I looked around and struggled to find out what it does?

My guess would be that it notifies you of when new posts are made to communities you subscribe to. But that sounds like a lot, so I’m really not sure.

Otherwise, is it me or does the wording here not speak for itself?

  • Dave@lemmy.nz
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    3 months ago

    I had searched yesterday and couldn’t find it, but had another go and managed to find it.

    I also asked in the Matrix lemmy general chat but no one seemed to know. Might get an answer from a dev at some point but I’m beginning to suspect it does nothing anymore.

    • maegul (he/they)OP
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      3 months ago

      Well the error I got in the browser suggests it needs to be in a web socket session or something, so there’s a chance the underlying backend code is still around and functional.

      I’ve actually figured bringing the live updates thing back for temporary live chats could be an awesome feature.

      • Dave@lemmy.nz
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        3 months ago

        Having so many people permanently connected to the server wasn’t manageable for the early Lemmy software, and I doubt that has changed. WebSockets made more sense when Lemmy users were measured in the hundreds.

        The notifications were super annoying once the userbase started to take off!

        • maegul (he/they)OP
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          3 months ago

          Oh I know … I’m thinking of a feature where any community is allotted a certain amount of “live chat time” where they can run a websocket session for live chats. Presumably there’s a way to manage the resource overhead and get to a sweet spot. Plus, instead of updating everything, it’d only have to be comments in a single post.

          • Dave@lemmy.nz
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            3 months ago

            Oh I get what you mean now. Yeah, live threads are probably fine. There wouldn’t be the same overhead of every single user being permanently connected to the server, only the ones actually on the thread. So long as every thread wasn’t a live one it would probably be fine.

            To be fair, the existing polling solution might be able to be leveraged for this as well. I think it’s probably not so much a technical challenge as it is a nice to have feature when Lemmy doesn’t have a lot of must have features (though it’s improving).

            • maegul (he/they)OP
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              3 months ago

              Lemmy doesn’t have a lot of must have features (though it’s improving)

              Fair, though I’m increasingly thinking multi-communities are pretty much “must-have”

              • Dave@lemmy.nz
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                3 months ago

                It would be nice, but remember we are in a position where there is no way for a user to report something to admins. If someone sets up a community and puts illegal things in it, they can just quickly close the reports and they will disappear from the admins report view.

                Lemmy also saves images for thumbnails in full resolution, and has no clearing of this copy, meaning the image storage just grows and grows.

                Multi-communities are way down the list!

                • maegul (he/they)OP
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                  3 months ago

                  Fair!

                  As an admin … do you think there’d be scope to build and provide a moderation plug-in?

                  I figure it could be a separate sideloaded server that calls the lemmy API and/or DB as necessary. This way it can be a separate project, be developed more experimentally in a less performance oriented fashion (I’m thinking a Python flask app) as it’s only mods and admins using it, and if it requires work from core lemmy devs should only ever need a new API endpoint (which is less onerous than a whole new feature).

                  Adding a link to it in the default lemmy UI for mods shouldn’t be too hard either.

                  • Dave@lemmy.nz
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                    3 months ago

                    There are a bunch of tools already! Some of the alternate frontends have extra tools to help, plus there are auto-mod tools as well. See this page:

                    https://github.com/dbeley/awesome-lemmy?tab=readme-ov-file#tools

                    I would expect a multi-reddit type function could be built in an app or frontend without needing core Lemmy changes too. Isn’t it just a matter of pulling the data from each community and displaying it in one combined feed?