Lemmy

Mlmym is a new Lemmy app that replicates the old.reddit interface

https://mlmym.org/lemmy.ml/c/fediverse

[posted to @lemmy]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/545045

Decentralization

Reddit is going downhill, Twitter is a mess, Youtube is making decisions that no one wants and Instagram/TikTok are creating algorithms to make you addicted to their content at the expense of your mental health. Before them there was myspace, digg, yahoo etc doing the exact same thing. The common thing is that the power on these platforms is 'centralized', meaning that a single company has the power to make any rule or change which the users will have to agree with if they want to continue using the platform.

'Decentralization' aims to return control to the people. Instead of one dominant entity governing the entire system, these platforms rely on smaller, user-operated nodes that communicate with one another. This way no single user or company has the power to make changes to the entire system, or to decide what is acceptable or not as each instance can have their own set of rules by which they run.

Federation

In simple terms, when two instances communicate and send data to each other, they are said to be 'federated'. An instance can thus federate with thousands of other instances to view and interact with the content hosted on them. You can even set up your own small personal instance and federate with every other instance to view data from the entire fediverse.

If an instance becomes unomoderated, hosts illegal content, has a bot problem or has just in general a vibe you don't agree with, an instance admin can 'defederate' from that instance, meaning you will no longer view posts from them nor can they view posts from you, effectively breaking any communication with them.

Fediverse

Fediverse, or 'federated universe' is the name given to the social media platforms that utilize this concept of federation and decentralization. While Lemmy and Mastodon are the most popular right now, there are many similar platforms. There is Peertube for example, which is a Youtube alternative, or Pixelfed, which is an instagram alternative. You can view a list of all such platforms on this site. Here's also a visual representation that might help.

Lemmy

Lemmy is the reddit alternative social media that is part of the fediverse. It works similar to reddit, in the sense that people can post stuff and other users can comment on these posts, higher upvoted posts rise to the top etc. The main difference is that communities (subreddits of lemmy) are hosted on different instances which can then all be viewed by a user from their home instance (provided they weren't defederated). So no single instance or admin has control over all communities, nor do the hosting costs skyrocket as ideally each instance will host some communities to balance the load.

Mastodon

The Twitter alternative and the first popular fediverse platform. it's pretty similar to Twitter so if you know how that works you pretty much know how Mastodon works too (apart from the decentralized aspect).

Kbin

While Lemmy and kbin are spoken of together nowadays, kbin is actually more of a hybrid between lemmy and mastodon. While you can use kbin just as a lemmy alternative with a different skin, it is also a microblogging site. This means that you can follow individual users, and people looking at your 'timeline' can even view posts you upvoted, similar to twitter.

Right now there is no way to interact with mastodon users through lemmy, but Kbin can view content from both. So it's upto you which kind of platform feels better to you.

Edit: Small correction but Mastodon can view lemmy content as well, so it's just lemmy who's unable to fetch mastodon content right now.

ActivityPub

ActivityPub is the protocol on which the entire fediverse runs. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content. All you need to know is that if a platform is part of the fediverse, then it must be using ActivityPub protocol.

FOSS

Free and Open Source Software. It's a more general term but thought it's relevant enough to be added since a lot of people might not have heard of it. FOSS applications are not only free but make their source code public, which means anyone can view exactly how each part of the site works and to check if nothing malicious is added. People can even modify this code to make changes and make the application better. Here's the source code for lemmy for anyone interested.

Aside from the terms I'll also try to answer some questions I've seen asked frequently:

Q: How is this entire thing monetized?

A: In short, donations. Decentralization helps by making the hosting costs manageable for a single instance, so donating even a little bit to your home instance can help them cover a large portion of their operating costs.

Q: What Instance should I join?

A: While I wish I could say join any one of them, in reality, each instance has a different set of rules and philosophy on which they operate. Some can be heavy in their moderation, trying to curate a very specific feed, while others are much more liberal, letting users have more free control. My advice to someone new would be to make an account on any instance just to get a feel for how everything works and if you like the concept of Lemmy. Once you've grasped how things work, then choose an instance to be your main home.

