A year ago there were a bunch of new accounts posting random crap in PieFed, often using the same IP address. Turned out they were from a course. The professor had spoken to me about it a few weeks earlier but I had no idea the students would behave that weirdly.

A few weeks ago, we started noticing a number of applications on pixelfed.ca, where the user would say that they needed to register for a course. I don’t have full confirmation, but I’m fairly certain that this is a legitimate wave of signups from students at a Canadian university.

I’m sharing this post for a few reasons:

1. I thought it was neat

Personally, I’m excited that people are trying out Pixelfed and using it in coursework like this. If you are one of the students, now seeing this post, welcome! :) I hope that the project goes well, and that you have a pleasant experience on the platform. Feel free to share any and all feedback.

2. Some of the posts may look like spam at first

You might be seeing similar looking posts from different accounts on your feed. My guess is that the course has specific requirements and example templates. However, there’s also plenty of real content (ex. artwork, photography, etc.), so I don’t think it’s going to be disruptive

3. Please report anything that seems off

As always, you can report inappropriate content through the UI. For urgent issues, please email us at support@pixelfed.ca. You can also DM admin@lemmy.ca as there is overlap with our Pixelfed and Lemmy team members.

"Ah, yes, we have a generational game studio whose history includes several near genre-defining titles. We should get overly involved in their plans and then close the entire studio when that doesn't help"

(RIP BioWare)

"Ah, yes, we have a generational game studio whose history includes several near genre-defining titles. We should get overly involved in their plans and then close the entire studio when that doesn't help"

(RIP BioWare)

So Wordpress dot com was down for a bit (presumably due to PHP-pocalypse) and when my site came back it seems to be pointing all to the staging server for all the CSS, which causes CORS/cross-site loading issues. Lovely.

Listening to customers? Heeding advice from long-time employees who understand your products?

Fuck it, AI CHATBOTS AND BETTING MARKET INTEGRATIONS LETS GOOOOO

@dangillmor this guy is so far beyond having to go

Just begging for executives to once, ever, think.

I get that a lot of decisions are made as sacrifices to the Line Which Must Go Up, but in my experience, tech execs are *genuinely clueless* and just rely on the giant piles of money to fix the problems they create

Posts deleted from Google support forum

Posts deleted from Google support forum

I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.

This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.