Bug reports 🐞on🐛any🦠software🪲

I posted a duplicate thread because the Lemmy UI was so slow with a post submission I thought it gave up. So I deleted the dupe. But then later when visiting the same community from an mbin account the duplicate still appears.

cross-posted from: https://linkage.ds8.zone/post/543756

This seems quit serious because there is a security issue when one app can interfere with another.

If Ungoogled Chromium is running when Nheko launches, U/C instantly freezes. No i/o is possible with U/C. Then when Nheko is quit, U/C goes down with it.

I installed the app on AOS 5 in 2022. It shows the title screen then crashes. So I never used it. I recently had another look. They now impose AOS 6 or newer. So I went to Izzy’s archive and found the latest AOS 5 version (1405). Wow how fat we’ve gotten.. The APK (which is compressed) went from 12mb to 86mb. It gave some error when trying to side-load.

possible workaround

So I guess the app can’t serve me. And there is no desktop app AFAICT. I was glad to find the DB (mondoDB-based) is freely available. That beast is ~13gb compressed. Before I work on freeing up space, can anyone say whether it is practical to make direct SQL queries on it? Is it straight forward to port it to SQLite, or worthwhile to learn this new mondo DB platform?

This was discovered by Jim East:

https://slrpnk.net/post/27305276/18006810

I must say it fails the principle of least astonishment. If a user blocks Lemmy.World but subscribes to !linux@lemmy.world, for example, they obviously want to exceptionally see content in the subscribed community but nothing else from that node. But what happens is the instance block overrides the specific community subscription. So the general rule is prioritised above the specific rule.

And worse, when visiting the subscribed community it just shows no posts without reminding the user that they have a relevant block in place.

In the user settings, I have several Cloudflare instances on my blocklist (e.g. Lemmy.World). When a user from one of those instances DMs me, the sender is falsely led to believe the msg was delivered and the recipient has no way of knowing. It has a nasty side effect comparable to shadow banning.

I have not actually tested this myself. I just know that I do not recall receiving a DM from a user on an instance that I block. But the linked comment is from @wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net who discovered the bug and tested this.

When simply visiting the landing page for discuss.tchncs.de, the whole page is full of posts in communities that are hosted on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.

It’s a bit foolish because if someone wants to see posts for those communities, they would visit those nodes. If you visit discuss.tchncs.de the main timeline should show you a local timeline.

It would be sensible if someone is logged in to discuss.tchncs.de, in which case their settings would have effect. But it does not make sense to fill the page with foreign posts by non-local users to non-logged-in visitors. There is no user account and no community that traces to discuss.tchncs.de on the landing page.

Of course a visitor can click local, if they are familiar with Lemmy, but all is a shit default.

I did a search for communities with “history” in the name. It came back with !history@links.hackliberty.org even though that instance has been down for over a year. If I did not already know of that instance going down, I would just post there expecting my post to be seen, because there is no indicator of when the server was last up.

I needed to cross-post to !language@hilariouschaos.com but so many results match “language” that they cannot all be in the pull-down list (a separate bug in itself to not have a scrollbar). But extra stupid that communities a user is subscribed to do not get prioritized to the top of the list.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24727683

The fediverse w/the activitypub API sell itself as being decentralised, but it’s actually just neutral. It merely enables decentralised forums to coexist with centralised venues. The Lemmy implementation in particular does nothing to proactively promote decentralisation or counter concentrations of power.

When the software is not designed to steer toward decentralisation, centralisation persists because the network effect is left uncountered. The current stats prove that a mass majority of users and their activity are subject to the concentrated power of a few, which ultimately singularly falls under the power, oversight, and competency of the biggest walled garden in the world: Cloudflare Inc, in the US.

Calling Lemmy “neutral” is overly generous, in fact. When the stock Lemmy web client is queried for communities, it prioritises the giant centralised communities in top rankings of the search results. It’s no better than Google, where Cloudflare also dominates the top slots in web search results. This exacerbates the network effect by cattle-herding people toward increased centralisation.

Lemmy ranks decentralised communities at the bottom. And in some cases the ranking is so low that it’s out of reach when cross-posting. The cross-post mechanism forces a search for the target community, and that search does not support entry of the address of the community that includes the domain. When the list is so long it exceeds the pulldown window length, it’s out of reach.

Yes, we know centralisation is not their deliberate goal. Lemmy developers fear that newcoming novices would unwittingly post in a ghost town without strategically cross-posting and then become immediately discouraged by minimal engagement, and from there bounce back to Twitter or wherever they came from. But it must be realised that the mass nannied steering they have resorted to has cultivated centralisation that defeats the founding purpose of the fedi.

If an existing point of interest is on the map and you add a favourite with the POI highlighted, the address field is automatically correctly populated with the street address. But when the favourite is later edited for any trivial reason (e.g. to change the name or description), the address information is lost. The field is cleared.

