Lemmy maintainer. Interested in politics, video games, and many other things.
- 37 Posts
- 140 Comments
Joined 5Y ago
Cake day: Jan 17, 2020
The problem is that languages on your instance’s version of /c/announcements are also limited to English and German for some reason. I thought this might be a bug in that the site languages would also apply to remote communities, but I cant reproduce that. One thing you can check is go into the db, and make sure that select * from local_site; returns exactly one column. Then take the value of site_id and run select * from site where id = **site_id**;. This should show the domain and other data of your instance.
Anyway you should be able to solve it by refetching the community to your instance (by pasting the community url in the search field). If it worked then curl "https://lemmy.schuerz.at/api/v3/community?id=46" | jq.discussion_languages should output an empty array.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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[Activitypub](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/) is decentralized social networking protocol recommended by the W3C. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content. As part of the work on [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/), we have implemented some high-level abstractions for handling the server-to-server protocol in Rust. These abstractions are now available as a standalone library.
The main features are:
- Data structures for federation are defined by the user, not the library. This gives you maximal flexibility, and lets you accept only messages which your code can handle. Others are rejected automatically during deserialization.
- ObjectId type, wraps the id url and allows for type safe fetching of objects, both from database and HTTP
- Queue for activity sending, handles HTTP signatures, retry with exponential backoff, all in background workers
- Inbox for receiving activities, verifies HTTP signatures, performs other basic checks and helps with routing
- Generic error type (unfortunately this was necessary)
- various helpers for verification, (de)serialization, context etc
Documentation is currently lacking. If you want to get started with the library, best look at the example.
The code has already been used in production as part of Lemmy for a long time, without any notable problems. However, ergonomics are lacking and need to be improved. There are also many additional features which would be worth implementing. See the project readme for details. Contributions and suggestions are very much welcome!
You can find the project here:
[https://github.com/LemmyNet/activitypub-federation-rust](https://github.com/LemmyNet/activitypub-federation-rust)
[https://crates.io/crates/activitypub-federation](https://crates.io/crates/activitypub-federation)
When fetching a community or post for the first time, votes or comments are not fetched. You can subscribe, and will later receive new content.
Your instance is currently not configured correctly for federation. The following request should return json, but gives error 404: curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json' https://lemido.freakspot.net/u/lemmy (compare with curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json' https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic). The default Lemmy installation has an nginx config which takes care of this.
This is a good find. It would make a lot of sense for Lemmy to format mentions in that way too. Could you open an issue in the Lemmy repo please?
By the way, the fetch problem you mention is already fixed in this pr (but not yet released).
I see, you make a good point. Your instance has been running for a year, but received very few users compared to lemmy.ml. My guess is that you receive new users mainly via join-lemmy.org/instances, is that correct? The problem is that most people only look at the top 2-4 instances, as you can see in the stats (removed everything thats not a Lemmy instance).
Problem is, that list is sorted by most popular and strongly favors established instances. I think it would help a lot of we put 2-4 “recommended instances” at the top of that page, particularly small or general-purpose instances like yours. It would also be pretty simple to have different recommendations for each language, which should help regional instances. There could be a sort of tag system as well, but thats a bit more effort to implement. What do you think?
We dont have any plans to change lemmy.ml administration.
I think that this is the better solution for the problem you mention.
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Lemmy.ml has long had some political conflict among the userbase, especially in communities like worldnews. This is because the instance is composed of both leftists (anarchist/communist) and liberals (those who agree with the mainstream political views in western countries). Additionally, the instance admins all belong to the former group.
Recently we made an announcement offering [free Lemmy instance hosting](https://join-lemmy.org/news/2022-03-17_-_Free_Lemmy_instance_hosting) for one year, for non-politics instances. We are hereby making a similar offer to host a liberal or mainstream political instance, which can accomodate those who are unhappy with lemmy.ml moderation.
