I tested by making a report on homeimprovement@lemmy.world. I can see it in my reports page on my lemmy.world account, but my programming.dev account reports page still doesn't show any reports.

We have a bunch more supporting sites for the instances that have been set up. All of these are contributor sites which means accounts on them are available to programming.dev contributors, and/or admins.

Vault

Vault is a password manager running vaultwarden. It will be used to pass along login details when setting up accounts for users on the various contributor sites since registration isnt opened. The link for it is https://vault.programming.dev.

Files

Files is a site for file hosting and url shortening for then linking in places such as programming.dev. As an example heres a markdown file I added in https://files.programming.dev/u/9jsOS3.md and heres a link that redirects to an image http://files.programming.dev/go/meme.

Files can be given compression, a time it expires in, a maximum amount of views, and a password if you want to limit who can access it. The software used is Zipline.

The site for files is at https://files.programming.dev

Schedule

Schedule is a meeting poll site to find out what time people want to meet. This will be primarily used and have a poll link posted when we are scheduling events. The software used is rallly.

The site is at https://schedule.programming.dev and ive got an example poll at https://schedule.programming.dev/invite/Zwr8x2wrQBGA.

Polls

Polls is a poll site for getting information. Will be used when we want to poll the community about something or do something like a year end survey on stats for people using different languages, etc. Software used is input.

We updated our hosting of the mlmym frontend at old.programming.dev to version 0.0.40 which fixes an issue where bots could abuse a redirect feature for SEO.

You can see the details of the issue here: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/issues/101

Introducing blocks.programming.dev! This is a site to add small code snippets you make for sharing easily in threads in programming.dev if you need to do something like put the same code in multiple spots.

The site is running using software called opengist and is essentially an equivalent to gists in github. Repo for it is here https://github.com/thomiceli/opengist.

Snippets are accessible both in the web interface and using git if you prefer adding in code from your text editor and then pushing it.

You can find the site here: https://blocks.programming.dev.

Introducing a new supporting site for the instance, git.programming.dev aka Forge! This is a spot where development on things relating to the instance will be taking place. This includes for each thing having source code, task boards, and issue trackers viewable.

This gives us a spot away from GitHub so we don't have to rely on them for hosting our code. In addition, Forgejo, the software used, is working on federation so eventually features could be implemented to do things such as interact with Forge directly from our instances.

Who is allowed to make an account?

Anyone is free to make an account on the site provided you have not broken our code of conduct and have gotten banned from one of the instances.

What is allowed to be hosted?

Any code that relates to things we do on the fediverse or outside the fediverse but relating to programming.dev is allowed to be hosted on Forge. This includes things such as bots made for lemmy/sublinks, alternate frontends, software we host, tools, etc.

As an example alternate frontends like photon, alexandrite, etc. are free to choose to be hosted on Forge. Software such as Sublinks, etc. can be hosted, and various misc bots and tools such as Fediseer, Automod, etc. can be hosted.

Anything hosted on forge must be able to support the programming.dev instance it is built around. This means that things like bots and alternate frontends for the programming.dev instance must be able to support sublinks.

How can I make an organization on Forge?

If you want an organization on Forge to group a collection of repos together feel free to reach out to one of the team leads or email info@programming.dev.

How can I contribute to a programming.dev repo?

If you want to contribute code feel free to fork the relevant repo and then make a pull request back to it with the changes. If you have an idea for something that can be added to a platform or a bug report open up an issue on the relevant repo in the Programming.Dev org.

If you're interested in contributing a large amount to the programming.dev repos feel free to reach out to me (Ategon) on discord or matrix or email info@programming.dev and I can add you to the development team.

Two of our programming.dev alternate frontends have been updated to their most recent versions.

Voyager (v.programming.dev)

Has been updated from version 1.37.4 -> 1.41.0

Main changes:

• You can long press on comments/posts to get the more actions sheet
• Gifs can be configured to autoplay always, never, or on wifi
• When tapping into a post the video continues to play seamlessly
• Videos in the feed have a mute icon you can toggle
• You can now hide self-post thumbnails in compact mode
• You can now set it so you always need to tap to reveal child comments
• Large post voting buttons can be hidden
• Community icons can be hidden
• Link creation now has a dialog for entering link info
• Subscript and superscript support for markdown
• You can now long press usernames to block

Mlmym (old.programming.dev)

Has been updated from version 0.0.36 -> 0.0.38

Main changes:

• Image uploads has been fixed

Introducing the Programming.Dev community wiki. This is a place where communities can set up wiki pages for their communities to allow people to easily get info relating to it.

