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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren’t all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g. ls)

    $ ls -l
    sh: ls: command not found
    

    So he went on over to the system admin’s office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:

    # rm -rf / tmp/*.log
    ^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
    # ls -l
    sh: ls: command not found
    # stat /bin/ls
    sh: stat: command not found
    

    A few seconds after hitting return, and the rm command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn’t been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.












  • Why not just rename the instance, instead of creating a completely new one? Rename it, make sure feddit.uk still redirects there, job done. People are lazy and won’t migrate unless they have to - I think you underestimate the difficulty in migration (getting everyone to do it. Just look at migrating off reddit to lemmy - so many people declaring how they hated the changes at reddit but how many actually moved? 1% of them? 0.1% of them? 0.01%? I would expect the number is closer to 0.01% than 1%). Just rename feddit.uk but keep all the users and all the communities so it’s literally zero effort for the users and communities, even their bookmarks will just continue to work with a properly done redirection.

    Also - I’m picking nits here - but “Feddit” isn’t infringing a copyright, you cannot copyright a word. It would be a trademark infringement not a copyright infringement. The law around trademarks is quite different to copyrights. Even if Reddit gets wind of feddit.uk, the likely outcome will be a “cease and desist”, and feddit.uk will have to be renamed, not some kind of catastrophe. Reddit’s only going to go to the effort of pursuing a trademark case in the UK courts if the feddit.uk admins are completely intransigent and refuse to take action.




  • Looking forward to wave 3. Too bad but it has to be done.

    One of the weaknesses with Lemmy I think is that communities themselves aren’t distributed - a problem solved by both Usenet and FidoNet decades ago (for instance, a FidoNet bulletin board ceasing meant that the community there would have to be moved to another BBS - the FidoNet echoes (“communities”) were themselves distributed so as a user you could just move to a new BBS and whole communities wouldn’t have to be moved. Similarly with Usenet - your usenet server get shut down? Just move to a new one and subscribe to all the same groups.