Reddit goes dark, Lemmy lights up, OpenObserve, some blogging myths & Jefro on Automotive Linux

What up, nerds?! I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, June 12th 2023.

This week’s episodes features One More Thing Interview from Open Source Summit where Adam and I talk with Red Hat’s Jeffrey “Jefro” Osier-Mixon all about Automotive Linux. It’s good! Stick around past the outro if that interests you.

Ok, let’s get into the news.

Last week we covered how Reddit’s API (over)pricing changes caused its 3rd-party devs to announce closures, which causes many of its mods and users to revolt. After that, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman held a dumpster-fire of an AMA, doubling down on the pricing and his treatment of beloved Apollo dev, Christian Selig. This week they revolt began in earnest. And boy did it.

At the time of publishing over 8k unique subreddits have gone dark, representing almost 30k moderators decisions for a subscribed user count of 2.7 billion. It’s been so bad for Reddit, in fact, that the site (and API) was down for multiple hours today.

My word, it’s possible that they never fully recover from this.

I’ve heard it said: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Reddit’s implosion has many people looking elsewhere for their not-so-centralized Reddit replacement. Enter Lemmy: A link aggregator for the fediverse. Yes, the fediverse strikes again. “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.””

Can Lemmy do for disillusioned redditors what Mastodon did during the Twitter exodus? Time will tell. But for now, we’ll link you to a guide to finding Lemmy communities and an awesome list of Lemmy instances to choose from.

OpenObserve is a cloud native observability platform built specifically for logs, metrics, traces and analytics designed to work at petabyte scale. According to its creators: “It is very simple and easy to operate as opposed to Elasticsearch which requires a couple dozen knobs to understand and tune which you can get up and running in under 2 minutes. It is a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch if you are just ingesting data using APIs and searching using kibana (Kibana is not supported nor required with OpenObserve. OpenObserve provides its own UI which does not require separate installation unlike kibana).”

Interesting, indeed. Here’s a couple choice quotes from the comments section.

User gettodachoppa says “I just tried this 3 days ago… As someone running a homelab, and hadn’t set up logging yet, it was a great find. I didn’t have to learn and combine 3+ log technologies, it’s just a single all-in-one monitoring server with web UI, dashboards, log filtering/search, etc. RAM usage of the Docker container was under 100MB.”

and user SergeAx says “Interesting product, thank you for your effort, definitely want to give it a try! For me, though, setting up a system is not the primary pain point today. FWIW, signing up for a cloud service is not hard.
The problem starts at the ingestion point.”

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Julia Evans is one of the most successful developer bloggers out there, so when she decides to write up some myths about blogging… it’s worth paying attention to what she has to say. Here a few of the myths she debunks in the linked post:

• myth: you need to be original
• myth: you need to be an expert
• myth: writing boring posts is bad

She goes into the details as why these are all myths in the post. And here’s a good contrarian one from the end: myth: everyone should blog

Blogging isn’t for everyone. Tons of amazing developers don’t have blogs or personal websites at all. I write because it’s fun for me and it helps me organize my thoughts.

That is the news for now! On Wednesday, we go deep on Passkeys with Anna Pobletts, the head of Passwordless at 1Password. And on Friday’s talk show, Mat Ryer joins us for what will surely be a ridiculously good time.

Have a great week, share Changelog News with friends who might dig it, and I’ll talk to you again real soon.

Oh, and if you have some more time… stick around for our conversation about automotive Linux. It’s a good one.