Lemmy

I've read this comment on lemmy's github repository by sbordeyne:

I closed it cause I have no interest in having to battle dessalines on minor nitpicks. Feel free to take the branch and reopen the pull request.

My thought process was that since lemmy is open source, we should be free to add new features without having to battle over philosophies, which was made apparent to me with his reviews and very strong opinions over which features to greenlight and which features to debate at length over (see infinite scrolling, and this very issue which was only approved on the condition we make it a setting that is off by default). I just don't have the energy to contribute and be challenged on every little thing, I'll just remain a plain user of the platform and not bother contributing to the project anymore.

Originally posted by sbordeyne in #282 (comment)

Instead of contributing to a project where only @dessalines@lemmy.ml, lionirdeadman and @nutomic@lemmy.ml dictate what gets approved, why not make a fork with the settings most people agree on?

My stance is that I wouldn't contribute to a project hosted on GitHub, or a project that considers a few opinions more important than the majority.

Controversial takes

spoiler dessalines doesn't want SEO so we get URLs for robots

It might makes sense for the semantic web, but IMO it really doesn't add that much value... look at how silly this type of thinking has gotten w/ reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/glenz4/cute_baby_bunnies_think_the_golden_retriever_is/

Its gotten to reddit/community/comments/post_id/weird_lengthened_post_name, when it should be just reddit/post/postid

Originally posted by @dessalines@lemmy.ml in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/875#issuecomment-652165036 :::

:::

In my opinion, open-source projects should follow a set of principles to ensure transparency, community engagement, and effective development. Here are some key points that encapsulate these principles:

• Clear Decision-Making Process for Future Releases: Open-source projects should have a well-defined process for deciding what features and improvements make it into each release. This process should be documented and accessible to the community. (For example, you can read about how Discourse decides what goes into each release here).

• Complaint-Driven Development: Embrace the concept of "complaint-driven development," where user feedback and complaints guide the prioritization of issues and features to address.

• Transparent Donation Management: Be open about how donation money is allocated. Implementing a bounty system can further enhance transparency, enabling contributors to work on specific tasks for financial rewards.

• Inclusive Community Involvement: Encourage active participation from the community in brainstorming and voting on potential features before finalizing the project roadmap. Community input can be invaluable in shaping the project's direction.

• Public Roadmap: Maintain a publicly accessible roadmap that outlines what is planned for upcoming releases. This roadmap should include the status of each feature or enhancement to keep users informed.

• User-Friendly Feature Request Process: Provide a public feature request forum where users can submit their ideas. Clearly outline the process for how these requests will be reviewed and prioritized, ensuring transparency in the decision-making.

• Effective Communication Channels: Avoid using disorganized or private communication platforms for project-related discussions. Instead, opt for well-structured, publicly accessible channels that don't require users to log in to access information.

• Document with a Blog: Utilize a blog or similar documentation platform to keep users and contributors informed about important project updates, changes, and developments.

I was wondering whether that could cause issues for the limited servers available, like when the mass migration from reddit happened.

I know one account sounds like nothing but as a general practice would it be bad to add more accounts that would be mostly dormant?

And if one does create a throwaway would it be better to delete the account afterwards or leave it be?

Hopefully this kind of content is ok here. Up until recently, when I would be searching for some kind of technical info, the top (and best) results would usually all be Reddit posts. I was very pleasantly surprised to do that this time and find a Lemmy post instead!

...It did happen to be a post from me, so unfortunately didn't answer my question at all, but I still thought it was really neat and wanted to share. Has anyone else seen Lemmy stuff getting indexed and turning up in their search results?

Just posting my list of filter words on here in case anyone else wants to make their feed politics-free

Biden, District, EU, alt-right, democrat, democrats, desantis, elections, far right, far-right, federal, gop, Jan, maga, nomination, representatives, republican, republicans, senate, senator, trump

It's quite refreshing.

My GitHub repo awesome-lemmy-instances (that provides a detailed table to quickly compare lemmy instances) now includes the number of months that the instance has been tracked in the MO field.

We're now limiting the "recommended instances" to just instances with MO >= 2 months.

• https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

Data is pulled from the Fediverse Observer API.

I am experiencing weird behavior on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.ca where refreshing, or closing and reopening my browser, will cause me to be logged out. This seems to be an issue with my browser, Firefox 102.13 on Debian Bookworm, but it does not happen with any other sites with logins. I have tried clearing cookies and site data but nothing changed. I have also tried with Chromium and the problem does not occur so this is related to Firefox or some setting within.

If any one has experienced the same or has an idea what setting might be causing this I'd love to hear from you.

Regardless, thanks for the platform!

edit: ~~Just to fuck with me, after a week of consistent "refresh -> logout" the behaviour is no longer reproducible.~~ Still being logged out if I refresh or close/open the browser. The internet is cruel, laughs at you when you are naked, but you keep coming back for more, and more! Why? Because she is the only prostitute I can afford.

I tried the the conversation continues here button but it doesn't work for me :

I also tried the community's sidebar link but it results in timeout.

