Oh I thought you were asking what I meant. “The new Presidency will absolutely spin and use this event.” and then “Yes the system is broken but the optics here look REALLY bad.”

The reasoning doesn’t even matter anymore, bc it’s already done. I was talking about the fall-out. Centrists who aren’t paying attention won’t care about reasons anyway.

But if you want to get into it, it sounds like it would be a cost-to-benefit trade-off, e.g. if 16 months in minimum security prison, maybe able to just do a house arrest situation (didn’t they do that for Roger Stone?), then that’s one thing. As people are saying here elsewhere in the comments, “hunter filled out a form wrong” - which sounds like the penalty for that would be super low? But perhaps I’m missing something.

And some people consider principles to be quite important. Arguably it was the lack of enticement to vote Democrat that led to Trump winning the Presidency even?

Though anyway, I’m not trying to “both sides” this - I consider the matter already settled and done, and again was talking purely about the fall-out i.e. what happens next?

Ofc, but that’s more evidence of Trump doing whatever - whereas now they have something to point to in order to claim “bOtH siDeS”, which even if only 5% true / 95% false, can nonetheless work on a centrist who isn’t paying attention. And since the popular vote means nothing and those people control the entire outcome of every election, that could end up being highly impactful, e.g. in an upcoming House or Senate race where it might flip a seat towards Republicans that would otherwise have gone to Democrats.

They will spin it regardless:-P.

Not everyone seems to be agreeing that this is bad.

Yes the system is broken but the optics here look REALLY bad.

I liken it to what happened to the post office: first they shoot it in the leg, then blame it for being slow, then move to kill it off, citing how poor its performance is and thus deserving of blame and yeah sure “that” is why it must be killed off.

Now they have that much more support to kill off the DOJ - b/c despite how the President can do whatever he wants, now the previous President also did whatever he wants too (not really but again, optics, especially to those who will refuse to dig deeper into learning about something, even prior to showing up with a gun to help “defend democracy”).

Yes but now it will be that much more difficult to fight against it - assuming anyone even tries.

Hunter himself pleaded guilty, and this pardon is prior to sentencing (there are reasons for such obviously), and the justification is not that he is innocent, but that people who commit this crime usually are punished in a civil rather than criminal manner. Plus Biden seemed to be firm that he would never do this, until then he changed his mind and did - which on top of “DOJ bad” adds a measure of “President can do however he pleases”. Especially for people who aren’t paying attention, these are powerful symbols.

Conservatives were going to try, and who are we kidding almost certainly will have succeeded (definitely eventually anyway, even if heavy pushback might have lengthened the timetable more than they would have preferred), but their chances of succeeding right away are now higher than they were last week.

I wonder what the alternative would have been - 16 months in jail for the crimes he committed (that was only for one of the two though), vs. what now that will shake the foundation of our nation?

The new Presidency will absolutely spin and use this event.

…in other words she would fit in perfectly?

Jon Stewart

Oh yes, totally agreed there, I just presumed that such would most naturally arise from inside the USA itself. Then again, isn’t feddit.uk based in Germany? All it would take would be for someone to start it up, and begin attracting new users to it - though neither of those are small tasks, even if it could share hardware with another instance, such as feddit.uk? So if Discuss.Online were to step up instead, that does seem wonderful news!:-D

Ah, so is this what happened to lemmy.cafe?

And will Lemmy.World wait until that is fixed do you know? MrKaplan said perhaps a week ago that they were not ready to announce any plans, but perhaps you’ve heard something since then. I don’t know how stable 0.19.6 itself is in that case, or if they need to first wait until 0.19.8 and then wait further for the bugs in it, like 0.19.7 (and 0.19.6 too), to be discovered and patched.

Edit: in any case, thanks for sharing!:-)

By the way, Piefed does not pull in remote communities by default. It only does it once a local user subscribes. And that’s why a lot of them are missing on my own instance.

Oh yes absolutely - and Lemmy is the same way, so this too is not something specific to PieFed. For instance, that post I mentioned previously where my vote counts are all over the place, when viewed from StarTrek.Website has zero comment associated with it, and no upvotes beyond the default - and I have another post that is the same way, though it seems like later that same day someone subscribed and from that point onwards the community starts to have comments and some of the votes seen from other instances.

Or perhaps it is that these posts were locked somehow / for some reason? Which looks to be accidental from a new, inexperienced moderator in this brand-new community, and it was reversed a couple of days later - although that fact again depends on where you look. With an account at StarTrek.Website, I look at the post moderation history and it says that it is still locked: https://startrek.website/modlog?postId=16510256. However, with an account on DiscussOnline (substitute with whatever other alt you may have - hendrik@lemmy.ml?) I see that not only was it unlocked, but that unlock event happened 7 days ago: https://discuss.online/modlog?postId=13575162.

