Lemmy

Hi, usual disclaimer of not sure where to post this, or if this is already a thing.

But as a new Lemmier (?) I would love a feature that allows me to create a meta community or view where I can shove all the communities that have the same topic.

So I would have for example a meta community named "Tech" and I can add all the tech communities from different instances, so I can get a unified view of a topic thorough multiple instances.

Is this already a thing, or is it planned?

I've been using Lemmy for almost a week and I'm loving it. But some aspects are still a bit obscure to me. For instance : I have my account on lemmy.ml. I used https://browse.feddit.de/ to find some communities. I want to subscribe to https://reddthat.com/c/rts.

What's the easiest way to do so ? It looks like the search function only shows communities from the instance I'm signed on.

Edit: apparently, the servers are experiencing a little slowdown. Typing !rts@reddthat.com is the search field returned nothing at first but finally worked at some random moment after spamming ':D

Wanted to say THANK YOU to whoever came up with and implemented the extra sorting algos, specifically the Top Hour and Top Six Hours. The six hour one especially is great when looking for a quick break at work!

Hi all,

I’ve been observing and participating in this community for about a week now. I’m liking it so far, but one thing I’m really missing is a way to link to other Lemmy content in a way that’s instance-aware.

For example, if I were to want to link to !risa@startrek.website, I’d link to https://startrek.website/c/risa. But then I’d end up at a Lemmy instance where I don’t have an account; I’d really prefer to be redirected to https://derp.foo/c/risa@startrek.website.

So here’s my proposal: create a central Lemmy redirection service where people can set their instance (in a cookie). The idea would be that people can link to, say, https://example.com/c/risa@startrek.website, and be ensured us lemmings end up on an instance where we can actually post.

Linking to posts and comments should ideally be part of this as well but whould involve a little more work.

Companies have strategically undermined community driven projects in the past many times. We should all keep an eye out for corporate movements in this space. I felt the duty to spread this awareness.

[YSK about corporations' strategies to kill open source protocols] cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/571039

[https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html]

I saw this in another thread on /c/Showerthoughts. I think it's important for this to be circulated widely so that the broader Fediverse community is aligned. We don't want admins second-guessing their decisions when users start infighting. We should be united in our thinking and ready to protect our platform.

I recently came across a torrent that seems to be an archive of Reddit. It got me thinking if it would be possible to make it locally browsable. However, I also considered the possibility that someone might have already addressed this by creating a public Lemmy instance, enabling the content to be accessible from any federated instance.

In a recent thread asking for top five movies, my comment was added to another user’s post but weirdly they’re comment was VERY similar to mine. Then my exact same comment was added to ANOTHER user’s post. I’m now sure if this is an issue with the Memmy app or Lemmy I general, but the fact that my original comment was confused with another very similar comment is pretty sus. Why would this happen? Is it a coincidence?

More pics in replies

I'm sharing this post and it's thread because I've run into this issue of not being able to find communities, users, posts, or comments on other instances, or the communities are missing a substantial number of comments and votes even after interacting with these posts and receiving new replies. Is this functionality standard and desirable behavior? Why or why not? I'm trying to understand how it's expected to work, because it's not very intuitive starting out to explore other instances sometimes.

Maybe we could brainstorm a way to make it more intuitive. What are the trade-offs involved? Why does it work the way it currently works? Is there a better way?

The main point that has been brought up is the fact that users from smaller, newer instances will not be able to access the backlog of posts and comments from older more established instances. I'd say a lot of the value of the platform comes from this foundation of posts sorted by votes on a link aggregator site like this. Should new users be encouraged to join the older, more established instances in order to have access to the most content?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/357141

SOLUTION FOUND - thank you

There is a community called Tarot on lemmy.world, and I want to subscribe to it. The url is https://lemmy.world/c/tarot. I've been to lemmy.world when not logged in and I can see it there. But when I try to find it from here, I can't. I tried putting !tarot@lemmy.world in the search and got "no results found". I've been told that "someone needs to search for it, for it to appear", but I have already tried to search for it, many times. What else needs to happen for me to be able to see and subscribe to this community?

Or do I just have to make a second account on lemmy.world?

This is just an idea, but I see that some instance prevent bots from bypassing the registration step by asking unexpected questions like "are you human?". Apparently this is the type of question that can easily discern a human answer from a chatGPT answer. So what if the admin of an instance changed the question asked for registration application every few days? Something like " What did you hit for break f4st? " would give bot proof applications and the answers would likely give the admin a good laugh. Not 100% effective of course, but would help for the time being.