This has many advantages. Instance admins have full power to set the rules, block federated instances (like lemmygrad.ml), or remove unwanted content. An administration team that is closer aligned politically would certainly be an improvement for some of the users here.
So if you are interested to host such an instance, send an email to contact@join-lemmy.org some relevant details about yourself. You will also have to buy a domain. We will only host one such instance, so if multiple people are interested, you should coordinate among yourselves. As in the original offer, the hosting will be limited to one year.
On a side note, we would also like to help with the creation of a general-purpose instance that is less focused on politics than most of the existing instances. This is fully within the terms of the initial "free instance hosting" announcement, so if you are interested, send us an email!
You could point them to wolfballs.com, which seems closer aligned to them in terms of politics.
Yes that image takes full care of email sending, you just have to add it to the Lemmy config. Explanation is on Docker Hub. One thing you should do for email sending is set proper reverse DNS (which reminds me, it might not be set for lemmy.ml either).
The documentation has some ways to contribute.
The goal of Lemmy is essentially to create/develop a free software, federated forum/link aggregator. In my opinion, its best to keep the project focused on technical work as much as possible, and not make it political in any way. Of course thats not easy because all of us have certain political views. But dont mistake the rules of lemmy.ml as anything official, its just one instance of many. The purpose of Lemmy is that everyone can create instances based on their own ideals and preferences.
Many small Lemmy instances have already disappeared over time. You are free to archive existing instances, so that doesnt happen again. But in general, things disappear from the internet over time, whether you like it or not. Not even archive.org can prevent that.
That is actually a very good point, i never thought about it in that way. The main question about this is probably how it should work from a UX perspective. One way would be to have a mod action which changes the subscription of all users to the new community. But there would be a risk that a hacker could target mod accounts, to redirect users to his own community/instance for malicious purposes. We could send a notification to users to inform them about the change. And the old community might have to be locked or deleted (permanently or reversible?)
The time limit of one year is exactly because we dont want to host these instances forever, and centralize the project in that way. If the instances become popular and get many users, surely there will be someone willing to host them. If they are small and no one wants to host them, the content cant be that important. Besides, content will be mirrored on federated instances.
If you would like to improve the documentation, that would be very welcome, repo is here. However, i dont think its the right place to call for boycotts, or other political stuff like that.
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We just released a new patch which fixes an important federation problem. Due to a mistake in the code, activities were only sent out once, even if delivery failed (e.g. because the target instance is down, or a temporary connection issue). Instance admins should definitely upgrade.
This problem is fixed, so that failed deliveries are retried up to 9 times, with exponentionally increasing intervals. The only limitation now is that it will not keep retrying after Lemmy is restarted, but that case should be less common.
[PR link](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/2109)
Pretty interesting video, if you stop watching at 21:10. After that its just "china bad" scaremongering and other nonsense.
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.
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).
Do they want users to switch to the fediverse?
[Bonus](https://twitter.com/iamRahul20x/status/1455950490366263301?t=ONrAR3u0MTM8HLXqei233Q&s=19)
https://ds9.lemmy.ml/post/1717/comment/2202
https://greenish.red/notice/ACr3wLTInIOMRAoO1o
From [the-federation.info](https://the-federation.info/lemmy):
There is also [lemmy-stats-crawler](https://yerbamate.ml/LemmyNet/lemmy-stats-crawler):
```
"crawled_instances": 18,
"failed_instances": 7,
"total_users": 17671,
"total_online_users": 118,
```
A "Lemmy federation map", showing linked, allowed and blocked instances.
cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/184
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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.
I'm curious to hear if you have any thoughts or ideas about this. As a developer I understand very well how Lemmy works, and cant tell at all what might be difficult or confusing.
Some websites block lemmy.ml links, for example Facebook as you can see in the screenshot below.
