So many memories… Thanks !

Even though the data loss is a little sad (much time went into thoughtful comments now lost), it’s on version 0.18.4… Bugs are to be expected.

I don’t know whether this was caused by the timestamp issue mentioned by Penguin in the other thread about delays, but yeah, it’s obvious that the technology is not yet mature enough. Let alone it being suitable (alyaza mentioned the growth of storage space, which doesn’t even make sense when there is no data mining in place, since actual people pretty much never return to older posts)…

On topic, from the outside, the data loss, looks like a database rollback to a previous snapshot.

Anyway, I hope this doesn’t make you feel bad, you 've got a good thing going here, regardless of the technical issues, lemmy, or the fediverse as a whole.

At least, not at first. As the scandal heated up, EFF took an impassive stance. In a blog post, an EFF staffer named Donna Wentworth acknowledged that a contentious debate was brewing around Google’s new email service. But Wentworth took an optimistic wait-and-see attitude—and counseled EFF’s supporters to go and do likewise. “We’re still figuring that out,” she wrote of the privacy question, conceding that Google’s plans are “raising concerns about privacy” in some quarters. But mostly, she downplayed the issue, offering a “reassuring quote” from a Google executive about how the company wouldn’t keep record of keywords that appeared in emails. Keywords? That seemed very much like a moot point, given that the company had the entire emails in their possession and, according to the contract required to sign up, could do whatever it wanted with the information those emails contained. EFF continued to talk down the scandal and praised Google for being responsive to its critics, but the issue continued to snowball. A few weeks after Gmail’s official launch, California State Senator Liz Figueroa, whose district spanned a chunk of Silicon Valley, drafted a law aimed directly at Google’s emerging surveillance-based advertising business. Figueroa’s bill would have prohibited email providers like Google from reading or otherwise analyzing people’s emails for targeted ads unless they received affirmative opt-in consent from all parties involved in the conversation—a difficult-to-impossible requirement that would have effectively nipped Gmail’s business model in the bud. “Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers, and family members are just another direct marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa explained. “At minimum, before someone’s most intimate and private thoughts are converted into a direct marketing opportunity for Google, Google should get everyone’s informed consent.”

Google saw Figueroa’s bill as a direct threat. If it passed, it would set a precedent and perhaps launch a nationwide trend to regulate other parts of the company’s growing for-profit surveillance business model. So Google did what any other huge company caught in the crosshairs of a prospective regulatory crusade does in our political system: it mounted a furious and sleazy public relations counteroffensive.

Google’s senior executives may have been fond of repeating the company’s now quaint-sounding “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, but in legislative terms, they were making evil a cottage industry. First, they assembled a team of lobbyists to influence the media and put pressure on Figueroa. Sergey Brin paid her a personal visit. Google even called in the nation’s uber-wonk, Al Gore, who had signed on as one of the company’s shadow advisers. Like some kind of cyber-age mafia don, Gore called Figueroa in for a private meeting in his suite at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton to talk some sense into her.

And here’s where EFF showed its true colors. The group published a string of blog posts and communiqués that attacked Figueroa and her bill, painting her staff as ignorant and out of their depth. Leading the publicity charge was Wentworth, who, as it turned out, would jump ship the following year for a “strategic communications” position at Google. She called the proposed legislation “poorly conceived” and “anti-Gmail” (apparently already a self-evident epithet in EFF circles). She also trotted out an influential roster of EFF experts who argued that regulating Google wouldn’t remedy privacy issues online. What was really needed, these tech savants insisted, was a renewed initiative to strengthen and pass laws that restricted the government from spying on us. In other words, EFF had no problem with corporate surveillance: companies like Google were our friends and protectors. The government—that was the bad hombre here. Focus on it.

I don’t know whether it is illegal for someone to open a letter addressed to you or not, in the country you live, but this is pretty important. If the information presented here is accurate, this is not simply EFF focusing on the government, its EFF actively resisting similar rules to be applied on e-mail as those applied on regular mail. Would anyone use any of the non-electronic mail service providers or courier services if it was a given that for each piece of mail sent, there would be exactly one open and read, shared with multiple other parties besides the sender and receiver?

It seems to me that this is the whole point of this (quite long, but interesting) article and this instance probably illustrates it better than any other chosen to discuss in the article.

Ah, fellow runner…

Less dirty search (doesn’t even classify as quick), more recent, better documented, with some testing, without the console logs (lol what). Take a look.. There are actually quite few attempts, depending on what stack you are searching for and how you search.

Well, that’s just my experience with building software. Not sure if it has any educational value as such…

It’s pretty common for people who are not part of the design/implementation to underestimate the difficulty and the complexity, to mistake reluctance or delays as incompetence or indifference. It’s also quite common even for people who are part of the design/implementation to underestimate the complexity or already implemented assumptions that have to be adjusted, which almost always leads to defective software. Add to that the fact that it is an open source project currently at 0.18.4 version and you can explain all of the issues without attributing ill intend to anyone.

Getting nasty comments when you repeatedly point out that you are not familiar with the process would just be unfair. Besides, it’s the user experience (moderators/admins/hosts are users too) you are commenting on, making a completely valid point about the importance of moderation in building a community.

I really wish it wasn’t built on rust so I could actually be helpful :-/

A database that’s crummy (but functional) is an important issue, but one that seems like it can wait.

That’s often the problem with how software is perceived by a user. Simple functionality might introduce complexity in already existing functionality effectively breaking it at the scale it is supposed to support. The technical aspect of a piece of software will always seem secondary for the end user, regardless of the functionality it appears to be second to. That’s only logical. You don’t care about a certain metal’s properties when you buy a knife, you care about the kind of cuts it can perform.

My issue with the project is that it’s mostly written in a language that I am not familiar with, and much of the scale it’s built to support is over a protocol that is also new to me. I can’t really judge whether the issues (especially content removal and how actions are synchronized between separate federated instances) are a database issue, a protocol issue, a sub optimal approach to the complexity or even just doable in the current context.

Designing and implementing properly and fully working transparent software is always hard. And in new protocols and contexts is even more so.

You are correct though, these things are not important for the people who use it. What is important for the users is how the piece of software can, and if it can, allow for the use they want to make of it.

Well, I am sure many are tempted… I am waiting to see if a berson decides to carry the ring so I can offer my axe :p