Lemmy

Is there some sort of bridge similar to what is seen with Matrix and services like Discord and Messenger, but with Lemmy and Reddit so that users who are moderators of both communities can make it easier for enjoyers of one subreddit to switch?

Edit: What I am looking for is almost a live version of RedditLemmyImporter that would allow you to bridge the two communities.

The post count for some threads seems to be off, and there seems to be a problem with notifications for other instances.

Is the latter is a result of the recent increase of traffic on Lemmy.ml or a problem of the other instance?

I was recently approached by a user claiming to be the developer of Sync for Lemmy who wanted to be a moderator of the community I created, !syncforlemmy.

I was able to verify this user was indeed LJ Dawson as I knew where to contact him on Discord.

It is quite possible that an impostor user on another instance may be created, for example ljdawson@beehaw.org could easily be made.

Should Lemmy have a verified user marker for members who are of importance to any given community? Are there any other options to protect users against nefarious persons playing impostor?

Don't tell people "it's easy", and seven more things Kbin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon (UPDATED)

https://privacy.thenexus.today/kbin-lemmy-fediverse-learnings-from-mastodon/

This adds several new sections to the previous version -- including an update on what's happened since then. Here's the new table of contents:

I'm flashing!!!!!
But first, some background

1. Don't tell people "it's easy"
2. Improve the "getting-started experience"
3. Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
4. Prioritize accessibility
5. Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
6. Invest in moderation tools
7. Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
8. Values matter

This is a great opportunity – and it won't be the last great opportunity
Ten days later ...
A few more thoughts on moderation

@lemmy @fediversenews

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245

I posted far more details on the issue then I am putting here-

But, just to bring some math in- with the current full-mesh federation model, assuming 10,000 instances-

That will require nearly 50 million connections.

Each comment. Each vote. Each post, will have to be sent 50 million seperate times.

In the purposed hub-spoke model, We can reduce that by over 99%, so that each post/vote/comment/etc, only has to be sent 10,000 times (plus n*(n-1)/2 times, where n = number of hub servers).

The current full mesh architecture will not scale. I predict, exponential growth will continue to occur.

Let’s work on a solution to this problem together.

(Also- as federation has been completely broken on this particular server for me- there is a good chance I will not be able to see, or reply to anything posted below... That is, also assuming this even posts correctly to this server.)

Hello!

Is there a way to deterministically find an arbitrary post/comment on another instance? e.g. if I click on Post A on Instance A and I want to see what Post A looks like on Server B, how would I link there?

I assume there's some sort of ID in the backend so that all the servers know which posts match to each other, but is that exposed in the frontend somehow?

Mainly thinking of a way to utilize this in order to have a userscript that can send you back to your home instance if you get linked to a foreign instance's post.

E.g., maybe I could do something like https://myhomeinstance.net/post/lemmy@lemmy.ml/1418036 for this current post

Can you post to multiple Lemmy communities at once from Mastodon?

I recently made a post from here and tagged three communities in it, on three different Lemmy instances, but it only made it to the first one. Is this just how it is suppose to work? And regardless how does this mechanism work? Does it get posted to the first one tagged and then the others deny it? Or was it a synchronicity that my post just didn't federated to the second two?

[posted to @lemmy]

https://lemmy.ml/post/1412462

So I'm sure we've seen posts/comments like this recently. It gets me wondering if there isn't a way to create a unified experience across Lemmy instances.

My thinking would be to build a browser extension that lets you authenticate to your home instance, or pick up on your existing authentication, and then perform the required API calls to your home instance when interacting with posts on another instance.

But I also wonder if this couldn't be implemented at the UI level of the default LemmyUI. I know there are some federation mechanics that need to happen before your vote/comment/post is submitted, I just don't know if that's something that slows this idea down or completely derails it.

Part of the frustration is this: If I send a community to someone via some normal coms (email, text, whatever), the link is going to be relative to my home instance. If they are a Lemmy user but on another instance, they're not going to be able to vote, comment, or subscribe to the community from that link.

That interaction is what built Reddit. You send someone a link to a Reddit post, they enjoy that post, they eventually sign up for Reddit, and they start interacting with posts.

This might simply be a larger ActivityPub issue, but I have to imagine there are clever solutions to work within Lemmy's or ActivityPub's limitations.

I've tried to upload a video to a community and it errors out with a syntax error on line 1, is this an unimplemented feature or is it bugged?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/778315

Introducing the Lemmy Instance Assistant (browser extension)

Hey everyone :)

I started using Lemmy during the blackout, and I was finding it annoying to subscribe to new communities that I came across. I wanted to be able to quickly open a link on my home instance instead of copy/pasting the code, searching for it, and then subscribing. I looked around for an extension and didn’t see any * , so I started working on my first browser extension!

Firefox version is live, the Chrome version is still going through the review/approval stage. I’m working on getting it on other browsers as well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/lemmy-instance-assistant

This extension will let you set your home instance (https://lemmy.ca for me), and then it will insert a button onto community pages on other Lemmy instances (see screenshots on extension page). I tried to mimic the existing design for the button, and I included some popular instances so you can quickly copy and paste when selecting your home instance.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Why doesn’t it redirect automatically?

