Lemmy

Right now, NSFW-marked communities are by default(?) not shown by their home instance to non-logged-in users in the community list, and even if you go to them manually no posts are shown.

Fine, but they also aren't shown to logged in users on other home instances, unless somehow already federated over. If you go to the community's instance, it can't tell you are logged in, and if you go to your home instance you can't see a list of all communities on the other instance that might be available.

Also, older posts that are marked NSFW can't be gotten by anyone with an account anywhere other than the instance they were posted to. When you subscribe to a community on another instance it federates over a few posts, but to doesn't request and federate older posts as you try and page back through the archive. The normal solution is to view the old posts on the source instance, but if the community is marked NSFW the source instance won't let you read the archive there without a local account.

I really like the Lemmy Community Browser at browse.feddit.de for locating communities across instances.

When I first stood up my instance, I guess it was crawled and my community showed up there. Awesome!

I've since rebuilt on a new domain and federated again, and my old instance dropped off (as expected). However, a day or so later, my new instance still isn't showing up there. The new instance is known to join-lemmy.org and fediverse.observer, so it is discoverable.

I'm curious if anyone knows how often it updates and if that tool is based on a project I can clone to spin up another instance. I'm interested in both running a replica of it to act as another entry point as well as using it as a base to develop some quality of life enhancements. e.g. a click to subscribe option that ties into your home instance and does the initial search and subscribe steps.

I stole this from u/fuckass on Hexbear

issue: menus are not always immediately apparent

suggestion: style menus like sidebars (outlines and backgrounds)

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issue: user menu elements on mobile are jammed against left edge

suggestion: add left padding

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issue: content and comments are too narrow on large/wide displays

suggestion: add option to set min and max widths relative to viewport (CSS VW)

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issue: main menu (from hamburger button) elements on mobile/narrow displayed as block is unsightly

suggestion: elements should be inline-block until they cannot fit on one line

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issue: comment action icons are unnecessarily hidden

suggestion: show all comment icons persistently (could be grouped as [up/down/reply] on left, [message/flag/block/fav/source] on right; could be a user profile option to show/hide additional comment options persistently)

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issue: message notification (bell icon) often indicates unread count when all messages are read

suggestion: fix

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issue: auto-refresh on posts causes elements to move down as reading when scrolled

suggestion: implement option to disable auto-refresh OR move scroll position down correspondingly to total height of dynamically loaded post elements

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issue: (if above feature implemented) must refresh page if auto-refresh disabled

suggestion: add soft-reload button (reloads posts)

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issue: [subscribed|local|all] default from user profile doesn't work (always selects local)

suggestion: fix

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issue: no function to block a specific community from your feed

suggestion: add function

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issue: notifications view has no stateful awareness of viewing mode [unread|all] or [all|replies|mentions|messages]

suggestion: add stateful awareness to enable browser <|> navigation

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issue: replying to inbox comment/message does not display after submitting reply

suggestion: display reply to comment after submitting reply

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issue: [show context] from inbox comment does not display immediate parent comment

suggestion: [show context] from inbox comment should display immediate parent comment

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issue: when viewing context from comment on a non-local instance, you are not authenticated and cannot reply from context

suggestion: implement cross-instance authentication OR link to context in the currently-authenticated instance

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issue: [next] buttons have no stateful awareness (displays an empty page when clicked from the last page in a set)

suggestion: [next] should be statefully aware of page and be disabled when viewing last available page

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issue: when inbox messages appear as a notification, there should be a button to mark them as read

suggestion: add function

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issue: inbox messages are only marked read when explicitly clicking [read] checkmark button

suggestion: messages should be marked read when replying or navigating to context

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Hope this helps make some improvements to the UX! :)

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EDIT another one while I'm thinking of it: it would be nice for the top toolbar to be fixed at the top so you don't need to scroll back up to use it.

I love the growth and population, but I really want to help foster the decentralization of this platform, since that’s (to me) the best part of the fediverse.

Lemmy growth is crazy!

