Lemmy

I'm sharing this post and it's thread because I've run into this issue of not being able to find communities, users, posts, or comments on other instances, or the communities are missing a substantial number of comments and votes even after interacting with these posts and receiving new replies. Is this functionality standard and desirable behavior? Why or why not? I'm trying to understand how it's expected to work, because it's not very intuitive starting out to explore other instances sometimes.

Maybe we could brainstorm a way to make it more intuitive. What are the trade-offs involved? Why does it work the way it currently works? Is there a better way?

The main point that has been brought up is the fact that users from smaller, newer instances will not be able to access the backlog of posts and comments from older more established instances. I'd say a lot of the value of the platform comes from this foundation of posts sorted by votes on a link aggregator site like this. Should new users be encouraged to join the older, more established instances in order to have access to the most content?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/357141

SOLUTION FOUND - thank you

There is a community called Tarot on lemmy.world, and I want to subscribe to it. The url is https://lemmy.world/c/tarot. I've been to lemmy.world when not logged in and I can see it there. But when I try to find it from here, I can't. I tried putting !tarot@lemmy.world in the search and got "no results found". I've been told that "someone needs to search for it, for it to appear", but I have already tried to search for it, many times. What else needs to happen for me to be able to see and subscribe to this community?

Or do I just have to make a second account on lemmy.world?

This is just an idea, but I see that some instance prevent bots from bypassing the registration step by asking unexpected questions like "are you human?". Apparently this is the type of question that can easily discern a human answer from a chatGPT answer. So what if the admin of an instance changed the question asked for registration application every few days? Something like " What did you hit for break f4st? " would give bot proof applications and the answers would likely give the admin a good laugh. Not 100% effective of course, but would help for the time being.

Lets say that an instance doesn't allow downvotes called NoDownvotesInstance. That instance hosts a community called NoDownvotesCommunity.

Now, lets say someone on another instance that does allow downvotes places a downvote on a post made to NoDownvotesCommunity. Does NoDownvotesInstance federate that downvote out so that other instance with downvotes can see it, or does it just drop the downvote so that it goes no further?

Edit - @pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev has answered this, with evidence. Despite the highest upvoted reply suggesting otherwise, it appears as that instances with disabled downvotes do not federate downvotes on.

I have seen a lot of calls around Lemmy for more moderation tools. I have been working on Lemmy PowerShell module for a few weeks now, and I went ahead and released a preview version with multiple moderation tools now available. The module has the ability to perform the following tasks using a simple command line tool:

• Search posts and comments
• Remove a post
• Remove a comment
• Lock and unlock posts
• Add and remove moderators
• Create new posts and comments

You can get started now by installing the module through the PowerShell gallery.

Install-Module Lemmy-preview
Import-Module Lemmy-preview

If you are not familiar with PowerShell, I've include detailed instruction in the GitHub repo with lots of example. https://github.com/mdowst/Lemmy-PowerShell

If you run into any issues please let me know either here or by submitting an Issue to the repo.

Well I never had spam issues, until 0.18 forced captchas to be disabled. Thankfully the bots just seem to be signing up, not doing much yet. Using fake emails that never get verified.

So I threw together a little script. Just put this in a sh file, and create a cron job or systemd service to run it every 15 minutes or so. Use your favorite text edit tool to replace "thelemmyclub" with your instance name, or whatever you have your docker containers named. (Check docker ps). You'll also have to be able to run docker without sudo, so add your user to the docker group or put the cron job on root (if you do that make sure only root can access the file, for security)

Also if you set up manually without docker, well I'm sure you have the skills to adapt these commands appropriately.

First though run:

docker exec -it thelemmyclub_postgres_1 psql -U lemmy -h 127.0.0.1 -p 5432 -d lemmy -c "select * from local_user where id in (select local_user_id from email_verification where published < (NOW() - INTERVAL '60 minute'));"

This will list all users who haven't completed email verification, except those that are under an hour old. If you think these are all abandoned accounts and bots, carry on. It's always best to check before doing things to live databases...

