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Links for 2022-11-14

  • The Fediverse From Home

    Interesting — I didn’t realise it was possible to connect to the Mastodon fediverse with such a low-impact service —

    A single-user instance with about 100 followers/followees uses somewhere between 50 to 100MB of RAM. CPU usage is only intensive when handling media or processing lots of federation requests.

    (tags: fediverse mastodon self-hosting hosting ops gotosocial)

  • ‘Immunity debt’

    A new form of COVID-19 misinformation has cropped up in Canada:

    The term “immunity debt” is circulating widely online as an explanation for a significant surge in respiratory illness in Canada [… This] hypothesis suggests people’s immune systems are weaker now, due to a lack of exposure to viruses while observing COVID-19 public health measures over the last two-and-a-half years. But this notion […] is simply not true, says Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist and assistant professor in the faculty of information at the University of Toronto. “That is, in my estimation, and any immunologist will tell you this, nonsense,” he said. Dr. Samira Jeimy, an allergist and clinical immunologist at St Joseph’s Health Care London, agrees, saying the idea that one’s immune system can be weakened due to lack of exposure to illness “shows a basic lack of understanding of how the immune system works.” “There’s almost like an old wives tale, that you need to get sick to develop a healthy immune system. That’s actually not true.”

    (tags: immunity immunology covid-19 rsv viruses health medicine immunity-debt misinformation)