You can find the site here

How does navigation work?

The home page has a list of communities with pages. If you click on a community it will bring you to their list of documents that you can look through.

Some possible use cases for a community wiki are: a code of conduct page, a frequently asked questions page, information about the community, credits if you need to credit things such as your community icon, a page for related communities, etc.

Ive set up a couple example pages to start. The gamedev section of the site has 6 different pages that you can look through to set some ideas

How do I edit a page?

Editing is handled through git. Each page will have an edit this page button that will bring you to a page where you can fork the repository, make changes, and then make a pull request to get it accepted into the site.

The pages all reside in the content/docs folder while the sidebars are in content/menus. You can see how I set up some of the current pages for how to format things.

Pages are written in markdown.

Are other languages supported?

Yes! Currently theres only english set up as we don't really have communities in other languages but it would be easy to add more language options in the site config.

We have a brand new supporting site for the instances! Me.Programming.Dev is a place where you can see relevant links for things we host. Listed are software we are hosting, status pages, alternate frontends, and more.

You can find the site here

Custom pages

The site is a self-hosted linkstack instance so as a little thank you towards donators, donators are able to get a custom page to put socials on. You can see an example of that over on my page at https://me.programming.dev/@Ategon. If you want a page and you've donated just reach out to me (Ategon).

Adding links

As new instances and sites get made new links will be popping up over on the site. I recommend checking it out for new things every once in awhile just in case you miss an announcement on something new were releasing

Whats this instance I don't recognize?

You may notice theres something we haven't announced yet on there. Left it in as a little early access for those reading our update posts before it releases later this week. Feel free to make an account and check it out before the floodgates open :)

We finally have a blog site where you can easily see news relating to Programming.Dev! Theres an rss feed if you want to add it to your rss reader and posts from it will be mirrored onto all of our platforms (eventually ideally automated)

Theres a small welcome post I made on there and we should be releasing more things this week that will get announced there and then mirrored here

It turned out that most things I was working on are being completed mostly all at once so there will be daily news posts about new things dropping for a bit. Theres currently 4 things in the queue to be released

You may have seen me say in some posts for adding new admins to the team that we use discord as the chatting platform for the admins to all talk to each other

This has now been bridged to matrix so people on matrix can chat from there to the rest of the admin team on discord. This means that we don't require people to use discord to be an admin for the instance anymore, now its discord or matrix.

Also we are still looking to expand the admin teams a bit if you're interested in being on the community team (either for here or our new platform coming soon), development team, or infrastructure team

So recently theres been a bunch of trolls posting csam over in some other communities in the All feed. So handling this can be automated instead of a bunch of people needing to report it every time ive made it so users that have barely any activity in their account will no be able to make image posts

Let me know if theres any issues with the bot. Its also open source here https://github.com/programming-dot-dev/karma-bot (theres prebuilt docker images but theyre a bit bugged currently so if you want to use docker build it yourself)

this is the account that will be removing posts / showing up in the modlog - Ategon speaking here

So, I love this site. I've been here more-or-less since the beginning, across various accounts. I also have accounts on other Lemmy instances.

One common pattern I see is that instances branch out their communities too soon, and overly dilute the conversation. It makes an instance that is ultimately not that active (compared to any of the big sites that don't need naming, really) appear to be even less lively, due to so many instances with either nothing at all, a few month old posts, or a generic post linking to a projects blog.

Note that I am not criticizing the instance by pointing out the low activity levels - I really do love this place. It's just a fact at the moment. You can switch viewing posts by new and scroll down a little to see we get around 5 - 6 posts per hour, occasionally a bit more and occasionally a bit less.

I think that having lots of inactive, dead looking communities is off-putting. I know that I certainly don't feel encouraged to post in them. I worry this might have a similar effect on other users too.

I do understand that c/programming is deemed as something of a catch-all community, and so anyone could post there rather than the niche communities, but I'm not sure that this is totally obvious to everyone.

Personally, I feel we should purge all the tiny communities that have no posts (or just a single blog post, for example) and encourage people to post in c/programming. Then, new communities can be made when a particular topic becomes large enough to warrant divergence, either because it's clearly a subject of interest to many users or because it ends up dominating c/programming. c/rust is an example of such a community, as is c/programmerhumor.