I dont know if this is because of the .ml domain (which is free and might be used by spammers), or because they are scared of Lemmy. Anyway, this doesnt mean that it is impossible to share content from lemmy.ml on Facebook or other sites, thanks to federation there is a relatively easy workaround:
1. Find another [Lemmy instance](https://join.lemmy.ml/instances), ideally one that is relevant to your audience
2. Copy the lemmy.ml link, and paste it into the search field of your chosen instance
3. You should get a search result for the post, comment, community or user, click on it
4. Copy the link and share!
There are a few caveats though: In the case of a post, comments and votes will be missing. You can fetch comments in the same way through the search. The other instance will also not receive any new posts/comments/votes made in the community, unless a user from the remote instance is following the lemmy.ml community.
The easiest way to avoid these problems is for you to make an account on the other instance and follow the community from it. Then every post/comment/vote will be delivered to the other instance, and the community should look identical on both instances.
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In order to make Lemmy more accessible to people who don't speak English, we have decided to hire some translators for the documentation. Specifically, we are looking for people capable of translating into the following languages:
- ~~Spanish~~
- ~~Russian~~
- ~~Chinese (simplified)~~
The following documents need to be translated:
1. [Lemmy documentation](https://join.lemmy.ml/docs/en/index.html) (section 1, 2, 3)
- [Code of conduct is already translated](https://www.rust-lang.org/es/policies/code-of-conduct)
- [The English folder is here](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs).
2. Readmes:
- [Lemmy](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/README.md)
- [Lemmy-Docs](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/README.md)
3. [join.lemmy.ml website](https://weblate.yerbamate.ml/projects/lemmy/joinlemmy/)
To apply, you should be a native speaker (or equivalent) in the target language. it is not necessary that you are a professional translator. But you should have some experience (for example, from translating open source projects), and some basic technical knowledge. You can also do the work as a group, as long as one person takes responsibility for receiving and distributing the money.
Payment will be made in Ethereum (or another cryptocurrency). Making a contract for this would be impractical, as we all live in different countries. Instead we will send you a portion of the payment on advance, and the rest once work is completed.
Please send an email with the following details to translate@lemmy.ml:
- Subject: "Lemmy Docs Translation (Spanish)" (replace with your language)
- Previous translation work
- Estimated payment to complete the work.
- Alternatively: hourly wage and estimated time to complete it.
- Any currency is fine, if it is stable (so not Ethereum)
- Your [Matrix](https://matrix.org/) account
Even if your langauge is not included here, you can already start to translate the respective items via Weblate and Github.
Recently there have been some discussions about the political stances of the Lemmy developers and site admins. To clear up some misconceptions: Lemmy is run by a team of people with different ideologies, including anti-capitalist, communist, anarchist, and others. While @dessalines and I are communists, we take decisions collectively, and don't demand that anyone adopt our views or convert to our ideologies. We wouldn't devote so much time to building a federated site otherwise.
What's important to us is that you follow the site rules and [Code of Conduct](https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/code_of_conduct.html). Meaning primarily, no-bigotry, and being respectful towards others. As long as that is the case, we can get along perfectly fine.
In general we are open for constructive feedback, so please contact any member of the admin team if you have an idea how to improve Lemmy.
## Slur Filter
We also noticed a consistent criticism of the built-in slur filter in Lemmy. Not so much on lemmy.ml itself, but whenever Lemmy is recommended elsewhere, a few usual suspects keep bringing it up. To these people we say the following: we are using the slur filter as a tool to keep a friendly atmosphere, and prevent racists, sexists and other bigots from using Lemmy. Its existence alone has lead many of them to not make an account, or run an instance: a clear net positive.
You can see for yourself the words which are blocked (content warning, [link here](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/crates/utils/src/utils.rs#L10)). Note that it doesn't include any simple swear words, but only slurs which are used to insult and attack other people. If you want to use any of these words, then please stay on one of the many platforms that permit them. Lemmy is not for you, and we don't want you here.
