microsoft won't really take no for answer but may let you say "bother me later"... maybe. Once you are really pissed off, your only option is to leave a Microsoft operating system... which Microsoft is pretty sure you can't figure out on your own (more reasonably, you won't care to put in the work to learn another way) so Microsoft OS it is! Microsoft is a tad worried that those people are starting to wander off to get Google Chromebooks or just use their Android smartphones... those take less effort and more people are opting for that...
Still, Microsoft is relatively sure that people will just put up with what they are doing. I'm pretty sure they will... until they won't. Microsoft will be fine so long as they don't cross the line into the "until they won't" territory. Once they won't put up with that nonsense anymore, it is far harder to woo them back to a Microsoft OS in the future.
That second link is helpful. For instance, it shows an server which I thought was ran well ( startrek.website ) being about 1 million activities behind in content from Lemmy.world
https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=startrek.website&var-remote_instance=lemmy.world&from=now-32d&to=now
This means that the technology community here looks much different there. Here there are comments to our submissions. Shown there, the submissions seem to have no comments.
https://lemmy.world/c/technology
https://startrek.website/c/[email protected]
If a person there didn't know better, they may think that Lemmy doesn't have as much activity as it actually does.