The name of the function, what goes in and what goes out in most cases should be enough to get a good idea on what the function does.

It also helps to make a diagram of how everything ties together. Just boxes and arrows is enough.

When writing your own code, it takes a bit of experience to know when to put something in its own function. It’s very obvious when you’re replicating code. It’s also very common to cut things up when a function gets too big. Look for bits of functionality that you can give a good name.

I can strongly recommend the SponsorBlock extention (also available in revanched).

I always write it as a select, before turning it into a delete or update. I have burned myself too often already.

With Influx 3 the preferred language is gonna be their SQL dialect. Flux is on its way out and I suspect it will get deprecated in the near future. Flux saw very slow adoption and SQL can do everything as well.

The one that blew my mind is that plate tectonics is only a widely accepted theory since the 70s.

They’re nice if they also migrate your db schema. That way you define your schema once and use it both to setup your db and interact with it via code. I do write raw sql for more complex queries, e.g. when there’s recursion.

I was big into downloading before streaming services were a thing. Music streaming is one of the few services that’s totally worth my money: no hassle and I rarely have to resort to other platforms to find what I want (very different from video streaming, which totally sucks when it comes to that).

Lemmy devs expressed in an AMA that Liberapay is the preferred method of donation.

One you don’t wanna join ;) (Google). I’m still on the free tier of what’s now Workspace and intent to move, but I’m dreading the work that comes with it.

A year or so ago Google almost killed the free tier (look up gsuite legacy if you want to know more). Back then I prepared to move away and settled on Zoho as my replacement, but in the end Google responded to the community’s backlash and kept the free tier free for personal use (although there are some other restrictions put in place, so eventually a move is inevitable). Zoho might also give you the features you want.

I use my own domain and have support for aliases and also have a catch all. No need to selfhost for that.

I would not recommend running your own email server. Major email providers like gmail only accept email from servers that have all kinds of measures in place to make them as trustworthy as possible. That’s hard and probably not possible on a home internet connection.

Filtering incoming spam is also a pain in the ass.

It’s nice as an exercise to learn how email works, but I would not rely on it.

Thanks for the hard work. I’ve cancelled my Patreon and switched to Liberapay.

Imo the fediverse should not try to compete with the big commercial networks on their terms. It will be much healthier when it grows slow and steady with people who want to be here because it is the fediverse. A place of freedom and lack of controlling evil players who will use your data to control your behavior (to get more ad revenue or worse, to make you act against your best interests, such as happened on facebook with Cambridge Analytica).

We’re not gonna win from big dollars and vested interests. Let’s not play their game. Let them play their game and let us be a safe haven for anyone who is done with being a pawn in that game.

The fediverse is already a really nice place to be. You don’t need 100s of millions of users to have the network effect that creates a successful platform. We’ve already reached that critical mass.

NLnet already sponsors the development of Lemmy. They donate money when certain roadmap items are achieved (which has slowed down due to the efforts to make Lemmy scale). NLnet sponsors organizations and people that contribute to an open information society.

Places like Lemmy are not just shit posting. Just look at the immense value of the content at reddit. Google became so useless when the blackout happened. LLMs like GPT4 are trained for a large part on this human generated content. It’s absolutely vital that this information is not controlled by a handful large corporations as it is now. Federated social media could break this pattern and bring back a free and open internet.

Most importantly: Lemmy instances are not being run for profit. There is no need to make exorbitant amounts of money to pay shareholders. Right now it’s enough to cover hosting costs, in the future you probably want to be able to pay a couple of people as well.

Commercial instances are not off the table, but I hope we can avoid it. If it happens, I hope it will not be about profiting directly from the users, but instead through e.g. professional services. Imagine a company that hosts instances for entities that are willing to pay (I see this especially in the microblogging/Mastodon space, where for instance governments want to run their own instance).

Please just donate… No need to invite ads here.