Lemmy

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/6111023

Hi,

I'm trying to post on: !programming@programming.dev

but it seem stuck

Hey guys,

Do you think it makes sense to create a service which allows users to spawn and host their own instances of Lemmy?

I understand that Lemmy is about distributed communities and Fediverse, but I am also thinking that we could increase adoption if we allow non tech-savvy communities to join in.

What are your thoughts?

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

@Neshura87 submitted the first ever RFC for Lemmy! It describes how post tags can be implemented.

0.19.0 is getting closer and closer to release, but we are still busy squashing bugs and getting lemmy-ui ready. For now there is another release candidate deployed on voyager.lemmy.ml for testing. Here is the full list of changes since the last release candidate for Lemmy and lemmy-ui

@nutomic fixed a bug with following local communities in the release candidate. He added a first integration test for image uploads.

@dessalines has been busy updating lemmy-ui to account for Lemmy API changes, and squashing various bugs like an issue with timezone db migrations, adding a creator_is_admin field to Post and Comment views.

@SleeplessOne1917 has implemented support for settings import/export in lemmy-ui, as well as some bug fixes.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

@lemmy I was just going to go on Lemmy and it says my account is banned until the 27th. I clicked on the email thing to see if maybe there was an email with some sort of reason and it said my account is being verified but then I checked my email and found nothing. Would you mind letting me know what or why or what?

I'm wondering if there's any progress on the private communities front? Or any way it could be helped? At some point there was a suggestion that a user story of how it should work would be helpful - is that still the case?

My use case would be something like "private" fakebook groups. Private enough not to be publicly visible, and invite only, but otherwise without high expectations of privacy.

The description section on the website may be grammatically incorrect. I can fix it with your suggestions.

i tried creating accounts on lemmy.world and lemmy.tf but a error of captcha incorrect came up even though it was correct

I really like lemmy and have stopped using reddit months ago. My only real gripe with lemmy is the title: when a conversation gets going in the comment section, that gets killed when the post is deleted, for whatever reason. I can't even go back to a conversation and have a look at the comment threads to "dwell in nostalgia" (or whatever) if the post to the comment section gets deleted. Piecing the threads together from the inbox and my comments on my profile, and continuing a discussion via direct messages is cumbersome and kind of antithetical.

So, feature request, I guess: Enable retrieving comment sections of deleted (removed from community) posts. Bonus points if new comments could be added after the deletion (/removal) of a post.

As it stands right now, individual mods have way too much power to fuck up the platform by banning people for political reasons and the modlog is not even remotely adequate in providing a full story on such actions. This isn't too big of an issue now, but as certain instances have proven, it has the potential to become a federation-wide problem if it's allowed to continue.

On reddit, the platform Lemmy was made to replace, removals are logged (r/undelete) so that any interested party may look into them, the users are warned of the action so that they know not to behave as such, and the affected parties can (in practice, most mods will just instantly mute you) have a chance to appeal. Here, your posting history is instantly wiped out with no chance of seeing the light of day, you're given a nebulous reason in the mod log, if any, and you have zero tools for correcting an erroneous action. You're just wiped out instantly with most of the people you've interacted with not even having knowledge that you're gone.

There's also an issue where removing a comment which is rightfully due for removal (for example: dogwhistled bigotry) also removes any comments below it explaining why the original comment is bad. This leads to a situation where mods are either forced to either keep up the hateful rhetoric alongside its callout, or remove the comment while also wiping out the educating material. This is an example where I feel redacting could be an acceptable option to keep the community safe while also allowing bigots to face the music for their shitty views.

The tools Lemmy provides to deal with evil on the platform are opaque and inadequate, and have high potential for being used in bad faith by bad actors seeking to destroy the platform itself, and have even caused friction among users in good faith in the past (as many warring instances, federating and defederating have shown) Ultimately a healthy federation comes from having moderation tools which protect the average person from being exposed to evil, while also giving a complete picture to those want to look into the why and how of a removal.

And for the love of god, if an instance bans you, please don't require you dig your own grave by having to block each and every community from that instance manually, one by one.

Lemmy is still small and growing, so trying to use your subscribed feed of smaller communities, mixed in with larger communities leaves you with a very uneven feed as your scroll. I like being subscribed to the largest Technology community, but also I am subscribed to the Movies and TV community. One is more active with posts and more comments, and the other is not so much. In this scenario, the current algorithms will always show a feed full of technology posts for pages, and you wont end up seeing Movies and TV until you scroll for a awhile.