Even so, the post when viewed from DiscussOnline shows 98 upvotes and 8 comments, but when viewed from Lemmy.World (where the !tech_memes@lemmy.world community is located) it shows 191 upvotes and 9 comments (or I think it’s 193 upvotes and 2 downvotes, but the web UI no longer shows those individually, unless you jump through many many, undocumented, hoops - e.g. I think I can see those broken down into their individual components on a mobile device in Firefox, possibly solely when viewing a individual users list of posts but not when looking at a post directly or in the standard community view, and definitely you cannot see this breakdown from either Chrome or Firefox on a desktop, etc.). And since it has been 7+ days, this is now enshrined in stone, and we can be confident that having not caught up by now, it never will. A decade from now, if e.g. DiscussOnline is still with us, it will show this post as having 98 upvotes rather than the true value of 193, and StarTrekOnline will still show the default upvotes=1 and no comments, thus providing 3 different stories for this same identical post, depending on how you try to view it - and only one of those stories being explanable by the fact that nobody on StarTrek.Website had subscribed to the community yet (MAYBE, b/c there are 2 other posts that are even older in that community, which have +1 upvote added!? so perhaps this is a complex mixture of that + the locking effect, with the unlock action having not been propagated correctly).

The above stories reveal - federation is NOTHING AT ALL LIKE EMAIL. In the latter, the message either gets passed or it does not, whereas in federation, you can see partial messages as I’ve shown. And this has not even begun to delve into the variety of defederations that further complicate any mess - especially with a unidirectional defederation where one account can talk to someone on a server that has defederated from them, though the recipient will never be alerted to that fact nor have the capability to respond. Thus it is my opinion that trying to fit the square peg into the circular hole is never going to work - the email analogy is hopelessly simplified, so much so that as soon as users begin to encounter such complexities when they make their posts, especially the content creator types that we very much want to come here, they may outright leave, and moreover be very vocal about how we are not what was promised to them. So while we could say “it’s a little bit like sending email”, I don’t think we should push too hard on that avenue, making it sound so simple, b/c it’s really not!

Okay… weird hill to die on but you do you I guess!? :-P

I get the age requirement - as you say it makes sense - though it makes less sense why it isn’t up to date information. Anyway regardless of the why factor it helps me understand where people are coming from when THAT is what they see, which is different than what I do, or what I would see if I personally (who would use DDG rather than Google) would see if trying to look up such a thing today.

I also get why they would want to see an example of a working Lemmy instance, before looking at a website called “join Lemmy” - they aren’t interested yet in JOINING Lemmy, or information related to that, until they have seen what(ever) Lemmy IS first.

One correction: lemmy.ml has now fallen to fifth place in terms of MAUs (Monthly Active Users), with only 2165 compared to Lemmy.World’s whipping 17195. The second place is lemmynsfw.com with 3288, so definitely a steep drop-off from the #1 spot to all others, then #3 lemm.ee with 2996 and #4 sh.itjust.works with 2392. So even just with respect to these top 5 servers alone, ignoring the entire rest of the Fediverse, lemmy.ml makes up at most 7.7% of the Fediverse, which falls further behind with each server added to the consideration (including the one I am on now:-).

I sorta get the historical argument, but isn’t that a bit like saying that an actor is alive bc at one point they were, despite how they are currently dead? Or saying that Russia has not invaded Ukraine, bc at one point that may have been true, though it has not remained true for quite a number of years now. Or saying that Nixon is the President of the United States of America, bc at one point that was legitimately a true fact (yet is not a current one). Google results just seem so hopelessly wrong these days, telling people to put razor blades into their pizza and the like, and that if you stand more than 6 feet away from a nuclear blast you’ll be fine to survive it safely. There are REASONS for all of how those answers came about, but it definitely highlights how they - and therefore by extension Google results (tbf the AI ones in those latter cases) - are incorrect. But that is what mainstream normies are most likely to use regardless? (Even if they ignore the AI garbage)

Also, those instances sorta are interchangeable?:-P Somewhat at least, which is by design of the ActivityPub Protocol that anywhere you are, you can access mostly the same content. That said, I like where you are going with that: in one sense they are, if not “the same” then at least they are interconnected, yet in another sense they each have a distinctiveness to them, with unique local content (which if marked “local-only” cannot be accessed from the outside, without an account on that specific instance) making them different from all others. And distinct admin+moderation practices, and account creation procedures, etc.

Less like email and more like a fleet of pirate/free trader ships each passing their messages to all of the others (excepting defederations), but remaining distinctive entities unto themselves with their own flairs and styles. And anyone can spin up their own ship and tap onto the Fediverse network to become one of them.

Yes often I’ve chased it down to some small degree. The one that Rimu messaged me was near a time of great instability on piefed.social and I got a bunch of gateway errors even so much as trying to reach it as a user (having nothing to do with posting I mean). This instance has calmed down a ton since then and works perfectly these days, but things happen from time to time. Likewise the incident with StarTrek.Website that I mentioned and provided a link describing more.

