Because of changes in how the lemmy API works I had to abandon the project awhile back.

The GitHub page is still up and if anyone wants to take over they’re more than welcome. But the project would need a complete rewrite in order to function and even then there’d still be limitations.

Yes, but Google at least innovated and tried to increase customer value with Android. They also make better phones (from some people’s perspective) than Apple. I’ve seen nothing from Epic that tells me that their product is better than Steam. Sure they have free games, but that business model isn’t sustainable and for the non free games, why would I buy from them vs Valve? Sure, if I was a developer I might get a better deal with Epic, especially if I can sign an exclusivity agreement), but I’m not a game developer I’m a gamer just looking to play my games on my PC as easily as possible.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I can at least share why I didn’t care for it.

Steam already exists and there isn’t a lot I feel is missing from the Steam store. Not to mention there isn’t anything that Epic does better than Valve for their storefronts. Epic doesn’t provide any new value that Valve doesn’t. In fact I’d argue that Epic causes negative value for several reasons:

1. They essentially fragmented the PC market as now I can’t access all of my games in a single location. The same reason for example that I hate that Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, etc … exist. It just makes the overall experience less convenient and more expensive.

2. Several features that Steam already has working are either broken or missing in the Epic Store. Especially around the shopping cart, etc … I haven’t gone to look recently to verify if any of these have been fixed and probably won’t until the other points are addressed, if they even can be resolved.

3. There’s no level of trust with Epic compared to Steam. I have a massive Steam collection and Valve has shown time and time again that I can trust that my data is relatively safe with them. When was the last time you saw Valve in the media because of a data breach? When was the last time your Steam account got hacked. Epic is just new here so they haven’t had a chance to earn that trust.

4. Their motives for wanting to create a new store wasn’t to improve the customer experience. Instead it was to improve their bottom line. The court cases against Google and Apple prove this. If they at least tried to have a PR campaign to show how Epic is innovating compared to Steam especially for making the customer experience better, the Epic Store might have sit better with me.

5. Timed exclusives. Similar to point 1, but they were just trying to use their massive cash reserves from Fortnight to buy their way into the market rather than earn the trust of customers. This again resulted in fragmentation of the PC market.

Anyway, just my two cents.

Deflation just doesn’t happen in a bubble though.

From my understanding the primary lever that can be pulled for this is the Fed interest rate. With a high interest rates you’re trying to decrease the amount of money institutions spend and rather increase the amount that they invest/save. As it becomes easier to make money by buying bonds than by reinvesting into your business. This in effect removes money from the economy.

The problem here is this means businesses also spend less on salaries, thus triggering layoffs. This then also has a downward pressure on inflation as the working class ends of being layed off as unemployment rises. This puts more and more pressure on businesses to cut costs as more and more people have less disposable income to spend.

This is the downward spiral that’s being referred to here.

In effect you can’t create defationary policies without causing high unemployment, at least in a capitalist society.

Take a look at the history of the Great Depression and the New Deal that helped the U.S. get out of it. Effectively the government had to create jobs to stimulate the economy as businesses couldn’t or wouldn’t shoulder that cost but the government could. As disposable income rose, so did spending and in turn inflation turned positive again as unemployment fell.

Correct. As I can only provide links to posts that are on your selected home instance. Eventually I’ll change this but you’ll get a 404 page for links that aren’t on your home instance, but see my P.S. below.

P.s. there have been changes to the Lemmy API that have prevented me from getting updates for about a month now. So most of the results you’re seeing are from old posts only. Until I can rebuild the crawler or find a new API there won’t be any new content.

So I’m totally save-scumming along the way, at least for my first playthrough. But damn was that fight hard even on normal. Was finally able to save Isobel but it ended up costing me Jaheira as she got swarmed by 3 of the enemies while I was dumping everything into Marcus. And at this point not going to try again.

Question though, when I got to the inn only a few tieflings were there and the rest had been kidnapped? Not sure what I might have missed to cause that?

I was using it’s APIs. But new restrictions have effectively been put in place that prevent me from using them for what I need. Similar API calls were being made that were causing DDOS attacks on lemmy.world.

As for running a lemmy instance itself. That’s a thought but I need the data in a different format to do efficient searches. It’s a tricky problem.

Yep that’s the new idea. The sad part is that with this method there’s no way to get historical data. Only new posts. So if a server goes down, gets DDOSd etc… I’ll lose posts forever.

Also building an ActivityPub implementation from scratch isn’t trivial either. So that’ll take some time.

I’ve got a few other ideas I’m playing with as well. Like just assuming that internal post IDs are all sequential and literally fetching them one by one. Or maybe some combination of both?

Thanks for the shout-out.

But FYI I’ve run into some bugs that’s preventing new content from being indexed. So you won’t see anything new (from about a week ago) until I can find a new method to fetch new posts.

I’m guessing Samsung. Google seems to show a handful of posts online about Samsung users asking about it. Or at least asking what is it, and how to uninstall it.

Pixel doesn’t seems to have it pre-installed anyway.

I can’t say anything about other manufacturers though.

Ya if it’s not federated already, I’m thinking the link will just remain as-is? Then comes the question of what happens after federation is complete? Ideally I’m thinking to do these rewrites as the comment containing the link gets federated so it only happens once, but that prevents updates… If I do it during someone looking at the post, then that becomes a lot of network traffic…

Still a lot to plan out initially and then propose to the devs for feedback… So it’ll be awhile still.

I just got a PR merged today that might help with this. I’ll start experimenting with it more over the next week or so.

Basic theory is that I can detect at least lemmy posts in the comment bodies and then rewrite those to your local instance. Primarily question is going to be performance, as remote network calls will be necessary.

Think of Lemmy as email. Each post or comment is just an email sent to a distribution group (a community). If your email server goes down, all of those users and distribution groups are gone. Now I’ll still have the emails I sent to you in my email box but you won’t be able to see them as your email server is offline. Sure you could create a new account on a new server but you’d have to tell everyone about your new address (federate) but there’s nothing to associate your old user with your new one and there’s no way to backfill data. I could reply-all or forward (comment) on to your new address but there’s still no way to associate those old posts with your new account.

Not necessarily. I have several servers behind Cloudflare for free. I’m just limited on analytics, some advanced firewall settings, advanced cache management and maybe a few other features that I don’t use. But the basic service is free.

https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/free/

If an instance goes down (permanently), federation of all of the communities hosted by that instance essentially stop. The content that has already been posted remains but anything new added to those communities only remain on your home instance. The only way for federation to resume is for that instance to come back online with the same domain it started with.

Same. Honestly I need to create a community just for this tool IMO. But I don’t have the time to moderate it.

https://www.search-lemmy.com/ ?

I’m open to feedback though if the search results seem out of order etc…

It searches the title and body. It also automatically searches for similar words like. Like ‘bike’, ‘biking’, ‘bikes’ (aka stemming). Granted though, I’m still improving the page ranking as time goes on.

There is a public API now. While I won’t support sorting, you can process and do what you will with the results as-is. Currently I only support Posts and Communities for now.

When you search for posts you’re just matching against the title or body. For communities it’s searching the posts within that community.

There’s also more filters now with: instance/community/author/since/until and a safe-search option.

So I’m not sure how close this comes to your idea but I thought I’d share.

Yep. The idea is that the instance you select is the instance that all links will open up in. This way once you find a post you’re looking for you don’t have to find it on your home instance and can immediately start replying, save it for later, subscribe to the community, etc…

Edit: I do plan on “fixing” this eventually, but I’m waiting on a bugfix on lemmy itself. You can see more here: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/20