Lemmy

This is just to followup from my prior post on latencies increasing with increasing uptime (see here).

There was a recent update to lemmy.ml (to 0.19.4-rc.2) ... and everything is so much snappier. AFAICT, there isn't any obvious reason for this in the update itself(?) ... so it'd be a good bet that there's some memory leak or something that slows down some of the actions over time.

Also ... interesting update ... I didn't pick up that there'd be some web-UI additions and they seem nice!

Today I deleted my Reddit account.

I think the platform is now just a playground for AIs and has integrated lots of ways to make money (prenium subscription, NFT, way too many ads for my taste).

What really made me take the plunge was Reddit's interface. Seriously, go to the website, what's with the attrocity? It's like Fandom but as a social network?

Now why am I on Lemmy? Because in my opinion, it's the first step towards a mainstream Fedivers! Mastodon, Peertube and Pixelfed aren't very widespread, but when you see the number of people active in Lemmy communities, it's really impressive! It's also free and Open Source which is always great, but also as open as possible, I mean, Reddit killed Apollo on iOS, I can now have lots of apps on my iPhone with Lemmy!

Now what do I expect from Lemmy. For this universe of instances to grow, but also to add a bit of personality to the platform! Do a bit of Reddit and add customization options for each community, like on the Minecraft Subreddit of old Reddit that I've always smiled at.

In short, I'm happy to be on Lemmy.

Just a general observation I've made in my time on lemmy.ml, which I figure is attributable to lemmy the software, that may or may not be useful.

I'm talking about writing comments to posts (or replies to other comments, not sure if I've seen a difference).

And, just anecdotally, it seems that the longer the instance has been up without a restart or update (AFAICT of course), the longer the time between me clicking the Reply button and the time that the request is completed.

Usually, the first sign in my experience that the instance has been restarted is that this latency speeds right up to being almost instantaneous.

Anyone else notice the same or on other instances? It might be a clue to performance issues??

EDIT: applies to posts too (including this one incidentally)

I saw that the community i moderate is available on blahaj.zone, and it has pulled some old comments, but new ones did not federate. There is also an old stickied post still stickied.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/bicycle_touring@lemmy.world

I assume somone from that instance had the c subscribed at some point, but then unsubscribed, so new comments and actions did not federate. If now somebody on that instance would subscribe again - will the obsolete sticky post just stay there forever? Because i am not sending the mod activity again to unsticky it?

Sometimes you post on Lemmy and it gets a level of traction that you were unprepared for. Right now, that just ends up filling your inbox. It would be nice if we could mute posts and then no responses would be sent to the inbox and everyone else can continue their discussions.

It recently struck me recently that a number of users mostly scroll the All feed. This came up in a conversation where people were discussing how their main usage of lemmy was to scroll All and then rely entirely on blocking to refine their feed.

Now whether that's a pathological instance of Hyrum's law of all possible uses being relied on or an intended or fair use of a lemmy/reddit system, it does strike me that a substantial portion of the user base doing this likely has an effect on what happens within communities and the ability for communities to define themselves.

Thoughts and speculations (and perhaps paranoia/exaggeration):

• I don't know what happened on reddit in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if a relatively high proportion of users rely on All as described above compared to reddit in order to "fill out" their feeds more due to the smaller user base here.
• A higher amount of All-feeders means fewer people willing to invest, contribute to or even care about specific communities.
• This likely means community migrations away from toxic mods, or, starting new communities can run into more friction or less engagement.
• Which, arguably, becomes a problematic feedback cycle in which All becomes a "better" feed than curating a set of subscriptions.
• Perhaps a clear mechanism for this to manifest is that anyone can up/down vote anything, which means All-feeders can influence what appears in Subscription-feeders' feeds by imposing their tastes/preferences on posts' scores. In fact, if All-feeders are substantial in number and activity relative to Sub-feeders, this could be a sizeable influence on post ordering across lemmy/threadiverse.