I understand that the issues is, "The community isn't active enough". Fair. But could prioritizing smaller communities in the algorithm help these small communities become more active then?

If there was way for the subscribed feed to better spread out all of your subscribed communities over your front page, I think this would help smaller communities get more attention. Plus it would be nice to see my smaller communities showing up at the top of my feed. Instead it shows 5 Lemmy Shitposts, 5 Memes and 5 Technology posts, before I see anything else.

Im no programmer, so Im not going to act like I think this would be easy or possible, but I thought id throw this idea out there and maybe it will get some traction.

I've just set up a new personal instance (this account is on it) but I'm apparently not able to subscribe to beehaw communities. When I click the subscribe button all I get is "Subscription Pending" no matter how much I refresh the page.

Additionally, unlike communities on other servers the search for a beehaw one doesn't appear to bring down any posts. Is that normal?

I'm running a small Lemmy server using the Ansible setup modified to our needs. Now, we do not post that many (if any) images, but I'm also running an Akkoma server with Cloudflare R2 setup for images, and I was wondering is there an easy way to just set the Lemmy server to use this bucket? Would be better than to just keep them lying around in the server disk for sure.

If somebody else did this, is there any written documentation on the best practices? I might need to (again) modify the Ansible scripts, but I'd love to not waste time making mistakes if there's a good way to do this.

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

In case you missed the announcement, this week we launched a redesign of join-lemmy.org together with our first annual funding drive. Please consider donating to support Lemmy development.

We are also readying another release candidate 0.19.0-rc.4. As usual it is available for testing on voyager.lemmy.ml and by installing the Docker image on your server. There are no breaking changes this time as we are preparing for the final release. It has been one month since we announced the major breaking changes for 0.19. In that sense we would like to know from developers of Lemmy clients and frontends if their projects are ready for 0.19, as we are planning to release it within the next weeks. There is no specific release date, but we will first update lemmy.ml to a release candidate, and if it works well publish the new release shortly after.

@nutomic is implementing a proxy for remote images, so that clients don't have to connect directly to remote servers and avoid leaking personal information. He also added support for Arabic and Cyrillic usernames and community names. Additionally he made various smaller changes and code rewrites, such as ordering reports and registration applications by oldest first.

@dessalines has implemented numerous minor bug fixes and enhancements. This includes disabling voting for bot accounts, a change to the hot rank to avoid content getting pushed off the feed after mass downvoting, and more. Also added an Platform filter for the join-lemmy.org/apps page, and fixed a memory issue.

@phiresky is extending the /api/v3/site/federated_instances endpoint to include error count and time of last successful send for each linked instance. This will allow determining the exact state of federation between all instances.

@SleeplessOne1917 made two minor improvements to 2FA code input and to the search page.

@hackerncoder relaxed the check for valid displaynames to allow more unicode symbols.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

lemmy-synapse is a light-weight observability and monitoring stack for Lemmy servers.

Using Prometheus and Grafana, it allows the admins to visualise and query the stats of their instance. v1.0.0 comes out of the box with 3 detailed dashboards:

• Host stats (CPU, RAM, disk, network, ...)
• PostgreSQL stats (connections, locks, transations, queries, ...)
• Docker stats (container CPU, RAM, disk, network, OOM signals, ...)

It runs as Docker compose cluster alongside the Lemmy cluster and does not require any changes to it in most cases. Uninstalling lemmy-synapse is as easy as tearing down its cluster and deleting its installation directory.

Got questions/feedback? Pray drop a line:

• #lemmy-synapse:matrix.org
• !lemmy_synapse@lemmy.ml

I'm using my own instance. Is there a way to block the posts coming from other instances that are below a certain threshold? For example -3 upvotes. I don't need to see them I trust the moderators of other instances to handle their own posts responsibly. As it is today half my Homescreen is full of -40 voted posts that might have been deleted on their home instance already. But they get downloaded to me regardless.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7291022

Some months have passed on since the Reddit blackout this June. It led to an explosive growth in Lemmy users, and lots of urgent work in scaling, bug fixes, user onboarding and more. Since then things have calmed down significantly, giving us breathing room and time to get more long-term work done.

As of Nov. 2023, Lemmy is at ~36k active daily users 🥳 (those who have posted or commented within the last month). While user counts are not an explicit goal of ours, this is still a tremendous achievement, and one which we can all be proud to be a part of. It shows that people truly do want alternatives to US tech companies, and will use them if they exist.

