Lemmy

The API docs on join-lemmy.org are actually JavaScript SDK docs, not API docs. I want to build an API client in a different language, not write a JavaScript thing using the SDK, and would prefer not to plumb the JS SDK code to understand the API.

Is there somewhere that has a language-agnostic description of Lemmy's APIs?

I dislike how to post on like the majority of big subreddit, you have to have X karma, Y account age etc, and those things seem to be enforced by automod. A really good feature of lemmy for me is there being no automod!

That would be a nice feature, unless I'm missing it

I'm new here, so I'd like to know if this project is growing steadily or not really catching on. It has a lot of potentioal imho, but I understand how hard it is to make people use "alternative" websites.

(I'm having a headache currently so, I hope you don't mind some garbly sentences.)

As of writing, I've looked into the communities available on lemmy, most are pretty much dead but for a few reasons. I will not focus on that now, the objective I have for this is to explain how we could change that.

As much as you want to do community work, I advice against making yourself in a position where you have to be active all the time/regularly. It's very, very easy to get burnt out this way. In a very much online community forcing yourself to do something is counter-productive. Plus you have better things to do.

You can do this once in a while, improving things bit by bit, and let people enjoy, they will come and go.

Every community has to have a wiki. An "About", "FAQ", "Examples of what to do in this community"/"What to write about" can help people give them a choice. Not to mention a "Rules" section would be great once the community is bustling with activities.

Optionally you can add something like a matrix server, so within your community people can bond together and become friends. (Especially important for video game communities, to enable them to play games together)

And then you can further upgrade the community with adding something specific to them. For an example if the community is about writing, perhaps you can setup an own plume/writefreely instance. If the community is a multiplayer mmo game like minetest or veloren, adding a game server would boost the activity up a notch.

Lastly, not all communities are created equal, some are based around a conversation, asking for advice or help; Nothing much can be done for those stuff. However, for everything else it has potential.

Before any social platform was popular it tried to attract as many users as possible in some way. I'm not an expert so I feel like we need to discuss about this more, since our lemmy is still pretty much an infant.

I'm developing a tui for lemmy :).

It's in a very early stage of development, i'm looking forward to improve my Rust skills by working on this project (this is my first rust project)

Please don't put any hate comments against the developers of lemmy or against the person who posted this.

I am also unhappy about what the main lemmy instance is doing.

What are your thoughts?

I think most of us agree that the main problem which Lemmy has today is its lack of users. This is not for technical reasons, as we know it is quite stable and usable. The main cause is that the project is not widely known yet. In this post I will propose what we can do to change that.

First, lets clarify why we should promote Lemmy. Clearly there are many different reasons, and every person prioritizes them differently. So I will just give some common examples:

• Promote open source (and all the benefits that entails)
• No advertising or tracking
• Allow communities to manage themselves, instead of being controlled by corporations
• Making Lemmy more active, particularly if you would like to see more discussions on certain topics

So how can we promote Lemmy?

I think one of the most effective thing we can do at this point is to post about Lemmy in other communities where we are active. This has the benefit that other people already trust us to some degree. Open source projects looking to setup a forum might also be a good target. When doing this, we should consider which aspects of the project would be most important to the target audience, and emphasize those.

Another option is to contact bloggers, video creators, podcasters or others, and suggest that they report about Lemmy. As above, it is important to adjust the message to the target audience. Because Lemmy is quite small, it is unlikely that major tech magazines or professional content creators would care about it. Instead we should focus on smaller creators. This will also lead to more sustainable growth, and give us some legitimacy in the eyes of bigger creators.

In both cases, we should avoid doing anything that might be perceived as spam. It is better to create one or two high-quality messages, which will give a good impression of the project, rather than a dozen generic ones that tarnish the reputation.

It is worth noting that some important features are still missing in Lemmy, particularly mod tools (we are going to implement them in the next ~12 months). There also aren't many different instances yet.

When promoting Lemmy like this, please avoid linking to lemmy.ml directly. This instance is already too big relative to other instances, and it is not meant to be a "flagship instance" (What is lemmy.ml?). Instead you should try to find an appropriate instance on join-lemmy.org and link to it, or link to the joinlemmy site directly. You can also explicitly encourage the creation of new instances.

