Lemmy

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I thought this would be good to share, its an excerpt from an unpublished interview written in december 2020 about Lemmy's origins and goals.

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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?

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

I made a post on r/ukulele where I seek help finding vegan friendly ukuleles. Instant-down-vote because of the V-word hindering it being discovered by those interested. It's not offensive, I specifically ask to keep discussions on veganism out of it and I stayed polite about the topic - I think? Mind you this is not the worst case of instant-down-vote of non-controversial or non-offensive honest posts on Reddit. It's the hive-mind-tribe thing of Reddit doing it's thing as usual.

What if down votes had reduced "power" or impact/value. Up-votes are a full point and down-votes are .5 or .75 of a point in order to prevent instant-reptile-brain-knee-jerk down-voting because of a small difference in opinion or world view. So that there have to be two people down-voting for one integer point to count.

What do you folks think?

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

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?

Disclaimer: I am a multiply marginalized person on the radical left.

I see various issues with the slur filter.

The biggest one, I feel, is that many, many people in marginalized communities have reclaimed slurs. I'd go as far as to say that some (myself included) strongly identify with reclaimed slurs. The word "queer" is a very common example. Will those who identify with it not be allowed to express themselves fully here? The ban on slurs actually makes me feel far less welcome here as a marginalized person as a part of my identity that I am proud of, embrace, and find power in is banned. Most of my friends with various marginalizations have reclaimed slurs as well and would not feel welcome in this space. The reclamation of slurs can be an essential tool for marginalized people. Who are non-marginalized people to decide which slurs marginalized people are allowed to reclaim? I encourage you to read more about this, because it is incredibly important.

Additionally, the code used to filter slurs is flawed. Does it handle if users use alternate Unicode characters to write slurs? Replacing "O"s with "0"s? Slur filters have been implemented time and time again and the result is always the same: users get more creative in their use of slurs or even invent new ones. There are so many variations of slurs, and language is far too complex for this to be enforced with a simple regex. It's also critical to consider different languages here. If Lemmy centers English in its slur filtering, it will inadvertently censor non-English words that are not slurs as well as not censoring non-English words that are. Not to mention -- centering English is incredibly problematic.

Finally, the code is easily removed, and I speculate that if anything, it will lead to a fork of Lemmy by the alt-right even sooner that will gain significant traction. At the very least, marginalized users such as myself who simply wish to reclaim slurs will have to go through the labour of modifying the code and hosting our own instances.

tldr: as a multiply-marginalized person with experience developing and running community platforms, this is a huge mistake, and will end up alienating many of those that you wish to protect.

Please reconsider this change as it is far more nuanced than it appears on the surface. Thank you.

edit: a simple solution would be to allow individual users the ability to filter out slurs (or phrases, or whatever) that they are uncomfortable with.

Besides @dessalines and me who work on Lemmy full time, there are many people who contribute to Lemmy without any financial reward. Those include translators, community moderators, programmers and others. Without them, Lemmy wouldn't be what it is today.

Because we are funded by donations, we aren't able to reward these contributors with money in any useful quantity. Besides, not everyone wants to receive money and turn this into a kind of job. So what we can do is try to reward people in other ways. Here are some ideas:

• Code Contributors: We are starting to write changelogs for every release now, and will mention who contributed to the code. We could also include a list of contributors directly in Lemmy, eg in an about page (here is an example from Syncthing).
• Translators: Mastodon credits them by mentioning their names in the changelog. I have another idea, we could show the names of translators directly inside Lemmy, to the people who are using that language version. So if someone uses Lemmy in Spanish, they would see the names of Spanish translators (could be on an about page, or next to the language setting).
• Documentation Writers/Translators: Seems pretty straightforward, we can mention them on the first page of the documentation.
• Mods/Admins: These are different from the previous ones, which are related to Lemmy development, while this is about using Lemmy. Moderating is generally a pretty thankless job, and I can't think of any projects or websites that reward it especially well.
• Any others that I forgot to mention?

One thing to note is that this shouldn't cause much extra work for us developers, because then we would have less time to fix bugs and implement features. So it should be possible to automate these tasks (eg with a script that reads the names of contributors from git), or someone should volunteer to take care of manual tasks.

Another thing I am wondering is how to treat contributions of different sizes. Should someone who translates a single string be listed in the same way as someone who does the translation for a whole language? Maybe we could set a minimum contribution size for people to be listed, or order the names by the size of their contributions?

I am curious to read your ideas and suggestions, especially from those who already contribute to Lemmy (or similar projects).

Where did the API documentation in the documentation go? There used to be this great listing of all of the API calls but it seems to be gone now?

Lemmur is a mobile lemmy client that I and @shilangyu have been working on for quite some time. It's supposed to give you seamless experience when using multiple instances.

It's available for android, windows and linux, although it is mainly targeted towards mobile devices. The experience on other platforms might be less satisfactory.

This is only an alpha release so not everything will be working, there are some parts of the app that aren't finished. But we believe it is usable enough for people to browse their favorite instances.

