• 2 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Very insightful look into the mechanisms of minimalist design and their shortcomings.

    Minimalism as a design trend dates back to the beginning of the last century, but you might have noticed that companies have extensively used minimalist principles in their product design in the past few years. Apple is especially known for this, but you see it everywhere nowadays. Cars, fridges, TVs… they are all stripped of any extravagant design features: fewer buttons, no ornaments, single colors, and so on. Even if you are not designer, you have probably noticed that in some way.







  • Matrix is also decentralized/federated, has encryption integrated into the protocol and enjoys a broad adoption and public support. It also has pretty good integration of bots and even other message protocol services like IRC via “bridges”. The chat clients are pretty good too; Element is pretty much available for every platform but there’s other one’s which are more focussed on Desktop or mobile usage, depending on how you primarily use it.



  • I’m pretty sure there is no particular reason why it’s done this way. It’s just the easiest method to coomunicate upvotes across different servers. There are already a lot of ideas for doing it differently or more efficient (e.g. vote aggregation) but that requires a more sophisticated architecture:

    • Vote aggregation also makes faking votes much more efficient and requires different detection methods. Of course, a spam server can also invent users or votes but it’s a bit more complicated.
    • Aggregation in any form can be hard to implement because it should be flexible enough to reduce load but not increase delay or make tracking a consistent state even harder. Finding the right configuration will be difficult and go through a lot of trial and error. Should be easier though now that more people are working on the code.
    • Keep in mind that Lemmy should also be able to communicate with other services across the Fediverse like Mastodon via ActivityPub. I’m not sure if there is something in the standard for message aggregation yet. It’s definitely being discussed because Mastodon, Pixelfed and Peertube all have or went thorugh the same growth problems as Lemmy in terms of scaling, spam and security concerns. If there’s a good solution it will likely come through the AP standard.