Now I don't know if any of this is really a problem at all, I'm just thinking out loud here (as, to make my bias clear, someone who doesn't get using the All).

As far as Lemmy design decisions go:

• Should non-subscribers be allowed or disallowed to vote on posts/comments in communities they're not subscribed to? My intuition on this is obviously not (ie, disallowed) and that the All feed is just for browsing not participating. For me, it's about enabling communities to form their own identity and sub-culture that doesn't get pushed around by others.
  • How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.
  • You could limit voting to those who have a subscription to the community, but then anyone could just easily subscribe and then vote while sticking to All. And that'd be harder to implement too I'd imagine.
• Maybe communities should be able to control this behaviour. Private and local-only communities are apparently on the road map. Excluding non-subscribers from voting seems like a reasonable continuation of such options.
  • To get even more annoyingly complex, I could imagine communities having the option to exclude down votes or exclude down votes for non-subscribers. I'm sure that'd raise issues for some people's feeds as non-down-voting communities might unreasonably rise to the top or something. But if multi-communities come along, and voting in All is off or not guaranteed, this feels like a non-issue to me.

I'm really confused here. I was kind of freaking out for 10 minutes because all the posts on my Lemmy account on the lemm.ee instance from the last 7 months completely vanished out of thin air on my profile.

Than I loaded my profile page (this account) on my new account which I just created on lemmy.ml, and the posts all appear to still be there. So I'm confused, why is it that others can see my posts, but I cannot? If you're reading this, can you check my profile and see if the posts appear for me please? The last post should be 5 days ago.

There's only two things I can think of that might have bugged Lemmy out:

1. I was playing around in the settings earlier, and clicked the "Bot Account" checkbox; but I can't see how this would glitch anything, because I didn't click "Save".
2. The profile I'm posting this on is on lemm.ee. My newly created profile is on lemmy.ml and has the exact same username (DreitonLullaby) as this one; but I'm not sure how this would cause issues, because they are on two completely separate instances.

That's all I can think of. Is this a known bug? How can I fix this?

Now anyone can be made mod/admin without their consent . A yes or no option would be much appreciated so someone can't abuse it and make innocent people mod/admin of troubling instances or communities .

If you write a plugin, let me know how it goes!

Link to PR

In this case, it's one specific channel: https://diode.zone/c/andybalaam_lectures/videos?s=1. That is, !andybalaam_lectures@diode.zone. It's run by @andybalaam@lemmy.ml / @andybalaam@mastodon.social

AFAICT, federation hasn't been working from this channel to lemmy for ~3 months, for all the instances I checked (perhaps a particular lemmy version broke things?).

EG:

• the view on lemmy.ml
• on lemm.ee
• on programming.dev
• and on endlesstalk.org

By comparison:

• mastodon.social is up-to-date: https://mastodon.social/@andybalaam_lectures@diode.zone
• And on hachyderm.io, following the user (rather than the channel) is also up-to-date: https://hachyderm.io/deck/@andybalaam@diode.zone

I'm not following anything else on peertube so I don't know how common this is (and I couldn't find anything on the GitHub issues), but different behaviour on mastodon and lemmy would superficially indicate that it's a lemmy problem, which would be a shame given that lemmy is much better for consuming peertube.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15109471

This is a feature that as far as i know lemmy does not have, so it might be worth it to checkout and support piefed, it will probably be useful if there are certain topics that are really relevant to you and you want to develop in depth knowledge of.

Could this be implemented in Lemmy as well?

I have wanted this feature for some time now, and it seems like there is decent user interest:

• https://lemmy.world/post/4010300
• https://sh.itjust.works/post/8431810

Hi. So when I'm watching a tv show or movie, and it hits me in the feels, I will think something like "Oh, this movie is wholesome, or this tv show is wholesome" Even if it has swearing in it, as long as the message is a good one. I've been on Lemmy now a couple days, and I rate lemmy super-duper wholesome. Maybe it was the question/thread I asked, but the responses I got were very nice. Lots of people love to cuddle dogs as self-care and by golly, that's just as wholesome as it gets.