I am nobody here, and I was not asked for my opinion, but I just wonder if this topic has been thought about much? I really want this place to thrive. Do any other users here have an opinion? What do the instance admins think?

Hey everyone! I talked a bit in the January Newsletter about us expanding the admin team but figured I would do a post specifically about the development team so I can go more into depth about it.

Currently in the admin teams around half the people are in infrastructure and the other half are in community with 1 person in development making the split around 4/4/1. This means that currently ive been the only one doing the development work so figured I would do a post looking for some more help

Whats the development team

The development team is in charge of development projects for the instance for users to interact with. This ranges from adding in features to the software we use (e.g. lemmy, sublinks) that the instance needs, to making supporting development projects such as events, bots, a support page, etc.

What would joining the team mean?

If you want to help out and join the team theres a very wide range of possible things that could be worked on depending on what you enjoy.

For frontend currently theres some supporting sites being built such as a team page, a support page, a donation page, etc. as well as the frontend for sublinks which will become the instance default UI at some point. Primary languages used are JavaScript and TypeScript and sublinks uses Next.js

For backend the backend of sublinks is currently under construction. Primary languages used are Java for backend and Go for federation. We also have another thing we will be hosting soon that is currently being rewritten to use C# for the backend

(for people who dont know what sublinks is its a lemmy alternative being built with the help of a bunch of different instances and lemmy alternative frontend devs. Being built with a compatible API so will be easy to swap out to it when it reaches parity with all of the apps and frontends still working)

If youre also interested in making some misc thing that might not fit in either of these but could be cool for the instance feel free to join as well. For example some supporting bots or a tool for users to use (e.g. post scheduler (this already exists but this kind of thing))

How much time would I have to commit?

Theres no real hard time limit you need to fulfill. Were all volunteers helping out here and anything helps. If youre mostly busy during the week but have time to fix a small bug on a site for a couple hours thats perfectly fine

Im not great at coding, can I still join?

Yep! Anyone is free to join regardless of level and if you need some help I can guide you through how to develop using the technologies we use or can get some other developers to help out if its more backend related since im primarily frontend. Certain tasks are available on some of the projects that are fine for new coders to do

How to join?

If youre interested feel free to dm me or comment below and I can add you to the development team spaces. The admin team in general primarily chats on our discord server https://discord.gg/kwyxvYEYt4

this post is being pinned in the instance for 24 hours

Hey everyone, have a lot of updates on things occuring around the instance so figured would compile them all into one post. Will be pinned for 24 hours in the instance

Sublinks

In the past a bunch of you may have seen me working on a new frontend for the instance called Pangora. That has been merged into another project called Sublinks which should let progress go way faster (was previously 2 people who contributed to Pangora vs now 18 in Sublinks)

Sublinks is releasing with a lemmy compatible API and we should be switching over to it once it reaches parity. As the API is lemmy compatible all alternative frontends and apps will still be usable when we swap over.

For anyone interested in the project the matrix space for it is here https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online and the repositories are here https://github.com/sublinks

The backend is using Java, the frontend is using TypeScript with Next.js, and the federation is using Go

New Community Team Lead

Ive been prepping to stop being the community lead for awhile now so I can focus on the development side of things and ill be transitioning fully over the course of the next month into being only on the development team. The new community team lead will be @recursive_recursion@programming.dev

With me focusing on development I should be able to develop things for the instance a lot faster so you should see some new things popping up soon :)

Hexbear

Hexbear handles federation by votes and they recently had a vote and removed programming.dev, lemm.ee, and aussie.zone from their allowlist. Weve added them to our blocklist as well so theres no one way conversations

Community Stats

Types of Communities

• Lively: 5001+ members
• Active: 201-5000
• Moderate: 51-200
• Quiet: 11-50
• Dead: 0-10

Stats

• Lively: 0% (-1% from last month) (theres still 1 lively community but the total communities pushed it down to 0%)
• Active: 7% (~)
• Moderate: 12% (+2%)
• Quiet: 26% (-8%)
• Dead: 55% (+7%)
• Total: 243 communities (+55 from last month)

Overall the amount of communities has been getting significant expanded and starting out near the bottom in terms of active users. I assume these are going to start climbing up within the next month and there should be a boost to moderate and quiet. Moderate still has been growing and active has been holding on to its 7% even with the amount of new communities

