For the latest version of lemmy, hot sort works in the new fashion. There is a pull request with further implementation details linked in the GitHub issue.

Ah, fair enough. My response doesn’t apply then.

You misunderstand what the Hot rank is doing. It’s not balancing newness vs hotness, it’s scaling hotness according to community size. This might feel like newness if you’re focused on vote counts as a proxy for post age, but it’s a different approach. See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622 for details.

There’s a couple ways to think about this:

1. There are a handful of Lemmy communities that are just WAY more active than everything else. The main feeds are kind of lame if you have to scroll 300 posts it to find anything other than a shit post from the same 3 communities. Scaled Hot rank shows a greater variety of communities by making it easier small communities to get ranked hotly.
2. Or you can consider Hotness to be a rough measure of what percentage of people who have seen the post interacted with it. A post with 500 upvotes in a community with 10,000 active users is kind of popular, but only 5% of the people likely to have scrolled passed it cared about it. A post with 50 upvotes in a community with 200 active members is much MORE popular relatively even though the absolute numbers are smaller.

At any rate, this preference toward smaller communities in hot is a recent change and deliberate. While they might further tweak the scaling factors, I wouldn’t expect it to be drastically different. It sounds to me like what you want is Top, Active, or Most Comments. All these are unscaled according to community size and will get you top posts by their absolute metric rather than posts that are doing well relative to their community size.

Have you emailed admin@lemmy.world to try to get reinstated? This all seems like a pretty reasonable explanation if it isn’t repeated behavior.

I feel like you’re combatively advocating for a specific vision and not collecting and processing feedback as your OP suggests, at any rate… you don’t seem to be understanding what I was trying to say at all… but it’s not something I’m going to fight about with someone who is questioning if I know what a multi-reddit is and dismissing client-side techniques as nonsense without seeming to understand why they were being discussed in the first place.

I’ll leave with these thoughts, do with them what you will:

1. I’m not interested in any multireddit feature that reduces sub privacy. I’d consider it a net loss for lemmy.
2. On Reddit, multi-reddits personal in nature. Such a personal multireddit for lemmy doesn’t require interaction with federation or privacy changes.
3. I realize that a shared super-community feature is frequently requested on Lemmy aimed at addressing duplication of communities across instances. I don’t think that’s more than superficially similar to actual multireddits, and I don’t think it’s a good idea because it creates moderation problems that are far worse than the community duplication problems it purports to address.

What you’ve described is one way. It could also be a filtered view based on the subscribed/all feed which provides a single API call that can return material from multiple communities. I’m not suggesting that a client-side only solution is a GOOD solution. But from an information-flow perspective, I’m suggesting that multireddits are a “local” function. Theu are so local that they’re possible without server-side support at all, and especially local enough not to require representation in the federated feed… which is a more significant change with potential impacts to other federated projects like kbin and mastodon… and shouldn’t require relaxing privacy constraints in any case.

Anyway, what’s the feedback on privacy issue with allowing any user to have read-only access to your community subscribe list…

I wouldn’t want this in exchange for multi-reddits. You can a little bit infer the communities someone subscribes to from their comment activity, but as it stands one can choose to privately lurk and this would eliminate that… silently for existing users in the absence of some big series of announcements to make it well known.

Why are multi-reddits a thing that involves federation at all? Multi-reddits as they exist on Reddit itself could be implemented entirely client-side, the server side stuff just syncs the behavior of multiple client apps. Why does the concept of a multi-reddit need to extend outside of the user’s instance?

Another comment links an older article about freenom (the registrar that is having .ML taken away) losing .ga previously and a plan to delete millions of .ga domains that were being used for abuse. Presumably the .ML situation is another abuse cleanup, though I can’t find confirmation.

That then leaves the question of whether the Lemmy instance that went down was correctly flagged for abuse (I heard it was focused on piracy?) or whether an appeal could get it back for them.

https://lemmy.world/comment/1547287

I’ve found several articles similar to this, but transfer of management of a TLD from one registrar to another generally shouldn’t result in breakage of registered domains. And nothing in that article (nor any of the others I’ve found) suggest that Mali plans not to honor existing registrations (which all expire eventually anyway, so they have an orderly way to reclaim things by refusing renewal if they wish).

There’s more going on here that hasn’t been reported (or that I haven’t found) yet.

Tests go in !test@lemmy.ml

Yeah, federation is being creaky globally right now. The GitHub issue list is littered with admins reporting intermittent federation issues.

I wouldn’t expect it to repeatedly prevent communication though. Just maybe some intermittent issues occasionally.

Many servers have been struggling lately, especially lemmy.world. When that happens, they frequently time-out when comments/posts are submitted, even though the comment/post was processed… the client doesn’t realize and behaves to the user as of the comment/post failed. It didn’t fail though.

