This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What is so special about piefed? I see a few communities moving there. The interface looks different from the original lemmy interface.
For regular users there is not a huge difference, but the web-interface is significantly faster and you can subscribe to topics that combine multiple communities. The disadvantage is less mobile app support. Right now only Interstellar supports Piefed.
The really advantage is for moderators and admins, as the Piefed developers actually listened to community feedback and implemented a lot of nice moderation features that require bots or annoying work-arounds on Lemmy.
And there are a few technical differences that make Piefed easier to administrate and troubleshoot from a sysadmin perspective.
Our sysadmin explained some technical advantages here: https://feddit.org/post/13613230/7063696
Postgres slowing factor
I'm pretty sure one of the best optimised free/libre DBMS's is faster than Python 💀
Also no one know how Piefed scales, since it only has like 350 MAU
Reread it. They're saying "The slowest part is postgres, so even if python is slower than rust it won't make a difference."
That is, in theory. In practice, it can make a big difference. Source: Worked professionally with large services built in Python and Rust.
Yes, I also suspect that at a certain scale it would make a difference, but with a single Postgres database and no advanced clustering or so, the real-life performance metrics of a medium sized Lemmy instance strongly point to Postgres being the bottleneck and not the Python or Rust codebase of the rest of the software.
Piefed also uses PostgreSQL. He was mentioning that the limiting factor on either platform is the DB, meaning that the parts written in Python will likely not be a limiting factor.
Piefed also has quite impressive optimizations in other areas as well compared to Lemmy or even Mbin.
Well, you can add flairs :)
After a month and a half downtime all the users will have moved on to other instances. This is essentially a death sentence for the instance and its communities.
I don't think so, I will definitely go back and do not wish to move permanently in another instance.
As others have said I think this instance has a strong base of dedicated users, it's a "specialized" instance that has no equivalent.
Idk, quite a few (me included) made alt accounts for the time being, and we'll return when it becomes possible, especially if we really do migrate to piefed.
You underestimate the userbase. I made a temp account in the mean time, but we are a hyper tight knit community. We will probably lose accounts - no question - but the core userbase will return
Count me in! Slrpnks all the way! 💚
I agree. I replied to Kris elsewhere saying this, but I am super glad to have been a part of this instance because it feels like a nice balance of being large enough to be robust and diverse, but small enough to have a distinctive culture. I don't often interact with the communities that were on the instance, but I always enjoy seeing my peers crop up in the comments of various posts — it's one of my favourite parts of Lemmy being federated (db0 is another example of an instance that has such a distinctive vibe that seeing it as someone's instance is often useful metadata that affects how I parse their comment)
The local communities are such a great mix of uplifting and informative posts that I am sure to return.
I dont think it will be. I've had two accounts for a while to deal with unexpected issues & will happily return to my slrpnk account once it's back up and running :)
Plus for the communities, people who were subscribed to them before will likely stay subscribed & once the instance is back up the posts will be in their feeds without an issue.
Being able to accommodate issues like this is one of the major upsides to a decentralized platform.
You may underestimate user dedication. I love my instance and totally would come back after a few months away temporarily.
You got me on the communities though.
Fediverse is designed to handle servers with less than stellar reliability.
Don't pull a feddit.de on people, alright?
What exactly happened there? It was the big thing, then I didn't use it for a month or so and then it was gone.
The admin basically ran it as a one man show with only one other admin who had very limited privileges. He then went on a "business trip" or workaction or longterm vacation - there were different stories. Anyway, the database went belly up, the other admin couldn't do a thing and none could contact the admin. There are some rumours that he wasn't who he claimed he was and actually was a Chinese national who simply returned home, but who knows that. As a matter of fact none had any meaningful contact with him for months then and it appears he did not return. (But is alive)
A Austrian NGO who amongst others does host some mastodon instances,etc. took over and now feddit.org is on a very productive, professional and transparent level.
Thanks for the summary! That sounds freaky!
Well, the trade-off between trusting a huge corporation or a single dude on the internet.
That sucks.
Did they run out of sun?
No, just punk.
Maybe is vacationing in United Kingdom
Alt text:
Slrpnk.net is currently offline due to an unforseen hardware failure in combination with the main system-administrators having no physical access to the server location until mid July due to work or summer-holiday related travels.
We are very sorry for this unforseen down-time, but slrpnk.net will return for sure and we already have some plans for a nice relaunch, so stay tuned!
Thank you so much for the update - I hadn't had access for about a week and was getting worried. Couldn't reach them on XMPP either.
Yeah, the xmpp server is down too. That is something that bugs me quite a bit and I will probably move that one to an external small VPS to retain a more secure backup communication channel.
(speaking as a slrpnk user): Another backup communication strategy (once things are backup) might be to designate somewhere on a non-slrpnk instance as a place where people can check for updates if things go down; when I first discovered the outage, I wasn't sure where to go to check for info/updates.
Unrelatedly, I hope that this unexpected outage isn't causing you or other admins too much stress. Whilst the extended nature of this outage is unfortunate, I respect that you're using this as an opportunity to migrate to a more robust solution. This kind of resilience focussed response is a key part of the solarpunk ethos, in my view.
Some people have said that such a long outage seems likely to kill an instance, but for my part, this community is worth waiting for — I have enjoyed having an account on this instance because it feels like the perfect blend of small enough to have a distinct culture and ethos, but is large enough to be robust and diverse.
Thanks.
Yeah at the very least this will result in some changes in the hardware setup to avoid similar situations. But of course it is impossible to forsee all possible problems.
