SorteKanin

I recently discovered an interesting (and somewhat disappointing, as we'll find later) fact. It may surprise you to hear that the two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance (that I could find at least) are both on Feddit.dk and are quite significantly higher than the next top comments.

The comments in question are:

1. This one from @bstix@feddit.dk with a whopping 3661 upvotes.
2. This one from @TDCN@feddit.dk with 1481 upvotes.

These upvote counts seems strange when you view them in relation to the post - both of the comments appear in posts that do not even have 300 upvotes.

Furthermore, if you go on any instance other than Feddit.dk and sort for the highest upvoted comments of all time, you will not find these comments (you'll likely instead find this one from @Plume@lemmy.blahaj.zone).

Indeed, if you view the comments from another instance (here and here), you will see a much more "normal" upvote count: A modest 132 upvotes and a mere 17 upvotes, respectively.

What's going on?

Well, the answer is Mastodon. Both of these comments somehow did very well in the Mastodon microblogging sphere. I checked my database and indeed, the first one has 3467 upvotes from Mastodon instances and the second one has 1442 upvotes from Mastodon instances.

Notice how both comments, despite being comments on another post, sound quite okay as posts in their own right. A Mastodon user stumbling upon one of these comments could easily assume that it is just another fully independent "toot" (Mastodon's equivalent of tweet).

Someone from Mastodon must have "boosted" (retweeted) the comments and from there the ball started rolling - more and more people boosted, sharing the comments with their followers and more and more people favorited it. The favorites are Mastodon's upvote equivalent and this is understood by Lemmy, so the upvote count on Lemmy also goes up.

Okay, so these comments got hugely popular on Mastodon (actually I don't know if 3.4k upvotes is unusual on Mastodon with their scale but whatever), but why is there this discrepancy between the Lemmy instances then? Why is it only on Feddit.dk that the extra upvotes appear and they don't appear on other instances?

The reason is the way that Mastodon federates Like objects (upvotes). Like objects are unfortunately only federated to the instance of the user receiving the Like, and that's where the discrepancy comes from. All the Mastodon instances that upvoted the comments only sent those upvotes directly to Feddit.dk, so no other instances are aware of those upvotes.

This feels disappointing, as it highlights how Lemmy and Mastodon still don't really function that well together. The idea of a Lemmy post getting big on Mastodon and therefore bigger on Lemmy and thus spreading all over the Fediverse, is unfortunately mostly a fantasy right now. It simply can't really happen due to the technical way Mastodon and Lemmy function. I'm not sure if there is a way to address this on either side (or if the developers would be willing to do so even if there was).

I personally find Mastodon's Like sharing mechanism weird - only sharing with the receiving instance means that big instances like mastodon.social have an advantage in "gathering Likes". When sorting toots based on favorites, bigger instances are able to provide a much better feed for users than smaller instances ever could, simply because they see more of the Likes being given. This feels like something that encourages centralization, which is quite unfortunate I think.

TL;DR: The comments got hugely popular on Mastodon. Mastodon only federates upvotes to the receiving instance so only Feddit.dk has seen the Mastodon upvotes, and other instances are completely unaware.

@TDCN@feddit.dk made a post on Feddit.dk a while back about an easy recipe for traditional danish rye bread or rugbrød. So I tried it, as I've never tried baking rye bread myself before (usually just get it in the store).

Rugbrød is extremely common in Denmark and most people eat it every day or at least very often. It is used for the traditional smørrebrød, but mostly it is eaten more casually for lunch. It's a very dense, dark and filling bread and not sweet, making it quite healthy in general. You definitely don't need more than a few slices with toppings to feel sated.

The recipe was indeed very easy. It mostly consists of rough rye flour and lots and lots of whole grains and sunflower seeds. I didn't follow it exactly, but I ended up with a good result regardless.

Prior to baking:

Slices:

It's a super delicious bread! Doing it this way, you also have a lot more bread than the usually smaller packages you get in the supermarket.

Bonus panel:

Before cutting:

Slices:

My second attempt at 80% hydrated bread and this time I used some flour additives or baking aids or whatever you call them, to get to a higher protein percentage. Specifically (links are to the Danish site where I bought the stuff):

• 400g flour (12% protein)
• 25g gluten (81% protein)
• 25g dried soughdour for extra taste (13% protein)
• 15g baking enzymes for larger volume (30% protein)

That's a total dry mass of 465g, of which 76g is protein, so roughly 16% protein. With 80% hydration, that's then 372g of water. And then I added 15g of fresh yeast or something like that (not sure if fresh yeast should be counted as dry or wet 🤔).

I think the bubbles are bigger this time than in my last attempt, so I guess the additives made a difference! :D

I still want to try using the additives for pizza dough, but that will wait a few weeks.

One big difference that I've noticed between Windows and Linux is that Windows does a much better job ensuring that the system stays responsive even under heavy load.

For instance, I often need to compile Rust code. Anyone who writes Rust knows that the Rust compiler is very good at using all your cores and all the CPU time it can get its hands on (which is good, you want it to compile as fast as possible after all). But that means that for a time while my Rust code is compiling, I will be maxing out all my CPU cores at 100% usage.

When this happens on Windows, I've never really noticed. I can use my web browser or my code editor just fine while the code compiles, so I've never really thought about it.

However, on Linux when all my cores reach 100%, I start to notice it. It seems like every window I have open starts to lag and I get stuttering as the programs struggle to get a little bit of CPU that's left. My web browser starts lagging with whole seconds of no response and my editor behaves the same. Even my KDE Plasma desktop environment starts lagging.

I suppose Windows must be doing something clever to somehow prioritize user-facing GUI applications even in the face of extreme CPU starvation, while Linux doesn't seem to do a similar thing (or doesn't do it as well).

Is this an inherent problem of Linux at the moment or can I do something to improve this? I'm on Kubuntu 24.04 if it matters. Also, I don't believe it is a memory or I/O problem as my memory is sitting at around 60% usage when it happens with 0% swap usage, while my CPU sits at basically 100% on all cores. I've also tried disabling swap and it doesn't seem to make a difference.

EDIT: Tried nice -n +19, still lags my other programs.

EDIT 2: Tried installing the Liquorix kernel, which is supposedly better for this kinda thing. I dunno if it's placebo but stuff feels a bit snappier now? My mouse feels more responsive. Again, dunno if it's placebo. But anyways, I tried compiling again and it still lags my other stuff.

Bonus panel: