Similar to SEO, there's a lot that isnt public (some for obvious reqsons), so it's a lot of guess work / trial and error / anecdotes. This volume thing I'm pretty sure is real. What is almost certainly real as well is open rates. If you send a bunch of mail that isn't opened, this isn't good either.

The warming up was in the docs for the 3rd party mail service I managed for work a few years ago when we wanted to switch to a dedicated IP. They also cautioned to keep open rates up. I assume they have the data to advise their customers appropriately.

I've mostly run my own mail servers since around 2000, and I gave up a few years ago and started using a 3rd party for outbound SMTP. I had considered giving people free SMTP accounts to boost legit traffic, but I didn't know how to prevent spam/scammers from using it. Like if I posted on Reddit that I was doing that, I'd probably get legit people, but also almost certainly a spammer or few. As such, idk how anyone can practically run their own SMTP server today unless they sort of bootstrap it with a few legit newsletters (that people actually want and open) spread out over multiple days or transactional emails like say a ticketing system (if the people receiving them are the types to actually open them).

As far as personal emails going through the same spam filters, there are some headers newsletters add that I'd assume handles them slightly differently (list-unsubscribe).

I helped some small sites with this lately (friends of friends kind of thing). I've not methodically collected the stats, but Cloudflare free tier seems to block about 80% of the bots on a couple forums I've dealt with, which is a huge help, but not enough. Anubis basically blocks them all.

Basically what Nintendo did on one of their schemes to prevent unauthorized software (Famicom Disk System, which was a floppy disk drive for the Japanese version of the NES). This was the physical Nintendo logo embossed on to floppy disk and with a flat disk instead, the disk can't be physically loaded (sort of, you can add extra cut outs). Other game systems required a logo or similar other brand/trademark/IP to be present in the game code in order to boot, so if you wanted to make your own game without Nintendo's blessing, you had to invlude their IP in your physical disk or in the game code just to get it to boot. This BMW patent seems to be in the spirit of those hard and software protections that prevent people from doing what they want with the hardware (car) they bought.

Slackware was my first and I didn't know that package managers existed (or maybe they didn't at the time) to resolve dependencies and even if they did, they probably lagged on versions. I learned true dependency hell when trying to build my own apache, sendmail, etc from source while missing a ton of dependency libraries (or I needed newer versions) and then keeping things relatively up to date. Masochistic? Definitely for me, but idk how much of that was self inflicted by not using the package tool. Amazing learning at the time. This would have been mainly Slackware 3.x and 4.x. I switched to Debian (not arch BTW).

They're not actually bad. It's just a joke that nearly everyone plays along with kind of like Americans using imperial measurements. Americans don't actually use imperial. Sure, the products may list both measurements, but just for historical reasons. TV shows and movies use them as just another trope, which helps with keeping the illusion up. Anyway, I'm gonna go buy a pound of candy corns and eat the shit out of them.

A ton of companies have ESOP, but that doesn't stop enshitification because the employees generally don't own enough shares to exert control.

Sounds like they're a good friend. I don't mean the murderer, but the one worthy of being trusted with such info.

EDIT: I recently cut my hair.

I like forums, but maybe I'm part of the problem. I've read a forum obsessively for years without registering an account. Even when I have an account, I rarely post/comment. I've been reading Lemmy almost daily for over a year before registering an account and don't reply much even with an account. Decentralization starts with individuals, so I'm going to try to add signal to the fediverse.

I generally prefer the traditional flat forum UI with oldest first, but that's mostly a client issue. The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently (think threaded vs flat forums).

RE karma, a lot of forums show post counts and like counts next to their forum profile, which is often included in every reply, so in some ways, the likes (karma) was a little more in your face. I think there was less astro turfing due to scope of benefit. What I mean is that while traditional forums were decentralized, so was the account and its reputation, so karma (like/post count) farming was isolated to that specific forum/community and if you were astro turfing, you'd get banned and lose that and could not transsfer that to other forums. Services like reddit effectively make this transferrable between forums. I'm concerned about how this will play out as decentralized platforms grow. It could be worse than reddit. I've been trying to come up with ways to handle this, but I can find flaws in every idea I've had so far.

A friend (works in IT, but asks me about server related things) of a friend (not in tech at all) has an incredibility low traffic niche forum. It was running really slow (on shared hosting) due to bots. The forum software counts unique visitors per 15 mins and it was about 15k/15 mins for over a week. I told him to add Cloudflare. It dropped to about 6k/15 mins. We excitemented turning Cloudflare off/on and it was pretty consistent. So then I put Anubis on a server I have and they pointed the domain to my server. Traffic drops to less than 10/15 mins. I've been experimenting with toggling on/off Anubis/Cloudflare for a couple months now with this forum. I have no idea how the bots haven't scrapped all of the content by now.

TLDR: in my single isolated test, Cloudflare blocks 60% of crawlers. Anubis blocks presumably all of them.

Also if anyone active on Lemmy runs a low traffic personal site and doesn't know how or can't run Anubis (eg shared hosting), I have plenty of excess resources I can run Anubis for you off one of my servers (in a data center) at no charge (probably should have some language about it not being perpetual, I have the right to terminate without cause for any reason and without notice, no SLA, etc). Be aware that it does mean HTTPS is terminated at my Anubis instance, so I could log/monitor your traffic if I wanted as well, so that's a risk you should be aware of.

Mead can be made with various spices including tea. There are specific names for these different variations. I don't know if that's why OPs's mead is that color. It could just be the honey.

I did bee keeping for a few years and the honey harvested at the same time from 2 adjacent hives can look very different in color, but even more so based on the time of year the bees made the honey due to the different plants available. I've had honey that was very light in color and some that looked like Guineas when I put it in jars.

Mass produced honey will just blend honey from hundreds or thousands of hives and even from multiple bee keepers. You get a more of an average, which I suppose is better for consistency/predictability in flavor, which would be important for some types of cooking. The flavors varies due to the different plants the bees collected from just like the color.

This may seem pedantic, but mp4 is a container that holds the video and audio streams. The actual video stream can be encoded im various formats (mpeg 2, h264, h265, etc). If you open vlc and look at the codec menu, find the video stream and report back the encoding type it may provide some insight. It could be that there's a performance regression with a particular decoder or maybe they changed decoding library or any number or things. Sorry it's a bit vague, but what I'm getting at is if we know the actual video encoding of the file it may help to track down the decoding performance issue.

If it does turn out to be mpeg2, it could be that something changed about how the video decoding drivers (kernel module) are loaded. Like maybe they stopped including them by default or are no longer being used for some reason.

If it's not mpeg 2, then could look in to decoder specific changes between distro versions or hardware support related changes (like maybe a kernel module needs an extra config passed to it to get better performance on 3b), or even decoder library config may be possible to tweak. Sometimes performance optimizations make things worse and the new default configs work better on newer hardware but worse for you.

In any case, I think knowing the specific video encodings would be helpful. I also just remembered that I had some performance issues on some files due to audio formats if I was having the Pi software decode vs connected to an external AV receiver that could decode the bit streamed audio data.

It is. I remember reading it in a guide (pretty sure the one this screen shot is from as it looks very familiar). I was able to do it a couple times, but it required enough precision / luck that it wasn't worth doing IMO.