Done. Update post coming shortly.

Gonna assume this was a test post. It worked!

Oh wow, this seems like a fantastic addition. One of these days I really gotta switch from my decade old tmux workflow to zellij!

So there's two options (assuming /r/bevy even wants to consider migrating here):

1. We setup a dedicated Bevy community
2. /r/bevy could potentially use the existing Rust: Game Development community we have here

I don't really have preference either way. I do think that project-specific communities could certainly become a thing if people prefer to keep discussions laser focused.

And yeah, unfortunately I can't really make it free-for-all community creation simply because of potential DDOS/spam attacks and things rampantly becoming out of hand (part of the reason the instance is also application based).

I think TWiR can certainly belong in Rust: News along with any other relevant potentially recurring content (I'm thinking rustfmt, useful pkg update(s), news articles etc perhaps).

I've noticed its kinda challenging finding communities for folks and it's also kinda hard to make an actual announcement of sorts. I do, however, try to "pin" posts which I believe to be particularly important for the members to know. Honestly though, I too am figuring this out along with y'all :)

Their pricing and reputation is certainly good. However, it seems like they don't have simple full server snapshot support. I think that's mandatory at this point in case of potentially irrecoverable failures.

Sigh, I tried it one more time. Same problem. Downtime this time was probably < 5 mins though so hopefully not noticeable. I am wondering whether the database is in some bad shape (no idea why/how). I guess we wait and retry with 0.18.1.

Well, the lemmy container kept running into:

lemmy  | 2023-06-24T23:28:52.716586Z  INFO lemmy_server::code_migrations: Running apub_columns_2021_02_02
lemmy  | 2023-06-24T23:28:52.760510Z  INFO lemmy_server::code_migrations: Running instance_actor_2021_09_29
lemmy  | 2023-06-24T23:28:52.763723Z  INFO lemmy_server::code_migrations: Running regenerate_public_keys_2022_07_05
lemmy  | 2023-06-24T23:28:52.801409Z  INFO lemmy_server::code_migrations: Running initialize_local_site_2022_10_10
lemmy  | 2023-06-24T23:28:52.803303Z  INFO lemmy_server::code_migrations: No Local Site found, creating it.
lemmy  | thread 'main' panicked at 'couldnt create local user: DatabaseError(UniqueViolation, "duplicate key value violates unique constraint \"local_user_person_id_key\"")', crates/db_schema/src/impls/local_user.rs:157:8

despite the fact that:

lemmy=# select id, site_id from local_site;
 id | site_id
----+---------
  1 |       1
(1 row)

So you can see that it was unconditionally trying to create a local_site and running into a DB constraint error. I further narrowed it down to this piece of code:

///
/// If a site already exists, the DB migration should generate a local_site row.
/// This will only be run for brand new sites.
async fn initialize_local_site_2022_10_10(
  pool: &DbPool,
  settings: &Settings,
) -> Result<(), LemmyError> {
  info!("Running initialize_local_site_2022_10_10");

  // Check to see if local_site exists
  if LocalSite::read(pool).await.is_ok() {
    return Ok(());
  }
  info!("No Local Site found, creating it.");

At this point I gave up because I couldn't really tell why LocalSite::read(pool).await.is_ok() was, well...not ok.

Will you update to Lemmy 0.18.0 (announced today)? The new HTTP API is allegedly more lightweight.

Of course I will! I was just waiting for a few more instances to bump theirs before I update this one.

By the way, I updated my dark theme published here for lemmy-ui 0.18.0 :)

Most excellent, I have been using your CSS with Stylebot :) You could also submit a PR to lemmy-ui repo btw with your custom theme so it gets even easier for people to try.

I think it’s likely to spike again when the api goes dark

That's a fair point. I think I might bump up the specs of this instance over the weekend (will make an announcement prior).

I haven’t been back there, is any consensus forming regarding whether people will use /r/rust, !rust@lemmyrs.org, or !rust@programming.dev going forward?

I am still of the opinion that both can (and probably should) co-exist. This particular instance will always be Rust focused, federated and have rust dedicated micro-communities. Whether it continues to grow only time will tell I suppose.

I can somewhat relate. I mostly do something like this (instead of the exact dependency version):

chrono = {version = "0", features = ["serde"]}
clap = {version = "4", features = ["derive"]}
anyhow = "1"

I do, however, typically write application code instead of library, so it's probably less critical for me. Occasionally do run into dependency hell here and there, but nothing too bad so far!

Right, that's certainly possible. Is it enough for us to start thinking about de-federating, maybe? Arguably this has been true since forever on any public forum. I think what's needed is better mod tools on Lemmy in general.

Personally, I think it's best for us to be patient while things settle before we consider any action. FWIW, we don't see much incoming traffic here anyway since the subreddits started coming back online after the 48 hr blackout.