Join-Lemmy Redesign

Most recently we've been working on a redesign of join-lemmy.org to provide a better onboarding experience and cater towards new users. This includes:

• A helpful new instance picker to reduce choice overload.
• The instances page is now filterable, based a set of topics and languages, as well as sortable based on activity. The default sort is Random, to encourage people to join smaller servers.
• The apps page now has sections for Android, iOS, and web apps, as well as libraries. Feel free to do a pull request to add any apps that are missing.
• The donate page now shows the total amount of monthly donations across all platforms. More details below.
• The technology used is Typescript with tailwind and daisyUI CSS frameworks.

For server admins: If your instance isn't listed already, you must explicitly add your server topics and languages by doing a pull request to this file.

As you may have noticed, texts on the website are unchanged, and images on the main page are still generic placeholders. We are hoping for your contributions to improve them. For the texts, edit this file. Translations are managed via weblate. Images are located in this folder. If you are good with AI tools, consider replacing main_federation.webp and similar with more colorful images. More main_screen_x.webp images with custom themes or alternative frontends would be nice too. In general feel free to open issues or pull requests for improvements to the site.

Funding Drive

Before the Reddit migration, our income was almost exclusively made up of generous donations from the NLnet foundation. This funding was based on getting paid for implementing new features, specified in advance.

We've known that this funding could not last indefinitely, and that after several years of funding, NLnet's resources are better spent getting other projects up and running. Additionally, much of our time is spent on other equally important work: reviewing changes from community contributors, fixing bugs, doing support, and various organizational tasks.

That is why we are launching our first annual funding drive. The goal is to increase monthly, recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Recurring donations from Lemmy users are the most sustainable solution for the future. It also means that we need to worry less about funding, and can focus more on improving Lemmy. And instead of being accountable to an external organization, we work directly for Lemmy's users. While one-time donations are also welcome, they are too unpredictable for long-term planning.

You can find available donation options on the donate page. This page was also updated during the redesign to display current donations and funding goals. If each active Lemmy user donated ~€0.33 per month it would be enough for 3 full-time developers. So please consider donating if you use Lemmy every day. Our preferred donation platform is Liberapay because it doesn't have any payment fees or delays, and is itself open source.

Besides Lemmy's developers, please consider donating to those who develop open-source apps or software for the Lemmy ecosystem, as well as server admins and moderation teams who are the backbone of the Lemmyverse. We would be happy to add donation links for the above to join-lemmy.org as well!

If you have any suggestions in regards to the topics mentioned in this post, please let us know. We also want to use this opportunity to thank the countless contributors who are working on Lemmy now.

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.world/post/7542906

So, Lemmy is sometime missing content. I don't regret switching from Reddit to Lemmy but, expecially for niche communities, the content isn't always here.

My idea is to fix this is a Fediverse-based content relay named Relly.

Relly allows you to select RSS feeds, Mastodon users, Mastodon hashtag and Mastodon instances (so, the top posts on that instance) as sources for content, and post them to your favourite Lemmy community.

There are several features which make Relly better and anti-spam:

• Limits for a source (example: only up to 5 posts a day from this RSS feed)
• Limits for a community (example: only up to 5 posts a day to !archlinux)
• Global limits (example: only up to 10 posts made each day)
• Opt-out for servers & communities (instance and community moderators will be able to ask to be put in the UNLIST, which blocks by default Relly on your instace/community; this isn't an anti-spam, as it is more a tool for avoiding common users to use Relly in a malicous and spammy way)
• Order posts (so, if i have 10 RSS posts and 10 Mastodon posts and a global limit of 15 posts, you can either have the 10 RSS posts and the 5 most upvoted Mastodon posts, or some RSS posts and some Mastodon posts [always the most upvoted])
• Multiple communities (post the same content to different communieties, or set up a fraction [ex. 50%], so that each post has a certain percentage to be posted on a certain community)
• Dynamic limits: You can set an objective of active users/post made in the last 24 hours, so that the limits (either for a specific source, a specific community or globally) will be reduced. Example: if you set a objective of 50 posts, and 25 are made, the limits of Relly will be 50% of what they were originaly set to be; this allows Relly to completly stop posting on a community if the objective was already reached.
• Do not repeat: before posting a link, checks if it was already posted in the community in a specific time period (by default, 48 hours)
• Modularity: new post sources and post outputs can be implemented; an example could be an e-mail output, so that you can run Relly in local and recieve an e-mail everyday with your favourite news)

Relly is designed to be used by moderators of communities, but users can also use it. A user should always ask the moderator if it is OK to use it. A moderator should always ask the admins if it is OK to use it. Moderators, if they are the one using it, should also make public the list of sources, and allow the community to discuss possible edits to the list. The admins should put in the sidebar notes if Relly is OK to use for moderators of communities.