Edit: thanks to input from @freeskier@centennialstate.social

The sh file you need:

#! /bin/bash
docker exec -it thelemmyclub_postgres_1 psql -U lemmy -h 127.0.0.1 -p 5432 -d lemmy -c "DELETE FROM person WHERE local = 'true' AND id IN (SELECT person_id FROM local_user WHERE id IN (SELECT local_user_id FROM email_verification WHERE published < (NOW() - INTERVAL '60 minute')));"

This will delete all users over an hour old who haven't completed email verification. (Only applies to accounts made after you enabled email verification, so older accounts are safe)

Hope this helps!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/530049

I mod a sports league community, and I was trying to put team logos in the description. But after the fourth one the editor would not upload any more. I tried saving and going back into the editor but it still wouldn't.

I was shrinking them down to 20x20 pixel png files, and I saved all the links to the ones I already uploaded so that if I can get this resolved I won't be re-uploading the same ones.

I was able to add more today, but again it stopped after a few. The 4 image refs in the editor was probably a coincidence vs the number of uploads, and I didn't count the number of uploads. So there is for sure some limiting happening, I'm just not sure what in specific. I wasn't able to add more using an incognito window either, so maybe it's a limit on uploads per day per IP.

Startrek.website purged their bot accounts a few days ago. I asked the admins how the did just in case it'd be useful for other admins.

Here's a link to their response (from @williams_482@startrek.website ):

https://startrek.website/comment/172094

Warning ... I make no claim that this is at all sound advice, and williams_482 themselves warn that you need to make sure you know what you're doing ... as it seems they ran some direct delete commands over their database.

This platform could be a viable alternative for forums (cuz we know in which state they currently are), but the lack of general attachments (any mime/file type) is what I believe stands in the way. I have an electronics forum I run (a local one, nothing too serious) and I believe Lemmy can make it more intereactive (not die out) because people from all over the world will get the feed and not just people that are online on the forum at that time.

Still, we frequently exchange PDFs, schematics (not always in image form), archives, etc., which makes Lemmy useless if there are no plans to implement something like this, even if disabled by default.

So, are there plans for anything like this being implemented?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/578734

And vice versa I guess.

Is it possible? Will they get reports? Messages? Can they do mod actions?

I've found previously that Lemmy content on kbin gets delayed, and edits and comments don't transfer perfectly.

Also there's that remote mod bug, which I hear is fixed in 18.x. Are there any other potential issues with remote mods?

Hey Fediverse,

We've been working on something cool and wanted to share it with you. It's a new project called Lemmy.link, and it's all about making RSS feeds more accessible and useful on Lemmy.

We've noticed there's been a lot of talk in various communities about people shifting back to traditional RSS aggregators like Feedly, TT-RSS, and Newsblur. It got us thinking: why not bring those RSS feeds directly to Lemmy instead?

That's how Lemmy.link came to life. Right now, we have 10 communities collecting from over 30 RSS feeds, covering topics from World News and Technology to Business, plus some popular YouTube communities like News, Technology, and Explainers.

But we're just getting started, and this is where you come in. We'd love your ideas for new communities or RSS feeds to include. There's just one thing - to keep things running smoothly, we're focusing on shared interests and staying away from personal communities with custom feeds.

Also, please note, for now, lemmy.link is closed for signups. You'll need to subscribe from your current Lemmy instance. Once we've incorporated the upcoming 0.18.1 captcha update, we'll take a fresh look at this.

So, take a tour of Lemmy.link and let us know what you think. We believe there's huge potential for this project in the Fediverse and your input is a big part of that. Please provide any feedback on !meta@lemmy.link

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy what we've built so far with Lemmy.link.

-- Notorious

I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.

I've been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc... But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.

I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist. Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.

This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the 'compatible' users and communities from other instances.

Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/813606

From the article:

An angry, lawbreaking employer just became $39,000 poorer.

Fox 5 Atlanta reports:

“A decision has been made in the case involving the Fayetteville man who was given 91,500 oil-covered pennies in January 2021 as his final paycheck by the owner of Peachtree City auto repair shop A OK Walker Autoworks.