Expanding the Admin Team

We have a new thing releasing soon and in preparation of that we are expanding out the admin teams. If youre interested in helping out in the instance (development, infrastructure, or community) feel free to reach out

New Release Soon

Speaking of the new thing releasing soon it should hopefully be released sometime within the next month as a subdomain here. For anyone who wants to beta test it its theoretically up now if you're able to find it. Good luck :)

Hint: Larger than bits

We upgraded to 0.19.3 which should fix a bunch of bugs including the need for us to restart the servers every day

• The site now receives reports from mastodon and kbin
• Admins can see votes in the UI (could previously do so within the database but this makes it easier to moderate votes)
• Post views have a secondary sort of published date added so things that have the hot rank of 0 arent returned randomly
• Max title is based on chars (previously it was bytes)
• Mastodon federation (aka posts showing up when people follow the community in mastodon) has been fixed

Pulled some updates for some of the alternate frontends were hosting!

Photon

(https://p.programming.dev)

• Community and instance sidebar got overhauled to declutter them a ton

Voyager

(https://v.programming.dev)

• You can now create crossposts
• Unread item color got changed
• Updated login + sign up flow
• Autofill crosspost titles
• A new setting has been added to show posts youve hidden so it shows in the community it was posted in rather than being hidden everywhere
• User and community autosuggest when you start typing the relative links for them (!community@instance and @user@instance)
• Account switching anywhere
• Guest accounts

Hello everyone,

First of all, thank you for your good work on this instance. I was wondering, do you know when you plan to move to 19.3? I noticed some federation issues (especially votes), it's not a big deal but it would be nice to see them fixed.

Thanks!

Do you keep access logs? How long do you keep them?

I imagine that if you ever got a request, you'd understandably just give in and hand out the data. Have you thought of a canary?

Thanks for all your work!

Hello. I follow 4 community bots from here on Mastodon - dotnet, dotnetmaui, csharp, and community request. The last time I got a post from any of these on Mastodon (at dotnet.social) was the 13th of December (that was from dotnet), but there have definitely been posts/comments made since then.

I just tried posting to dotnetmaui from Mastodon via the bot and that worked, so it's just outbound (just to dotnet.social?) which is affected. Are you aware of this? Is someone looking at it? (I've had a look and can't see anything that sounds like it) Or is this an issue for the admins of dotnet.social? It's odd that inbound (from Mastodon/dotnet.social) is working but outbound (from here) isn't, and it's the same with all the communities I follow here (though I only tested dotnetmaui with inbound).

thanks, Donald. dotnetmaui admin

Finally fixed the issues I was having with mlmym and we now have our fourth alternate frontend in the instance! This one is similar to old reddit if you prefer that sort of browsing experience. I know some users requested it in the past

Frontend is up at https://old.programming.dev

We now have the four main alternate frontends hosted. The other three are currently in the site sidebar and ill be adding mlmym there as well now

Hey everyone. Some of you may have seen the recent announcement with blahaj to defederate with the instance. Ive been handling things privately and wanted to do an announcement to catch you all up on the results of that

#1: Background knowledge

Realized that not everyone knows how the instance is structured so figured I would do a little section in the front to go over that (especially for visitors reading this from other instances)

We currently have 8 admins in the instance. Of those 2 people are currently lead admins (snowe and I). Majority of admins are part of the community team but not all of them (people are split between infrastructure, development, and community). I was planning out a team page similar to what lemmy.world has to go over this with a bit more detail and that should be coming in the future. Main thing though is its intentionally structured so one person doesnt solely have power (hence the two leads). If one person ends up messing up theres the other lead and the rest of the admin team to talk with them about it and help them do better in the future.

#2: What happened?

