maltfield

awesome-lemmy-instances adds two new columns:

1. BI - The number of instances that this instance blocks
2. BB - The number of instances that block this instance

Now you can quickly see which instances censor (or are censored) in the lemmyverse:

• https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

I wrote a guide to help users with their migration to Lemmy

• https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/

This guide will help new lemmy users find and subscribe-to (remote) lemmy ~~subreddits~~ communities

Before reddit goes dark on Monday, I would like to add a short video to the join-lemmy.org site that shows new users how to create a lemmy account and subscribe to (remote) communities.

The video should be about 2-minutes long (shorter is better) with a screen recording and voiceover narration. If you do this, you'll get a lot of traffic to your youtube/peertube account ;)

Here's the outline of the video requested:

1. Mention that lemmy is a federated reddit alterntaive based on ActivityPub where 'subreddits' are called 'communities'. Go to join-lemmy.org in your web browser and click the big Join a Server button.

2. Tell the viewer that it doesn't really matter which instance they pick because you can subscribe to a 'community' from one instance from any other instance. Again reiterate that what reddit calls a 'subreddit' is called a 'community' on lemmy. Then just click Join from a random server from the "Recommended" list of instances. Tell the user to just pick one at random because it doesn't matter which they choose.

3. Signup for an account. Tell the user they may need to wait for the account to be approved.

4. Try logging-in. Wait some hours (for approval), if needed. Login to the account.

5. Show the UI for ~10 seconds, then tell the user that they can browse all communities using the "Lemmy Commnity Browser" run by Feddit. Again, reiterate that what used to be called ‘subreddits’ in reddit are called ‘communities’ on lemmy, and that each lemmy instance can have many communities. Open a new browser tab going to https://browse.feddit.de/.

6. On https://browse.feddit.de/, search for some popular community (eg documentaries) and then click the link. For the purposes of this video demo, make sure you select a “remote” community that’s hosted on an instance that’s distinct from where the user signed-up.

7. Tell the user that there's three ways to subscribe to a remote instance: [1] Search by remote URL, [2] Search by shorthand identifier, or [3] Manually construct the URL for your instance to their instance

8. Show copying & pasting the URL of the remote community (eg https://lemmy.ml/c/documentaries) into the search field of their own instance, and then clicking on the result.

9. Show copying & pasting the shorthand identifier for the remote community (eg [!documentaries@lemmy.ml](/c/documentaries@lemmy.ml)) into the search field of their own instance, and then clicking the result.

10. Open a new tab, and show how to manually construct the URL for the remote community in their own instance's site (eg https://[their.instance.tld]/c/documentaries@lemmy.ml) and load this page in the browser. Then click the Subscribe button

11. Tell the user that after they've subscribed to a bunch of communities, they can click the logo of their instance on the top-left of the UI to return to the Home Page of their instance. Then they can click the "Subscribed" tab to view posts to all the communities they subscribed to across the entire fediverse.

12. Show the changing of the sort from 'Active' to 'New' and 'Top'.

13. Tell the user that for more information on how to use Lemmy, they can read the documentation at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/ or post questions to the Lemmy community on lemmy.ml (https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy or [!lemmy@lemmy.ml](/c/lemmy@lemmy.ml)) that’s moderated by the lemmy developers.

Bonus: Tell that there's an iOS and Android app and show a quick ~5 seconds browsing in one or both.

I'm crowdsourcing this because I'm not much of a video creator, but I think this would be an incredibly useful resource to new lemmy users. And I can tell you that, if you make this video, it will drive a ton of traffic to your channel ;)

Can anyone with some video production skills help-out new lemmy users by making this short video? If you upload this to YouTube, please make sure you mark the license as Creative Commons CC-BY-SA so that we can add it to documentation and share it as widely as possible :)

The GitHub repo that provides a comparison table of different lemmy instances now includes server uptime %

• https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

Thanks to David Morley for providing this data via the Fediverse Observer API

• https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

I created a ticket with Font-Awesome to add the lemmy icon.

• https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/19758

Why?

I went to add my new Lemmy profile to my website's social media links, but -- err -- there's no icon for Lemmy in my "social media links" wordpress plugin.

I looked around and saw that a lot of plugins on popular platforms (wordpress, drupal, etc) just use the Font Awesome library for icons.

So, if the lemmy icon gets added to Font Awesome, it means that the lemmy icon will suddenly become available in thousands (millions?) of software/apps (themes, plugins, etc).

The Process

For context, it took them about 1 year to add the mastodon icon to Font Awesome.

I've never done this before, but it looks like you can either pay them $300 or vote in their Icon Requests Leaderboard for new icons to be added:

• https://origin.fontawesome.com/support#requesting-icons

Until the leaderboard is up, how about we show them community interest and let's all give the GitHub issue a thumbs up reaction/emoji?

I created a repo on GitHub that has a table comparing all the known lemmy instances

• https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

Why?

When I joined lemmy, I had to join a few different instances before I realized that:

1. Some instances didn't allow you to create new communities
2. Some instances were setup with an allowlist so that you couldn't subscribe/participate with communities on (most) other instances
3. Some instances disabled important features like downvotes
4. Some instances have profanity filters or don't allow NSFW content

I couldn't find an easy way to see how each instance was configured, so I used lemmy-stats-crawler and GitHub actions to discover all the Lemmy Instances, query their API, and dump the information into a data table for quick at-a-glance comparison.

I hope this helps others with a smooth migration to lemmy. Enjoy :)