- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
The linked post shows how most non-tech people’s understanding of email is very very different from most of the people here.
The linked post shows how most non-tech people’s understanding of email is very very different from most of the people here.
In my experience, the majority of people doesn’t have the slightest clue how mail works. Somehow you type it in and provide it with an address into one of the three indistinguishable fields that are titled “To”, " CC", “BCC”. And by some black magic it either appears on the screen of the other person. Or it doesn’t. That’s about the amount of knowledge.
So comparing something to this is kind of meaningless.
Ironically it is often that way with Lemmy as well, outside of Lemmy.World. You write up a post, maybe it makes it to its destination, maybe it does not (for several days, after which point extremely few people will see it when it suddenly appears, but down among the older content no longer listed as “new”), maybe people write comments into it, maybe they don’t but who even knows if you aren’t able to see any of them to be able to respond.
This is definitely a monthly or almost weekly occurrence, even if not quite a daily one, though it depends strongly on what instance you are on.
Also, whether it makes it to the destination or not depends on which server you try to view it from.
And I haven’t even begun to start into the defederation artifacts yet!?
Right. Learning Lemmy and the Fediverse takes some effort. The onboarding isn’t super smooth and flawless… I think we all know this. I’d still like to see a few design changes. I think generally we’re headed in the right direction. Albeit kind of slowly.
I haven’t noticed any federation hiccups in quite some time. There was some debacle with two updates. But since then it’s been forwarding posts within seconds for me. At least on the last two instances I used.
Almost every single one of my posts has had major issues. Even those from other instances. e.g. Rimu messaged me about this one that did not federate for 2-3 days, and consequently was seen by very few people. And here’s one from a difference instance that made it to its destination on !tenforward@lemmy.world, but from its originating server I could see none of the comments, and had to respond from a third account involved in that 3-way attempt at communication. (a post talking about such federation issues on that same server) So to be very clear, I am not saying that instances running PieFed software are having issues, but more that the issues are with Lemmy regardless of software type run.
Uh, right. Sorry, I did not notice you were from Piefed… I was talking about the times when we had the borked Lemmy updates… Did you ever debug or resolve your issues? Is there a way to tell something didn’t federate? And is this an issue specific to Piefed? Or to the whole Fediverse? I’m not sure if I’m affected. I occasionally check my posts from another account and it always seems okay. But I mean I don’t do it very often.
Yes often I’ve chased it down to some small degree. The one that Rimu messaged me was near a time of great instability on piefed.social and I got a bunch of gateway errors even so much as trying to reach it as a user (having nothing to do with posting I mean). This instance has calmed down a ton since then and works perfectly these days, but things happen from time to time. Likewise the incident with StarTrek.Website that I mentioned and provided a link describing more.
Other occurrences have still other causes - e.g. a few of them in one community seems to have been due to my posts getting “locked”. I have no idea why - perhaps the new mod was just fat-fingering the button? I did not ask. But now the vote counts vary GREATLY (192 vs. 183 vs. 98 vs. 0 etc.) depending on which instance you view it from. If you want to test for yourself, a good one to use is https://piefed.social/post/330559 - though I notice that (fairly recently created) community !tech_memes@lemmy.world does not appear at all on your instance.
The primary cause though was a limitation in how the ActivityPub protocol was implemented in the Lemmy codebase, and not having anticipated that ~80% of the entire Lemmy-based Fediverse would concentrate itself onto a single server, Lemmy.World. So how it works is that any “action” - a post, a comment, an upvote or downvote - will be federated out to all the other instances world-wide at a rate of 1 per second. However, if the ping from the other servers to Lemmy.World is itself a significant approximation of that, then the list of actions to be federated will fall behind and take longer to catch up. Eventually after more than a week it gives up entirely, but in the meantime an action can be delayed for days. Poor Aussie.Zone - geographically distant from the EU - has been really having a hard time of it ( https://aussie.zone/post/13429731 ).
