On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
I suppose this community is as good as any. But it’s difficult to talk in general about this as each fediverse app has different performance needs/characteristics, so I’m not sure if you can extrapolate anything in general. But perhaps?
Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral. So it’s good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years. I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer ‘hot’, and folded away … Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.
“New comments” sort helps with that
Well, that’s the nature of link aggregators. Lemmy’s and Reddit’s style is a link aggregator, not really what you would consider an old-fashioned forums. It’s a different sort of use case with different pros and cons. A con is that you don’t get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. A pro is that… you don’t get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. :P
“New comments” sort helps with that
Sort of, but doesn’t it just sort by the latest comment? I.e. any thread would be bumped to the top by a single comment? I might be wrong. But that makes it kind of less than ideal if true.
That’s indeed how it works (and that’s I was able to see those comments).
It works for me, how would you like to have it differently? IIRC on old school forums a single message would also bump the thread
Yes, but that doesn’t scale. If there are thousands of comments being submitted constantly, the All feed would just be a new page every time you refresh for the new comments sort. It would be chaotic.
It should instead be based on a recent rate of comments for instance. Much like normal votes but comments instead and not based on the age of the post.
Piefed partially solves that with multicommunities
That way you can follow your hobbies feeds, your tech feed, your art feed separately.
For All it would indeed be messy.
Yea it’s still only a partial solution. Even those feeds could get very active over time (we can hope 😅). The way Piefed implemented feeds is interesting but seems almost overengineered? Sharing feeds could have been done via a simple query parameter I feel like.