Lemmy maintainer. Interested in politics, video games, and many other things.

  • 20 Posts
  • 40 Comments
Joined 3Y ago
cake
Cake day: Jan 17, 2020

help-circle
rss

Yes with Activitypub federation you generally have to trust server admins with the data they handle (similar with private messages). Though I suppose it would be possible for communities to anonymize votes when announcing them to followers, then only the admin of the community’s instance could see who voted.


Likes were previously marked as public in federation messages. This obviously didnt make sense, so now they are marked as private.


FYI this will be fixed in Lemmy 0.17


Request for build servers
We are looking for someone who would be willing to provide a build server for Lemmy's continuous integration. This is used to ensure that new changes and pull requests pass all the checks, and that the code is written well. At the moment we are using a small VPS for this purpose (2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM). This works but is quite slow, and can slow down the development process with unnecessary waiting times. For this reason we are looking for a community member with a spare server or computer, who would be willing to provide it as a build server. There are no specific hardware requirements, but the faster the better. The build server has to run 24/7 and run the [Drone Docker Runner](https://docs.drone.io/runner/docker/overview/). The setup is very easy, especially if your machine is already running docker. If you have such a server and are willing to provide it, please comment below with the specs. Additionally we are also looking for an ARM builder, so that we can provide official releases for this platform as well. Note that some Raspberry Pi models seem unable to build Lemmy (our 4GB memory builder failed), so please try if the compilation works on your device. If you can provide an ARM builder, also comment below with the specs.
fedilink


Thats a possibility, but it would get very verbose in case of a discussion with long comments. And then there would be cases like a user manually quoting something (so the same text might be quoted twice in a row), or having to exclude the automatic quote when the responded comment comes right before the current one.

I think this solution is preferable.


Yes thats exactly what i meant, though probably without the hover functionality.


Displaying comments in nested form would look very bad, i dont want to do that.

Another problem is that phpBB forums are always organized into hierarchical categories (example). To make it work properly, such categorization will have to be added to Lemmy (optional, could be disabled for instances that use lemmy-ui).


By the way, contributions to this project are very much welcome. It doesnt even require knowledge of Rust programming, many things can be improved simply by editing the HTML templates.


Auto-generating quotes is one possibility, though I dont like that it implies rewriting the comment text. It could also be ugly in case there is already a quote. Or there could be a text field which links to the comment being responded to.

Another option would be a config option which disables nested comments entirely (both over federation and api). That means lemmyBB users wouldnt get to see all comments.


LemmyBB, a new frontend based on phpBB
Lemmy is structured in a way that backend (database, api, federation etc) and frontend (html, css, javascript) are completely separate. This makes it possible to create other frontends which can take the place of lemmy-ui. I have long been playing with the thought of having a Lemmy frontend that looks more like a traditional forum. Now I finally found some time to work on this, and get an initial proof of concept working. ![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/91170cff-8737-4a84-b70d-5e2c4d85bf72.png) ![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/da0d0bd8-5dcd-4ea8-a3ab-3b8eabf8b85a.png) To reduce the amount of work, the project uses HTML templates and CSS themes from [phpBB](https://www.phpbb.com/), which are open source under GPLv2. This also has the advantage that many preexisting phpBB themes can be used for lemmyBB. It is written in Rust, because it allows for tight integration with the Lemmy API, and is generally a great language for webservers. For now the funcionality is very basic, but nonetheless its already usable. You can: - browse the local post listing - browse comments - login and logout - create new posts and comments To give it a try, run the following commands on your local computer, replacing lemmy.ml with your own instance: ``` git clone https://github.com/Nutomic/lemmyBB.git LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=https://lemmy.ml cargo run ``` If there is any specific feature that you would like to see added, please [open an issue](https://github.com/Nutomic/lemmyBB/issues). For now there arent any instructions for deploying lemmyBB to a server. If you would like to do that, please open an issue as well. This post was made from lemmyBB.
fedilink

It would be a pretty complex change, probably better to start with something smaller first. Anyway its always good to have more contributors :)


Yes that migrating the urls would be possible. Just needs someone to implement it, as always ;)






Cryptocurrency trading is like a speedrun of stock market trading.



Actually I tend to agree with @PP44@lemmy.ml. Maybe the problem you are describing could be better solved by having admins review new communities.




It can be useful as a word seperator. If its a copy, instance admins can remove it if necessary. Also, it seems inconsistent to allow _ in community names, but not in usernames (if thats what you’re suggesting).


I suppose there could be options to crosspost as copy (current behaviour) or as link to the existing post (as requested here).


It should work fine. Feel free to open an issue to discuss the details.



Seems like a very useful project. You can add a link to it in the Lemmy docs if you want.

Btw instead of copy-pasting the structs from Lemmy into your project, you could pull them directly from crates.io. Disadvantage is that it will force you to pull in lot of dependencies that have to be compiled, but that could probably be avoided in the future by adding feature flags to Lemmy crates.



It would be possible to federate a list of all communities on a remote instance, so you could browse that. But probably only the community name and profile, fetching posts/comments could use a lot of resources.


The domain was included in a spam list, which meant that confirmation emails couldnt be delivered, and signup was impossible. Now the problem is fixed, so if you would like to translate Lemmy into your language, register an account and get started. You can also join the [Lemmy Translations](https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-translations:matrix.org) Matrix chat.
fedilink


Do we really need self upvotes in Lemmy?
I never really thought about the automatic self upvote on Reddit and Lemmy. But after reading this article [Dont let me like my own post](https://yujiri.xyz/theory/selflike), i'm wondering if we should just get rid of it. Its not really adding anything, or does it? Plus removing it would slightly simplify the code, and slightly less federation messages would get sent (probably unnoticable in practice).
fedilink

This would quickly get complex, as it would require configuration options for instances to fetch from, fetch interval, number of communities to fetch each time, etc. At least for now i think its better to have an external tool. But it could be linked in the docs so other admins can easily find it.


I still have to check if the retrieved communities don’t get somehow deleted if they are never used (if nobody subscribes)

Communities will be stored forever, unless you manually go into the database and delete them. Even the delete buttons on the frontend only hide them.


I would recommend that you use our ansible playbook instead. It does this and a lot more.






Either one should work. Anyway, this post shows that images are working correctly in new posts now. But you will have to edit old posts manually to remove the www from the url.


You need to run docker-compose up to reload the settings. With docker-compose restart, it keeps using the old settings.


Its possible that certbot messed up something in your nginx config, but i dont see how that would affect the html sent by the server. Did you previously have www.beehaw.org set in docker-compose.yml? Maybe its still using the old setting.

Otherwise i cant think of anything.


Hmm, then did you configure www.beehaw.org in some other place? Because Lemmy certainly doesnt add that.




Can you link your instance, and the url where the error happens?


How did you install Lemmy? And are you using pictrs for images? Because that is normally available through Lemmy (same domain).


[Source](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/). I think you can clearly see that each wave is getting less deadly, and less dangerous. The rate of new positive cases is relatively stable though: ![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/3ZoPiREN0j.png)
fedilink

FYI if you want to run a bot on lemmy.ml, you should definitely ask the admins about it first. In my opinion it could easily be considered spam.




Lemmy communities are activitypub groups, and they already federate without problems.



True, we have to see what we can do about that.


https://ds9.lemmy.ml/post/1717/comment/2202 https://greenish.red/notice/ACr3wLTInIOMRAoO1o
fedilink

Hmm not sure. We were having a bug recently where lemmy.ml failed to send anything to other instances, but that should be fixed. @dessalines@lemmy.ml any idea?




I am really against paid ads for Lemmy. If we receive that amount of donations, there are much better things to spend it on than giving it to youtube or other corporations. For example we could give the money to pay people who are contributing to Lemmy in different ways.


Promoting Lemmy
I think most of us agree that the main problem which Lemmy has today is its lack of users. This is not for technical reasons, as we know it is quite stable and usable. The main cause is that the project is not widely known yet. In this post I will propose what we can do to change that. First, lets clarify why we should promote Lemmy. Clearly there are many different reasons, and every person prioritizes them differently. So I will just give some common examples: - Promote open source (and all the benefits that entails) - No advertising or tracking - Allow communities to manage themselves, instead of being controlled by corporations - Making Lemmy more active, particularly if you would like to see more discussions on certain topics So how can we promote Lemmy? I think one of the most effective thing we can do at this point is to post about Lemmy in other communities where we are active. This has the benefit that other people already trust us to some degree. Open source projects looking to setup a forum might also be a good target. When doing this, we should consider which aspects of the project would be most important to the target audience, and emphasize those. Another option is to contact bloggers, video creators, podcasters or others, and suggest that they report about Lemmy. As above, it is important to adjust the message to the target audience. Because Lemmy is quite small, it is unlikely that major tech magazines or professional content creators would care about it. Instead we should focus on smaller creators. This will also lead to more sustainable growth, and give us some legitimacy in the eyes of bigger creators. In both cases, we should avoid doing anything that might be perceived as spam. It is better to create one or two high-quality messages, which will give a good impression of the project, rather than a dozen generic ones that tarnish the reputation. It is worth noting that some important features are still missing in Lemmy, particularly mod tools (we are going to implement them in the next ~12 months). There also aren't many different instances yet. When promoting Lemmy like this, please avoid linking to lemmy.ml directly. This instance is already too big relative to other instances, and it is not meant to be a "flagship instance" ([What is lemmy.ml?](https://lemmy.ml/post/70280)). Instead you should try to find an appropriate instance on [join-lemmy.org](https://join-lemmy.org/instances) and link to it, or link to the joinlemmy site directly. You can also explicitly encourage the creation of new instances. On a side note, it might be worth mentioning the many ways that people can contribute to Lemmy (again depending on the audience). There are the obvious ones, like writing code for lemmy and lemmy-ui, writing documentation or translating. There are also multiple interesting options to create new projects, such as: - Create an [alternative frontend](https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/client_development/custom_frontend.html): nojs frontend like [lemmy-lite](https://github.com/IronOxidizer/lemmy-lite), a traditional forum frontend or something like stackoverflow - Create a new client, be it for mobile, desktop or terminal. - Gather instance statistics using [lemmy-stats-crawler](https://yerbamate.ml/LemmyNet/lemmy-stats-crawler), and build some nice graphs. By the way, Lemmy is not just a Reddit alternative, so there is no reason to limit the promotion to Reddit. To help with these promotion efforts, [@dessalines](https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines) and I would be happy to give interviews via email (in English, German or Spanish). For that, they can get in touch by mailing contact@lemmy.ml.
fedilink