Dave @ Dave @lemmy.nz

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536

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5,452

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

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Well it was the API changes; and the general fuckery that drove me to look for an alternative.

Yep that's most of us.

Thinking about it, I haven’t been back to Reddit for over year now.

Other than finding search results to my technical questions, I'm the same. I haven't doom scrolled reddit since Relay for Reddit shut down maybe 18 months back.

Edit: Oh shit they went subscription based! The app still lives! Still not going back though 😆

This instance was set up at the same time as reddit announced they would charge for API access and all that fiasco. My favourite app (Relay for Reddit) said they weren't going to continue and I really didn't like the official reddit app so I set it up on a whim since I was really into self-hosting at the time, with a few years experience and feeling confident to give it a go.

There were many people joining that month. I seem to recall the monthly active users across all of Lemmy went from a few hundred to tens of thousands in a pretty short space of time. I can't seem to find data going back far enough though.

I still recognise quite a few users from the early days, such as yourself, but we also lost many cool people over the years which I'm a bit sad about when I go trawling through old threads (such as to make this post) and I see cool people that I enjoyed interacting with that have deleted their accounts or just not been around for a long time.

Thanks! It hasn't been perfect but yes Lemmy as a platform is way, way more stable than those early days. I can't remember the last time I had to restart everything to get it working after it went down. I used to do that quite regularly (and of course there was the period of time I had a nightly scheduled job set to restart everything otherwise it would run out of RAM).

The early days sure were a wild west 😅

2 years for me as well!

Me too!

That sounds like a really interesting field. I just realised there are Silicon Valley scenes that are about this as well…

Oh I haven't watched Silicon Valley, is it good?

The phones had those annoying little metal gates in them that some candybars used to have. I remember being completely weirded out by it.

I am struggling to follow, what are the little metal gates in candy bars? I have a bad memory 😅

I would say many people are, but not exclusively. There are plenty of non-technical people around, but I'd say we have a much higher proportion of tech savviness.

If you're interested, we did a census survey last year to learn about our users.

Over half of us work in IT. But many people don't!

I'm actually working on a new one at the moment for this year, the survey should be posted in the not too distant future. I've been working with lemmy.ca who were the inspiration for our one last year, to refine a set of questions.

Nice! If my memory is correct, @Axisential@lemmy.nz (who hasn't been around recently so probably won't see this) runs a business on the West Coast that does caving trips for all ages. Something to consider!

Yeah I think most of it is fine. Will be interesting to see the feedback on this, if there are any other arguments I'm not thinking of.

Wow, sounds like it's about time you had a holiday!

Got big plans or just a staycation?

Solar has got a lot cheaper recently, and big projects take time. But they are happening now!

That list of power stations has 8 operational solar fars and another 18 proposed/in development!

How do you come up with/discover the personas?

You talk to people! Something that's a lot harder for a FOSS project to arrange. User Experience (UX) is a whole job, including interviews with users. And a related job is Service Designer.

"Design thinking" is a good starting point to Google😉

This is a rambling tangent but one of my super weird memories from the late 90s was being asked to a market research focus group where all they did was give us cell phones and sim cards and video us trying to open the backs and insert the sims. It was new tech for most of us at the time and it's really funny to me now how challenging we found it.

That market research group sounds like the above UX stuff I was talking about!

SIM card swapping is an interesting line of thought. Because you could sell phones with them installed, so problem solved. But if it's hard to do, you might struggle to convert customers from a competitor. But at the same time, it might help prevent your customers leaving.

Do you know what they were trying to learn?

I mean, over the years the scroll bar has got less and less visible. Maybe these people don't even realise it exists.

I'm in two minds about it. The bit already at 110 is the most suited part, it's straight and flat. The start is pretty decent too. There's just this massive, very steep part that seems the most risky. A pileup there seems like a really bad situation. Maybe we have the first 30km or so at 110, the wiggler up and down bits at 100, then back to 110 on the flat?

Alternatively, put it all at 110 but put in one of those new average speed cameras, just on the riskier bit, so people have to go at 110 rather than adding another 10 or 15.

I’m looking forward to this actually, I drive that road a lot, and this will represent a significant time saving on a round trip.

The part still at 100kph is by my maps measurement 37km long. Taking a little over 22 mins to drive at 100kph. Increasing this to 110kph makes this a little over 20 mins, a saving of 2mins each way or 4 mins from a return trip. I don't know that it would be that significant, but you'd still get most of that gain if you did the first 30km at 110.

Are there enough trampolines on earth that we could reasonably expect that at any time there is at least one person in the upper part of their jump on a trampoline?

I mean 30,000 feet is 9km. The Kármán line is 100km. The ISS is at an average altitude of 400km.

It's a bit like saying people in planes don't count as flying because then people on trampolines should count.

My plan is to have a self hosted, private site for the family. In the old days, people made their own sites and others could visit. I see this as a replacement for social media - instead of using facebook to catch up on family, this would be a self-hosted alternative. People could still use facebook for other things if they wanted, but this would be somewhere you would know you'd see all the posts people were making, with no ads or manipulative algorithms.

Despite all the options, it's actually a hard thing to find a good solution. There there is promise in some so I haven't given up hope yet.

In terms of public sharing, I see Lemmy as one form of that. Anyone can host their own instance but we all share with each other. No ads, algorithms are known and published. For things more like a personal site, it's never been easier to self-host things.

I still use email and RSS.

If you want to read blogs and minor websites, maybe check out kagis "small web" index (this is free access I believe): https://kagi.com/smallweb

The real web is still there, and probably has as many users as it did 25 years ago, but the average person doesn't use it. Remember the average person didn't use the internet much at all 25 years ago.

One thing I want to do is try to create a space for family to hang out. Self-hosted. No concerns about data mining or trolls, just a personal space for us.

They don't have to use it but starting from the right group, I think they will, many of them perhaps only because it will become the only place to see photos of our kids. Just need the right platform.

It does have geothermal at Ngawha which is relatively near a forestry and could be expanded significantly.

Opened in 2020! Your link also says "The Ngāwhā geothermal field is the only high temperature geothermal resource in New Zealand, outside the Taupo Volcanic Zone." so I think I'm allowed to be surprised 😅

While looking for that website I just stumbled on a tiny, rickety old hydro station so turns out I was wrong about that!

It can be fascinating reading the list of power stations in NZ.

I noticed one that's believed to be one of the oldest continually operating hydroelectric plants in the world. Mokopeka, since 1891. Some photos here.

One of the big things these days is "personas", which is basically sitting down and thinking about all the different people who might use your software. Which might be some guy called Fred who drives trucks doesn't really use a computer very much. It might be some chick called Jessica that has used the software for years and likes the current layout, or it might be Susan who has used photoshop but doesn't like the new subscription model so is looking for another tool.

All these people have very different needs, and you need to make sure it works for them all. They will all have quite different expectations about how things should work. Ideally you'll find people that fit each of your personas and get them to test and give feedback.

Unfortunately when software is made by volunteers, a lot of this side of things can be lost.