Other occurrences have still other causes - e.g. a few of them in one community seems to have been due to my posts getting “locked”. I have no idea why - perhaps the new mod was just fat-fingering the button? I did not ask. But now the vote counts vary GREATLY (192 vs. 183 vs. 98 vs. 0 etc.) depending on which instance you view it from. If you want to test for yourself, a good one to use is https://piefed.social/post/330559 - though I notice that (fairly recently created) community !tech_memes@lemmy.world does not appear at all on your instance.

The primary cause though was a limitation in how the ActivityPub protocol was implemented in the Lemmy codebase, and not having anticipated that ~80% of the entire Lemmy-based Fediverse would concentrate itself onto a single server, Lemmy.World. So how it works is that any “action” - a post, a comment, an upvote or downvote - will be federated out to all the other instances world-wide at a rate of 1 per second. However, if the ping from the other servers to Lemmy.World is itself a significant approximation of that, then the list of actions to be federated will fall behind and take longer to catch up. Eventually after more than a week it gives up entirely, but in the meantime an action can be delayed for days. Poor Aussie.Zone - geographically distant from the EU - has been really having a hard time of it ( https://aussie.zone/post/13429731 ).

Fortunately this problem has already been fixed in the Lemmy codebase by allowing multiple actions to be sent in parallel (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623) - however, what causes the continued problems nowadays is the fact that Lemmy.World is still awaiting that upgrade to 0.19.6 to make use of that change in the codebase (release notes) (actually now 0.19.7 is already out too, having come less than a week after the former, and representing just a few bugfixes, release notes). When Lemmy.World upgrades to one of those, a good deal of these systemic issues should calm down, by a GREAT deal, if not entirely.

Afaik, there is nothing particularly special about instances running PieFed having troubles connecting to any Lemmy instances. In fact it seems rather stable compared to many (even most!) others - particularly StarTrek.Website that has poor uptime. In fact, https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list reports that piefed.social has a remarkable uptime rate of 99.89, which I very much believe, compared to the aforementioned StarTrek.Website’s rate of 98.20, although a year ago when I left it it must have been significantly poorer b/c it would be down for days sometimes, and every single action took like a minute sometimes, back then. Your own instance reports 98.60 - does that sound right?

Rather, it is Lemmy instances - particularly smaller ones (e.g. https://lemmings.world/post/14171987) - having trouble federating specifically with Lemmy.World.

And then recently there were a bunch of instances having troubles connecting to lemmy.ml too (https://lemmy.world/post/22196027) - though this one is more expected as that one is administered by the developers of the Lemmy codebase, and thus that is the place where they test out all of their new code in beta, prior to deploying it across the entire Fediverse. Sometimes that leads to some REALLY odd behaviors, such as entries disappearing from modlog files that were extremely concerning to people, but it is par for the course with that highly special instance, which is unique in its manner.

Edit: ah and I neglected to answer one of your questions: as you said, the way to tell if something federated properly or not is to check the instance - specifically the one hosting the community that you are sending it to. So e.g. to check a post to !tenforward@lemmy.world, I would visit Lemmy.World. If it is there but not on your home instance, then at least that particular message packet got sent, even if the message packet from Lemmy.World to your instance got lost or fell behind in its processing backlog somehow.

I am more fearful that as the USA grows more towards fascism that any USA-based instance may become less stable. e.g. if Project 2025 really does outlaw porn, can all of Lemmy be labelled as “porn” due to the presence of a NSFW post or two, and thereby be taken down? Perhaps people wanting to be admins can volunteer their time to help out other instances across the world without owning any instances within the USA borders? Though the need to have spaces where left-leaning people can communicate with one another will grow all the more as a result.

Almost every single one of my posts has had major issues. Even those from other instances. e.g. Rimu messaged me about this one that did not federate for 2-3 days, and consequently was seen by very few people. And here’s one from a difference instance that made it to its destination on !tenforward@lemmy.world, but from its originating server I could see none of the comments, and had to respond from a third account involved in that 3-way attempt at communication. (a post talking about such federation issues on that same server) So to be very clear, I am not saying that instances running PieFed software are having issues, but more that the issues are with Lemmy regardless of software type run.

Ironically it is often that way with Lemmy as well, outside of Lemmy.World. You write up a post, maybe it makes it to its destination, maybe it does not (for several days, after which point extremely few people will see it when it suddenly appears, but down among the older content no longer listed as “new”), maybe people write comments into it, maybe they don’t but who even knows if you aren’t able to see any of them to be able to respond.

This is definitely a monthly or almost weekly occurrence, even if not quite a daily one, though it depends strongly on what instance you are on.

Also, whether it makes it to the destination or not depends on which server you try to view it from.

And I haven’t even begun to start into the defederation artifacts yet!?