If things start getting out of hand and this instance starts getting bombarded with just bots/troll, we will likely have to consider de-federation (or some other alternative).

Hey, thanks for bringing this up. I completely agree that this is indeed something that we should discuss as a community. I haven't had the chance to make a thread about this yet, so we'll use this one :)

I have been keeping an eye on the de-federation of some instances but afaict the primary reason they did that was because of the open signup nature of those instances resulting in a flood of potential bot/troll accounts which the mods couldn't keep up with (understandably so). LemmyRS is (and probably will be in the foreseeable future) an application only instance. We just don't currently have the infrastructure or the manpower to deal with a completely open instance.

Any user who signs up using this instance presumably understands the target topic is Rust (and we have communities on this instance to cater to those users, so it's already pretty self-isolated in that sense). If someone wants to subscribe to communities on other federated instances they're completely open to do so. While things settle I think this approach should serve us well (please feel free to disagree and provide any counter arguments).

But again this isn't my unilateral decision, I would simply do what the users of this instance want as a group.

Makes sense, done.

Thank you, I love it! The contrast with your CSS is very nice. Also like the sticky navbar!

Just saw your Edit. Yeah, this was probably the first post I think. I wouldn't be here myself if things weren't as transparent as they could possibly be.

As for Hetzner, yeah I've used them in the past (they're great) but for initial setup, I felt that Vultr was probably just fine. That said, I'm definitely going to have to bump up the storage and RAM on this instance in the very near future, we're cutting it closer than I'd like, specifically:

df -h:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs            97M  1.7M   96M   2% /run
/dev/vda1        24G   15G  7.8G  65% /
tmpfs           485M     0  485M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            97M  4.0K   97M   1% /run/user/1002

free -m

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:             969         472          72         133         424         212
Swap:           2399         456        1943

I think a 2 tier bump to $24/month 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 5TB egress at Vultr might serve us for a decent amount of time. And it would probably still be cheaper than the cheapest Hetzner dedicated we could find. Maybe.

Agreed on the "bit early" part, disagree on the "split". As for traffic, maybe it comes, maybe it doesn't; can't really make a call on that yet. I feel it's better to do this now instead of when there's 1000+ members here (if ever).

I wouldn't necessarily label it as a "split" instead more like an organizational restructuring to keep things slightly more focused and on-topic. One can choose to "subscribe" to Rust Lang + Rust: Support but not to the other ones if they aren't interested for example.

I think I struggled at least a couple months before I even got the hang of Rust. Read "the book" several times, didn't help. Watched several videos, didn't help. What eventually clicked for me personally was learn rust with entirely too many linked lists, I think I have read that 20+ times (still visit it sometimes).

6 months into it, I started getting better at organizing code and thinking more in terms of a data-driven approach (structs and impls) vs abstraction based (class and methods).

Bottom line is, everyone has a different approach to learning with wildly different times it takes to absorb knowledge. As for whether it's worth, well, it's still a relatively young language (compared to C, python, erlang, java) so you're already early. Another decade and perhaps Rust becomes as universal as C is.

However, I still see the posts show on my homepage, and appear to be able to view and interact

It's quite likely that your subscribe went through, mind sharing your findings by looking at the network tab in developer console on your browser.

What does subscribe do? e.g. are my posts visible on lemmy.ml I’ve just tried posting from here and my posts are visible from there so what exactly changes once subscription completes?

It simply makes communities on other instances show up in your subscribed feed. Similar to how you join a subreddit (the difference on lemmy is that the subreddit aka community is hosted on a separate instance).

What’s the problem and how do we fix it? (Depending on the answer to #1 maybe the fix is just “ignore it”)

My suspicion is that its websocket related, I've seen similar behavior when testing locally. The best you can do is maybe browse github for potentially relevant issues and see if you can help, otherwise please just be patient while things get more stable :)

considering that it adds friction and delay to the registration process

Yeah, if I make it entirely open it would be very easy to DDOS the instance with bot accounts. Once I (and one mod for now) figure out the infrastructure, scaling, community management etc. I would certainly prefer it to be entirely open as well. It's just that things are in flux during this transition period.

This should help you get started:

• There's the umbrella: https://github.com/LemmyNet
• Backend: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
• Front-end: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui

A few things:

• Instances are like their own self-hosted Reddits with communities being the sub-reddits. We have (had?) r/python, r/rust, r/golang along with r/programming; we can do the same here with topic-focused instance (like this one). I can imagine there being instances like lemmygo.org, lemmypy.org etc if the Reddit exodus continues.
• You don't need multiple accounts to access communities (sub-reddits) from other instances (reddit). A single account on any instance allows you to access communities from any other instance. The UX/UI is a bit wonky, but it works.
• As @erlend_sh@lemmyrs.org pointed out, micro-communities like cli, wasm, networking etc can potentially become big enough and/or have specifics that are more suitable to exist on a topic-based instance.