Thanks

PS : I'm sorry the GIF URL is from Discord but Lemmy converts to JPG and Infinity converts to WEBP so I didn't seem to have a choice.

EDIT

TO EVERYONE ASKING TO OPEN AN ISSUE ON GITHUB, IT HAS BEEN OPEN SINCE JULY 6: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3504

June 24 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3236

TO EVERYONE SAYING THAT THIS IS NOT A CONCERN: Everybody has different laws in their countries (in other words, not everyone is American), and whether or not an admin is liable for such content residing in their servers without their knowledge, don't you think it's still an issue anyway? Are you not bothered by the fact that somebody could be sharing illegal images from your server without you ever knowing? Is that okay with you? OR are you only saying this because you're NOT an admin? Different admins have already responded in the comments and have suggested ways to solve the problem because they are genuinely concerned about this problem as much as I am. Thank you to all the hard working admins. I appreciate and love you all.

---

ORIGINAL POST

You can upload images to a Lemmy instance without anyone knowing that the image is there if the admins are not regularly checking their pictrs database.

To do this, you create a post on any Lemmy instance, upload an image, and never click the "Create" button. The post is never created but the image is uploaded. Because the post isn't created, nobody knows that the image is uploaded.

You can also go to any post, upload a picture in the comment, copy the URL and never post the comment. You can also upload an image as your avatar or banner and just close the tab. The image will still reside in the server.

You can (possibly) do the same with community icons and banners.

Why does this matter?

Because anyone can upload illegal images without the admin knowing and the admin will be liable for it. With everything that has been going on lately, I wanted to remind all of you about this. Don't think that disabling cache is enough. Bad actors can secretly stash illegal images on your Lemmy instance if you aren't checking!

These bad actors can then share these links around and you would never know! They can report it to the FBI and if you haven't taken it down (because you did not know) for a certain period, say goodbye to your instance and see you in court.

Only your backend admins who have access to the database (or object storage or whatever) can check this, meaning non-backend admins and moderators WILL NOT BE ABLE TO MONITOR THESE, and regular users WILL NOT BE ABLE TO REPORT THESE.

Aren't these images deleted if they aren't used for the post/comment/banner/avatar/icon?

NOPE! The image actually stays uploaded! Lemmy doesn't check if the images are used! Try it out yourself. Just make sure to copy the link by copying the link text or copying it by clicking the image then "copy image link".

How come this hasn't been addressed before?

I don't know. I am fairly certain that this has been brought up before. Nobody paid attention but I'm bringing it up again after all the shit that happened in the past week. I can't even find it on the GitHub issue tracker.

I'm an instance administrator, what the fuck do I do?

Check your pictrs images (good luck) or nuke it. Disable pictrs, restrict sign ups, or watch your database like a hawk. You can also delete your instance.

Good luck.

Between Lemmy.world desperately needing new mod tools, Lemmy.ee disabling image uploads, and the two main Lemmy.ml devs working on Lemmy for less than minimum wage, I want to urge and remind everyone to please Donate!

The Lemmy devs have refused advertisements, refused collaboration with Meta, and focused all of their efforts (and then more) to support the wave of users who left Reddit. The Lemmy devs did this, as they let the work owed to their sponsor take the back seat, to give everyone here today reading this message the best experience possible.

Lemmy is already at 1% the size of Reddit, but only has 2 full time employees. Not only do they deserve more for the gruelling hours they've put in, but so does everyone else who's contributed too.

https://join-lemmy.org/support

Right now Lemmy is unusable for writing code that contains less than/greater than signs because Lemmy's sanitizer treats that as potentially malicious HTML code.

Here's an example:

if(x < y)
{
/* ... */
}

The listing becomes littered with < gibberish.

I got tired of seeing trump face everywhere and a kind user by the name of SubArcticTundra shared his keyword based block list as images. I wrote them down and am sharing them with anyone else that is tired of constantly seeing USA politics on his feed.

it should work on sync, Connect and eternity since they have keyword based filtering . Voyager , liftoff and jerboa don't have this feature (yet).

here's the list in text format for direct use on connect (i didn't use some of the keywords he shared to minimize collateral damage on actual world news posts that may be interesting ) :

gop, jan, maga, representatives, congress, biden, trump, desantis, far right, alt-right, democrat, democrats, republican, republicans

It may not work 100% of the time but it should drastically decrease the constant spam of political news / trump pictures.

What is your email used for when signing up to Lemmy? Is it just for password reset?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g&t=96s

That's supposed to link to the middle of a video, but Lemmy messes up the ampersand.

I'm seeing strange behavior when I click on a post, then click the "back button" in my browser. Sometimes if I'm on the "subscribed" tab, click on an article, then press back, it seems to show me "all" or "local" posts. Sometimes it shows me a different list if I'm on the "all" tab, click on a post, then press back. Same behavior on Firefox mobile and desktop version.

Haven't went into in-depth testing, but I can't be the only one seeing this right?

Guessing it's something to do with browser, CDN, or server-side cache?

Back in the ole Reddit days of ereyestermonth I had a habit of closing my reddit app of choice on my phone, and then as a reflex immediately open that same app back up.