Blahaj zone (the Calckey instance) has been running for around 6 months now. We've had a slow but constant growth of new members, with a big spike when Calckey drew a lot of attention. And as a result, even though we're not a huge instance, we are one of the larger Calckey derived instances around.

lemmy.blahaj.zone on the other hand has seen crazy growth! In the last week, our lemmy instance has gone from almost no members, to nearly as many users as our Calckey instance. The mind blowing part though, is that the lemmy instance isn't even close to being one of the largest lemmy instances. We don't even appear on the first page of Fediverse Observer! And the sheer number of lemmy instances online now is huge compared to where it was a couple of weeks ago.

And that's before we even talk about kbin and the threadiverse as a whole, of which Lemmy is only a part

I can honestly say that this whole thing has shifted my view of just what the future of the fediverse might be. I assumed it would always be microblogging centric, but now, I question that...

#fediverse #lemmy #kbin #threadiverse #calckey

@lemmy@lemmy.ml @fediverse@lemmy.ml

I replied to thread from Linus Torvalds and agreed with what he said but added my opinion which was not hate or rejection (literally) https://lemmy.ml/comment/477089 (ask for a revert)

My response to a mod (not committed in order to be able to post this thread)

They even removed my upvoted comment about a ChatGPT's response regarding question "Is disagreeing is hating?" i was going to share again with this person Arthur: https://lemmy.ml/comment/445401

This is a pathetic move and so low compared to what the extreme you're criticizing could do, at least them, are honest in their stupidity.

Dessalines posted https://lemmy.ml/post/1140303 "Be respectful..." my twist is "...as long as you agree with us".

One thing for sure, you are not serving your cause. BUT, I won't be a hater, I definitely won't be your supporter!

If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit's daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don't think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.

I know the goal of Lemmy isn't to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.

I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?

I recently setup a new Lemmy instance and was surprised when my feed was mostly empty. I've since learned that a key part of Lemmy's federation is based on a user from your instance subscribing to communities on other instances. Only then, will your instance pull in posts from the subscribed community to your "All" feed.

This means that subscribing to new communities is especially important if you're on a young Lemmy instance since it helps to build out everyone's feed on that instance.

I've found discovering new communities to subscribe to on other instances can be difficult. To help me search for new communities I may be interested in, I tried aggregating as much of the Lemmy fediverse together into a single feed by subscribing to the widest range of Lemmy communities possible. This offers a Lemmy feed that's kind of like reddit.com/r/all. If it's interesting to anyone else, you can find the instance here: https://lemmy.directory.

Hopefully this offers another way to find new communities to subscribe to on other instances.

Here's a better description of my understanding on how Lemmy federates communities and why you might be interested in checking out lemmy.directory: https://lemmy.directory/post/34207.

Hope this helps ease the orientation to how Lemmy federation and communities work.

I've noticed this in many places in the Lemmyverse in my first few days here. When first signing up almost all the instances were listed as having 2 or less active users. The biggest was Lemmy.ml at something around 1000. Then I've seen those numbers listed in other places including a post yesterday that is supposed to help bring redditors to Lemmy.

These numbers will just get most people to turn around and not even consider Lemmy as an alternative.

I saw a GIF today showing the growth of user accounts on Lemmy instances and Lemmy.ml (for example) was over 30000 and many of the other servers were in the 100s, approaching 1000. That's a HUGE difference and indicates a community that is 10 times (or more) more active than the initial numbers presented indicate.

Any thoughts? Am I out to lunch?

I'm seeing across various instances that registration is going through manual approval as an anti-bot measure. As someone whose also run Fedi instances, I know how bad the bot problem is.

I do think invite links can get around this though. If we allow existing users to simply send a referral/invite to their friends (and have a tracker on who is inviting who), that'll do a ton to both mitigate spam registration and allow people to join quickly.

The more obstacles we put in the way of registration, the more people will be dissuaded and go away. We've seen it with Mastodon (and now there's this whole reputation of it being too complicated). We have a window here to fix stuff if we're fast. People will eventually forget about the Reddit API and put up with it if we don't offer a compelling alternative when the iron is hot.

I'm considering making a GitHub issue, if anyone has any thoughts or plans to work on it, let me know. I have a decent amount of connections on the Fedi and if enough people are serious about getting this ASAP, I can help out with the logistics/coordination.

