zalack

The comment was about strategy, not objective.

It’s not that strange. A timeout occurs on several servers overnight, and maybe a bunch of Lemmy instances are all run in the same timezone, so all their admins wake up around the same time and fix it.

Well it’s a timeout, so by fixing it at the same time the admins have “synchronized” when timeouts across their servers are likely to occur again since it’s tangentially related to time. They’re likely to all fail again around the same moment.

It’s kind of similar to the thundering herd where a bunch of things getting errors will synchronize their retries in a giant herd and strain the server. It’s why good clients will add exponential backoff AND jitter (a little bit of randomness to when the retry is done, not just every x^2 seconds). That way if you have a million clients, it’s less likely that all 1,000,000 of them will attempt a retry at the extract same time, because they all got an error from your server at the same time when it failed.

Edit: looked at the ticket and it’s not exactly the kind of timeout I was thinking of.

This timeout might be caused by something that’s loosely a function of time or resources usage. If it’s resource usage, because the servers are federated, those spikes might happen across servers as everything is pushing events to subscribers. So, failure gets synchronized.

Or it could just be a coincidence. We as humans like to look for patterns in random events.

I posted a version of this in another thread:

I really think Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon need to figure out a way to have a default terms of service that ships with their product which forbids using the API to collect data for anything outside of user-facing social network interfaces, including account association heuristics and similar processes.

A way for users to set licenses on individual posts would be huge as well, with a default license instance admins can set.

That way for-profit instances could be forced to filter out posts with licenses that do not allow for-profit use. Honestly, even just a simple check mark “[ ] allow for-profit republication”, and have two licenses that can be attached: one that allows for-profit use and one that does not.

The fediverse should start baking in data control into it’s legal framework. Want to federate with Mastodon? You need to follow the ToS for what you can do with its posts. If we wanted to get really extreme we could even say the license should be copy-left. Any instance that wants to federate with a non-profit instances needs to also be non-profit.

That could block for-profit companies from becoming part of the network in the first place, even by use of stealth relay instances.

#threads

I really think Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon need to figure out a way to have a default terms of service that ship with their product which forbids using the API to collect data for commercial purposes.

Additionally, there should be a way for users to indicate licensing for individual posts, with a default license instance admins can set.

That way for-profit instances could be forced to filter out posts with licenses that do not allow for-profit use. Honestly, even just a simple check mark “[ ] allow for-profit republication”, and have two licenses that can be attached: one that allows for-profit use and one that does not.

Kbin generally seems to churn faster than Reddit for me, but posts on Lemmy do seem to stay around for a awhile.

The thing is that this can happen even without active malice.

If the product owners or engineers decide “hey, we want to add this cool feature, but it’s not supported by activity pub” the path of least resistance – bypassing the long process of changing the activity pub spec and getting everyone else on board – can be super tempting, and come from a place of wanting to make your product better.

Those ostensibly good intentions can lead to E/E/E without actively meaning to.