The issue has evolved for me on Lemmy. I have two Lemmy apps on my home screen. I was using Voyager before Sync was released and then I started using Sync. But I also kept Voyager on my home screen since Sync didn't support posts when the beta was originally released. But now I'm too lazy to remove it. I still like Voyager anyway.

You see where this is going. I'm now stuck in a loop where I'm closing one app and opening the other, just to read through the exact same posts.

Send help. Or not. This is fine. I'm going to take a break from Lemmy for the rest of the day.

Posted from Sync for Lemmy

I partially know the answer to this question...You cannot host videos directly on Lemmy, but that is understandable, video hosting is pretty expensive, but Lemmy also doesn't support video embeds(videos don't play within Lemmy), which means that you will have to open the link in a new tab/window to watch it. Which is pretty annoying/inconvenient, and that is probably the main reason why video/gif posts are just not popular here. Even if someone does post it, users mostly can't be bothered to open it.

I've read somewhere that this is intentional and that is "privacy and security matter". But that kind of doesn't make sense to me. Alright, I understand how it can be a privacy concern, since the sites on which the videos are hosted can track you. But we switched from Reddit...Not really known for being privacy friendly... People that are concerned about their privacy will know what to do/not to do.

I'm not knowledgable enough to understand how it can be a security matter. I guess if the video is hosted on a malicious site...But wouldn't that be easily solved by simply allowing only trusted, well known sites?

Video is simply the most superior type of media there is, and I think that not having easy access to it on Lemmy is hurting it.

Are there any other reasons why we don't see video posts on Lemmy, and are there any plans to make videos more easily consumable on Lemmy?

I speak my mind here and sometimes it causes some friction. Having been banned a few times for various dumb reasons what really annoys me is there's no notice of it, and many will just hide behind a generic "mod" label for banning and deleting. Is there a reason there's no attribution required for these actions?

Some users want to horny post and some want to filter it out. It would resolve the conflict.

I find myself accidentally leaving Lemmy. The icon marking an outbound link isn't very noticeable depending on the image it loads behind it and the amount of user brain activity (for me it's extraordinarily low when scrolling).

Pretty cool idea that leans into Lemmy's ability to provide a rich and federated blogging platform. Essentially, with this tool, it seems, a lemmy post along with its comments can become static content on a static web page of your choice.

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/1244281

This is a great way to include comments and discussion on a static site. Take a look at the demo.

It struck me recently that as the quality of content on the internet has arguably gone to shit, in the form of increasingly frequent ads plastered everywhere, paywalls or superficial/dumb blog posts or mainstream media articles, the basic idea of a link aggregator platform can naturally lose its quality, or struggle to maintain a level of quality, and so lose its appeal.

I think I can see this on lemmy (which is my favourite fediverse platform) to some extent and have probably noticed it on somewhere like hackernews to an extent too. I see a link that has an interesting/important sounding title on an interesting/important topic, then click the link and see an article or web page that maybe is just not worth my time.

I'd be curious how many people upvote a link here without reading the cited article/page?

All of which is sad and speaks to general problems with media today, with AI garbage, of course, probably about to make it worse. But regarding the fediverse and lemmy, I think it maybe raises interesting questions.

Obviously the idea of a link aggregator is to seek out and share "the good stuff". But maybe talking about where that generally comes from needs to be a more prominent and open question? Or maybe I need to subscribe to fewer news communities? More ambitiously though, maybe, at least over time, it will get more important or valuable to lean into the forum-like or even blog-like aspect of lemmy where it's increasingly all about the "OC" here, especially as engaging with actual humans with actual personal thoughts gets more and more valuable over time? Could private, maybe even invite-only communities even be of value here?

Thoughts?

I think it's one feature missing from all the text-based websites. I do not watch videos at all. I use text-based media because I cannot interact with else than text and images. It would further improve the speed at which you load the website and improve content quality for all the other people who do not interact with video content. By adding this we'd set a much higher experience standard for users.

I can load an entire website with videos and then load videos in 720p, but I cannot load my inbox with one notification. It should be a miniscule amount of data. I was wondering how the data downloads are being parted. Unread and All seem to be separate based on the loading icon, but are they also separate in regards to downloading them? Is the inbox being partially cached or not? Do pages get downloaded separately or do you pre-download other pages?

Either way, I feel like a way to counter it may be if users were given the option to disable downloading media unless clicked on. Maybe add an option to disable avatars too. I've seen some users having animated avatars and I wonder how much of a download that causes for me. I mainly use Lemmy on the go so on mobile Internet and I won't lie, it's been a struggle at times.

Hi,

I created a few communities here and want to switch to a new instance.

Is it possible to hand over ownership to my new account on a different instance?

What if my new instance would defederate my current instance?

There are a couple of instances that are clearly misaligned with my values, but they're very active, so a lot of the communities keep popping up in my feed. I've been blocking the communities, but it would be pretty cool if I could just block the entire instance. I know an instance can defederate from another instance. Is there a way for an individual user to do something similar, short of spinning up an entire instance myself?