At the moment we would prefer to focus on fixing bugs rather than implementing arbitrary features so if you have any bugs or crashes please let us know in the comments or create an issue on github. Screen recordings are welcome (github now supports uploading .mp4 and .mov files), it's always easier to understand the problem through visuals rather than words only.

If you'd like to see a version for iOS on the apple app store or just generally would like to support the development you can chip in over on patron or buymeacoffee, which will help cover the $99 developer license.

Here are some screenshots of the app: https://imgur.com/a/B5XhhXQ

Here are the milestones and payouts we agreed on with NLnet.

• All payouts will be split 50:50 between /u/dessalines and /u/nutomic
• Milestone ordering is only for reference, they may be completed in any order
• Total amount: 45.000€

1. Federation feature complete

Nearly all back-end activitypub actions (voting, commenting, posting, etc) complete.

Amount: 4500€

Tasks

• Community updates: make sure nsfw and sidebar changes propagate
• Federate post::stickied
• Fetch all inreplyto objects: #694
• Proper CommunityFollower forwarding: #662
  • https://yerbamate.dev/LemmyNet/lemmy/pulls/36
• In all the receives, in addition the the signature verify, do a check to make sure they are actually allowed to do the action.
• Remove options like "make mod" or "make admin" for remote users
• Create a "linked instances" page (from the whitelist)
• Issue link (everything left under Backend -> Features, and Frontend)

2. Security

Various security-related checks for federated activities completed.

Amount: 6000€

Tasks

• Ensure URLs start with https:// and verify attributedTo, ID and pubkey URLs are from the same domain/actor
• Get rid of unwrap() in apub code
• Apply bans, slur filters, length checks etc to posts coming in over activitypub
• Go through all the TODO and see if there is anything important
• Implement instance blocklist
• Remove tags like <script> from federated html before rendering it (eg in embeds)
• Try to fix any remaining security issues
• Setup security@lemmy.ml address with PGP
• Issue link (Backend -> Security and Maintenance)
• Once this is finished we should be ready for a production release (but we might wait until things like tests are finished)

3. Refactor Rust code

Refactor rust code to use new activitystreams library, and clean up technical debt.

Amount: 3000€

Tasks

• Abstract API code to be able to use federated authentication, not just JWT auth. #653
• Migrate to asonix' new activitystreams library
• Split the code into seperate crates, like lemmy-database, lemmy-api, lemmy-apub
• Speed up compilation time
• Address technical debt
• Issue link

4. Documentation for ActivityPub implementation

Complete documentation for other activitypub implementors, based on communities.

Amount: 2250€

Tasks

• Describe how we are using ActivityPub
• Different documentation targeted at developers, admins and users
• Explain how instance blacklist/whitelist works (doesn't affect data that was already federated before)
• Add activitypub json outputs to docs

5. Tests for ActivityPub implementation

Complete integration tests for all activitypub actions.

Amount: 3000€

Tasks

• Split integration tests into multiple files, extract helper functions
• Extend integration tests
• Add tests for malicious behaviour (eg invalid http signature)
• More unit tests
• Add integration test that verifies ActivityPub sending/receiving (using raw json)
• Look into using FediDB
• Issue link

6. Rework Caching / Views

Complete more efficient caching system, since materialized view refreshes are currently locking reads.

Amount: 2250€

Tasks

• Rework materialized views into fast tables. #606
• Rewrite all SQL triggers to fill fast tables.
• Do performance comparison.

7. Accessibility

Add accessibility tags to front-end components.

Amount: 1500€

Tasks

• Add aria tags to all front end components.
• Reach out to a community who can test other dynamic components (popups, etc).
• Implement results of NGI0 Accessibility review

8. Federated Moderation

Allow federated users to be added as moderators of communities on non-local instances.

Amount: 6000€

Tasks

• Ability to add community moderators that are users on other instances, who have full moderation abilities. IE, community mods don't need to live on the same instance as the community. (This will be important later for private communities too)
• Federated moderation actions (ban, removes, etc)
• Ability to appoint federated moderators

9. Private Communities

Allow the creation of private communities.

Amount: 4500€

Tasks

• Private communities #187
• Communities have view, submit, vote, and comment priviledges.
• Add integration tests to make sure communities are properly invisible to non-approved users.

10. Private / Invite only instances

Complete private / invite only instances (currently all instances are public, and registration is open to the public). Amount: 4500€

Tasks

• Private / Invite only instances #209
• Add email verification
• Customizeable questionaire

11. Blocking Users / Communities

Allow users to block other users and communities.

Amount: 6000€

Tasks

• Users can block other users or communities
• If user A blocks user B, then all interaction between these users is impossible and they can't see each other's posts
• Also works for federated users / communities
• Issue link

12. Create a project website for Lemmy

Create a project website for Lemmy (similar to joinmastodon), with a project description and list of instances.

Amount: 1500€

Tasks

• Project description
• List of instances
• Issue link

13. Additional search functionality

Add additional functionality to Lemmy's search page, such as community and category filtering, and url searching.

Amount: 2250€

Tasks

• Add community filtering for posts, comments
• Add category filtering for communities
• Add URL search type
• Issue link