Lemmy

From the UI that pretty much copies Reddit's in the regard, it would seem that yes. However, the votes are actually not secret. Maybe they were when they were local, but now they are transmitted to the federated instances. From other platforms, like Friendica, one can actually see the votes as (dis)likes. I can see your votes.

Because of Lemmy's UI, it is very easy to believe that the votes are secret, and many users probably assume they are. For example, I am quite sure the ones who use an alt from another instance to double-downvote do make that assumption. I think this fact should be disclosed in a clear way, at least in the instances' sidebar, if not in a banner.

From there on, I see two possibilities:

• embrace that the votes are not secret, and allow Lemmy user to optionally see them
• make the votes actually secret

As a Friendica user, who is used to like as a public appreciation mark, I am naturally in favor of the first option, but that is only my personal preference.

If the second one is preferred, it means that the other admins should never receive the voters' identities. One should not trust the other admins to just not display them. In fact, I think "never trust the remote admin" should be an important rule in the fediverse, an instance should generally protect its own users rather than expecting others to do it in its stead.

In that case, I think it would be appropriate that "Vote" should be an disctinct activity from "Like", and in particular one that cannot be federated with the authors name. Maybe it could be a private thing sent to the Group, who in turn sends a IsVoted activity? This is pure fantasy, I am not qualified to suggest an actual implementation, I just think it should be distinguished from other platforms' public likes.

I can't found it how can I post embedded videos or posts from social media sites, like on Reddit or other similar sites.

Is it possible to navigate through Lemmy with keyboard shortcuts? I appreciate the vim-like shortbuts in Mastodon.

I have finished writing instructions for deploying lemmyBB on a production server, which you can follow at the link above. Right now the project is still in a very early stage, nevertheless main funcionality is already working. This includes browsing communities, posts and comments, writing posts/comments and registration/login. Before developing the project further, I would like to get some feedback from users and admins.

If you are interested, you can follow the instructions to install lemmyBB on your own server. This setup also installs lemmy-ui, in order to access functionality which is not yet available in lemmyBB (particularly moderation).

You can also try out lemmyBB on a test server with this setup, namely lemmybb.lemmy.ml. It runs lemmy-ui at lemmyui.lemmy.ml, which shows the same data in another format, and the same account login works on both domains. Registrations are currently open, but keep in mind that this instance is only meant for testing, until other instances are created.

If you notice any bugs or want to request new features, please open an issue or comment here.

Lemmy is structured in a way that backend (database, api, federation etc) and frontend (html, css, javascript) are completely separate. This makes it possible to create other frontends which can take the place of lemmy-ui. I have long been playing with the thought of having a Lemmy frontend that looks more like a traditional forum. Now I finally found some time to work on this, and get an initial proof of concept working.

To reduce the amount of work, the project uses HTML templates and CSS themes from phpBB, which are open source under GPLv2. This also has the advantage that many preexisting phpBB themes can be used for lemmyBB. It is written in Rust, because it allows for tight integration with the Lemmy API, and is generally a great language for webservers.

For now the funcionality is very basic, but nonetheless its already usable. You can:

• browse the local post listing
• browse comments
• login and logout
• create new posts and comments

To give it a try, run the following commands on your local computer, replacing lemmy.ml with your own instance:

git clone https://github.com/Nutomic/lemmyBB.git
LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=https://lemmy.ml cargo run

If there is any specific feature that you would like to see added, please open an issue. For now there arent any instructions for deploying lemmyBB to a server. If you would like to do that, please open an issue as well.

This post was made from lemmyBB.

Discussions here are often very interesting, and at times incredibly helpful. If I had no clue about Lemmy, but I searched online for a topic that happened to be discussed in Lemmy, will that discussion appear in the search engine?

As a related question, do you think the discussion example would show up in the search results in the most informative way? I mean in an search engine optimization-kind of way.

I like it a lot. I come here often, it's a good addition to my reddit use, it has some nice people and some interesting content.

I love that it is decentralized, which means that there will always be a server without ads, tracking or bad governance.

Also it feels like being part of Lemmy is being part of something new and novel. The idea of decentralizing services online, away from corporate silos, should be resurrected.

Activitypub is decentralized social networking protocol recommended by the W3C. 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 content. As part of the work on Lemmy, we have implemented some high-level abstractions for handling the server-to-server protocol in Rust. These abstractions are now available as a standalone library.

The main features are:

• Data structures for federation are defined by the user, not the library. This gives you maximal flexibility, and lets you accept only messages which your code can handle. Others are rejected automatically during deserialization.
• ObjectId type, wraps the id url and allows for type safe fetching of objects, both from database and HTTP
• Queue for activity sending, handles HTTP signatures, retry with exponential backoff, all in background workers
• Inbox for receiving activities, verifies HTTP signatures, performs other basic checks and helps with routing
• Generic error type (unfortunately this was necessary)
• various helpers for verification, (de)serialization, context etc

Documentation is currently lacking. If you want to get started with the library, best look at the example.