The former employee named Andreas Flaten contacted the Department of Labor when Miles Walker refused to give him a final paycheck. The Wage and Hour Division contacted Walker. The shop owner then dumped the thousands of pennies in the employee’s driveway along with a pay stub marked with an expletive and published defamatory statement about the former employee on the company’s website.

The US Department of Labor announced a lawsuit against Miles Walker in January 2022.

It was determined Walker violated the FLSA’s overtime provisions by paying the complainant and other employees straight-time rates for all hours worked, including for hours over 40 in a workweek when an overtime rate-of-pay was legally required.

The court has now ordered the Walker to pay nine former employees $39,934 in back wages and damages and has forbidding the owner from additional discrimination and retaliation against any employee.

The court ordered the auto shop operator to pay $39,934, representing back wages owed and an equal amount in liquidated damages, to nine workers.”

For the full story, visit Fox 5 Atlanta here.

Can somebody let me know how I would remove an account from the posgreSQL database?

I can see the tables, but don't know where the accounts are held or the sql statement to delete them.

Thank you.

An underrated accessibility feature on Lemmy is the ability to add alternative text to images in Markdown. The image above will be read as "photo of a snail" by screen-readers. The Markdown for that one is:

![Photo of a snail](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f9281257-b8bc-4c77-9aad-be5038e0758f.jpeg)

As you can see, the alternative text simply needs to be inserted between the two brackets, which are empty by default when you insert an image.

I just set up my lemmy instance today (yay!). I am noticing that when I search for communities, the community is being fetched, but the posts, comments, votes, and pretty much all the other data is not always being fetched. Probably around 2/3rds of the time no data is fetched aside from the community itself. Sometimes one or two posts which may be years old, and maybe a couple of comments.

Is this a known issue or is this perhaps the product of a mechanic I am not understanding? From reading the documentation here, I was under the impression it should fetch 20 posts, and I would expect it to get the comments and votes for those posts as well.

Is there any known fix or workaround for this? Is there a way to trigger downloading the posts in a community manually or retry fetching the data?

Memmy is an early fave (posting from it now) but it reminds me so much of the Dec-Feb app development days for Mastodon. So many fun options to try out!

Does the config Lemmy domain need to match the actual accessed domain?

For instance, can I use the domain example.com to produce users like @dave@example.com but still access the UI using lemmy.example.com?

See THIS POST

Notice- the 2,000 upvotes?

https://gist.github.com/XtremeOwnageDotCom/19422927a5225228c53517652847a76b

It's mostly bot traffic.

Important Note

The OP of that post did admit, to purposely using bots for that demonstration.

I am not making this post, specifically for that post. Rather- we need to collectively organize, and find a method.

Defederation is a nuke from orbit approach, which WILL cause more harm then good, over the long run.

Having admins proactively monitor their content and communities helps- as does enabling new user approvals, captchas, email verification, etc. But, this does not solve the problem.

The REAL problem

But, the real problem- The fediverse is so open, there is NOTHING stopping dedicated bot owners and spammers from...

1. Creating new instances for hosting bots, and then federating with other servers. (Everything can be fully automated to completely spin up a new instance, in UNDER 15 seconds)
2. Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour. NEWS POST 1 POST TWO
3. Lemmy is EXTREMELY trusting. For example, go look at the stats for my instance online.... (lemmyonline.com) I can assure you, I don't have 30k users and 1.2 million comments.
4. There is no built-in "real-time" methods for admins via the UI to identify suspicious activity from their users, I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database. I don't think it is even exposed through the rest api.

What can happen if we don't identify a solution.

We know meta wants to infiltrate the fediverse. We know reddits wants the fediverse to fail.

If, a single user, with limited technical resources can manipulate that content, as was proven above-

What is going to happen when big-corpo wants to swing their fist around?

Edits

1. Removed most of the images containing instances. Some of those issues have already been taken care of. As well, I don't want to distract from the ACTUAL problem.
2. Cleaned up post.

The issue: You find a link to a neat lemmy community on some random instance. In order to subscribe, you have go to your instance, search for the community, find it, open it, subscribe...blah!

The fix: Use a simple browser bookmark to go to your home instance and open the federated community in one click.

