Like helping to find a bug, discussing about how to setup an application for a certain use case or anything like that? Answering questions on Stack overflow is an example but is that the best way?

Generally the best way to help out is to do a thing that’s needed and that you can figure out how to do. Your list includes a bunch of good options, and I’ve been thanked for doing all those things at one point or another. Some common growth paths include:

1. Using the software
2. Encountering bugs, problems, or small opportunities for improvement.
3. Discussing those informally in forums and helping people find workarounds.
4. Identifying some of those issues as common things other things experience as well, so filing bugs for them with clear explanations and links to related forum discussions.
5. Reading source code to better understand bugs.
6. Discussing potential fixes in developer bug threads (or in GitHub or whatever).
7. Submitting small fixes for simple bugs as pull requests.

Another path might be:

1. Using the software and reading forums/docs for help.
2. Answering basic questions on forums, looking to old threads and relevant docs.
3. Learning about common questions.
4. Writing blogs or forum posts about common questions.
5. Submitting improvements to official docs to clarify common areas of confusion.

There are other paths as well, the main thing is to use a thing so you learn about it and then use that knowledge to make it a little easier for the next person. Good luck!

I don’t think titles directly transfer between companies, and yet the industry allows it. It’s a very useful tool for advancement.

This may be true on some corners of the industry, but at the more competitive end (both in terms of competitive pay, and a competitive pool of candidates)… I believe it’s common to relevel on hire. I’ve seen folks go from director to senior and from senior to junior at my org. The candidates being offered those seemingly big “demotions” often seem to be somewhere between unphased and enthusiastic about the change, presumably because the compensation package we offer at the lower level beats what they were getting with an inflated title and because they know their inflated title is nonsense and they’re frustrated with the other aspects of organizational dysfunction that accompany title inflation at their current company.

What you say is real, and sometimes a promotion in one org can help bridge you into an org that would have been hard to get hired into as a junior, or harder to get promoted in. It’s not without risk though. All things being equal, I’d much rather spend my time working on a strong team and learning a lot and being challenged than to be in a weaker org that’s handing out inflated titles. Getting gud isn’t a guarantee of advancement, but it’s at least as reliable over the long haul as title inflation.

And just today with a comment by a world admin! Hopefully they’ll get it sorted soon.

I’m mostly in the pro-written word camp myself, but I have sought out video tutorials in cases where written docs seem to assume something I don’t know. When I’m learning something new, a written doc might have a 3-word throwaway clause like “… add a user and then…”. But I’ve never added a user and don’t know how. If it’s niche open-source software with a small dev team, this may not be covered in the docs either. I’ll go fishing for videos and just seeing that they go to a web-ui or config-file or whatever sets me on the path to figure out the rest myself.

That is to say, video content that shows someone doing a thing successfully often includes unspoken visual information that the author doesn’t necessarily value or even realize is being communicated. But the need to do the thing successfully on-screen involves documenting many small/easy factoids that can easily trip someone inexperienced up for hours.

I’m as annoyed as anyone when I want reference material and find only videos, and I generally prefer written tutorials as well. But sometimes a video tutorial is the thing that gets me oriented enough to understand the written worthy I wasn’t ready to process previously.

Edit: The ubiquity of video material probably has little to do with it’s usefulness though, and everything to do with how easy it is to monetize on YouTube.

… advertisement and push they did on sites like reddit…

The lemmy world admins advertised on Reddit? Can you link an example?

… their listing on join-lemmy.org…

Until recently EVERY lemmy instance was listed on join-lemmy.

And with the name Lemmy.world they did nothing to dissuade anyone from thinking that.

They run a family of servers under the world tld, including at least mastodon, lemmy, and calckey. They’re all named similarly.

I also saw nothing from .world not claiming to be the bigger instance(super lemmy)

They ARE the biggest instance, but that happened organically. It’s not based on any marketing claims from the admin team about being a flagship/super/mega/whatever instance. People just joined, and the admins didn’t stop them (nor should they). It’s not a conspiracy to take over lemmy. It’s just an instance that… until recently… happened to work pretty well when some were struggling.

I think the issue is that .world has put itself forward as some sort of super lemmy.

Citation needed. All the admins of lemmy world ever purported to do was host a well-run general-purpose (aka not topic-oriented) lemmy instance. It was and remains that, and part of being a well-run general purpose instance is managing legal risk when a small subset of the community generates an outsized portion of it.

Being well run meant that they scaled up and remained operational during the first reddit migration wave. People appreciated that, but continuing to function does not amount to a declaration of being a super lemmy.

World also has kept signups open through good times, and more recently bad. Other instances at various times shut down signups or put irritating steps and purity tests along the way. Keeping signups open is a pretty bare-minimum bar for running a service though, it is again not a declaration of being a super-lemmy.