There was a thread in lemmy.ml about the hogwarts legacy game winning a steam award. For reference for the following images + description, snowe is the other lead admin for the instance apart from me and the other people are various other users

There was a conversation that ended up essentially devolving into a slap fight within this post (ive purged the entire conversation so people dont stumble onto it in the future but ill post images here with them for archiving reasons and to explain it)

^ These comments were what initially started it. Essentially it was an argument about the hogwarts legacy game being or being not transphobic

^ Later in the argument

^ One branch that ended up getting started due to the frontend snowe uses on mobile not showing pronouns (how most instances handle it currently is its appended to the end of the display name but some frontends choose to ignore the display name and just do the username instead)

(edit: changed the word triggered to started to make it more clear what definition of triggered I used. Forgot that tends to not be common usage)

There are other branches but it is a very large amount to screenshot and dont want this to completely flood this post. Everything should be available in the modlogs still if you want to dig a bit deeper or I can send other screenshots in the replies on this post if youre interested in what was said for certain parts

#3 Aftermath

Due to the argument above blahaj chose to defederate with programming.dev which was going to take effect 48 hours after their announcement on it. (This is due to the person in the conversation being one of our lead admins which is ultimately understandable as they represent the instance)

snowe has sent a message apologizing to ada (the lead admin for blahaj). I dont know the contents of what was said but if they want the two of them can choose to publicize it.

One of our admins should not have escalated the situation and participated in this slap fight so on behalf of the admin team here were sorry about that

Internally we have a guidebook for admins to follow for the various aspects of the instance (moderation, applications, etc.). Ive refined this guidebook with a couple new rules for admins that should be taking effect in the future

• admins will be required to have two accounts, one for admin activities and one for non admin activities. This is how some admins have already been interacting in the fediverse and basically makes it so comments done on the non-admin account should not be taken as that admin speaking on behalf of the instance. Generally the admin account will be things done relating to admin duties (e.g. my posts here in meta) while the non-admin account is other various conversations. Admins can be as anonymous as they want with the non-admin account similar to how our users here can be as anonymous as they want with their accounts
• im adding in some guidelines for tone while chatting for the admins so comments made that are on behalf of the instance should be respectful and not devolve to slap fights

Like I said before in #2 ive also purged the entire conversation to avoid people stumbling onto it and seeing a slap fight with an admin that has since apologized. As the community exists on lemmy.ml I cant fully do this due to how federation works in lemmy but the mods in the community have been doing the same which should federate.

This should not have happened in the first place and we as an admin team will be better going forward

I hope the blahaj instance sees our actions and chooses to reverse the defederation decision but at the end of the day its their instance and they can choose whoever they want to federate with (note federation is done directionally. I will still leave our direction of federation open)

Edit: Blahaj stopped their defederation (shown in an edit on their announcement) so the two instances will still be federated both directions going forward

Another edit: its a work day, its midnight here, and some comments here are also devolving into slapfights. Ive locked the post since this has already taken up most of my free time to try to handle and moderate this. My dms are always open if you want to dm me regarding the situation

We now have our third alternate frontend setup, voyager. This one is a mobile first frontend

https://v.programming.dev

Mlmym coming next (old reddit style) but ive been having issues with it so unsure when

Continuing with alternate frontends for the instance, we now have the photon frontend hosted at https://p.programming.dev/

Voyager should be coming tomorrow

Hey everyone

Its been a bit since the instance has been started and the community handling has become mostly stable so we are changing how community creation works

You should now see a button in the UI called create community that you can use to create a community without needing to go through our community request zone. Instead of filtering communities ahead of time we will retroactively check on new communities and delete them if they dont match the instance

This should be a much better experience for community creation instead of needing to dig around for the community request community. This also means the vote threshold is no more as it doesnt seem needed anymore now that its stable here and things shouldnt be coming in too quick

The UI still isnt ideal since its not apparent that the creation will be moderated afterwards but hopefully in the future we should be able to make something to show its happening (and possibly limit the community until its approved but make it still happen through the button). But for now ill be updating the sidebar with info on the new system

In the future I will draft up a mod welcome guide and mod guidelines and post a link to them here once I get time to do so

Please do not community spam. Try not to mod more than 5 communities unless you have the time to handle that many things

If we notice someone is community squatting by mass creating things and then doing nothing with them theyll be handled and the communities will either be deleted or put into the adoption community !adopt_a_community@programming.dev

Hey everyone! Ive been messing around with getting alternate frontends hosted for the instance

To start it off we now have the alexandrite frontend hosted at https://a.programming.dev

(a in the front to match how other instances have been doing it so its consistent)

Im also attempting to get voyager, photon, and mlmym hosted as those are the other main ones. If you have any suggestions for other frontends let me know and I can try to get it set up

Note for all of these its not guaranteed they will be supported forever since it depends on the developers of them to update to the most recent lemmy versions. If we end up dropping one due to lack of support for recent versions ill announce it here