This works through modifying the URL of the page your on and puts the host name (e.g. lemmy.ml) after an "@" symbol after the community and then changing the host name to your own, hard-coded one.

How to steps:

1. Create a bookmark in your browser and then "Edit" it.

2. Change the URL to this text (modify the "lemmy.world" bit with whatever your home instance is):

   For lemmy.world users: javascript:(function(){location.href="https://lemmy.world/c/"+location.href.match(/(?:.*)\/c\/(.*(?=\/)|.*$)/i)[1]+"@"+location.host.toString();})();

   For lemmy.ml users: javascript:(function(){location.href="https://lemmy.ml/c/"+location.href.match(/(?:.*)\/c\/(.*(?=\/)|.*$)/i)[1]+"@"+location.host.toString();})();

3. Change the name of the bookmark to whatever you want. Mine is named "lemmy.world".

4. You're all set!

Now, from any federated community main feed page, click on the bookmark and you'll magically be taken to the same community on your local instance. Magic!

Disclaimers: The community must be federated with your instance. You can only do this from a URL that has the community in url (e.g. not from a post or anything).

Source:

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/14hb7h3/one_week7_more_days/jpcby48

Correction: the pop up for Lemmy should start to appear sometime this weekend

https://www.reddit.com/r/SyncforLemmy/comments/14fhi9u/using_sync_for_reddit_as_a_marketing_tool_come/jp2bts8/

Also apparently confirmed in discord that kbin support will be coming:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SyncforLemmy/comments/14g8eix/q_will_sync_for_lemmy_be_able_to_handle/jp4uvh5/

Whenever I visit a website with huge pages I wish the navigation bar was fixed on top so I can access the whole site range in a couple of clicks instead of scrolling back to top again. What do you all think about this? On 1920x1080 the navigation bar is about 55px high so we woudn't miss that much.

On my own hacky website I fixed the navigation bar and pushed the content down by using margin. I'm pretty sure there are better and nicer ways to do so but for my private entertainment it works for me

Hi, my train of thoughts started with my "home" instance Lemmy.ml disabling the creation of communities. I did write this already somewhere as a comment, but I think it deserves its own topic ;)

TLDR; I have 2 big questions: do admins have too much power? Should an account be easily transferrable to another instance?

To be clear: I have no problems with that decision. I understand it. What I am writing here is a theoretical issue.

Let me explain:

So, the current problem is not being able to create a community on Lemmy.ml, so on Lemmy in general, for all Lemmy.ml member. The solution is easy. Create and alt account on another platform, create the community, make my prime account the mod et voila, problem solved.

However, my “problem” is theoretical. I joined Lemmy.ml “per accident”. I did not pick it for a specific reason, I just stumbled on it (being a Reddit refugee) and selected this instance. (I know now that this instance will always “do good” because it is run by the creators of Lemmy (I did not know this when joining) - so my issues will probably always be theoretical FOR ME, but hear me out. ). If someone would join another instance, and that instance would suddenly stop providing essential services of Lemmy (let’s say, commenting, participating, cross posting or any other feature) OR if the instance would stop alltogether, you kinda loose everything. Yes, you can create an alt, but your post/comment history belongs to the other, severely limited in features, account - or the account is lost forever. I think, from a theoretical standpoint, I would feel better if I was able to “move” my main account to another instance. Not sure how this would technically work (federating accounts might be a huge GDPR / privacy nightmare), but it would give me some peace of mind knowing that I can’t be… euh… fucked over by an instance admin.

I know you can run your own instance to circumvent these issues. I am considering it since my account is stil fairly new, but it seems like a tedious thing, both in technical knowledge as in financial terms. And with the federation/discovery thingy that is around on a not-well-used instance, this is even more difficult.

My 2 cents. Not sure if I’m missing something and/or if someone agrees/disagrees with me?

Any post and community could be accessed through a theoretically limitless amount of instances, which also means a theoretically limitless amount of URLs.

Will this hinder Lemmy from ever coming into the mainstream? If I type any topic in Google, I will get a reddit thread that deals with that. Can something like that ever happen for Lemmy?