Spider

Oh, I just got back from there.

For a vacation less than 90 days, you only need a passport from your home country, and proof of your return flight in less than 90 days. Drugs were covered in another comment, but dont bring veggies or meat products into Japan, even if its like a Slim Jim thing you got at the airport, they’ll give you a hard time over it. The trip can be long, so its worth planning it out to give your future tired self less things to think about. Expect to be sleep deprived your first 2 days.

Travel agencies are good for booking hotels in advance, which i highly reccomend to do 1 month before. I stayed 2 weeks and that I think was a great amount of time. I booked the hotels and plane in advance, then had $2000 in savings to convert to cash yen for the actual trip. Use cash, Japan is very cash heavy. That was way more than enough spending money actually, i probably could have done it with half that amount. Fall time has great weather, and I avoided the more expensive spring season / cherry blossom bloom. That sounds nice, but tickets are more expensive that time of year.

Travelling in Japan, there’s the fast way and there’s the cheap way. For trains, they have the shinkansen and the regular regional trains, and for roads theres the side streets and the expressway. Beware expressway tolls. Getting out of Osaka wasnt too bad but getting back in beaned my wallet for ~$90 USD. Theres toll gates less than 5 minutes apart there. If you have 4 or more people in a car the expressway might be cheaper than the shinkansen, which you need individual tickets for each person. Using the expressway isn’t required, you can take side streets the whole way.

I had local friends who knew the language and could drive. They made my trip amazing. I tried to study some japanese language but when it really came time to interact with people i could not cut it. I really needed my friends to do anything more than sightsee and shop outside of tourist traps. My appearance and dress alone indicated me as an Obvious Foreigner and so people were quick to help and give me menus to point at. Even if your speaking skills were terrible, manners make up for it. Learn the local customs and formal etiquette, and people should forgive awful broken sentences and be patient with you. If you remember only one phrase: sumimasen. It’s excuse me / sorry / can i have your attention all rolled into one phrase.

You asked

How should tags be integrated into Lemmy?

Which is a generic question that goes beyond the scope of one change, so I assume you also wanted to shore up probable future changes, all of which built on top of the first change. Forseeing problems in advance can prevent problems from propagating down the chain like this, so my contribution here is to reiterate the mistakes Ive seen other failed social networks make. That is, if spam bots have a way to output sludge faster than genuine content can be created, people will leave. I dont know lemmys specifics and its not my job to learn that, and this is not a code review. I do expect defederation to add some unknown complexity, so literally all i am asking is to just have a strategy for the final implementation and not handwave stuff as someone elses problem or take moderators for granted like reddit did.

I’m less concerned about the client side ui layout, so much as for enabling spamvertisements. So for example if a feature is added to be able to search by tag someday, then theres a potential for people to try and abuse that by labeling irrevelant things under tags in order to get attention.

I’ve experimented with other platforms before, and whenever a search feature gets added in any system that supports multiple tags, you start seeing posts with literally two dozen or more trending tags, and its irrevelant spam. I think the big proprietary platforms like tumblr have tools to moderate these, but I am aware that a community-led version of fighting spam has different needs and tools

Theres likely a way to incorporate downvotes into the server search algo, so it isnt surfacing junk for example. All of that is just one idea of a complete plan for helping the community to moderate spam. I’m not proposing any complete strategy here.

All I’m trying to get across: don’t forget to anticipate spam, and give the platform and users tools to defeat it.

If there’s tags, there needs to be a way to prevent spam abuse where someone adds like 100 popular and trending tags on their post to boost visibility for their advertisement, even though those tags do not fit the post. The simplest solution to that is limiting tags to like a maximum 1-3 per post, though other more complex solutions exist.