Comment by moksha256 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moksha256 | Hacker News Reader

I created Hystoria as an experiment to see if blocking out current events can lead to more thoughtful discourse.

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Hystoria is a simple, reddit-like site (built with a simplified version of Lemmy [0]) where only items older than 5 years can be posted.

I've been obsessed with media dynamics for years now, always wondering what variables can be adjusted within the current environment to result in better media production and consumption.

This is my approach for Hystoria. Time creates context: so even a vapid political article from years ago can present worthy insights since we know a lot more about the topic, context, and outcomes. Lindy effect: chances are that an older item worth discussing now is even more important now. And philosophically: we know exponentially more about the past than the present, and history rhymes, so we should talk more about the past.

More details on my approach are in the launch post [1].

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[0] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

[1] https://100millionbooks.org/blog/news/introducing-hystoria/

You should fire this behind CloudFlare or a general cache provider immediately. Get the settings for Nginx figured out later, you don’t want to miss your moment on the front page..

Yeah I was scrambling for a few minutes there but finally uncovered some not-so-well-documented rate limits set by default in the Lemmy config. I suspect requests will die down pretty quickly after this submission peaks.

Interesting - reminds me of the "Delayed Gratification" magazine I just started subscribing to; it's a less ambitious timeframe, but by being deliberately 1-2 quarters behind, it does avoid a lot of churn and puts in a lot of perspective.

(FWIW: I find I enjoy the magazine, but I find it also spends a bulk of it in discussing interesting but marginal items from 6 months ago, whereas I would've expected a benefit-of-retrospective discussion of key items from the past)

https://www.slow-journalism.com/

If you don't mind, is it nicely laid out, typeset, nice paper, presented nicely on arrival etc.? i.e. is it a good gift, or is it 'just' a good magazine?

I've thought about 'Lapham's Quarterly' before, it's just international shipping enough to put me off.

Lapham's Quarterly is great stuff. They had a 50% sale a couple of months ago and I bought...a lot of their back issues.

Lapham’s Quarterly is truly a gem. I am a longtime subscriber and have the whole catalog, which I consider to be one of my prized collections.

The design is great.

Paper is good; thick and matte. Presentation is great, TONS of infographics, interesting design. It's a visual delight.

(Whether it's a good gift, hugely depends on the recipient; it's not quite in the "Coffee table artsy book" range :)

I love the concept, but I don't know if 5 years is even enough time for people to have gotten over current events. If you made it 20+ years, I suspect that would work better.

In any case, good luck, and I hope I'm wrong. :-)

I think having it at a filter would be nice. Maybe 5, 10, 20 years.

20 years! Frankly hadn't thought of going back even further. But I guess if Lindy holds true, the farther you go back, the better it should get. In such a case having options to filter would be helpful, as other commenter suggested.

Heh! The site could have “vintages”.

With a twenty year rule we could be arguing about hanging chads right this moment!

Blocking your own proxy?

404 Kod: Message, IP. 172.18.0.3, 180 per 60 seconds

Ugh it was just working, looking into it.

To add, I believe that's caused by rate limiting in Nginx.

Thanks, looks like it was at 1 per second...I just boosted it a bit.

EDIT: boosted again...gosh, HN front page is no joke :D

EDIT 2: I ran into multiple rate limits, some of which were harder to discover/configure than others. Site should be back again. Sorry.

Seems like the host is down altogether for me.

For me too.

Why have rate limiting at all? Just disable it

Maybe they don't have an unlimited budget for bandwidth charges? I'd strongly recommend they go behind a (free or cheap) caching CDN first before removing limits.

Host pings, but port 80 is dead.

Also, the rate limiting is probably meant to be based upon the client's IP, not the proxy IP. Usually, the proxy adds the client IPs to the request headers and you can use those in Nginx rules.

This reminds me of my approach to reading the news around election day. Every day's news was just waybackHN's random day function:

http://www.waybackhn.com/?date=random-day

This is what makes askhistorians nice. There 20 year real I think. I look forward to checking this out.

Link to the rule, for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules?utm_source...

I agree, this is a very interesting topic.

Ay I thought this was based off of lemmy. It's cool to see it be used to create interesting sites like this.

I've deployed a number of web services and I have to say...Lemmy was incredibly streamlined and easy to deploy. Deployment is entirely automated with docker and an ansible script, and updating requires just 1 command.

Really looking forward to them completing the ActivityPub integration.

Does lemmy still do the thing where they censor certain words and don't include a way to configure the censorship to try and discourage certain groups from using it?

Looks like it:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/server/lemmy_u...

That's the most offensive Regex I've ever seen.

I would seriously question why you would want to attract anybody that used any of the regex statements words, but is as easy as changing it in the code.

Really? You can't go 10 minutes in many LGBT spaces without hearing someone using the f-slur in an affectionate way. Also banned is "b!tch", which is not really considered that offensive in most of the US between female friends, as well as "pu!sy", which is maybe vulgar but not an offensive term at all (I notice "dick" didn't make cut). Maybe for a site like Hacker News those terms aren't usually appropriate, but I see Lemmy \more as a replacement for Reddit and I'd hoped it would be inclusive to everyone, not just to those in their bubble.

I don't know how their system works, if using these words just means the comment won't be shared or if it flags it for a moderator's attention, but I don't think so. Here's a direct quote from a developer:

> I'll have to think about this. Hard-coding it means I don't have to do a database migration every time someone comes up with a new slur. And putting it in a DB table means someone could very easily remove it by deleting every row of that table, which isn't good. I want to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

In my view this goes against the core point of the fediverse. The whole reason I like the fediverse is because it democratizes control by giving it to the users instead of a small-group of potentially self-interested owners.

(After googling I found out "n!ps" can be used as a racial slur but I associate it with a funny slang for "nipples". I wondered how the AI conference dealt with this but apparently they changed their name a couple years back to avoid connotations with the slur so maybe it's more widespread/well known than I thought.)

(edit: censored slurs. asterisk didn't work because it triggered the markdown so I used !)

I wasn't aware of this element of Lemmy...thanks for bringing it up. Philosophically speaking, I detest the idea of software limiting a user's speech in such a way...maybe such a filter would be needed, or maybe not, but I would prefer to see the need demonstrated over time through practice instead of bluntly imposed by software by default.

Reminds me of how Mastodon doesn't allow quote-toots...but quote-tweets can be highly effective when used correctly. Should be up to instance owners to regulate such behavior.

Next challenge: Write a regexp to check whether the post was written by an African-American or not, so you know whether to censor the n-word.

Not possible! Regular expressions aren't context-sensitive.

You should just detect bit color?

I think it's a brilliant idea. It will result in timelessness being emphasized. Politics rage and "the Twitter mob" is not timeless for the most part, but the key learnings and historical insights are timeless. How do you ensure that a post is actually old? Can't post age be spoofed by the client or the server that is serving the post?

Currently I'm relying on the poster (a) identifying the year of publication in the title and (b) trusting that the year claimed in the title is accurate.

So it's not automated. I'm not sure if automating such a thing is doable in a reliable way, but I'm happy to be corrected.

Fantastic idea, I've had several concepts like this in mind.

I love this idea!

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