Thanks for pointing this out. I am not that active on masto, but I am from the Boston area, so this might be the kick I need to check out that side of the fediverse. I lived in Somerville for 10 years before more recently moving to the burbs. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in this country these days.

Growing up in the US, other responders are correct that school systems vary a lot depending on what state/district you live in. Over the course of my K-12 education, I attended 10 different schools across three states because my family moved a lot. There were times where I would switch schools and suddenly be way ahead in some subject and have completely skipped over some other topics. As an example, I never took a course in world history, but ended up having three separate US history courses because the different districts taught those subjects in different grades.

I do take issue with some of the commenters painting all US schools with a broad brush as terrible. There are excellent schools in the US and excellent school systems. As an example, I currently live in Massachusetts, and if you took it as its own country, it would be one of the best school systems in the world. In general, the states that prioritize education and pay teachers well end up with better educational outcomes. It’s not that surprising really, but a huge portion of the country seems to ignore that fact or spend money in less efficient ways.

My Ph.D. is in rheology and material science. One of the craziest papers I ever remember reading was about the non-Newtonian behavior of frog tongues and saliva. I still think about this paper from time to time. There was a sequence of pictures showing a frog tongue (removed from the rest of the frog) lying on a table, and then somebody touching it with an ungloved finger and showing how sticky it was as they retracted their finger. What they won’t get poor grad students to do…

Link to the paper (pdf warning).

discuss.online is doing it right. There is a significant overlap between discuss.online and lemmy.world’s admin teams, and I generally think they handle it about as well as could be expected of a general-purpose instance of their scale.

As for piefed, I think the primary things that help users filter their experience are the additional blocks that are at their disposal; blocking communities with a word in their name, blocking posts that match keywords, blocking posts that point to certain domains, etc. However, it can only help if a user actually goes through the effort of setting them up.

Alright, I need to step away to do actual work that pays the bill at this point, but wanted to drop what I found here before doing so.

• Summit seems to be 403-ing for piefed.social. However, I was able to log in to other piefed sites (feddit.online, piefed.ca, my dev instance) with Summit, so it’s probably just piefed.social I guess?
• I tried both Boost and Voyager and they were both able to log into piefed.social.
• I was able to confirm that Summit wouldn’t trip any of the user-agent related filtering in the codebase (to try to keep scrapers out of certain things).

My guess at this point is that there might be something wonky going on at the infrastructure/WAF-level. If so, then this status quo is going to stick around until @[email protected] can dive into it. My sysadmin skills are not the best when it comes to this kind of thing.

I see, so Summit is where the 403’s are coming from. I’ll do some testing on my end and see if I can figure it out.

Edit: confirm that Summit is giving a 403, but other apps are still working…investigating…

Mobile browser, or one of the apps (voyager, summit, interstellar, etc.)?

It’s unlikely to be an IP ban. Within the piefed software, an IP ban basically coincides with a site ban. At the infrastructure level, your IP may be banned because it was doing some pretty heavy DDOS’ing and got swept up that way. Since your user isn’t banned, try switching between a mobile network and a wifi connection to see if that resolves things since your IP would have changed.

Are you trying the mobile browser or one of the mobile apps? If it is the mobile browser, try clearing the site data for piefed (cookies, etc.). There have been some cases in the past where a browser’s local cache is not being refreshed properly and weird stuff starts to happen, like the CSRF tokens mismatching and whatnot.

My goodness, I hadn’t realized how big fedinsfw.app had become. It’s now easily the biggest piefed instance with almost 2x the MAU of piefed.social.

I’m pretty sure that’s what is happening and I am really looking forward to it.

Been a bit since I last popped into one of these threads. The main thing that happened recently was that we wrapped up the Anime awards for last year (post here). I definitely need to do some rethinking of how that was run, because participation was way down compared to a year prior. To the community’s credit, there was lots of good feedback in that thread.

Otherwise, the [email protected] community is getting ready for a new season to come in April.