I saw the impressive setup used by the sh.itjust.works instance with 24 CPUs and 64 GB RAM. This inspired me to reconfigure join-lemmy.org so that it can quickly update the instance list, and point users to sites which are actually reachable. This will be an immense help if a lot of Reddit users decide to join Lemmy at once (e.g. during the blackout on Monday). Individual instances will likely go down at that time, but others will stay available and users can easily join them.

Additionally, changes to the site, documentation and translations are also updated automatically. If you see anything that can be improved, consider making a contribution to help new users.

The instance list has a couple of recommended sites at the top. They are defined in this file and seperated by language. For most languages there is only one recommendation or none at all, so you can simply add yours by making a pull request.

In case of English, the situation is a bit different. The current recommended instances (beehaw.org and sopuli.xyz) are already quite large and would be shown near the top of the list anyway. So it makes sense to recommend smaller instances instead.

To be recommended, an instance should meet these requirements:

• It should be a general purpose instance
• At least one member of the admin team needs to be in the Instance admin chat to coordinate with other admins
• The admin team needs to be prepared for a large influx of users, both in terms of hardware and moderation

We can use this thread to discuss which instances should be recommended. There is no maximum number of recommendations, but it should be an even number to work with the desktop layout.

On a side note, the instance list itself could use many improvements such as showing more details about instances or using different sorting methods. If you are a programmer or web designer, you can contribute to improve the website.

Edit: If you are a Lemmy admin and want your instance to be recommended, go ahead and open a pull request for this file. Developers can also contribute in the same repo to improve join-lemmy.org.

question for the #lemmy users and #activitypub developers out there:

now that @lemmy is seeing a spike in interest, and @Gargron has said he's interested in building out groups on #mastodon - this seems like the right time to update ActivityPub protocol to support groups natively. anyone looking into this?

lemmy's integration into mastodon is pretty janky right now and can be a lot better!

I created a repo on GitHub that has a table comparing all the known lemmy instances

• https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

Why?

When I joined lemmy, I had to join a few different instances before I realized that:

1. Some instances didn't allow you to create new communities
2. Some instances were setup with an allowlist so that you couldn't subscribe/participate with communities on (most) other instances
3. Some instances disabled important features like downvotes
4. Some instances have profanity filters or don't allow NSFW content

I couldn't find an easy way to see how each instance was configured, so I used lemmy-stats-crawler and GitHub actions to discover all the Lemmy Instances, query their API, and dump the information into a data table for quick at-a-glance comparison.

I hope this helps others with a smooth migration to lemmy. Enjoy :)

Hi all!

So, I'm assuming everyone has seen links like https://beehaw.org/c/news and clicked through to find it doesn't work right because it's a different site (I'm assuming a different instance here).

Well, I just stumbled across an interesting feature: if you enter a link in the following format, it works for everyone regardless of instance of origin:

[News](/c/news@beehaw.org)

News

[My User](/u/barbarian@lemmy.reckless.dev)

My User

You're welcome!

This works with Chrome. Knighthawk 0811 says it works with Firefox as well.

1. Go to your Lemmy instance
2. Open the browser menu
3. Tap on "Install app"
4. Tap "Install" in the dialog
5. Tap on the newly created Lemmy shortcut on your home screen

...but I already left yesterday. 👋

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.perthchat.org/post/302114

let's address the possibility that like mastodon/matrix 99% of ppl will flock to the biggest handful of servers

What is the real value of decentralization given that? Outside of like political unrest.

And what role do small servers really do in that landscape? Obv "novelty" servers like midov cater to the like lolicon enthusiasts and I'm sure there are a few other servers dedicated to illegal things. Regional severs are quite compatible with various nationalists/patriots

Lemmies? Lemmings?

(These instructions are for using Lemmy in a browser. If you are using an app, some steps may differ.)

How to Join Lemmy

To use Lemmy, you need to be a member of one instance from the list at https://join-lemmy.org/instances. You will still be able to see content from anywhere, but the instance you choose will determine:

• What URL you use to log in to Lemmy,
• What content shows on the homepage when you select "Local" or "All",
• Who moderates your instance, and
• What rules you agree to when you sign up.

