lvxferre

Disclaimer: I like the Fediverse, Lemmy, and the concept of federation, I've been here for two years, and I feel grateful towards people working on this platform - devs and admins and mods and everyone else. As such, I hope that what I'm voicing is interpreted as constructive criticism and food for discussion.

TL;DR: I'll list some issues with Lemmy, how they relate to Reddit, and a few proposals on what should be done to address them.

The issues

When you're posting/commenting you're supposed to acknowledge and follow up to three independent sets of rules: of the comm, of the comm's instance, and of your instance. This is a burden for good users, and yet another excuse for bad users to ignore the rules.

There are also up to three groups of rule enforcers, in any situation: two admin teams and a mod team. If any of those goes rogue (greedy pigboy or powerjanny style), you got a problem.

Usually the ones enforcing the rules - the mods - are the group that, by design, lacks access to user info like IPs. So they either play whack-a-mole with old trolls under new accounts, or they rely on assumptions (i.e. stupidity) to keep control of their comms.

Your feed depends on which instances yours is federated with. So you either deal with the fact that you won't get content that you'd otherwise want, or you register into multiple instances to check multiple, partially overlapping feeds. One by one.

Federated instances mirroring content from each other causes sync issues (got removed from A, but not B? You'll still see it in B), storage issues (raising the requirements for people to create their own instances), and it's a big liability (cue to CP being posted to LW, and every single admin team removing it from their own instances).

The biggest instance (by MAU) is as large as the seven following instances combined. This sort of demographic concentration is bound to defeat the advantages of a federation (sharing the burden, sharing the power) without alleviating its cons (added complexity).

The top 10 instances is mostly populated by general purpose instances, doing redundant efforts to provide the same content to the users.

What do those issues have to do with each other?

Look at Reddit.

• Users want their own Reddit communities, but they can't build new "Reddit instances". So they create their communities as "vassals" (subreddits) of the single Reddit instance.
• Since you always post in the same Reddit instance as you registered to, there are no federation woes like "I want content from instance A, but I'm in instance B and they don't federate", or "admins of my instance vs. admins of the instance where I'm posting".
• Reddit cannot rely on other instances to provide content for its users. As such, it hosts all its content in a single, general-purpose instance.

I believe that, once you apply those three aspects of Reddit to a federation, you get the issues that I mentioned.

In other words those issues are born from trying to replicate a non-federation into a federation.

So, what should be done in your opinion?

I'm no coder, nor I want to pretend to be one, and I'm aware that some of those might not be viable. Still, if I had to propose something...

First of all, a change of paradigm: we (users: including mods, admins, developers, everyone) should see Lemmy first and foremost as a federation of forums and advertise it as such. Similarities with Reddit should be only secondary.

People who code in Rust would do an amazing job if they focused on instance creation and management. Ideally, it should be feasible even for a tech-illiterate granny running a potato computer to spin up her own instance.

I think that content mirroring needs to go away, with the users pulling the content straight from the instances where it's created.

Interface developers should expect users to have 2+ accounts, and to log into all their accounts at the same time. The resulting feed should be a combination of the feed of those instances; handle this through the interface/front-end. And when the user is posting/commenting, ideally they should be able to choose which account to use, on a per-community basis.

Desktop users should be encouraged to migrate from "my instance's website" to instance-agnostic front-ends, such as Alexandrite and Slemmy. [This doesn't affect mobile users, I believe.]

We should be contributing more to specific-purpose instances (for example: mander.xyz, ani.social, etc.), at the detriment of general-purpose instances (for example: lemmy.world). Perhaps, at the start even migrate our comms to those instances.

Eventually [in the far, far future] I think that the concept of subreddit-like communities should be deprecated, with communities becoming simple sub-forums of the instance where they're hosted.

By default, admins should focus mostly on the activity inside their own instances. Let the behaviour of their users in other instances up to those admins; a dog with two owners ends either overfed or starved.

When possible/reasonable, admins should be moderating more communities in their own instances.

I often switch between phones and speakers, but I'm too lazy to do it through the sound preferences window. So I came up with this script*, and I'm sharing it here as others might find it useful.

You'll need to tweak it a bit to work in your machine, but once you do it you can run it from a launcher or a keyboard shortcut, it's really comfy.