I block all Cloudflare instances I know of (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, lemmy.ca, programming.dev, etc). But sometimes I inadvertently end up on one of the those instances when searching in a logged out state. When I login, the block rules apply (as expected). But it makes no sense to block all comments in a thread without blocking the thread’s OP.

IOW, if the OP is displayed because it is visited specifically, then the full thread with all comments should also be visible.

I am somewhat forced to use Alexandrite because the stock Lemmy client is broken on Ungoogled Chromium. So when Alexandrite cannot handle something it’s a burden. In the case at hand, Alexandrite is unable to search for a community using an exact path as the query.

Workaround: We have to use the stock client or some other client.

(edit) what is in the heads of ppl who downvote a bug? “This bug does not affect me personally so please don’t spend time fixing it”.

I am not sure why subscriptions are often not instant. Some subscriptions are forever stuck in the pending stage. The problem is that to enter a community in that state I must remember the host and community name, or I have to search for it again every single time.

The fix: put in the profile a list of pending subscriptions so we can easily enter those communities.

When visiting this community from a stock Lemmy front end, there is down-voted spam and garbage near the top of the timeline. This happens regardless of the view selection (hot, active, scaled, etc). Certainly if the user asks for the “hot” view they should not be seeing negative scored threads near the top. And ironically, using the “controversial” view pushes the negative threads further down, which is the complete opposite of what’s expected.

Mbin fails to show the spam at all, even when selecting the “Newest” view, which we expect to show everything in chronological order regardless of score. So mbin is broken too.

The 3rd-party Lemmy client alexandrite behaves more like mbin, and does not show the spam even if a chronological order is requested.

The linked article showcases a disaster of the text previewer in the stock Lemmy client. It makes sense that linefeeds would be stripped to some extent, but when the content relies on a linebreak for every line because it’s important for formatting, it’s a disaster when you have half a screen of text.

The fix: the preview code should count the number of linefeeds it removes. If it removes more than ~4 or so linefeeds, it should be clear that it’s not dealing with normal sized paragraphs. In this case, it should only show a few lines (with linefeeds) and have a spoiler or expansion option.

Another simpler fix: have a “suppress preview” tickbox so an author can manually clear a bad preview box.

An original poster asks a question or attempts to create a thread to compile information about a topic, and there is always some clown or asshole who cannot resist posting a snide remark. If the snide remark is clever or captures the sentiment of many, it gets a flood of up votes and rises to the top, bringing with it a tree of replies to the snide remark. Useful constructive answers get buried because they are boring to the wider audience who just likes to see a good roasting. I think there are more kids in the threadiverse than we expect.

So content that’s nearly garbage dominates the thread and drowns out the thread’s purpose, disservicing the OP and all those who want the same answer or collaboration. It’s a design failure of Lemmy to be blind to this very basic characteristic of human nature.

Censorship is unreasonable in this situation. But so is the status quo. Nothing wrong with a bunch of clowns having fun, but that fun should happen non-disruptively on the sidelines and out of the way. The OP has a mission and purpose. The OP should be able to click a red fish that flags a post as a red herring. From there, that tree should be pushed out of the way somehow.. to a sidebar or folded, or a subthread of sorts.. call it the clown room. Critics who just want to bitch or push contempt should still have a voice. Make it so they have to click a “criticism” button to then step into a space with unwanted criticism.

There is wanted criticism and unwanted criticism. An OP might say “Roast me..” or “what’s wrong with this approach?” If the OP intends for the discussion to be controversial, then the OP obviously has no interest in the flagging anything. But if the OP has a mission to accomplish, they should have a control.

Another way to look at this is the fedi could use a stackexchange replacement. Stackexchange never has garbage getting high ranks. I’ve never had an acct there so I don’t know how they manage it, but it seems Lemmy could learn from that.

Every Lemmy instance chooses its own name for the meta community. Some don’t even have one. Some choose quite bizarre names.

That’s shit. If you walk into an office building, the receptionist is almost always close to the main entrance. When you enter a restaurant, the host(ess) is either close to the front door or there is a clear path to the host(ess). Yet Lemmy is terribly organised in this way. The power of defaults can go a long way here. A meta community should be created by default with a default name. And by default it should be listed at the top on the communities list.

Best way to cope with the madness is sort communities chronologically with oldest first. But it’s not solid. Sometimes the meta community is created late in the game.

Both Lemmy and mbin have a shitty way of treating authors of content that is censored by a moderator.

Lemmy: if your post is removed from a community timeline, you still have the content. In fact, your logged-in profile looks no different, as if the message is still there. It’s quite similar to shadow banning. Slightly better though because if you pay attention or dig around, you can at least discover that you were censored. But shitty nonetheless that you get no notification of the censorship.

Mbin: if your post is removed, you are subjected to data loss. I just wrote a high effort post europe@feddit.org and it was censored for not being “news”. There is no rule that your post must be news, just a subtle mention in the topic of news. In fact they delete posts that are not news, despite not having a rule along those lines. So my article is lost due to this heavy-handed moderation style. Mbin authors are not deceived about the status of their post like on lemmy, but authors suffer from data loss. They do not get a copy of what they wrote so they cannot recover and post it elsewhere.

