I am also partial to "lemmings"
i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances
For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.
Scrolling through the linked instances and noticed Lemmygrad was banned? Is it their politics or are they just annoying or smth.
The lemmy.ml instance federates with lemmygrad.ml, the collection of Marxist communities. It blocks lemmygrad.com, which currently redirects to the forum of choice for President Donald J. Trump. The latter does not seem to be hosted using lemmy and I think could not be federated with in any case? But presumably this was once the domain of a similarly-minded lemmy instance.
Some instances other than lemmy.ml do block lemmygrad.ml. Besides being a place for Marxist communities, the instance is also home to some very radical and very hostile users. I haven't been around long enough to really know the situation for myself, but I have seen mentions of lemmygrad.ml communities engaging in brigading in the past.
It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?
User accounts can be independent of anyone else's instance. You just have to host your own.
But it's always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else's instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn't want to do that.
The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is...less practical than you might think.
The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user's name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.
I do think there's room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you're registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.
You got yourself a new sub. Thank you for sharing!
Does the gmail SMTP server have a limit on how many emails can be sent per day?
I think it does, yes. The kinsta.com link says the limit is 500 per day. If you're expecting a higher volume than that, or if the unpredictability of relying on a free Google service for anything is not acceptable, then you would probably want to pay for an inbox service.
But if you're running a small instance and just need the occasional email to go through without a lot of effort or fees, then it ought to be fine.
I keep getting logged out every time I visit another sub-lemmy page? I’m trying to subscribe from the button but then I get taken to their site and logged out. Logging in takes forever as well. When I copy and paste the ! Link into the feddit.uk search I get no results as well.
I'm really not sure, but it sounds like these could be issues related to feddit.uk? I suggest asking about this on a community there, or messaging an admin of that instance.
In the meantime there’s nothing stopping community mods from making pinned posts or sidebar links or whatever (I assume)
Well... Hopefully in the near future the UX for linking to communities can be improved, since right now the way things work makes it a pretty crappy user experience for anyone on an instance that hasn't synced that community yet.
Hah, that’s what…four rival gamedev communities now? At least 😄
No need to compete! I'm self-hosting my own instance in any case, so I thought I might as well make communities for things I'm interested in. I've also subbed to every other gamedev community I've come across so far...
It would be really neat if there were a lemmy feature to easily co-promote related communities, maybe even give users an easy way to see them all in one feed.
It's all good, thank you for the reply. I hope you're right. But new registrations do not actually appear to be closed for lemmy.ml at the moment, it's just that newly registered accounts require admin approval.
If email isn't working, then you'll have to turn off email verification in your instance's settings before anyone is able to log in without encountering that spinner.
To get email to work, you'll need to provide SMTP credentials in lemmy.hjson on the server you're using to host lemmy. An example SMTP configuration is shown in the docs here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/configuration.html
You may also have to restart lemmy after you update the configuration, in order for it to take effect. (I do this on my server via docker-compose restart.)
When I set up lemmy on my server with lemmy-ansible, the config file was initially set up with a valid-looking SMTP config. But when emails weren't working I looked more closely, and it turned out that there is something broken with the SMTP service that lemmy is integrated with by default. It seems that you will need to provide your own credentials.
I'm using an SMTP service provided by a web hosting service I pay for, but you can also use gmail in a pinch: https://kinsta.com/blog/gmail-smtp-server/
The #1 thing missing is user notes. In my experience, being able to attach notes to users that are shared among moderators is essential, even for smaller teams or smaller communities.
As the number of things that need to be moderated grows larger, being able to maintain a list of pre-written removal messages will also help a lot.
And as lemmy continues to grow, it will be very important to have something that works like automod that can be configured on either a per-instance or a per-community level. Especially something that can do filtering and auto-reporting. There are a lot of cases where you don't want to outright forbid a certain kind of content, but you do always want to bring human attention to it.