maltfield

awesome-lemmy-instances adds two new columns:

1. BI - The number of instances that this instance blocks
2. BB - The number of instances that block this instance

Now you can quickly see which instances censor (or are censored) in the lemmyverse:

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

I wrote a guide to help users with their migration to Lemmy

• https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/

This guide will help new lemmy users find and subscribe-to (remote) lemmy ~~subreddits~~ communities

Before reddit goes dark on Monday, I would like to add a short video to the join-lemmy.org site that shows new users how to create a lemmy account and subscribe to (remote) communities.

The video should be about 2-minutes long (shorter is better) with a screen recording and voiceover narration. If you do this, you'll get a lot of traffic to your youtube/peertube account ;)

Here's the outline of the video requested:

1. Mention that lemmy is a federated reddit alterntaive based on ActivityPub where 'subreddits' are called 'communities'. Go to join-lemmy.org in your web browser and click the big Join a Server button.

2. Tell the viewer that it doesn't really matter which instance they pick because you can subscribe to a 'community' from one instance from any other instance. Again reiterate that what reddit calls a 'subreddit' is called a 'community' on lemmy. Then just click Join from a random server from the "Recommended" list of instances. Tell the user to just pick one at random because it doesn't matter which they choose.

3. Signup for an account. Tell the user they may need to wait for the account to be approved.

4. Try logging-in. Wait some hours (for approval), if needed. Login to the account.

5. Show the UI for ~10 seconds, then tell the user that they can browse all communities using the "Lemmy Commnity Browser" run by Feddit. Again, reiterate that what used to be called ‘subreddits’ in reddit are called ‘communities’ on lemmy, and that each lemmy instance can have many communities. Open a new browser tab going to https://browse.feddit.de/.

6. On https://browse.feddit.de/, search for some popular community (eg documentaries) and then click the link. For the purposes of this video demo, make sure you select a “remote” community that’s hosted on an instance that’s distinct from where the user signed-up.

7. Tell the user that there's three ways to subscribe to a remote instance: [1] Search by remote URL, [2] Search by shorthand identifier, or [3] Manually construct the URL for your instance to their instance

8. Show copying & pasting the URL of the remote community (eg https://lemmy.ml/c/documentaries) into the search field of their own instance, and then clicking on the result.

9. Show copying & pasting the shorthand identifier for the remote community (eg [!documentaries@lemmy.ml](/c/documentaries@lemmy.ml)) into the search field of their own instance, and then clicking the result.

10. Open a new tab, and show how to manually construct the URL for the remote community in their own instance's site (eg https://[their.instance.tld]/c/documentaries@lemmy.ml) and load this page in the browser. Then click the Subscribe button

11. Tell the user that after they've subscribed to a bunch of communities, they can click the logo of their instance on the top-left of the UI to return to the Home Page of their instance. Then they can click the "Subscribed" tab to view posts to all the communities they subscribed to across the entire fediverse.

12. Show the changing of the sort from 'Active' to 'New' and 'Top'.

13. Tell the user that for more information on how to use Lemmy, they can read the documentation at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/ or post questions to the Lemmy community on lemmy.ml (https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy or [!lemmy@lemmy.ml](/c/lemmy@lemmy.ml)) that’s moderated by the lemmy developers.

Bonus: Tell that there's an iOS and Android app and show a quick ~5 seconds browsing in one or both.

I'm crowdsourcing this because I'm not much of a video creator, but I think this would be an incredibly useful resource to new lemmy users. And I can tell you that, if you make this video, it will drive a ton of traffic to your channel ;)

Can anyone with some video production skills help-out new lemmy users by making this short video? If you upload this to YouTube, please make sure you mark the license as Creative Commons CC-BY-SA so that we can add it to documentation and share it as widely as possible :)

The GitHub repo that provides a comparison table of different lemmy instances now includes server uptime %

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

Thanks to David Morley for providing this data via the Fediverse Observer API

• https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

Hello everyone, after a few days of discussions with Reddit I finally have an update to share on the current situation.

It has been agreed that RedReader falls under the exemption for non-commercial accessibility-focused apps, due to the work that has been done to optimize the app for screen readers, and the app's high level of usage within the blind community.

To summarize:

RedReader can continue to operate as a free and open source app.

There will be no ads, monetization, etc.

I still have concerns about Reddit's current trajectory, and plan to expand the range of sites RedReader is able to access in future.

Short-term plan

In the next few weeks, there are a couple of changes I need to make to the app to comply with the new developer terms:

When users first launch the app, they will be prompted to agree to Reddit's terms and conditions.

Developers other than me who compile RedReader from source will need to provide their own API keys. For individual use, these fall under Reddit's free tier.
    This change will unfortunately create an extra hurdle for contributors, so I'll do what I can to make this as simple as possible and I'll write up some instructions for this.
    Users who download the app from Google Play are unaffected by this, as those APKs are built by me.
    With F-Droid, I will continue to ensure the app is distributed there (I personally use a de-Googled phone), however this will have to be distributed from the RedReader repository rather than the official F-Droid repo (similar to the Alpha version). I'll aim to release more details on this soon, but needless to say, non-Google app distribution channels are still a big priority for me.

So for the most part, we can continue operating under the status quo. Long-term plan

While I'm grateful to them for granting the accessibility exemption, I continue to think that Reddit is making a big mistake with the broader API changes as a whole, and throughout the discussions with them I've made this clear. I think it's very reasonable to be concerned about Reddit's current trajectory, and nobody can know for sure how long the exemption will last.

I also have concerns about the treatment of other developers, particularly Christian Selig, including the dubious public claims that have been made about Apollo's efficiency.

I spent a long time thinking about whether to continue operating RedReader as a Reddit app under these circumstances, and came to the decision that the app will continue to interoperate with Reddit for the foreseeable future.

Over the last week I've been in touch with the developers of Lemmy, who indicated that they would prefer a slow ramp up of traffic rather than a sudden influx. Similarly, the major Lemmy instances are struggling under the sheer number of Reddit refugees right now.

While I hope the accessibility exemption will continue indefinitely, nobody can guarantee that it will. Even in the the worst case scenario, the exemption at least grants us some breathing room to see how the situation develops.

My long-term vision for RedReader is to restructure the app to more easily support other sites, including Lemmy, and perhaps others such as Tild.es and Hacker News. Before the API changes were announced, I was already considering adding RSS reader functionality to the app, and I think it would be cool to work with some kind of "open forum protocol" which would allow a variety of websites and apps to interoperate with each other through a uniform API.

We will continue to prioritize accessibility in the app, while also continuing to serve the userbase as a whole. Thank you

Finally, I want to thank everyone in the community for your messages of support, and the nearly 200 contributors who have written code for RedReader over the last decade.

To those who have worked so hard on RedReader's accessibility features, I'd like to offer an extra big "thank you", as without your contributions, the app wouldn't have been granted this exemption.

Despite my continuing reservations about Reddit's current direction, and regardless of what people will say about their motivations here, I am pleased that they've taken into account the fact that RedReader is free and open source, and serves a purpose for users in the blind community.

We just published our #WarrantCanary for 2023 H2 🕵️

https://buskill.in/canary-006/

Warrant Canaries are a means for us to (not) inform you of (not being) breached if served with a State-issued, secret subpoena (gag order) #infosec

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 :)

This article is about a new 3d-printable prototype version of the BusKill cable.

The BusKill cable is a laptop kill cord. If you're still struggling to understand what is a BusKill cable and why you'd need a laptop kill cord, there's a 2-minute explainer video that makes this clear:

• https://www.buskill.in/#demo

Enjoy and happy printing :)