andrew_s

Helene was the second major hurricane (Cat 3 or higher) of the 2024 season. Record-setting Hurricane Beryl preceded it as the earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic basin’s history. Beryl became a major hurricane in the month of June east of the Lesser Antilles, the first time that’s ever happened during the first month of hurricane season since record-keeping began in 1851.

While Beryl weakened before reaching the United States as a Category 1 hurricane, Helene intensified into a major hurricane and continued strengthening right up to landfall. That now puts 2020-2024 into the record books, tying the mark for the longest consecutive number of years (five) in which a major hurricane has made landfall in the United States.

For decades, I had felt in control. Not in control of the weather, of course. But in control of the message that, if my audience was prepared and well informed, I could confidently guide them through any weather threat, and we’d all make it through safely. Today as a result of so many compounding climate-driven factors, the warming world has forcibly shifted my manner from calm concern to agitated dismay.

The patterns of Earth’s high winds have surprisingly widespread effects on life on the ground. A recent study in the journal Nature shows that when the summer jet stream over Europe veers north or south of its usual path, it brings weather extremes that can exacerbate epidemics, ruin crop harvests, and feed wildfires.

“The jet stream has caused these extreme conditions for 700 years in the past without greenhouse gases,” said Ellie Broadman, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of Arizona. “To me, that’s a little scary, to think about the compound effects of simply adding more heat to the atmosphere and imagining how those extremes might get more extreme in the future.”

It's not just datacenters running AI that need their own energy sources. Taiwanese hardware manufacturer to the clouds Quanta has revealed the purchase of three sets of fuel cell microgrid systems to power one of its California plants, after purchasing two in April of this year.

Fuel cell microgrids, like those produced by Bloom Energy, generate electricity through an electrochemical process and are designed to operate independently from the power grid. They require natural gas, biogas, or hydrogen as fuel.

Datacenter operators across the world have voiced concern over their ability to source sufficient power for their operations – especially new infrastructure using power-hungry GPUs to run AI workloads. Many are turning to nuclear power. Indeed, Microsoft recently made a deal to reactivate a reactor at the famed Three Mile Island plant to get the juice it needs

There's more than one way to do this, of course. For group-based forums like piefed, I think the most promising way is to automatically create a local community for each person that someone wants to follow. Incoming activity is then put into the appropriate community, and so you have a consistent UI of UserA has posted to technology@wherever, and UserB has posted to [UserB's community]@piefed.social. This avoids the '2 websites in 1' look that can happen when a site wants to display both lemmy-like communities and mastodon-like microblogs.

I haven't done too much work on it, in case this idea gets shot down in flames. So far, what I've got is:

1. A user searches for another remote user, e.g. @freamon@pixelfed.dk

2. When they're found, the user is offered the opportunity to create a 'Follower Community' (for want of a better name. I've been using 'fan club', but that's maybe a bit naff)

3. The community is created, formatted from the profile id, so [https://pixelfed.dk/users/freamon](https://pixelfed.dk/users/freamon) becomes [https://piefed.social/c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon](https://piefed.social/c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon)

4. A follow request is sent to the remote user (from the user doing the search, or a dedicated bot account, maybe)

5. Incoming activity will just be to activitystreams and followers, so there won't be any matches in 'to', 'cc' or 'audience'. In that case, 'attributedTo' is looked at, using the same conversion as above: so something from [https://pixelfed.dk/users/freamon](https://pixelfed.dk/users/freamon) will be sent to [https://piefed.social/c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon](https://piefed.social/c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon) if it already exists.

6. The posts will show in the community like any other. Other users can then subscribe to the community in the normal way, and get updates whenever the remote actor publishes something for their followers.

7. Posts from Mastodon would need another post-type to look their best (something that simulates how they look over there). Posts from Pixelfed already display well using Masonry:
   On pixelfed:
   
   On piefed:
   

8. Post replies and upvotes (maybe) should make their way back to remote user, the same way they do if they'd actually made a post in a local community.

Random thoughts:
There would need to be an Undo Follow sent if the community was deleted.
A local community called c/pixelfed_dk_users_freamon looks a bit ungainly, but there's likely a way communities like this could be rendered as something like [SELF] in the homepage feed.
I realise pixelfed are planning to implement Groups, but that hasn't really worked out for mastodon, so we'll see how it goes. I think the ability to follow individuals will still be useful.
The remote user could be made a moderator for the local community, and it set to 'mod posts only' so it would only contain stuff from them.
This approach doesn't require any database changes.

I've just bashed this together for now - looking to get your thoughts before I continue ...

Lemmy's spoiler format is

As described here

The regex I've come up with is :{3} spoiler\s+?(\S.+?\n)(.+?)\n:{3}

It won't do spoilers inside spoilers, but that's a pretty niche case.

The changed code is viewable on GitHub

Any thoughts or suggestions for the regex before I create the PR?

I'm assuming that if I create a PR, and if they accept it, they'll (eventually) release a version with it in, and the line in pyfedi's requirements.txt can get version bumped. This seems like the 'proper' way to do it, but it's a bit long-winded, so maybe there's a better way to do it.

I've been thinking about what to do about cross-posts (e.g. where the same link is uploaded to both fediverse@lemmy.world and fediverse@lemmy.ml).

In terms of them being annoying, I don't yet know what to do about that.

My progress so far, and what it requires:
The Community table has an extra field (xp_indicator), for the field which determines if something is a cross-post or not. It defaults to URL, but it could be the title for communities like AskLemmy.
The Post table has an extra field (cross_posts), which is an array of other post ids (Note: this would lock PieFed into using Postgresql)
New posts, for local and ActivityPub, are checked to see if they are a cross-post, and the relevant posts are updated. This also happens for local edits and AP Update. In the DB, the posts in the screenshot looks like:

-[ RECORD 1 ]----------------------------------------------------------
id          | 27
title       | Springtime Ministrone
url         | https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/springtime-minestrone
cross_posts | {28,29,30}
-[ RECORD 2 ]----------------------------------------------------------
id          | 28
title       | Springtime Ministrone
url         | https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/springtime-minestrone
cross_posts | {27,29,30}
-[ RECORD 3 ]----------------------------------------------------------
id          | 29
title       | Springtime Ministrone
url         | https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/springtime-minestrone
cross_posts | {27,28,30}
-[ RECORD 4 ]----------------------------------------------------------
id          | 30
title       | Springtime Ministrone
url         | https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/springtime-minestrone
cross_posts | {27,28,29}

In the UI, posts with cross-posts get an extra icon, which when clicked bring you to another screen (similar to 'other discussions' in Reddit)

In terms of hiding duplicate posts from the feed, I don't yet know. If it was up to the back-end, it would require some extra DB activity that might be unacceptable speed-wise. This update would mean though, that a future API could provide a response similar to Lemmy for posts, so apps/frontends could merge duplicates the same way some of them do for Lemmy. Likewise, if there was a 'Hide posts marked as read' feature, it could regard any post ids in the cross_posts field as also being Read.

I have to wait a few days until the quota on my ngrok account resets (something in the Fediverse went crazy, I'd guess), so I thought I'd share here in the meantime. Also, it means the PR doesn't come out of the blue, and it can be discussed beforehand.

(also: it turns out I can't spell 'minestrone')