Initially I tried to make it redirect, similar to ‘Old Reddit Redirect’. This is still possible, but it might be a little dangerous to have it set up that way. Since there is no way to predict what URL a Lemmy site will have, we can’t restrict the extension to specific domains. This means that the extension MAY run on other sites, depending on how it is detecting the Lemmy site. A button popping up is less harmful than being redirected unexpectedly.

Future plans:

GitHub link: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

• As mentioned above, we can’t specify which domains the extension should run on since that’s not something we can predict. I’d like to improve the specificity of which pages the button will appear on, to minimize unexpected behaviour. As this is my first extension, I’d appreciate help with this while I learn it myself!
• Right now the button does not appear if you are already viewing a community in a different instance, even if that is not YOUR instance (ex. You are looking at lemmy.world/c/technology@lemmy.ml, while your home instance is lemmy.ca). This limitation comes from the method I used to distinguish between the community page and your home instance page. I’m planning to change it to use the URL itself instead of card elements.
• It would be nice to be able to jump to a specific post. Currently, it appears that Lemmy post URLs do not include a slug for the community/instance, making it challenging to implement something like this. I plan on exploring this some more (relevant thread: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/875)
• I want to add a button next to other Lemmy links in the post body / comments. However, I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do this and which links it should appear next to.

Other thoughts:

Some of the third party Reddit tools that I used the most were the browser extensions. Reddit Enhancement Suite made it a LOT easier to start using Reddit, and other extensions like Old Reddit Redirect (the inspiration for my extension) fixed other annoyances. While there are a lot of areas where Lemmy can improve, I think it makes more sense to implement certain enhancements through browser extensions and separate tools. That is to say, I’m happy to let this be pushed into Lemmy’s code, but right now I feel like it makes more sense as a separate extension.

(*) Also when I started building my extension, I didn’t see any similar ones listed. A few other ones have now popped up, and it looks like a lot of them were forked from this project. So if you don’t like mine, there are others that you can try :) Similarly, I’m happy to collaborate if you want to help / integrate my extension into a bigger project!

So, I’m kinda new to this Lemmy thingy and the fediverse. I like the fediverse from a technological standpoint. However, I think that, if we gain more and more traction, Lemmy (and by extend the entire fediverse) is a GDPR clusterfuck waiting to happen. With big and expensive repercussions…

Why? Well, according to GDPR, all personal data from EU users must remain in the EU. And personal data goes really far. Even an IP-address is personal data. An e-mail address is personal data. I don’t think there is jurisprudence regarding usernames, so that might be up for discussion.

Since the entire goal of the fediverse is “transporting” all data to all servers inside the ActivityPub/fediverse world, the data of a EU member will be transported all over the place. Resulting in a giant GDPR breach. And I have no idea who will be held responsible… The people hosting an instance? The developers of Lemmy? The developers of ActivityPub?

Large corporations are getting hefty fines for GDPR breaches. And since Lemmy is growing, Lemmy might be “in the spotlights” in the upcoming years.

I don’t like GDPR, and I’m all for the technological setup of the fediverse. However, I definitely can see a “competitor” (that is currently very large but loosing ground quickly) having a clear eye out to eliminate the competition…

What do y’all thing about this?

Reddit refugee and Noob to lemmy/fediverse here.

For example, I'm currently logged into my lemmy.ml account, and subscribed to !anime@lemmy.ml and I can see a lot of posts there. I can also see that it has over 3K users.

If I log into lemmynsfw.com, and look at my subscription to !anime@lemmy.ml, I only see a few posts, and I know there are several that are missing. Also, it tells me that the community only has 8 users.

Is this synching problem common in lemmy, and/or the fediverse in general?

Do I have to create a new account on each server hosting communities that I want to keep up to date on?

I am getting a ton of errors in my single-user lemmy install. It's likely a configuration issue but I can't figure it out.

When I try to search for a remote community, I get this error:

srv-lemmy-1     | 2023-06-21T05:49:22.923593Z  WARN lemmy_server::root_span_builder: couldnt_find_community: Failed to resolve actor for lemmy@lemmy.ml
srv-lemmy-1     |    0: lemmy_apub::fetcher::resolve_actor_identifier
srv-lemmy-1     |              at crates/apub/src/fetcher/mod.rs:16
srv-lemmy-1     |    1: lemmy_apub::api::read_community::perform
srv-lemmy-1     |            with self=GetCommunity { id: None, name: Some("lemmy@lemmy.ml"), auth: Some(Sensitive) }
srv-lemmy-1     |              at crates/apub/src/api/read_community.rs:30
srv-lemmy-1     |    2: lemmy_server::root_span_builder::HTTP request
srv-lemmy-1     |            with http.method=GET http.scheme="http" http.host=lem.amd.im http.target=/api/v3/community otel.kind="server" request_id=299619ee-3e51-4833-9311-84f1182aaa3f
srv-lemmy-1     |              at src/root_span_builder.rs:16
srv-lemmy-1     | LemmyError { message: Some("couldnt_find_community"), inner: Failed to resolve actor for lemmy@lemmy.ml, context: "SpanTrace" }

and then nothing comes up in search

If I search a few times, I can usually get something to trigger (though no logging occurs at the WARN level) and pictrs starts downloading.