If it is not possible, I strongly suggest making it possible. Top in my experience has been more useful than hot and it's annoying to have to click on it for every post

User count has plateaued at about 420K

Active user count rose significantly between 2/24 37K to 3/24 51K

Hopefully users who signed up last year are coming back to use their accounts.

Maybe because they're tired of ads on reddit?

Should we put together a collection and and buy an ad campaign on Reddit?

I can see it now:

"Ads suck. We're ad-free forever. Join Lemmy."

and

"He'll never get us. Join Lemmy." or "Don't let him get you. Join Lemmy"

Hello,

I think it would be possible to improve the user experience of the language selection box.

Now:

Suggestion:

Everyone knows what they want to improve in their software. However, I am opening this post to raise awareness on this issue. It’s just a humble request.

As you know, large video subreddits contribute greatly to Reddit reaching a large user base. For example, when you open the homepage, you can see many subreddits such as r/interestingasfuck, r/funny, r/yesyesyesyesno, r/unexpected etc.

Lemmy is Reddit's alternative for text posts, but unfortunately not for videos at the moment. To fill this gap, I have opened the !yesyesyesno@lemy.lol community and shared a few posts. But these videos are inconsistent between applications and UI’s.

For example;

• Voyager can open videos inline without any problems.
• Mlem showing it as URL and opens the browser instead of playing.
• Lemmy default UI is worst. It doesn’t even show the link. You have to click it’s title to see the video but it’s visually not a link. (looks like this one only occurs on mobile)
• Alexandrite shows as a link.

Yes, video hosting is expensive. However, before solutions such as torrents and IPFS, we must ensure that direct videos work smoothly. This is my $0.02 opinion.

!generative@lemmy.ml

Technically it's not new, but practically speaking it's had 2 posts ever, with the last being 8 months ago.

You may also know it as "creative coding" or the like, but it's not limited to coding.

Has anyone else encountered ad bots in their signup applications?

Is there any plan or timeline to support in-line >!spoiler!< text?

I know a few apps have implemented this already, but it would be nice to have it on the entire platform.

https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/9436237

@MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
(replaced with my own user profile, as I'm not trying to fill other users' inboxes for no real reason)(also, this somehow worked right when making this post, but not the original comment)
[@MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de](/u/MachineFab812)
https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/9293054 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/9620373 https://jlai.lu/comment/6487794

While we're at it, am I missing at instance-agnostic method for linking posts as well?

If a comment or post gets reported, I can think of a number of different groups who might see that report:

• The moderators of the community in which it was posted.
• The admins of the instance hosting the community (call it instance X).
• The admins of the reporter's instance (call it Y).
• The admins of the poster's instance (call it Z).

Do all of these see the report? Only some subset? Some other group I'm not thinking of?

And if it is all/multiple of these, how does the actioning work? If the report's admin removes a post, does that mean nobody from instance Y can see it, but everyone else still can, or does it remove it more widely? Same for Z's admins and Z users. If X admins remove it, I presume that means nobody at all will see it, is this correct? And would a mod approving it means that admins of various instances will then not see the report, or does it stay in their queue separately?

Or do I need to save all the interesting posts I want to be able to find again? Because Reddit has this feature iirc.

I assume that it somehow scrapes the page for some sort of header text, but this doesn't seem to always work.

For example, titles are suggested for spacenews.com articles, but not for europeanspaceflight.com articles. What differences result in suggested titles for one but not the other?

I want to make a thread of Lemmy communities that people should know about.

Jerboah (which makes Lemmy usable for me) or my instance have real troubles finding a lot of communities on distant servers, and opening them from Firefox also doesnt work.

We dont need more tech stuff, we need to make Lemmy more useful!