Total Annihilation… couldn’t get enough of it. Even playing strategy games today I desperately miss the elaborate control and mechanics of TA.

It’s restricted right now. Most recent post is 10 days ago.

The beehaw admin said, to grossly paraphrase, they don’t have enough admins to deal with the extra activity and they’re “mildly annoyed” that sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world have “open registration” policies as they feel it invites trolls and the like.

🤷

Edit: full post if you want to read it. I left out some stuff about ethos and spirit and stuff.

Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site.

…

Huffman acknowledged that if those users instead browsed with Reddit’s own app, it would shore up the company’s bottom line.

Hmm.

I’ve been using Linux since ~1996; I used to wonder about this a lot.

The tl;dr answer is, it’s too much effort only to solve the problem of making life easier for new users, and it can be a disservice to users in the long run.

As others have pointed out, there are limited GUI tools for common administration roles.

Power users are much, much faster at doing things via CLI. Most administrative tasks involve text file management and the UNIX userland is exceptional at processing text files.

A graphical tool would have to deal with evolving system software and APIs, meaning the GUI tool would be on constant outpatient care; this is counter to the UNIX philosophy which is to make software simple and well-defined such that it can be considered “done” and remain versatile and flexible enough to live for decades virtually unchanged.

It wouldn’t be that much easier for things like network rules unless a truly incredible UI was designed, and that would be a risk since the way that’s implemented at the system level is subject to change at any point. It’s hard enough keeping CLI userland tools in sync with the kernel as it is.

It would need to be adaptable to the ways different distributions do things. Administration on CentOS is not always the same as it is on Debian.

And ultimately, the longer a user spends depending on GUI tools, the longer it will take them to learn and become proficient with the CLI, which will always be a far more useful skill to have. You’ll never learn the innards of containers or VPS’ if you only know how to do things from the GUI.

I wouldn’t be so sure. I believe great managers could take it over and rescue it today, but they don’t have great managers, the place is run by idiots. It might survive in the manner Digg survived.

They just made it a lot harder to moderate by sparking an angry powder keg like they did, let alone killing all the mod tooling. That was better than what they’ve managed to produce in almost 20 years. They’ve also lost many of the moderators who weren’t doing it for the money (at least not reddit’s money). They can always hire new moderators, but that’s yet another expense on the earnings statement.

If they can get all the spam and hate posts under control it’s going to be a repost farm and OP will not surely deliver anymore.

From where I’m standing it appears they’ve been given an ultimatum by VC investors who are hellbent on selling whether they lose their asses at the bottom or not.

A dozen or two of the largest subs would be plenty.

Those subs required a huge effort to moderate before, but it’s going to be 10x worse now that every submission is going to be AI generated pictures of spez doing things to goats or something.

Has that happened with Mastodon?

Orgs spending volunteer money have to be careful, they have to allocate money to their stated causes or they could get in trouble. A Lemmy instance would have to coincide with their agenda.

A philanthropist can do what they want, but they could still attract criticism for not donating to world hunger or some more optics-friendly cause. They’d also probably end up with a fairly popular instance which would require effort spent on maintenance and moderation.

I think people who actually want to run instances will end up running them. I’m considering starting one. Some of those will end up running really good, stable and desirable instances which can then attract donations for the cause.

I joined reddit in 2007 but I’d been surfing it for a year or so already. Early reddit was amazing. There were no subreddits yet, which was fine, there weren’t that many users. The concept of subreddits was innovative when they introduced them, but once you could create your own it was pretty mind blowing.

I always felt like reddit was “hiding” from the common folk. It had a plain white background with default blue & purple links and it looked like someone’s personal project. Digg had lots of gradients and borders and glitz but reddit had a real “function over form” quality that really appealed to me as an engineer.

It makes me sad to think about how many terrible things it’s been put through by its dumb ding dong owners over the years.

Just a thought - you should wait until the blackout is over at least, those submissions aren’t accessible right now. After that, do it ASAP. Some communities are already permanently dark and more will be over time.

I’ve used a Python app called bdfr though not for the purposes of archiving an entire account. There are tutorials on how to do so out there if you search; perhaps there’s a more purpose-made tool.