Personally, I don't have any preference. I will simply subscribe to the community which is the most active on whichever instance.

Hey !meta@lemmyrs.org should be open now for non-admins to create posts. My apologies I had it setup for admin-only post creation on it earlier.

As for the logo, I was actually a bit concerned about it when setting this instance and communities up because I didn't quite know which icons were in public-domain for general consumption, so I picked the ones with the most permissive licenses I could find. Happy to change to whatever icon(s) the community desires as long as we don't use any icon with a strict license.

Err, agreed. Bad phrasing on my part. I do like the idea of inviting them to be here and participate in discussions.

There would certainly be public discussions and participation from other mod(s)/admin(s)/interested parties before any such decision is made.

I agree, many questions to answer (which is why I made the post :)).

Here we go:

Who is hosting/admining this right now? One of the r/rust mods? Or someone else?

Me, just a regular engineer, not a r/rust mod. I'm hosting this because:

• I like self-hosting and wanted to participate in the fediverse
• I write Rust professionally and very much enjoy the community around it but the recent Reddit fiasco made me realize that I need to do something about it

What would happen if this organisation went bad/went under? Would anyone be able to take back control?

By "this" you mean Nivenly? Yeah I don't know about that. I think it's best to have redundancy if we are to migrate entirely away from Reddit, presumably Nivenly takes care of that? Once I/others get in touch with them, we can answer this better.

What would happen if the current hoster/admin went AWOL/hit by a bus/etc? Is there anyone else (preferably in a separate country) with enough access to take over and sort things out?

So yeah, if I get hit by a bus, this instance will likely be dead as it stands right now. I'm working on potential mod/admin applications and will post something in the next couple days on some sort of streamlined public process so a few folks (other than myself and ideally in different time zones) can maintain the instance in my absence.

What would be gained from this? E.g. do they provide any specific services to the community?

Presumably:

• Transparency
• Governance
• Maintenance and uptime
• Server Costs(?)
• More outreach?

This was brought up in my DM. I thought rather than continue to discuss this in DMs it's probably best to gather public opinion, that's pretty much it.

Personally I'm neither for/against this and would prefer to leave it to community vote. But from the limited search I've done so far on Nivenly, Hackyderm; they do seem promising. Eventually it's up to the community to decide, I'm only facilitating the discussion while things are in flux.

I have been using Artix Linux for many years now. On laptops I prefer to use either Fedora or PopOs!

I'll certainly make a post detailing that in a day or two. Just have to be careful about regulations etc.

Currently we don't have anything setup (we're just too tiny right now). I'm talking to other instance admins about best practices around donations/tips.

I'm looking into Open Collective as the platform to accept donations at some point.

Looks like https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/146qxzn/building_a_better_rrust_together/jnrtsac/ sparked some incoming user activity.

Took a couple screenshots of the instance's stats:

• Containers:

• Host file system:

• vultr bandwidth:

Hey, thank you for volunteering! Yeah, we can figure out the mechanics of it at some point. I think we just need some redundancy, 3-5 folks who can manage in different time-zones would be ideal.

As for the time necessary to dedicate, it varies I would say and I can't really gauge it just yet. Some days even 5-10 minutes is enough to keep a cursory eye on things you know.

Dead cells by far!

In order of play time on the deck:

• Dead Cells
• Hades
• Katana Zero
• Hi-Fi Rush
• Neon White

I've added https://lemmyrs.org/c/support for largely the same reason :)

I’m yet to get my hands dirty with GATs, just haven’t had the opportunity yet. I typically write application code instead of building libraries so that’s partially the reason I suppose. One of these days though I’m sure I’ll get to it.

It’s promising that you were able to switch with relative ease, excellent work!

Hey! I recently made a post detailing the instance I run. Admittedly it's tiny compared to the big ones but I wanted to get something going :)

Borderlands series is pretty fun split screen!

If old.reddit.com gets taken down, I'm out for good.

As good as the fediverse is, there has to be a tremendous amount of work to make it easier for non-tech folks to participate. I am excited though, being here certainly feels like the good old simpler web.

Yeah, I know folks are struggling to find the communities on other instances. I posted https://lemmyrs.org/comment/3900 if it helps. Basically you start your search with the full URL, wait a second and then switch back to text search and it pops up magically.

The UX certainly needs some polish, but we'll get there :)

Okay, so it is definitely a little wonky but I was able to search for lemmyrs.org/c/rustlang from another instance.

I first had to paste the full url https://lemmyrs.org/c/rustlang in the search bar then click search a few times for it to actually show up.

I understand it's very annoying that it is this way but I'm hopeful that the experience will smooth out over time.