I have seen a lot of calls around Lemmy for more moderation tools. I have been working on Lemmy PowerShell module for a few weeks now, and I went ahead and released a preview version with multiple moderation tools now available. The module has the ability to perform the following tasks using a simple command line tool:

• Search posts and comments
• Remove a post
• Remove a comment
• Lock and unlock posts
• Add and remove moderators
• Create new posts and comments

You can get started now by installing the module through the PowerShell gallery.

Install-Module Lemmy-preview
Import-Module Lemmy-preview

If you are not familiar with PowerShell, I've include detailed instruction in the GitHub repo with lots of example. https://github.com/mdowst/Lemmy-PowerShell

If you run into any issues please let me know either here or by submitting an Issue to the repo.

Well I never had spam issues, until 0.18 forced captchas to be disabled. Thankfully the bots just seem to be signing up, not doing much yet. Using fake emails that never get verified.

So I threw together a little script. Just put this in a sh file, and create a cron job or systemd service to run it every 15 minutes or so. Use your favorite text edit tool to replace "thelemmyclub" with your instance name, or whatever you have your docker containers named. (Check docker ps). You'll also have to be able to run docker without sudo, so add your user to the docker group or put the cron job on root (if you do that make sure only root can access the file, for security)

Also if you set up manually without docker, well I'm sure you have the skills to adapt these commands appropriately.

First though run:

docker exec -it thelemmyclub_postgres_1 psql -U lemmy -h 127.0.0.1 -p 5432 -d lemmy -c "select * from local_user where id in (select local_user_id from email_verification where published < (NOW() - INTERVAL '60 minute'));"

This will list all users who haven't completed email verification, except those that are under an hour old. If you think these are all abandoned accounts and bots, carry on. It's always best to check before doing things to live databases...

Edit: thanks to input from @freeskier@centennialstate.social

The sh file you need:

#! /bin/bash
docker exec -it thelemmyclub_postgres_1 psql -U lemmy -h 127.0.0.1 -p 5432 -d lemmy -c "DELETE FROM person WHERE local = 'true' AND id IN (SELECT person_id FROM local_user WHERE id IN (SELECT local_user_id FROM email_verification WHERE published < (NOW() - INTERVAL '60 minute')));"

This will delete all users over an hour old who haven't completed email verification. (Only applies to accounts made after you enabled email verification, so older accounts are safe)

Hope this helps!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/530049

I mod a sports league community, and I was trying to put team logos in the description. But after the fourth one the editor would not upload any more. I tried saving and going back into the editor but it still wouldn't.

I was shrinking them down to 20x20 pixel png files, and I saved all the links to the ones I already uploaded so that if I can get this resolved I won't be re-uploading the same ones.

I was able to add more today, but again it stopped after a few. The 4 image refs in the editor was probably a coincidence vs the number of uploads, and I didn't count the number of uploads. So there is for sure some limiting happening, I'm just not sure what in specific. I wasn't able to add more using an incognito window either, so maybe it's a limit on uploads per day per IP.

Startrek.website purged their bot accounts a few days ago. I asked the admins how the did just in case it'd be useful for other admins.

Here's a link to their response (from @williams_482@startrek.website ):

https://startrek.website/comment/172094

Warning ... I make no claim that this is at all sound advice, and williams_482 themselves warn that you need to make sure you know what you're doing ... as it seems they ran some direct delete commands over their database.

This platform could be a viable alternative for forums (cuz we know in which state they currently are), but the lack of general attachments (any mime/file type) is what I believe stands in the way. I have an electronics forum I run (a local one, nothing too serious) and I believe Lemmy can make it more intereactive (not die out) because people from all over the world will get the feed and not just people that are online on the forum at that time.

Still, we frequently exchange PDFs, schematics (not always in image form), archives, etc., which makes Lemmy useless if there are no plans to implement something like this, even if disabled by default.

So, are there plans for anything like this being implemented?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/578734

And vice versa I guess.

Is it possible? Will they get reports? Messages? Can they do mod actions?

I've found previously that Lemmy content on kbin gets delayed, and edits and comments don't transfer perfectly.

Also there's that remote mod bug, which I hear is fixed in 18.x. Are there any other potential issues with remote mods?