My other communities:

• [email protected] - Has managed to stay somewhat active despite my not being able to read/post much in recent weeks.
• [email protected] - Not too active since there aren’t any active gundam series going right now. We do get occasional history/lore and gunpla posts though, so that is fun.
• [email protected] - Pretty dead…but that is to be expected really. The show has ended after not really living up to its own hype and the manga doesn’t really have a consistent release cycle (at least in English), so it has been some time since there is any new content.

Ironically enough, the federation issues weren’t just present for mastodon, but more general, and rimu’s response didn’t federate over to zip. Here is a direct link to his response. I think the technical details are that there was an issue where webfinger responses were not always working reliably.

Yeah, I suspect this is why rimu made the initial version of private communities just local and not federated at all. Once things that are meant to remain private start traveling across the network to other servers, it’s questionable how private that information can remain, especially if other software is involved.

So, I see you joined ani.social and you have made mention of enjoying Japanese media elsewhere in this thread. In that case, I have some community recommendations for you:

• [email protected] - The most active community for anime discussion (disclosure - I am a community mod)
• [email protected] - The most active community for manga discussion (disclosure - I am a community mod)
• [email protected] - Community for Japanese light novels
• [email protected] - Memes, but anime
• [email protected] - Other anime memes

There are plenty of other communities out there for specific pieces of media, if you are looking for those as well. Some of the more active ones I am aware of:

• [email protected] - Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End - Season 2 is airing right now!
• [email protected] - Delicious in Dungeon
• [email protected] - General Gundam community (disclosure - I am a community mod)
• [email protected] - Bocchi the Rock
• [email protected] - One Piece
• [email protected] - Overlord
• any of the communities on bookwyr.me - Ascendance of a Bookworm

lemmy.ml defederated from ani.social ages ago, so OP is at least spared on that front.

The navbar that is across the top of the page when on a desktop browser collapses into the hamburger menu at the upper right corner when on a narrower, mobile screen. Expand that and then Account to see the bookmarks.

The hamburger menu system is kind of clunky, so that is why the bar along the bottom was introduced, but it doesn’t have all the options.

My D&D group just started a Delta Green campaign last month. It’s been a bit of a change, but I have been enjoying the focus on role playing over lots of mechanic-driven combat. The combat is often my least favorite part of D&D.

Pretty easy for me as I tend to not comment too much other than about development issues and bug reports. So, I usually have my user flair set to PieFed Contributor or something along those lines.

The reputation score (sum of upvotes - downvotes) is something that only admins can see. I absolutely agree with a lot of the criticisms people have with reputations systems like this or reddit’s karma, but at the same time, it is one of the most reliable and highest signal to noise indicators of spam/scam/etc. accounts out there. If we were to remove it entirely, it would take away a powerful tool for flagging accounts like that to admins earlier rather than later. Oftentimes, we can spot accounts like that even before they get reported by other users because users are much more likely to downvote/block than go through the trouble of creating a report.

To address your other reply in the same place, ngrok is not affiliated with X’s (twitter’s) Grok. ngrok is a service that provides https tunneling much easier than manually managing domains. Developers often use this for proof-of-concept stuff or testing features that need SSL because ngrok addresses can be created and destroyed easier and quicker than manually managing your own dns.

In actuality, I didn’t even realize that ngrok was a sponsor. Or, was a sponsor at some point. Is this still accurate @[email protected]?

I had a scroll through the recent exceptions thrown by piefed.social and I might have a guess as to what is happening, but I can’t really prove it, and it is rare. I just pushed a fix and backported it to the 1.6.x branch. If @[email protected] updates and this is still happening, then it is some other issue (a stack trace would be helpuful if you are able to grab one). This issue would be separate from the auth issues described by @[email protected]. More technical details below.

From my sleuthing, there are certain posts that, if they are present in the returned list of posts, will cause the API to throw an exception. This is due to the python library we use to validate our API schema (marshmallow), having too strict of a set of requirements on how urls should be formatted in Url fields of the returned json. I have changed the API schema to just be a string instead so that it isn’t validating against its url requirements.