Essentially lemmy world just… kept working (until recently when it has done a pretty poor job of that). I dunno where you found a declaration that lemmy world is a super-lemmy, but it’s not coming from the lemmy world admins, it’s likely randos spouting off.

Lemmy.world has been under repeated attack recently though, and the behaviors you’ve described match what I see when th service is down. You can see current status and the history of frequent incidents at https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/.

To relate to your statement about what fails and how, I can say I’ve seen the failure-modes change as they adapt the setup, and it’s a more complex stack than other lemmy instances in order to deal with the attacks and large scale. It degrades in complex ways that are hard to fully reason about unless you’re pretty deeply familiar with how things are out together.

I suspect you’re seeing a combination of “lemmy world is broken sometimes”, “Cloudflare gives weird errors sometimes”, and “clients cache things or degrade to unauthenticated connections sometimes”. But in any case, seeing lemmy.world be flaky is not weird, it’s having a heckuva time.

It’s at mastodon.world. Check the lemmy.world sidebar, it states that the servers are run by the same team and share some infra, including that email address.

Edit: My bad, the sidebar suggests emailing at lemmy.world, I misremembered or it’s been updated.

It’s not guaranteed that every federated app integrates with every other federated app in a particularly useful way. You kind of need to take it on an app by app basis:

• Kbin and lemmy integrate very well. “Magazines” on kbin show up as communities in lemmy. You have almost certainly already read and responded to posts and comments from kbin users, and you may have subscribed to communities on kbin.social, the largest kbin instance. Interacting between the two is pretty much seamless.
• Mastodon and Lemmy integrate, but less completely. If you’ve seen a post full of #hashtags and with an @thecommunity@instance mention, that’s probably from a mastodon user. I’m not sure how a lemmy user can initiate contact with a mastodon user, but a mastodon user can at-mention a lemmy community as if it were a mastodon user and doing that will create a lemmy post. Comments on the lemmy post look like replies to the mastodon toot.

Other fediverse projects will interact in varying specific ways, and you need to figure each pair out individually.

It wasn’t a meme yet? So like… 30+ years ago?

1. The phrase hadn’t been coined yet in 1993.
2. I said what I said.

… since I moved from OS/2 in I think 1996 or so.

Quitters never win. Warp is the OS of the future, we just haven’t gotten there yet.

I stand by the meme even if I can’t stand by the statistics in it.

Fwiw I’m in it too. I’m not going to say what year was the year of Linux on the desktop for me, but it wasn’t a meme yet. And I’ve continuously run an actively used Linux desktop (or mostly laptop) since, often at work but always at home. I unironically prefer it to Windows and Mac, which I also also daily drive and consider to be worse in most ways that matter to me.

I think desktop Linux gamers are right to cheer for the Steamdeck, as its success translates quite directly to an improved gaming experience on desktop Linux. So yeah, the reason this meme is so clear to me is because I see it in the mirror each morning.

This, but desktop linux users are on the step for 193rd place while excitedly screaming and holding a third-place sign. Steamdeck users are on the 3rd-place step while calmly playing their deck.

The earth and sun and milky way are temporary. Like these things, the Beehaw defederation is ongoing and has no predetermined end.

I don’t think it is more complicated than, e.g a VPS provider or a SaaS platform and a customer that wants to have run a server online or a managed application.

That’s a very reasonable comparison, but to me the more relevant comparison is that of creating a commercial social media account or standard fediverse account today. This is much less accessible to users than that process, and also much more demanding on server admins.

I’d certainly be overjoyed to learn that I’m wrong and for this to revolutionize account mobility. But I don’t see volunteer server admins lining up to facilitate DNS delegation for fun or users lining up to pay VPS prices for commercial hosting of their own social media domain. The bar for simplicity and usability for me is quite a lot higher than I see this sort of approach evolving to provide.

Fair enough. The level of close coordination required between takahe server admins and domain owners seems to make domain migration at-scale somewhere between very expensive and simply prohibitive relative to self-service account sign up though. And I’m not sure I see a clear path to resolving that issue, though it’s certainly an interesting project even if it can’t deliver domain mobility at scale.

If you are not happy with the server, you just move to a different service and get your domain to point to the new server.

I’m just learning about takahe now, but it very much looks like domains are the remit of server admins, not users. Setting up a domain appears to require admin-privileges on the computer running takahe, not something that an individual user or non-admin group of users can do. So it seems to me that takahe doesn’t facilitate users controlling domains and improving mobility of domains between different servers controlled by different admins, but rather appears to be a tool for a given admin-team to segment their users and move them around among the group of servers they control.

I could very much be missing something here, this doesn’t seem to be a scalable approach to server mobility or a way to extricate yourself from an admin team you’re in conflict with.

I read the design notes and found them pretty interesting even though I haven’t really been pining for a faster linker: https://github.com/rui314/mold/blob/main/docs/design.md

I thought that was the first rule of rendering web content? Or was it protocol parsers?

I remember, it was first rule of video game character creation screens: