Reddit is experiencing a nationwide outage that has taken down the app and website. Thousands of users have reported error messages and comments disappearing from the site.
  • Strange_Design@lemmy.world
    3·
    16 days ago

    Reddit being down is how I found out about this place. This is literally my first post here. Thanks for sucking Reddit!

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
      0·
      16 days ago

      Don’t forget to apply to the No Poop Challenge!

      Jokes aside, welcome. It’s a bit messy but fun here. Make sure to take a look at how instances work, for most part you can ignore it but it does improve a lot your experience.

        • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
          0·
          16 days ago

          It’s a local meme.

          A year ago or so someone posted in AskLemmy “I need to survive for 3 days while pooping as much as possible. I can pee as often as I like. It can take up loads of space. What food do I pack?” Apparently they were serious with the question, but… well, it’s bloody hilarious and suddenly everyone was joking about it.

          The original thread was deleted, but you see plenty copycat threads like this one.

          • Lem Jukes@lemm.ee
            2·
            7 days ago

            Wasn’t the I need to not poop the first one? The link posted doesn’t open for me.

            • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
              2·
              7 days ago

              You’re right - I copied the title of the post without noticing that they flipped it. (I can’t find the original any more.)

              The link from .ml opens fine for me.

  • Mio@feddit.nu
    0·
    16 days ago

    This problem cannot happen to feddiverse? All nodes just queue sending to others?

    • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
      1·
      16 days ago

      Ask kbin.social

      It can happen because communities and users are monolithic. You lose your home instance, you have to create a new account somewhere else. The community is located in the instance that goes down, you can no longer participate in it and its former members all have to scramble if they want to participate.

        • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
          2·
          11 days ago

          there is… Mainly my implementing options for users to export their data (eg. their followers). But also other features like the ActivityPub Move activity for migration.

        • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
          0·
          14 days ago

          There’s a number of ways it could be improved, but I get the impression the devs and admins were really interested in a poor man’s Reddit and are into that sort of monolithic instance control and quite opposed to the transparency that would required to do it any other way (like having the author of upvotes or downvotes visible or the name or an identifier linkable to the mod who performed a moderator action show up in the mod log any longer). At this rate, all I see it is becoming more monolithic and eventually more drama between instances (which there is already plenty of).

          • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
            1·
            11 days ago

            impression the devs and admins were really interested in a poor man’s Reddit

            No, not at all. It’s just that sh*t things happens and instances goes down. Remember that kbin (and now Mbin) is development by software engineers doing their job in the free time. And instance owners also. Most don’t get paid for all this work, and if they do… we are talking about 5 dollar per month.

            At the same time devs also have families, full time job and other things. While I heard from the Lemmy dev is able to full time work on Lemmy now.

            • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
              2·
              11 days ago

              So where is the development interest for less monolithic instance control then? Everything I read indicates a movement towards it, with less transparency that can be federated (like not allowing downvotes and moderation to truly be transparent and there’s no interest in making communities that aren’t localized to single instances by making its moderation be something that can be something that can be applied and decided at the user or each instance level.

              This would also mean inherently allowing user participation in a community regardless of how much an instance doesn’t want it (as long as it is not their home instance, which would be the ones in charge of removing spam/bot/CSAM) if a particular selection of a moderation group does not allow it. Communities are monolithic by design, limited to an instance’s moderation and then to that instance’s administration and then furthermore by its availability.

              I’m sure that the availability of time and effort are a factor, it would require dealing with new and different issues, it might require leaving some monolithic aspects, but it fails before it gets at that point, there is no interest nor is it where development wants to head. Communities are monolithic and will essentially remain monolithic. The only thing that is federated is essentially the search features and pseudo-SSO of Lemmy.

              • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
                2·
                11 days ago

                What you all mention here are valid issues and concerts. The point is that everything you mentioned is related on how the ActivityPub protocol works, which inherently create this situation of semi-decentralizing in form of instances and federation. If we want to get rid of that, we need a fully different protocol that resolves all your issues in a decentralized way, which isn’t always scaling, or leaking the technical advances to do so. Or you could even argue that ActivityPub is currently de facto standard (which also includes Mastodon, etc).

                The only way to solve all the issues mentioned is to fully replace ActvityPub by another protocol. Which doesn’t relay on instances, and no DNS, and no global identity… Which are technically very challenging subjects on its own. Fediverse is well… federated, but not decentralized.

                Disclaimer: I’m the developer of Mbin project. And previous contributor of kbin.

                • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
                  1·
                  11 days ago

                  And thanks for the work in your branch, it has kept mbin alive. As I understand it, ActivityPub is an open standard for relaying information that is distinct from how the back-end operates, and it operates with very generic concepts like Objects, Activites, and Actors, so I suspect it can be adapted even if I don’t know it to the degree that you do. Each user could engage in a community and their contribution would be treated as a multicast hosted on the home instance which the rest of the servers could pick up and update on their end, for example.

                  Querying for comments and posts in a community could first return local and then the cached for remote content that would update on demand, delaying if necessary, applying the implementation specific decentralization mechanism of choice. Maybe Librecast would be an option, I don’t know any-end. Moderation could be applied to the result as a personal preference and in multiple layers by choosing which moderator activities and groups you would accept or ignore, and moderator groups could be treated as entities owned and coordinated by their leaders.

                  Users behaves badly, user is removed. Instance does not want to deal with certain users from other instances, they block them. They could coordinate general admin decisions between instances, they just would manifest direct control over communities. If they don’t like how certain communities behave, they would have options, they just wouldn’t have complete control and communities could criticize the application of those options without compromising their entire being. Instances could ban misinformation, but what one instance considers misinformation another might not. Moderators could become trusted instance enforcers and automatically help enforce misinformation filters for the instance groups they cooperate with. It would basically be another layer of abstraction between the community and the host moderators.

                  Communities could accommodate different schools of thought within the same community and without each other calling the other troll and banishing their participation, one would just have to shift between the moderator groups they want. Instances could step in, but exceptionally, making people’s choice of instance matter more. It would be extremely easy to set up a ground.news social network alternative in this context that wouldn’t have to devolve into two extremes, but things like downvotes and mod actions would have to be transparent because of how dynamic and customizable the system would have to be.

                  The problem in the software world isn’t usually that there is no choice, it’s that there is no will. The obstacles are not insurmountable, there’s just no interest in overcoming them I think. I know you can speak for yourself, but I don’t think you can speak for the main lemmy (lemmy.ml) devs, mbin is already much more transparent than lemmy is.

    • AngryPancake@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      16 days ago

      Your user is still linked to your home instance. If that goes down, you don’t have access to it. You can still browse Lemmy from other servers.

      • Mio@feddit.nu
        0·
        14 days ago

        That is sad. So you know if there is any work or solution here? Maybe sync to different instances or just assume it is still you because you have the key to some algorithm and have some data saved in your client?

        • TheVillageGuy@kbin.melroy.org
          0·
          13 days ago

          The solution is making your own instance. You’ve basically got a copy of your own of everything you follow on the fediverse. If it goes down for a while, messages are indeed queued for a reasonable time. And even if you do miss them, things like comments, up and down votes will act as ‘reminders’

          • Mio@feddit.nu
            1·
            12 days ago

            Sure, I wound have my own instans but having it alone would be pointless. I think feddiverse would be fine even if the biggest node go down as she many others exist.

  • GooberEar@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    0·
    16 days ago

    Somewhat tangential question: Why do so many sites have links to an external status monitoring site, but when the site is down and you go to check the status on that external status monitoring site, it says everything’s fine? What’s the point of the status site if it doesn’t actually acknowledge that there’s any sort of outage nor provide any info on it?

    • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
      0·
      16 days ago

      There are a few options off the top off my head

      1. the route/connection between the monitoring and you is OK; between the company and the monitoring is OK; but between you and the company is not OK – this means that, so far as the monitoring can tell, the site is up.
      2. The status checks run at some interval and you’re hitting it before that interval
      3. There’s some threshold of errors that needs to happen first so tiny hiccups don’t register as full-blown outages.
      4. the monitoring/metrics are poorly-designed

      There are probably other cases. I don’t know the architecture in this case, so I won’t speculate at any others.

        • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
          1·
          15 days ago

          Yeah, I thought of that a few minutes later and was too lazy to edit. I also thought maybe it’s semi-auto and someone needs to verify it manually before allowing the UI to show