Search will still show nothing but then i can got to /c/lemmy@lemmy.ml and it will appear.

Any ideas?

I'm kicking around a few feature requests.

One of them I've already created in github as it seems appropriate to mainline Lemmy, but a couple of others I think are more appropriate to third party development. Since I'm more a product management / sysadmin type and not much of a coder, I'm putting these in the aether in case they drum up some interest in those considering features for bots or other tooling.

First is YouTube aggregation - it doesn't have to be limited to YT. I'm interested in the ability to automatically collect notifications from a list of channels (click that bell icon, baby) and generate a community post to link new videos.

Second is RSS aggregation. If a blog or magazine or news site has a feed, and if that feed should feature an entry matching keywords defined by a moderation team, generate a post to the community linking to that content.

If these capabilities exist already for Lemmy, even in a hackish way, please do let me know. Otherwise, these are things I am wishing for :)

I keep getting reports for posts that presumably break community rules for the communities on the instance I admin, however the posts do not break the instance rules. I want to mark them as complete just to get them out of my notifications, but I can't tell if that stops the moderators of those communities from seeing the report.

If all else fails, I'll can create a test account and test myself, but I'm hoping to take the easy way out and ask if anyone else has already worked it out :)

I'm sure I'm not the first to think about this, but I haven't seen it mentioned yet. I believe there is another problem with open registration instances besides just the threat of spamming.

If you go through the process of making a new post in ANY community and you attach an image and then cancel the post the image is STILL on the server at the given URL and is publically viewable if someone has that URL.

Theoretically, someone could upload illegal images this way and hotlink to them from another site. Because there are no posts on the instance with the bad image attached an instance admin would have no way of knowing the images were there unless they make a habit of browsing the pict-rs datastore regularly. There's currently no easy way to moderate or delete images in the pict-rs datastore.

I don't think I need to elaborate more on what kinds of images could be lurking on your very own server which could be hotlinked into VERY dark places on the web. Saying that you "didnt know" that they were there is not a defense. When the authorities are knocking on your door because you are hosting illegal images you will be sorry that you didn't take a more active role in your user base.

I realize that even if you close or set manual registration that there's still the danger of a bad user doing this very thing, but I think putting in some minor hurdles would greatly decrease the chances.

Regardless, I think there needs to be a better way to manage the pict-rs part of Lemmy and an easy way for admins and instance owners to be able to view EVERY attachment on their server to make sure there's nothing there that could get them in trouble.

I run a small instance that just have people I personally know on it, so it's not a worry for me. But the larger instances that are opening signups to strangers should be aware and take precautions.

So, let's say you have accounts on multiple instances. And let's say you use each account separately and none of them you consider your "home" instance yet.

It would be cool if there was a web app that could allow you to login to each of the instances, and it would gather your message inbox into one inbox, and allow you to reply to each message from the instance account that it was attached to. Or to switch accounts if you want to start using a single instance as a "home" instance.

Does that make any sense?

Like, I've got separate accounts on Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, Lemmy.one. Beehaw.org, etc. and I've been logging in separately to each of them because I don't have all the community subscriptions synced between them all yet and I'm not sure which one I want to use as my home instance.

So it would be cool to be able to login to a single web app and see my reply inboxes from each instance.

Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.

For now, it seems that the bots are especially targeting instances that have:

• Open sign-ups
• No captcha
• No e-mail verification

I have put together a spreadsheet of some of the most suspicious cases here.

If this is affecting you, I would highly recommend considering one of the following options:

1. Close sign-ups entirely
2. Only allow sign-ups with applications
3. Enable e-mail verification + captcha for sign-ups

Additionally, I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible, before they start posting spam!

Please comment below if you have any questions or anything useful to add.

Update: on lemm.ee, I have defederated the most suspicious spambot-infested instances.

To clarify: this means small instances with an unnaturally fast explosion in user counts over the past day and very little organic activity. I plan to federate again if any of these instances get cleaned up. I have heard that other instances are planning (or already doing) this as well.

It's not a decision I took lightly, but I think protecting users from spam is a very important task for admins. Full info here: https://lemm.ee/post/197715

If you're an admin of an instance that's defederated from lemm.ee but wish to DM me, you can find me on Matrix: @sunaurus:matrix.org

Edit:

Official Lemmy Community:

https://lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy

UNIVERSAL SUBSCRIBE LINK

This should open the community in your instance

Looks like the Boost for Reddit Dev just reserved a Lemmy Community...No official announcement yet.

Proof: https://old.reddit.com/r/BoostForReddit/comments/14ehiqs/_/jouvuok/

Direct Link to the Community: https://lemmy.world/c/boostforlemmy

I have a specific comment on one of my posts that I cannot reply to. The only thing I can guess is that the commenter is coming from kbin.

Is this a thing? Can I not reply to kbin comments/posts?