Comment on Annual General Thread
Nath@aussie.zone 3 days agoI think the much larger immediate/medium term issue is the lack of time Nath and Lodion have had in recent months
Has this actually been an issue?
I like to think we’re pretty quick on the moderation stuff, our main problem is time zone related. People making reports or signing up early in the morning don’t usually get seen until after 7am WA time (9am for half the country).
Baku@aussie.zone 3 days ago
In my opinion, sometimes, yeah. I think you both do exceptionally well when it comes to report handling. I think Lodion has been handling the routine upgrades quite well, too. But when it comes to things like fixing problems, I think there’s been a lack of time investment put into fixing them.
The 2 things that come to mind were when the image proxying stuff was implemented and broke every single Imgur-hosted image on the site, it was a few weeks (might’ve even been over a month now that I think about it) before it was finally disabled. The other is from when the federation delays with LW were still present. Somebody developed a tool to implement activity batching (iirc) before it was implemented in Lemmy. But Lodion responded that they didn’t have the time to implement it.
There was also the time somebody proposed a migration tool to help people migrate from Reddit. To be fair, I do think the time required to vet it for potential security issues, and manage it, would’ve been worth more than the benefits anybody would receive from it. Perhaps that’s true for the batching tool, too, but I personally would place being able to see and interact with like 90% of Lemmy content fairly high up on the list of priorities. Double tbf: I don’t think Lodion actually said they didn’t want this because of the time investment required. I can’t remember exactly what the response was, but I’m pretty sure it was something along the lines of not being interested in managing any additional software.
I don’t mean this to sound like I’m bashing either of you, or AZ in general, I just wanted to share my perspective, since you asked.
Nath@aussie.zone 2 days ago
I’ll pay the imgur thing. It happened during school holidays and we went away for the (WA) long weekend in there as well.
I did have a shot at looking into it, but didn’t try very hard. I didn’t really prioritise it, because it only seemed to affect thumbnails and even then, it wasn’t consistent. I didn’t see it as that big of an issue.
The lemmy.world lag drama was more nuanced. It’s not a time issue, rather the precedent that one would require. We would have needed to spin up a new server somewhere close to lemmy.world in Finland, batch their feed and send it home. All for an issue with one remote instance that the Lemmy devs said was about to be fixed.
We didn’t want to eat into the finances for a temporary problem. Had we known in May that it would take until November to resolve, we may have made a different call. But the point is that one wasn’t a time problem.
Baku@aussie.zone 2 days ago
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I do politely disagree with the statement it wasn’t that big of an issue, as from what I could see, it completely prevented every Imgur image post from loading, thumbnail or not. Perhaps you mean the pictrs troubles (which are still intermittently happening, but primarily affect thumbnails and although annoying aren’t dire)?
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but Lodion specifically mentioned it was a time not financial problem when asked 3 months ago. I’m pretty sure there was a similar response when it was asked previously, as well
lodion@aussie.zone 2 days ago
When the LW lag issue was previously discussed, my main constraint was (and still is) time. Longer term it would have been a financial concern.
Either way, the issue has cleared up now due to a number of factors, none of which required time or finances on our part. I call that a win.
Worth noting, LW have still not upgraded their instance to the version that introduced multiple sending threads to a remote instance. If their volume of traffic were to increase substantially again, we could “lag” again.