Very possible, arguably even probable.

It could very well be a PR stunt but the content in the OP is “real” in the sense that it matches what’s being reported and isn’t photoshopped or something.

A quick search returning several news articles suggests it’s real. Pretty gross.

• Weed
• Music
• Memes
• Final F1 race of the season
• New episode of Bleach TYBW
• Good food
• Good times
• Good vibes

So far I haven’t been shot and killed, so I’ve got that going.

I’m aware. It’s part of the ridiculousness just like the OP.

The real hero’s are the terrorists we made along the way?

Well you aren’t dead which seems to be the preferred outcome for a 50th birthday. Congrats!

I’m not sure it’s been entirely solved. Our host is working through an unrelated hardware problem that hit in the middle of our last round of tuning but things have been behaving better aside from that.

The answer for us has been in adjusting the lemmy pool size to the database and tweaking the available resources to find a happy medium.

Can my humble, single-user instance handle it?

Maybe?

FWIW this information is based on the experience when using remote hosting not self hosting.

The main issue for us was tuning the database performance. The bot can beat your database to death sometimes and just throwing resources at it won’t necessarily solve it. related low effort meme Our experience was that the bot performance hit wasn’t really noticable immediately but it adds up as more and more communities are added to the database. There also seem to be bursts of database load at times, maybe that’s when new instances join the network? They seem to only last a short time though and haven’t really caused problems.

TLDR- Expect an eventual performance hit. If it’s too much you can always disable the bot or adjust what it does.

This is an excellent point. Thanks for taking the time to add this!

If you’re using the Boost app, there is a toggle for it. You can find it by going to your profile and hitting the “Edit” button.

How would Lemmy identify who the bots are

They are meant to be self reporting/labeled by the creator. There is also a setting for that in the account page.

Note that these options will be slightly different to change on the webui but it can be done even if you aren’t a Boost user.

Maybe your instance is federating with someone new that does a lot of bot posting? Sometimes all it takes is one person on the instance to join a very active bot community and next thing you know members are seeing a ton of new bot posts.

Editing to add- On Lemmy you can turn off viewing bot accounts completely in your account settings if you don’t ever want to see them.

Yup! Recognizing the shortcomings can definitely help with future decision making about purchases. It would be nice to see a more urgent stance taken on recycling though.

it’s so weird that our little town doesn’t offer recycling on our street.

A lot of places don’t even recycle the recycling. The idea of recycling is great but in practice it’s pretty much a shit show. Not enough places doing it, not enough facilities to handle the different materials, not enough money in it to motivate corporations to do better.

It needs to feel like a walled garden.

Imagine that.

i also noticed a recent sync in-congruence from .ml to .world which indicates some kind of funny business… purposeful or not

This isn’t unique to world or ml. There’s some wonky shit going on with federating across Lemmy at the very least, maybe other parts of the fediverse that I don’t use. On walledgarden there are at least half a dozen instances that are falling in and out of sync with our communities. No one on either side of the connection seems to have an answer for what caused this behavior or how to correct it. Talking to some other instances, we aren’t alone.

The lemmyverse crawler/site has also shown some odd behavior with communities and instances disappearing and reappearing seemingly at random.

I don’t think anything malicious is being done by any of the instances or admins in regards to federation delays.

FWIW the communities on walledgarden.xyz have been having federation issues to lemmy.ml for a few days as well.

Since we were/are working through some things with our host I didn’t want to bother anyone from lemmy.ml about it, but it’s a thing. AFAIK federation is otherwise working normally.

Good luck getting it figured out and resolved!

Back when I used reddit it seemed like everyone threw around Fascist in a similar way. Lemmy seems to prefer Tankie. For a lot of people the thinking doesn’t go any farther than “I disagree with you, therefore you are ________ist” or whatever.

It is what it is.