We are fully aware that the slur filter is not perfect. It is made for American English, and can give false positives in other languages or dialects. We are totally willing to fix such problems on a case by case basis, simply open an issue in our [repo ](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues)with a description of the problem.
https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/enterprise.lemmy.ml
Not that these changes arent released yet.
After almost a year of hard work implementing ActivityPub support on Lemmy, it is finally done! Anything that works here on dev.lemmy.ml, also works over federation between different instances (with one notable exception, community mods have to be on the same instance as the community for now).
Before we consider federation ready for production, some more testing is needed. And that's where you come in: go to our test instances enterprise.lemmy.ml, ds9.lemmy.ml and voyager.lemmy.ml, and try things like:
- post, comment and vote
- delete and restore posts/comments
- send private messages
- create communities, remove/restore posts and ban/unban users
- [setup your own lemmy instance](https://dev.lemmy.ml/docs/administration.html), and federate with enterprise.lemmy.ml or ds9.lemmy.ml
If you notice any bugs, please report them on [Github](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues), as comments on this post, or in our [Dev Chat on Matrix](https://app.element.io/#/room/!tUnhsBRCsiePXfsIGe:matrix.org). Please keep in mind that our [code of conduct](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) also applies to the test instances.
The more you test, the sooner we will feel confident to enable federation on dev.lemmy.ml. Happy testing!
Let's start with the biggest news first: Lemmy is receiving funding from the [NLnet foundation](https://nlnet.nl/)! The funding is for a total amount of 45.000 €, which will allow [/u/dessalines](/u/dessalines) and me ([/u/nutomic](/u/nutomic) ) to work on Lemmy full-time for at least half a year.
We have created various milestones for the work we are planning to do. Most of them are about getting ActivityPub federation ready for production. In addition, we will work on:
- better accessibility
- private communities and instances
- reworking search
- creating a `joinlemmy.ml` type site
- the option to block other users or communities
The details of the milestones will be posted on our github issue tracker soon.
We're very excited about this opportunity, and can't wait to finish federation.
In other news, we have just released [Lemmy v0.7.0.](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/RELEASES.md#lemmy-v070-release-2020-06-2x) Most importantly, this update switches to [Pict-rs](https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs/) for image hosting, due to various performance-related issues with Pictshare. Pict-rs was coded from scratch in Rust by the amazing @asonix, who also created the ActivityPub library for Rust. We can't thank him enough for all the work he is doing for Lemmy!
We'd also like to thank the following people for their contributions:
- @iav for their work in building arm compatible rust docker images and builds.
- @ernestwisniewski and @bytesnake for code contributions.
- Many others for contributing translations via the [Lemmy weblate.](https://weblate.yerbamate.dev/projects/lemmy/)
- Our [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/dessalines) and [Liberapay](https://liberapay.com/Lemmy/) supporters who help us devote more time to Lemmy (We're still very far from these being able to sustain two developers)
- Everyone else who contributes to Lemmy, be it by coding, hosting instances or just using it and spreading the word!
Other than that, since v0.6.0 in January [we've closed over 100 issues](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/milestone/16?closed=1), fixed tons of bugs and added many new features.
[You can find the full changelog and upgrade instructions here](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/RELEASES.md#lemmy-v070-release-2020-06-2x).
Edit: [Here are the milestones for the funding](https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/35612)
Just a public service announcement.
  
I see your problem but I dont think this can be fixed with any rule change or Lemmy feature. It would be possible to let people access posts after they are removed by a mod, but that wont help if your account gets banned. Or if your account gets hacked and deleted. Or if the instance goes down permanently for some reason.
If you are worried about your content disappearing, you should keep backups. For example with an API client which regularly downloads everything to a local file. There is also a feature request for a functionality to export an archive with user data. Even better would be an external service like reveddit.com which reads content from the API and stores it.
I suggest you create a new post to discuss this problem, then more people can give their ideas and opinions.