Fortunately this problem has already been fixed in the Lemmy codebase by allowing multiple actions to be sent in parallel (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623) - however, what causes the continued problems nowadays is the fact that Lemmy.World is still awaiting that upgrade to 0.19.6 to make use of that change in the codebase (release notes) (actually now 0.19.7 is already out too, having come less than a week after the former, and representing just a few bugfixes, release notes). When Lemmy.World upgrades to one of those, a good deal of these systemic issues should calm down, by a GREAT deal, if not entirely.
Afaik, there is nothing particularly special about instances running PieFed having troubles connecting to any Lemmy instances. In fact it seems rather stable compared to many (even most!) others - particularly StarTrek.Website that has poor uptime. In fact, https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list reports that piefed.social has a remarkable uptime rate of 99.89, which I very much believe, compared to the aforementioned StarTrek.Website’s rate of 98.20, although a year ago when I left it it must have been significantly poorer b/c it would be down for days sometimes, and every single action took like a minute sometimes, back then. Your own instance reports 98.60 - does that sound right?
Rather, it is Lemmy instances - particularly smaller ones (e.g. https://lemmings.world/post/14171987) - having trouble federating specifically with Lemmy.World.
And then recently there were a bunch of instances having troubles connecting to lemmy.ml too (https://lemmy.world/post/22196027) - though this one is more expected as that one is administered by the developers of the Lemmy codebase, and thus that is the place where they test out all of their new code in beta, prior to deploying it across the entire Fediverse. Sometimes that leads to some REALLY odd behaviors, such as entries disappearing from modlog files that were extremely concerning to people, but it is par for the course with that highly special instance, which is unique in its manner.
Edit: ah and I neglected to answer one of your questions: as you said, the way to tell if something federated properly or not is to check the instance - specifically the one hosting the community that you are sending it to. So e.g. to check a post to !tenforward@lemmy.world, I would visit Lemmy.World. If it is there but not on your home instance, then at least that particular message packet got sent, even if the message packet from Lemmy.World to your instance got lost or fell behind in its processing backlog somehow.
Yup, and people younger than a certain age think email is as archaic as the pony express.
In my country, people above a certain age think sending an email is impressive
Hilariously, fax machines are as archaic as the pony express. They were invented around 1850.
Abraham Lincoln could have literally sent a japanese samurai a fax.
As a younger tech person, I definitely don’t get a lot about email. It’s old and weird and arcane and half it’s features that match newer services seem to be built on top of hacks that are enforced through convention alone that will break if I decide I like to format my titles a little differently. Third party clients work, but the main providers, Gmail outlook use some proprietary api to make sure their own works well while everyone else gets stuck with shitty imap. There’s endless little incompatibilities. It all just feels like delerict tower held together with miles of duct tape. Oh and I still haven’t found a good answer to why calendars are so tied up with email.
Your calendars are tied up with your email because Microsoft Exchange decided to bring that feature to business ages ago and everyone else just copied them. There’s nothing preventing you from using third party calendar apps if that’s what you want, and there are standard protocols to exchange calendars between services. Your email address probably comes with a calendar by default already so most people just use that, but that’s your choice.
As for IMAP, there are a few alternative protocols but desktop mail clients are old people tech anyway. Outlook is just storing your email on their servers for a reason, people don’t want an IMAP alternative, they want an app.
I don’t really know what inconsistencies email supposedly has compared to other protocols. I use a bridge to join my Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/etcetera all in one place, and getting a consistent experience is a layer of hell not even email prepared me for. Telegram doesn’t do some emoji reactions, WhatsApp doesn’t do edits, every messenger needs stickers to be in a specific weird format, and god forbid you try to send files because every service has their own stupid quirks on that. Then there’s formatting, every service supports a specific subset of markdown, all incompatible with each other. And NONE of them allow “line of text, image, line of text” as a single message that can be forwarded. Messenger tech is bound to the same restrictions the Linux kernel mailing lists are. Email is a technical miracle in how it works consistly across platforms.
The only comparable protocols I can think of that come close to email are SMS (awful and insecure), MMS (awful and insecure and unreliable), RCS (only usable if you use Android and insecure in all other contexts). Young people don’t use email because they’ve been tricked into other apps, but it it wasn’t for the “my parents use it so it sucks” attitude that every teenager develops, email would’ve replaced so many shitty messengers.
And we still don’t have any worthy successor. In contrast to the pony express.