The code has already been used in production as part of Lemmy for a long time, without any notable problems. However, ergonomics are lacking and need to be improved. There are also many additional features which would be worth implementing. See the project readme for details. Contributions and suggestions are very much welcome!

You can find the project here:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/activitypub-federation-rust

https://crates.io/crates/activitypub-federation

Does anyone know if it is possible to create a new community on another lemmy instance using my lemmy.ml account or do I have to necessarily create a new user on the new instance?

And if the community is already created, is it possible to add moderators from other instances or do community moderators have to be registered to that instance?

It's my, general, understanding that most people connect to the Internet through mobile apps.

If this is the case, then why have apps such as Remmel, Lemmur and jerboa taken a back seat?

IMHO, it would be a mistake to market Lemmy without these mobile apps functioning properly.

I have forked the three aforementioned mobile apps here and will try to 'drum up' support from developers wherever I can find them.

Please, if you don't feel comfortable talking to me about this here, then send me a private message. Thank you.

Lemmy.ml has long had some political conflict among the userbase, especially in communities like worldnews. This is because the instance is composed of both leftists (anarchist/communist) and liberals (those who agree with the mainstream political views in western countries). Additionally, the instance admins all belong to the former group.

Recently we made an announcement offering free Lemmy instance hosting for one year, for non-politics instances. We are hereby making a similar offer to host a liberal or mainstream political instance, which can accomodate those who are unhappy with lemmy.ml moderation.

This has many advantages. Instance admins have full power to set the rules, block federated instances (like lemmygrad.ml), or remove unwanted content. An administration team that is closer aligned politically would certainly be an improvement for some of the users here.

So if you are interested to host such an instance, send an email to contact@join-lemmy.org some relevant details about yourself. You will also have to buy a domain. We will only host one such instance, so if multiple people are interested, you should coordinate among yourselves. As in the original offer, the hosting will be limited to one year.

On a side note, we would also like to help with the creation of a general-purpose instance that is less focused on politics than most of the existing instances. This is fully within the terms of the initial "free instance hosting" announcement, so if you are interested, send us an email!

Forgefriends highlights how propriety services, like GitHub, can lock in a projects and destroy its momentum.

If Microsoft were to release a competing link aggregator; then they could persuade GitHub (Microsoft's subsidiary) into locking or removing the main repository for Lemmy's source code.

We just launched our instance at https://beehaw.org not too long ago.

However, a good number of people have been asking questions like this for the past several days on our Discord server.

P.S. - I will have a big surprise (hopefully...if all goes well) for the Lemmy community in March.

This is horrible and terrible. Just suspend new subscription untill you find a way to address this thing. Now we have gore image too. Please just shut down new subscriptions for now, those trolls attacks are completely out of control

I just posted this in a comment here: https://lemmy.ml/post/112460/comment/110439 (link goes to the "What are your most wanted Lemmy features?" post in the "lemmy" community)

I am following up now with this new post, because I just found https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/875 (link goes to the "Community name in post URL" issue on the lemmy project's github, under the LemmyNet organization... note github has 2 of those 3 pieces of information in their URL) where I learned that @dessalines@lemmy.ml has actually thought about this and arrived at (imo) the wrong conclusion. Afaict, they have decided that having human-meaningful in URLs is "silly" and therefore we shouldn't?!

I am hoping they'll change their mind!

I think having no idea what a URL is about makes for a really lousy user experience. When people send me lemmy links, I want to have a clue as to what they're about before I decide to click it. Maybe I've seen it before. Maybe it's a meme, and I want to look at it later. Or maybe it's the answer to a question I urgently need to know the answer to. So, I have to click to find out - often to discover it is just a meme i've seen 3 times already.

Having the community name and the post title in the URL would make my lemmy experience much better.

In my opinion, there is no benefit to lemmy URLs being short except for in the rare case that you need to transmit one verbally or on paper. But, in that case, you can actually just omit the post title when copying the URL, as there would still be a database ID preceding it! (Try it with a reddit URL: if you remove the title slug and just supply the database ID, it redirects you to the post's canonical URL with the slug in it.)

Lemmy devs: please reconsider this!

In my opinion the only good thing it does is to create copies of already existing communities, so basically people tend to follow one community or the other and it divides the people who could be active.

If you want to create a community that's similar to one and for some reason you don't want to be a part of it, find another name, if you can't find another name, create your own instance. So if Lemmy is federating now we could have /c/worldnews, /c/world_news, and the same applies to every other instance that decides to do the same. In my opinion this only segregates people.

The same applies to uppercase letters, which Reddit uses but luckily Lemmy does not, imagine how many copies of a community could be created if you use both.

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 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?