At the moment, Relly is just the idea that I presented here; I want to hear the community's feedback, and if the community is OK with this project being made, I will start working on it (I will make it in Rust and release under the MIT License).

I'll admit I've drifted off Lemmy the last month or so.. content was a bit repetitive and felt like just an echo chamber of the same ideas. I didn't go back to Reddit, Reddit lost me to tiktok it turns out.

Jumped back on now and so many more posts have inspired me to comment. I'm a comment contributor generally but I wasn't feeling it.

Anyway.. just wanted to pop in and say I'm really enjoying it. Not that I was ever going anywhere but this is a great trajectory

What a hell is going on? I expect to see everything inside backticks exactly as I typed, but something happens to ''>" and "<" characters. In the preview everything is fine, but after submitting the post it breaks:

• "<" → <
• ">" → >
• "<<" → <<
• ">>" → >>
• "<a>" → ``
• "</a>" → ``

About 10 months ago I posted this thread saying that it would be useful for the fediverse to consider post once, share everywhere paradigms: https://lemmy.ml/post/641509

And now we have The Verge writers saying similar things: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon

Maybe worth re-considering.

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

We published a new release candidate for Lemmy 0.19.0. Note that this so-called release candidate is really a beta. In the future we will use more appropriate version names.

Most importantly it includes the new feature to export user settings, and later import them on another instance.

The Docker image was changed from Alpine to Debian which should improve stability and performance (#3972). This unfortunately broke ARM builds, so we'd need some assistance getting them working again for debian.

The remaining changes are mostly minor improvements and bug fixes, you can see them in the full changelog. Please test the new version on voyager.lemmy.ml or by installing tag 0.19.0-rc.3 on your server. If you encounter any problems, report them on Github.

For Developers: This version includes various API changes compared to rc.1:

• The endpoints for exporting and importing user settings are at GET /api/v3/user/export_settings and POST /api/v3/user/import_settings. Note that the returned json is not meant to be parsed, but directly stored to disk (#3976).
• /api/v3/login now sets the auth cookie automatically, so clients might not have to handle it anymore. There is also a new endpoint /api/v3/logout which clears the cookie and invalidates the auth token (#3818).
• There is a new endpoint /api/v3/user/validate_auth which returns errors in case of invalid auth token. This is necessary because other API actions silently ignore invalid auth and treat the user as unauthenticated. We are changing various endpoints to return simply {"success": "true"} (#3993, #4058 (not included in rc.2)).
• The endpoint /api/v3/post/mark_as_read can now take an array post_ids instead of single post_id value but remains backwards compatible (#4048).

@nutomic improved the way that titles for Mastodon posts are handled (#4033). He also worked on various minor fixes and enhancements, see here.

@dessalines is nearly done with the redesign of join-lemmy.org. You can see it here, and check the pull request to provide feedback / suggestions. Also worked on cleaning up stale lemmy issues.

@SleeplessOne1917 reworked a much cleaner 2FA interface for lemmy UI (#2179), fixed a bug with the emoji picker (#2175), and added an enable_animated_images setting to users (#4040). Also worked on lemmy-ui-leptos.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

Every major social media is censoring anti-israel or pro-Palestine content. This may be a good opportunity to convince Arabs to move over to lemmy, where only we control the content moderation.

For the record, the lemmy won't be Palestine only. I just think it'll be the reason people will move over.

The reason I ask for others to help me is:

• help advertise to other Arabs to bring them over
• someone to register the stuff in their name. Unfortunately, I am an immigrant in a country and have been interrogated by them before (on bogus grounds). While what I'm doing is not illegal, they have their eyes on me and I am paranoid they'll give me trouble again regardless. I can take care of the technology side of the hosting and the initial costs (hopefully donations cover the rest). Since it will be on your name, moderation and the like will be your decision, but I will just want to make sure initially that we are on a similar page.