Q: Why do I see different amount of upvotes and comments on different instances?

A: If the comment is new, it can take some time to sync and be visible on other instances in general. However, remeber that you can't see upvotes and comments from users your instance has not federated with. So if your home instance has not federated with some instances, the upvotes and comments from users of that instance won't be visible to you.

Q: How do I discover new Communities to join?

A: I made a specific post just for this question.

Q: Are there any mobile apps for lemmy?

A: Yes, a lot of them infact. Here's a megathread that's being kept updated with all current apps.

These are the main points I thought a new user might find useful. If someone has anything they wish to be added, comment below and I'll update it with relevant information.

Hey everyone, I am looking to change the domain name of my self hosted instance and had a question.

I used the Ansible installation instructions originally and am now curious if it would be as easy as editing the "hosts" file and the "config.hjson" file before running the playbook again?

Will this overwrite the necessary configurations and grab a new SSL while keeping the content of the instance intact?

My main concern is breaking federation.

Thanks for any insight.

I wonder if there is or will be a functionally providing the possibility to "hide" communities for a user? For instance I am not a soccer fan. So hiding communities with particular soccer teams as topic would be great. Later maybe I am interested so "unhiding" would be the other way around.

I don't know the code nor am I a Rust developer. But in my happy little programmer world this doesn't sound too complicated.

What do you think?

P.s. I didn't get a response to my last RFC and am a little concerned that stuff like this is not the point of this community. So please correct me if I'm wrong here :)

Edit: foo explained me that using block feature is the current state of art. Maybe there comes something "softer" than a block but for me this workaround works

I've read that it should be possible, but my experience seems to show that that is incorrect, that you need a login for every instance where you wish to make a post or comment. Could someone who knows clarify this?

If you need a login for every instance of Lemmy to participate in non-local communities, then that will, I think, be the #1 issue with Lemmy adoption, and the main reason folks bounce off.

Due to the nature of the default robots.txt and the meta tags in Lemmy, search engines will index even non-local communities. This leads to results that are undesirable, such as unrelated/undesirable content being associated with your instance.

As of today, lemmy-ui does not allow hiding non-local (or any) communities from Google and other search engines. If you, like me, do not want your instance to be associated with other content, you can add a custom robots.txt and response headers to avoid indexing.

In nginx, simply add this:

# Disallow all search engines
location / {
  ...
  add_header X-Robots-Tag noindex;
}

location = /robots.txt {
    add_header Content-Type text/plain;
    return 200 "User-agent: *\nDisallow: /\n";
}

Here's a commit in my fork of the lemmy-ansible playbook. And here's a corresponding issue I opened in lemmy-ui.

I hope this helps someone :-)

It would help a lot to speed up moderation if there was a way to have an RSS feed with the latest comments of a given community.

Hello folks!

My apologies if this is not the appropriate place for this, I'll take it down if so. I spent the better part of the last 11 hours getting this project put together.

The README in the repository goes over just about everything regarding what this tool is about (and how to get it up and running), but the quick elevator pitch is that I wanted a way to monitor the stats of my instance because of the bot spam issues that have been going around in a lot of places. As of now, Lemmy keeps track of a lot of data that could be useful to at least be cognizant of what is going on, but doesn't actually expose it on the UI side.

Originally my idea was to just read the database info straight into Grafana, but of course due to my very little experience with Grafana I didn't realize that this wasn't going to quite work out the way I wanted, as the data in Lemmy's table isn't super well suited for what Grafana expects in terms of time-series data. Which then lead me to wanting to connect it with InfluxDB - another thing that I "knew of" but didn't have any experience with.

The end result was building a tool that could export/stream data from Lemmy's PostgreSQL database over to Influx, allowing me to then make some really nice visuals in Grafana! There are a couple of screenshots at the bottom of the README (I don't know how to scale images when inlining them into posts here and don't want a massive image in the post), along with a link to a snapshot/demo version of the dashboard.

