Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#41

Post by MrEldritch » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 9:36 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #32

StudentStuff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally not, proactive blocking or silencing is reserved for instances that host illicit content like child porn or hate speech. Inter-moderator communication happens between your instance admin/democracy (or whatever structure your instance uses) and other instances. Traditional tools like muting a user, silencing an instance (if they're spamming up the Federated Timeline on other instances, like Humblr.social doe…

> Large instances like Mastodon.social are generally blocked tho (if your admin/democracy cares about a vibrant Fediverse). Ah, so you achieve vibrancy by .. blocking a large number of the users?

Honestly, I think this is the wrong way of looking at things. The Fediverse isn't really like a single social network that's shattered amongst many instances ... it's more like a bunch of individual, separate hangouts, in the vein of classic forums and IRC chatrooms and fandom websites, which have the ability to talk to each other and share stuff if they want.

It's not so much about "blocking" mastodon.social as not choosing to link up with it - because your instance is a specific community, and actual human social relations thrive when they can choose who they're hanging out with. So you choose to talk to other smaller, more diverse communities that you can actually get to know a good chunk of the people in them, instead of just drinking straight from the firehose that is a big instance.

Federating with another instance is basically two groups of people deciding to hang out together, effectively merging. Federating with mastodon.social means, effectively, merging your community with mastodon.social ... which means submerging it beneath the mass of mastodon.social's much greater activity.

A vibrant Mastodon isn't a more-obtuse recreation of the Twitter experience. Twitter is already Twitter. It's about fostering all the things that Twitter isn't - personal and Dunbar-scaled and locally moderated and diverse.

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#42

Post by MrEldritch » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 9:38 AM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #27

StudentStuff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally not, proactive blocking or silencing is reserved for instances that host illicit content like child porn or hate speech. Inter-moderator communication happens between your instance admin/democracy (or whatever structure your instance uses) and other instances. Traditional tools like muting a user, silencing an instance (if they're spamming up the Federated Timeline on other instances, like Humblr.social doe…

That sounds like it only works because spammers aren't really trying yet.

It'll probably end up "solved" in a similar way to email span being "solved" - if global spam starts to become a problem, you'll have big blocklists of spammy instances and general suspicion towards federating with any new instance that doesn't look sufficiently trustworthy.

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#43

Post by 1ba9115454 » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 9:45 AM UTC

saberience wrote: post #38

nvssj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say so? Can you give examples?

Well, for a start... having a single file called "server.rs" which is 2256 lines long is already disqualifying. This file, code structure would be incredibly poor for developer efficiency. It just grows and grows and does all the things while having a vague sounding name like "server.rs" Why is server.rs doing "EditSite." What does the name EditSite mean anyway? Poor code reuse, same bits of code copy and pasted all…

There are a few opportunities for code generation here.

The server.rs looks like an implementation of RPC over websockets. So a refactoring might be to model the interface using something like https://grpc.io/ or any other IDL then code generate Rust server stubs and Typescript client stubs.

Cargo has a mechanism for this. https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/build-scripts.html

The other area where there is some boiler plate is the Diesel ORM. Diesel does generate some code ie. schema.rs but you are left to write the structs that implement these as well as Form structs for passing data to Diesel.

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#44

Post by thejohnconway » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 9:54 AM UTC

Deimorz wrote: post #15

It doesn't look like there's any federation right now, the test site ( https://dev.lemmy.ml/ ) says "Federation into the ActivityPub network is on the roadmap."

Oh. Activity pub is complex and difficult to implement. The test suite is down.

Leaving it to last makes me worry that it won’t happen.

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#45

Post by zaarn » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

StudentStuff wrote: post #22

theamk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So delegate this all to a few large blacklists (spamhaus)? And block all residential users by default?

Generally not, proactive blocking or silencing is reserved for instances that host illicit content like child porn or hate speech. Inter-moderator communication happens between your instance admin/democracy (or whatever structure your instance uses) and other instances. Traditional tools like muting a user, silencing an instance (if they're spamming up the Federated Timeline on other instances, like Humblr.social doe…

I don't think mastodon.social is generally blocked, atleast not the instances I federate with block it.

Might be your particular corner of the fediverse, I prefer to have as much reach as possible.

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#46

Post by A2017U1 » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 10:21 AM UTC

saberience wrote: post #38

nvssj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say so? Can you give examples?

Well, for a start... having a single file called "server.rs" which is 2256 lines long is already disqualifying. This file, code structure would be incredibly poor for developer efficiency. It just grows and grows and does all the things while having a vague sounding name like "server.rs" Why is server.rs doing "EditSite." What does the name EditSite mean anyway? Poor code reuse, same bits of code copy and pasted all…

What is the max lines in a single file for a developer "to get fired" at your company?

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#47

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 10:21 AM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #31

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #14

Serious question: from a user perspective, isn't spam going to be insanely bad in the Fediverse? How do you stop spam without a central authority?

As someone running a federated server (mastodon); you get more problems with local spam than with foreign spam. Most instances will quickly shut down any spam, so it doesn't really fill the federated timeline that much. Local accounts are something you as an administrator need to act on, so they are the annoying ones. In my experience, instances that allow spam are rare and the get quickly blacklisted by everyone fro…

[deleted]

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#48

Post by zbqxu » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 10:22 AM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #31

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #14

Serious question: from a user perspective, isn't spam going to be insanely bad in the Fediverse? How do you stop spam without a central authority?

As someone running a federated server (mastodon); you get more problems with local spam than with foreign spam. Most instances will quickly shut down any spam, so it doesn't really fill the federated timeline that much. Local accounts are something you as an administrator need to act on, so they are the annoying ones. In my experience, instances that allow spam are rare and the get quickly blacklisted by everyone fro…

It doesn't look like that might scale at all. In other words, it works because Mastodon is a very small, niche community.

Good thing is that the Mastodon instance owners use shared block lists for servers that are currently used to ban free speech instances; that infrastructure could also be used to create a collectively managed list of instances that are full of spam.

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#49

Post by nprateem » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 10:31 AM UTC

A2017U1 wrote: post #46

saberience wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for a start... having a single file called "server.rs" which is 2256 lines long is already disqualifying. This file, code structure would be incredibly poor for developer efficiency. It just grows and grows and does all the things while having a vague sounding name like "server.rs" Why is server.rs doing "EditSite." What does the name EditSite mean anyway? Poor code reuse, same bits of code copy and pasted all…

What is the max lines in a single file for a developer "to get fired" at your company?

573

Re: Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

#50

Post by muvek » Thu, Apr 18, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

thejohnconway wrote: post #44

Deimorz wrote: post #15

It doesn't look like there's any federation right now, the test site ( https://dev.lemmy.ml/ ) says "Federation into the ActivityPub network is on the roadmap."

Oh. Activity pub is complex and difficult to implement. The test suite is down. Leaving it to last makes me worry that it won’t happen.

Check out https://gitlab.com/mbajur/prismo/.