Hey Fediverse,

We've been working on something cool and wanted to share it with you. It's a new project called Lemmy.link, and it's all about making RSS feeds more accessible and useful on Lemmy.

We've noticed there's been a lot of talk in various communities about people shifting back to traditional RSS aggregators like Feedly, TT-RSS, and Newsblur. It got us thinking: why not bring those RSS feeds directly to Lemmy instead?

That's how Lemmy.link came to life. Right now, we have 10 communities collecting from over 30 RSS feeds, covering topics from World News and Technology to Business, plus some popular YouTube communities like News, Technology, and Explainers.

But we're just getting started, and this is where you come in. We'd love your ideas for new communities or RSS feeds to include. There's just one thing - to keep things running smoothly, we're focusing on shared interests and staying away from personal communities with custom feeds.

Also, please note, for now, lemmy.link is closed for signups. You'll need to subscribe from your current Lemmy instance. Once we've incorporated the upcoming 0.18.1 captcha update, we'll take a fresh look at this.

So, take a tour of Lemmy.link and let us know what you think. We believe there's huge potential for this project in the Fediverse and your input is a big part of that. Please provide any feedback on !meta@lemmy.link

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy what we've built so far with Lemmy.link.

-- Notorious

I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.

I've been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc... But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.

I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist. Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.

This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the 'compatible' users and communities from other instances.

Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.

Can somebody let me know how I would remove an account from the posgreSQL database?

I can see the tables, but don't know where the accounts are held or the sql statement to delete them.

Thank you.

An underrated accessibility feature on Lemmy is the ability to add alternative text to images in Markdown. The image above will be read as "photo of a snail" by screen-readers. The Markdown for that one is:

![Photo of a snail](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f9281257-b8bc-4c77-9aad-be5038e0758f.jpeg)

As you can see, the alternative text simply needs to be inserted between the two brackets, which are empty by default when you insert an image.

I just set up my lemmy instance today (yay!). I am noticing that when I search for communities, the community is being fetched, but the posts, comments, votes, and pretty much all the other data is not always being fetched. Probably around 2/3rds of the time no data is fetched aside from the community itself. Sometimes one or two posts which may be years old, and maybe a couple of comments.

Is this a known issue or is this perhaps the product of a mechanic I am not understanding? From reading the documentation here, I was under the impression it should fetch 20 posts, and I would expect it to get the comments and votes for those posts as well.

Is there any known fix or workaround for this? Is there a way to trigger downloading the posts in a community manually or retry fetching the data?

Memmy is an early fave (posting from it now) but it reminds me so much of the Dec-Feb app development days for Mastodon. So many fun options to try out!

Does the config Lemmy domain need to match the actual accessed domain?

For instance, can I use the domain example.com to produce users like @dave@example.com but still access the UI using lemmy.example.com?

See THIS POST

Notice- the 2,000 upvotes?

https://gist.github.com/XtremeOwnageDotCom/19422927a5225228c53517652847a76b

It's mostly bot traffic.

Important Note

The OP of that post did admit, to purposely using bots for that demonstration.

I am not making this post, specifically for that post. Rather- we need to collectively organize, and find a method.

Defederation is a nuke from orbit approach, which WILL cause more harm then good, over the long run.

Having admins proactively monitor their content and communities helps- as does enabling new user approvals, captchas, email verification, etc. But, this does not solve the problem.

The REAL problem

But, the real problem- The fediverse is so open, there is NOTHING stopping dedicated bot owners and spammers from...

1. Creating new instances for hosting bots, and then federating with other servers. (Everything can be fully automated to completely spin up a new instance, in UNDER 15 seconds)
2. Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour. NEWS POST 1 POST TWO
3. Lemmy is EXTREMELY trusting. For example, go look at the stats for my instance online.... (lemmyonline.com) I can assure you, I don't have 30k users and 1.2 million comments.
4. There is no built-in "real-time" methods for admins via the UI to identify suspicious activity from their users, I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database. I don't think it is even exposed through the rest api.

What can happen if we don't identify a solution.

We know meta wants to infiltrate the fediverse. We know reddits wants the fediverse to fail.

If, a single user, with limited technical resources can manipulate that content, as was proven above-

What is going to happen when big-corpo wants to swing their fist around?

Edits

1. Removed most of the images containing instances. Some of those issues have already been taken care of. As well, I don't want to distract from the ACTUAL problem.
2. Cleaned up post.