It’s really disgusting that a moderator’s trigger happy delete button has data loss for someone else as a consequence. I probably spent 30 minutes writing the post only to have that effort thrown away by a couple clicks. Data loss is obviously a significant software defect.

Discuss. (But plz, it’s only interesting to hear from folks who have some healthy degree of contempt for exclusive corporate walled-gardens and the technofeudal system the fedi is designed to escape.)

And note that links can come into existence that are openly universally accessible and then later become part of a walled-garden... and then later be open again. For example, youtube. And a website can become jailed in Cloudflare but then be open again at the flip of a switch. So a good solution would be a toggle of sorts.

When an arrogant presumptuous dick dumps hot-headed uncivil drivel into a relatively apolitical thread about plumbing technology and reduces the quality of the discussion to a Trump vs. $someone style shitshow of threadcrap, the tools given to the moderator are:

• remove the comment (chainsaw)
• ban the user from the community (sledge hammer)

Where are the refined sophisticated tools?

When it comes to nannying children, we don’t give teachers a baseball bat. It’s the wrong tool. We are forced into a dilemma: either let the garbage float, or censor. This encourages moderators to be tyrants and too many choose that route. Moderators often censor civil ideas purely because they want to control the narrative (not the quality).

I want to do quality control, not narrative control. I oppose the tyranny of censorship in all but the most vile cases of bullying or spam. The modlog does not give enough transparency. If I wholly remove that asshole’s comment, then I become an asshole too.

He is on-topic. Just poor quality drivel that contributes nothing of value. Normally voting should solve this. X number of down votes causes the comment to be folded out of view, but not censored. It would rightfully keep the comment accessible to people who want to pick through the garbage and expand the low quality posts.

Why voting fails:

• tiny community means there can never be enough down votes to fold a comment.
• votes have no meaning. Bob votes emotionally and down votes every idea he dislikes, while Alice down votes off-topic or uncivil comments, regardless of agreement.

Solutions:

I’m not trying to strongly prescribe a fix in particular, but have some ideas to brainstorm:

• Mods get the option to simply fold a shitty comment when the msg is still on-topic and slightly better quality than spam. This should come with a one-line field (perhaps mandatory) where the mod must rationalise the action (e.g. “folded for uncivil rant with no useful contribution to the technical information sought”).
• A warning counter. Mods can send a warning to a user in connection with a comment. This is already possible but requires moderators to have an unhuman memory. A warning should not just be like any DM.. it should be tracked and counted. Mods should see a counter next to participants indicating how many warnings they have received and a page to view them all, so as to aid in decisions on whether to ban a user from a community.
• Moderator votes should be heavier than user votes. Perhaps an ability to choose how many votes they want to cast on a particular comment to have an effect like folding. Of course this should be transparent so it’s clear that X number of votes were cast by a mod. Rationale:
  • mods have better awareness of the purpose and rules of the community
  • mods are stakeholders with more investment into the success of a community than users
• Moderators could control the weight of other user’s votes. When 6 people upvote an uncivil post and only 2 people down vote it, it renders voting as a tool impotent and in fact harm inducing. Lousy/malicious voters have no consequences for harmful voting and thus no incentive to use voting as an effective tool for good. A curator should be able to adjust voting weight accordingly. E.g. take an action on a particular poll that results in a weight adjustment (positive or negative) on the users who voted a particular direction. The effect would be to cause voters to prioritize civil quality above whether they simply like/dislike an idea, so that votes actually take on a universal meaning. Which of course then makes voting an effective tool for folding poor quality content (as it was originally intended).
• (edit) Ability for a moderator to remove a voting option. If a comment is uncivil, allowing upvotes is only detrimental. So a moderator should be able to narrow the ballot to either down vote or neutral. And perhaps the contrary as well (like some beehaw is instance-wide). And perhaps the option to neutralise voting on a specific comment.

If you open a PDF document in the browser (thus in pdf.js) and click the down arrow (↓) to save it locally, it redownloads the document instead of simply saving it from the cache. If you lose network connectivity or disconnect then try to save the PDF locally for later viewing, the browser reports connection issues when there was no need for the network.

Tor Browser (Firefox based) does not have this problem.

An important part of the Youtube content is the transcript at the bottom of the video description. There are some 3rd-party sites that collect and share the YT transcripts separately but then the naive admins put the service in Cloudflare’s walled garden, which is worse than YT itself and purpose-defeating to a large extent. (exceptionally this service is CF-free, but it says “Transcript is disabled on this video” in my test: https://youtubetranscript.io/)

Invidious should be picking up the slack here.

And Lemmy could do better by automatically fetching the transcript of youtube/invidious links and include it, perhaps spoiler style like this.