Okay, here's the code:

#!/bin/bash

# You'll need to swap those four values with the ones that work in your machine.
# Check the rest of the post for further info.
mainCard="pci-0000_06_00.1"
mainProfile="hdmi-stereo-extra1"
altCard="pci-0000_00_09.2"
altProfile="analog-stereo"

# If the current default source is main, your new source is alt. Else, your new is main.
if [[ $(pactl get-default-source) == "alsa_output.$mainCard.$mainProfile.monitor" ]]
then declare -g newCard="$altCard" newProfile="$altProfile"
else declare -g newCard="$mainCard" newProfile="$mainProfile"
fi

# Tells PulseAudio to shift the card profile and default sink to the new.
pactl set-card-profile "alsa_card.${newCard}" "output:${newProfile}"
pacmd set-default-sink "alsa_output.${newCard}.${newProfile}" &> /dev/null\

# Tells PulseAudio to shift the currently running programs to use the new output.
for i in $(pacmd list-sink-inputs | grep index | awk '{print $2}')
do pacmd move-sink-input "$i" "alsa_output.${newCard}.${newProfile}" &> /dev/null
done

# Optional text notification.
if [[ $(pactl get-default-source) == "alsa_output.$mainCard.$mainProfile.monitor" ]]
then notify-send -t 500 "Main sound output on!"
elif [[ $(pactl get-default-source) == "alsa_output.$altCard.$altProfile.monitor" ]]
then notify-send -t 500 "Alt sound output on!"
else notify-send -t 2000 "Something weird happened."
fi

# Optional audio notification. It runs VLC but it's easy to adapt or remove if you want.
cvlc --play-and-exit /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/message-new-instant.oga

Check the first four lines of code. You'll need to replace that "pci.blahblah" and "audio.stereo.whatever" junk with the ones from your machine. To know them, run pacmd list-sources | grep name: in a terminal. The output will look like this:

name: ⟨alsa_output.pci-0000_06_00.1.hdmi-stereo-extra1.monitor⟩
name: ⟨alsa_output.pci-0000_00_09.2.analog-stereo.monitor⟩

Ignore ⟨alsa_output and monitor⟩. The second-to-last chunk (e.g. hdmi-stereo-extra1) is the profile. The rest (e.g. pci-0000_06_00.1) is the card. Now replace those in the script.

*credits: this script is partially inspired on this AskUbuntu comment.

EDIT: I was able to solve this by going into the "change password" screen, right-clicking the "old password" field, clicking "inspect", and changing maxlength="60" minlength="10" to maxlength="60" minlength="1", thanks to the tip provided by Dandroid in the comments.

When I try to login, the following message appears: "Please use at least 10 characters (you are currently using # characters)." Ditto when I try to change my password.

This issue affects me when trying to log in from Firefox and Chromium, in Linux. When trying to log in from Firefox in Android, I can't but no message is given. It does not affect Jerboa or Voyager, but I can't change my password from either.

Any idea on how to solve this? When I created this account 2y ago I was just checking Lemmy out, so I didn't bother with a strong password back then, but this has become a ticking bomb. I'm currently able to access Lemmy from Firefox due to saved credentials, but I'm worried about them eventually expiring.

Pictures showing the issue:


(My actual password isn't 6 chars long, but the error message is the same.)

If you want, please add your tips to the comments.

Here are mine - just a bunch of opinions/suggestions from someone who used to be a forum mod, then a subreddit mod.

As this is a rather big wall of text, I'll split it into sections, contained within spoiler tags.

I just deep-fried and filled a batch of the thing above. They turned out delicious, so I'm sharing here.

Here's a link for the recipe for the dough; I followed it closely, the only thing was that I subbed the butter with veg oil. The recipe yielded ~20 of them, but this depends a lot on the size that you cut them.

Recipe for the custard filling:

• 300g sweetened condensed milk
• 300g 20% fat milk cream
• 300g whole milk
• 2 eggs
• vanilla essence
• [optional] 1/2 tsp cornstarch

Just mix everything together until homogeneous, then heat it on low fire, while stirring constantly, until it thickens. I didn't use the cornstarch because I wanted it slightly runnier, but do add it if you like a thicker custard.

I'm serious. Specially, the community - you folks, no matter the instance, you rock. You're amazing.

In Reddit it's always a struggle to word your posts/comments in a way that it won't trigger

• unwarranted assumptions popping out of nowhere
• "I dun unrurrstand" meaning "I disagree but I'm pretending that you aren't following any logic"
• "You're saying that because..." [insert insane troll logic] everywhere
• "U think dat 50 is not 100? Than u think 50 is 0! Dats stupid lol" tier oversimplifications all the fucking time.
• insert random distortion of what you said, either due to malice or stupidity

Here though? People actually disagree with each other on rational = human grounds. They aren't attacking each other, they're agreeing or disagreeing with what is said!

It's specially noteworthy that even Lemmygrad's community specifically tailored for Leftist infighting is more wholesome than non-discussion subreddits. Like, it's a server made for people with strong political opinions, a community made to let them fight, and yet they can reason better than Reddit.

Please keep being awesome.