Maybe it'll help some other instance admins, or maybe everyone will think its terrible (I do mention that I'm quite new at Rust), but either way its been frustrating, yet fun, and a good learning experience thus far!

Is there some way to hide deleted posts? When someone spams a bunch of posts and then they get deleted the post is still there taking up space. It would be nice if there was a setting to hide such posts or have them minimized in some way until you expand them.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/579630

Hi all,

I've put together some code on on Val Town that easily allows auto-publishing videos on Youtube channels to a Lemmy community.

It's simple enough that hopefully anyone should be able to set it up, and Val Town has a free tier which should be enough for anyone to publish a few feeds for free. There's a "README" on top showing how it's used.

Anyway, let me know what you think! If you end up using it, I'd love to get some thoughts on how easy it was to set up etc.

The line-height might have to be increased a little bit in the post listing as we can see in the screenshot that lines are currently slightly overlapping? It seems to be fine in the comments however.

While browsing all, with the hot setting, there are several posts that are days, even months old. Doesn’t take long to reach them either.

Thought it had to do with Lemmy.world being on 0.17, but it’s still a problem on 0.18

How many times can replies be nested (as in I post a comment, someone replies to that comment, then another replies to that comment, and so on)?

I'm assuming that this means that if you select a language, you will only be shown posts of that specified language; therefore, if you choose an uncommon language, you will see very little content (I'm assuming the most common language that is used on Lemmy, currently, is English). The warning, on its own, is rather nebulous, to me.

If this is possible, what exactly does that entail?

I think the way federation currently works spells doom for the fediverse, should any service of it get major traction. Currently, if you subscribe to a community on Lemmy or follow a user on Mastodon, your instance will pull the content of that instance/user and make it available for all to see and interact with. What seems like a good idea to spread content however is becomming the achilles heel of the fediverse: The admins of Lemmy/Mastodon instances are liable in many juristictions for the content their servers are distributing. This means in practice that many Lemmy/Mastodon instances block NSFW content for example, as the admins, understandably so, are either unwilling or incapable of making sure they are not running afoul of any laws.

As such, I think that the fediverse needs to offer a way for users to follow content from other instances without having that content be stored, let alone shared by their home instances.

A question I have at this point is where this criticism is best levied against. Is it the job of Lemmy/Mastodon to provide such a form of federation, or does the ActivityPub protocol needs to be ammended?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/925265

I've been working on a new Lemmy client for iOS and Android and will be looking for testers in the coming weeks. I'll be starting with iOS and then later rolling out to Android.

Features (so far) include:

• Compact and card views
• Multi-account support
• Gestures
• Nested/Threaded comments
• Themes

Let me know some of your favourite features of other Lemmy / Reddit apps that you liked that I may not have thought of!

Please follow the link if you're interested in testing. Here are some screenshots of the app so far and you can check out my thread on its development on Mastodon.

--

Are server admins able to selectively modify user's content? Do they have the power to selectively edit, move, delete etc.? Or does the collective federation prevent a single bad actor from taking authoritative control?

I opened an instance for Turkey/Turkish content. I'm currently only partially able to access federated content. Posts, comments, upvotes are either partially missing or not coming at all. What can I do about it?

If I increase the server specs, is there a chance of improvement or is it a general situation?

Apologies if that's already been asked, but since moving my instance 0.18 I can't seem to federate with kbin magazines any more. I just get empty feeds whenever I access them. Is this expected behaviour ?

Thanks again to the Dev for their insane work lately.

Most admins on Lemmy instances do not have backend access. That is generally reserved for the server owner/head admin only. So if your instance is going on- and offline intermittantly due to server load, admins will also be having a hard time getting on the site to moderate or really do anything. The server owners may be able to use the backend command line to do a tiny amount of moderation, but it's very much not intended to be used in that way.

I say this to remind everyone to please be patient on the 1st, there will be a massive influx of traffic, servers will go down, and admins may not be able to get on the site and moderate effectively until things settle down at least a little. We're trying our best.