Choose an instance that matches your interests, language, and region. (If you want more information about an instance, you can tap its "Join" button, which will show you its current homepage in the main view and its description in the sidebar. You can also check the tables here and here.) Please avoid joining instances that are already crowded (1K+ users/month). If an instance gets overcrowded, it can start running slowly or experiencing downtime, so choosing an uncrowded instance will give both you and others a better Lemmy experience.

Once you have decided on an instance, tap its "Join" button to open it and then tap "Sign Up" in the upper-right corner. Fill out the form and wait for your account to be approved.

When your account is approved, log in and customize your profile and settings. If you change your language settings, select "Undetermined" in addition to any languages you speak so that you can still see posts and comments that are not tagged as being in any particular language.

How to Find and Subscribe to Communities

There are four ways to find communities through Lemmy:

1. To browse communities that others in your instance are already subscribed to, tap the "Communities" tab at the top of the page and choose the "All" scope. Tapping on a community name will open it through your instance.

2. To browse communities across all instances, visit https://browse.feddit.de/. Tapping on the community's name will open it, but probably not through your instance (in which case the page will say that you are not logged in). Instead, follow these steps:

   a. Copy the community's URL or remote name. You can use the copy button next to the community name, you can open the community outside your instance and copy the URL from your address bar, or you can open the community outside your instance and copy the remote name (which will look like [!community@instance.tld](/c/community@instance.tld)) from the sidebar.

   b. In your instance, tap on the "🔍 Search" button in the upper toolbar.

   c. Make sure that you have chosen "All" for each of the four filters: "Type", "Scope", "Community", and "Creator".

   d. Paste the community's URL or remote name into the search field and tap "Search".

   e. One of the results should be the community shown as an icon, a name, and a subscriber count. If you do not see it, or it is buried too deep in the search results, try changing "Scope" to "Local". If that does not work, you may need to wait a bit and try again.

   f. Tap on the community in the search results to open it in your instance.

3. If you want an experience similar to Reddit's r/all, visit https://lemmy.directory/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Hot/page/1, which aggregates from these communities as described here. As in Option 2, you can copy and search for a community's URL to open it in your instance and subscribe to it.

4. If you don't see a community by browsing, subscribe to https://lemmy.ml/c/findacommunity and make a post about what you're looking for.

Once a community is open in your instance, subscribe to it by tapping on the "Subscribe" button at the top of the sidebar. It will then appear in the "Subscribed" section of your "Communities" tab, and its posts will show on your home feeds.

Can't find a community you're looking for? If your instance allows it, you can create the community yourself by tapping "Create Community" in the upper toolbar.

now I can't even browse reddit since there is a never ending stream of posts and comments on lemmy ^^

I could browse lemmy all day, I still need to find some kind of lemmy browsing/life balance xD

I'd like to set up and federate an instance of Lemmy with the purpose of inviting friends and family. I imagine that they'd appreciate having spaces limited to family members where posting information or photos wouldn't erode their anonymity elsewhere in the fediverse.

Is there a way to make some communities private so that only those who are invited can view or post within them?

When searching, I only see one mention of private communities as a feature that isn't finished. But, that post appears to be 3 years old.

Thanks so much! I'm really enjoying the community here.

With forewarning about a huge influx of users, you know Lemmy.ml will go down. Even if people go to https://join-lemmy.org/instances and disperse among the great instances there, the servers will go down.

Ruqqus had this issue too. Every time there was a mass exodus from Reddit, Ruqqus would go down, and hardly reap the rewards.

Even if it's not sustainable, just for one month, I'd like to see Lemmy.ml drastically boost their server power. If we can raise money as a community, what kind of server could we get for 100$? 500$? 1,000$?

I’m on Safari iOS 15, not sure if that matters. Anytime I post a comment, it doesn’t actually get posted. Doesn’t matter if I disable content blockers, they just never appear.

PMs work, upvoting works, I’m not even sure if this post will work though. Any ideas?