On a side note, it might be worth mentioning the many ways that people can contribute to Lemmy (again depending on the audience). There are the obvious ones, like writing code for lemmy and lemmy-ui, writing documentation or translating. There are also multiple interesting options to create new projects, such as:

• Create an alternative frontend: nojs frontend like lemmy-lite, a traditional forum frontend or something like stackoverflow
• Create a new client, be it for mobile, desktop or terminal.
• Gather instance statistics using lemmy-stats-crawler, and build some nice graphs.

By the way, Lemmy is not just a Reddit alternative, so there is no reason to limit the promotion to Reddit.

To help with these promotion efforts, @dessalines and I would be happy to give interviews via email (in English, German or Spanish). For that, they can get in touch by mailing contact@lemmy.ml.

I think we need to add a couple more barriers to prevent spam. What about limiting posting to X amount of posts, or for new users or something?

Like a graph of the number of users on the whole lemmyverse.

Solved, graph here: https://the-federation.info/lemmy

Banners are fuckhuge. Even fitting wide ones like /c/gaming take up most of the page, and then there's vertical ones like /c/anime which are kind of absurd.

I admit that it's worse for me because I have to use the site zoomed in and wish the site was more left-aligned, but even at standard zoom, a typical community page will only show 2 actual posts and part of another one. It's overwhelming.

I appreciate the bit of customizability, but I think they go a bit overboard.

I thought this would be good to share, its an excerpt from an unpublished interview written in december 2020 about Lemmy's origins and goals.

What is the story behind the creation of Lemmy? What role do you want it to serve for people online / why did you make it?

The idea to make Lemmy was a combination of factors.

Open source developers like myself have long watched the rise of the "Big Five", the US tech giants that have managed to capture nearly all the world's everyday communication into their hands. We've been asking ourselves why people have moved away from content-focused sites, and what we can do to subvert this trend, in a way that is easily accessible to a non-tech focused audience.

The barriers to entry on the web, are much lower than say in the physical world: all it takes is a computer and some coding knowhow... yet the predominating social media firms have been able to stave off competition for at least two reasons: their sites are easy to use, and they have huge numbers of users already (the "first mover" advantage). The latter is more important; if you've ever tried to get someone to use a different chat app, you'll know what I mean.

Now I loved early reddit, not just for the way that it managed to put all the news for the communities and topics I wanted to see in a single place, but for the discussion trees behind every link posted. I still have many of these saved, and have gained so much more from the discussion behind the links, than I have from the links themselves. In my view, its the community-focused, tree-like discussions, as well as the ability to make, grow, and curate communities, that has made reddit the 5th most popular site in the US, and where so many people around the world get their news.

But that ship sailed years ago; the early innovative spirit of reddit left with Aaron Schwartz: its libertarian founders have allowed some of the most racist and sexist online communities to fester on reddit for years, only occasionally removing them only when community outcry reaches a fever pitch. Reddit closed its source code years ago, and the reddit redesign has become a bloated anti-privacy mess.

Its become absorbed into that silicon valley surveillance-capitalist machine that commidifies users to sell ads and paid flairs, and propagandizes pro-US interests above all. Software technology being one of the last monopoly exports the US has, it would be naive to think that one of the top 5 most popular social media sites, where so many people around the world get their news, would be anything other than a mouthpiece for the interests of those same US coastal tech firms.

Despite the conservative talking point that big tech is dominated by "leftist propaganda", it is liberal, and pro-US, not left (leftism referring to the broad category of anti-capitalism). Reddit has banned its share of leftist users and communities, and the reddit admins via announcement posts repeatedly villify the US's primary foreign-policy enemies as having "bot campaigns", and "manipulating reddit", yet the default reddit communities (/r/news, /r/pics, etc), who share a small number of moderators, push a line consistent with US foreign-policy interests. The aptly named /r/copaganda subreddit has exposed the pro-police propaganda that always seems to hit reddit's front page in the wake of every tragedy involving US police killing the innocent (or showing police kissing puppies, even though US police kill ~ 30 dogs every day, which researchers have called a "noted statistical phenomenon").