Lots of people resubmit without checking to realize it actually worked the first (or fifth) time, resulting in dupes. lemmy.world just fixed a bunch of performance problems and submitted PRs to the devs to fix them for everyone else too. With the improved performance, you should see less of these dupes going forward as the number of timeouts is reduced. But it’s another bug that clients get confused about whether a post went through or not. Maybe that will get sorted soon also.

This is likely bugs in Lemmy’s websockets API which are fixed in v0.18.0. Check the footer on the frontpage of your instance to see if that version has been rolled out there, if not it will be soon and should fix these issues.

When did lemmy.world go down for a lengthy period? I’ve been on and off all day with nothing more than 2m disruptions, which I assumed were routine restarts while the admins test stuff.

Is that ID local to the instance or universal across the fediverse?

I dunno, this is as far as I chased it. It should give you a starting point to dig further if you choose… but I don’t plan to at the moment.

Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.

I was a little skeptical of this assertion without any sources, but 10m of source scanning does seem to support it:

• The ActivityPub message for a vote does seem to transmit the ID of the voter: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/v0.17.3-rc.2/crates/apub/src/activities/voting/vote.rs#L26
• And the table for storing votes stores that id as well: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/v0.17.3-rc.2/migrations/2019-03-03-163336_create_post/up.sql#L17 (or did at one point, it’s hard to get a complete schema just out of git).

I haven’t looked for APIs to extract this data, it might only be available to an instance admin… but yeah Lemmy does not seem to aggregate vote histories, but rather stores them on a per-user basis.

The rocketship of registered accounts in the last 4d is indeed all bots attacking small instances where the admins are asleep at the wheel: https://lemm.ee/post/177673

The real registered user count is like 200k-300k I think. What you have to do is what the active user graphs on those pages, then extrapolate the registered graphs with a similar curve, ignoring the sharp rise when bots started flooding in this week.

So based on your answer, I am still misunderstanding something. What is the purpose of all the duplication then? Is it just for local caching purposes?

Pretty much everything in your summary was wrong. I can’t reasonably type out a complete primer on federation here, but in short… When the first user on an instance subscribes to a remote community, the subscribing server tells the community-hosting server “send me future updates about posts, comments, and votes and such for this community”. The subscribing server then stores them locally.

Why do this actual replication rather than just an API gateway?

• That’s what federation is. I don’t mean to be glib, but there’s more than one way to potentially do this stuff, and some systems designers think federation is a useful approach for a variety of complex reasons. Federation involves federated replication, API proxies aren’t federation.
• If the community-hosting server goes down temporarily, content replicated via federation remains available on the subscribing nodes. This enabled me to read communities homed on lemmy.ml recently when it was struggling and frequently down due to overload.
• It spreads the browse workload, which is generally bigger than the replication workload. For example, lemmy.world has commonly has like 4k active users this week. But it only takes one batch of federated replication messages for the community’s instance to serve the browse traffic of all those users… then the reads come out of lemmy.world’s db. This spreads the browse workload around the federated network.
• There are many other reasons to work this way as well, but as noted… at some point you’ll just want to Google primers on federated apps/networks. They definitely don’t operate according to your current intuition though, and the differences aren’t accidental.

Can federated networks have problems where the replication traffic becomes “too much”? Yes, they must be carefully designed to avoid that problem. And for some apps, it makes single-user instances sometimes anti-efficient as the federation workload for the instance can exceed the browse workload from the user, but for multi-user instances the federation messages are a rounding error compared to the browse work. But replication overload is a problem that federated networks generally weather, and the replication offers benefits that on-balance outweigh the costs.

Do instances fully replicate and locally store remote subscribed communities?

To a first approximation yes, they replicate the posts and comments made after the time of subscription. Images aren’t replicated, but posts, comments, votes, and mod actions do replicate.

My understanding is they are still solely hosted on the original instance; subscribing just opens a window to the community by making your instance aware it exists.

I don’t know what you consider “a window” to be, and maybe this is a fuzzy description of some steps of community discovery… but it’s definitely not a complete or coherent view of how instances interact through federation.

There’s an open GitHub ticket for something analogous multireddit’s: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818, but as you note that’s really just a read-only view.

People talk about community fragmentation like Lemmy invented it. There are TONS of duplicate and overlapping communities on Reddit. There’s /r/tech and /r/technology, /r/DnD and /r/dndnext, a zillion aita clone subs. Dupes are everywhere.

IMO what we need to manage community dupes is actually better community discovery. What makes duplicate communities less of a problem in Reddit is that when a community has good mods and starts to accumulate membership, it gets pushed up the search rankings in a snowball effect. Other subs grow less active and the well-manged one dominates. Remote community discovery is so poor on Lemmy that it’s a total tossup which option you find in the results… which currently makes the dupe situation a “problem”. But it’s my belief that if community discovery was better, dupe communities would mostly naturally aggregate into a few well run options.