We've also seen a rise in anti-China posts that have hit reddit lately, and along with that comes anti-chinese racism, which reddit tacitly encourages. That western countries are seeing a rise in attacks against Asian-Americans, just as some of the perpetrators of several hate-crimes against women were found to be redditors active in mens-rights reddit communities, is not lost on us, and we know where these tech companies really stand when it comes to violence and hate speech. Leftists know that our position on these platforms is tenable at best; we're currently tolerated, but that will not always be the case.

The idea for making a reddit alternative seemed pointless, until Mastodon (a federated twitter alternative), started becoming popular. Using activitypub (a protocol / common language that social media services can use to speak to each other), we finally have a solution to the "first mover" advantage: now someone can build or run a small site, but still be connected to a wider universe of users.

@nutomic@lemmy.ml and I originally made Lemmy to fill the role as a federated alternative to reddit, but as it grows, it has the potential become a main source of news and discussion, existing outside of the US's jurisdictional domain and control.

Where does the name come from?

It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals. I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that.

Do you have any interaction with the groups that use the open-source code?

We do, most of them are in a shared Lemmy developer chatroom, as well as interacting via github.

Are you familiar with the group running Chapo Chat at all, specifically?

Yes, we communicate with some of their developers regularly, both in tech-oriented, and admin-oriented chats. A few of their developers have made great contributions to Lemmy's code, and we've been happy to work with them.

Were you aware that the group that used to run the anti-trans forum r/GenderCritical on Reddit thought about using Lemmy for their site? Did they contact you at all?

They have not contacted us, and of course our code of conduct which explicitly contains a section against anti-trans bigotry means we wouldn't help them in any way. Many reddit alternatives have been happy to embrace "reddits rejects", no matter how bigoted those communities are, in the name of "free speech". We don't agree with this view, or with those who have nostalgia for a non-existent reddit past where it was more "free" and bigoted than it is now.

Do you have a sense of how many sites are running the code?

Currently, less than 10, but this is also because the killer feature of Lemmy, federation, is still only in beta, and that was only released a few weeks ago. Its a slow burn, but we're confident that it will grow organically as we turn federation on for the officially run instances, and more connect to them.

There's also a 3rd-party iOS and Android app called lemmur, in development that we're excited for, and will make using lemmy extremely easy to use on smartphones.

Is there a feature to receive RSS feeds for a community?

This is due to wanting to separate the lemmy flagship instance from the onboarding site.

From the instance admins to all of you, whether you're a member of the LGBTQ+ community or not, happy pride month 2021!

I am new to Lemmy and felt the need to just say how amazing it is!!!!!

it is very amazing >< glad to be here

https://lemmy.ml/c/findacommunity https://lemmy.ml/c/whatisthisplant https://lemmy.ml/c/whatisthisthing

Lately I'm seeing some spam posts. I don't see a button for reporting them. What should users be doing when we see spam?

EDIT: SVG files linked below:

dark sticker

light sticker

How much space is currently used by Lemmy.ml database? I'm thinking of hosting my own instance and wondering what parameters are needed.

I´m not sure if I´m the only one bugged out with this, but it would be nice to have either by default or an option to open links in a new tab with the regular left click.

At this point I lost count of how many times I opened a link from some news or something I found here and only remembered to come back after closing the tab. I know one could just middle click and be done with it, but other sites cough cough ~~Reddit~~ cough cough got me too used to this behavior and it would be nice to have some option for this.

I think it's lemmy.ml specifically but I don't know for sure? Anyone have a good workaround?

EDIT: Thanks to everyone who suggested Lemmur! Had no idea it existed but I've got it installed now!

I just found out about this website and I've been pretty happy with what I've seen, but there are some communities missing.

When I try to create a community the name field glows red and that doesn't allow me to create it. Am I misunderstanding something?

Thanks

I'm not sure what the current state of federalization is. I've tried to find it in the GUI but didn't find an option to subscribe a community from another instance.

As a mod it'd be useful to see the list of users that belong to a given community. Is it possible in the current UI?