This is a big problem. It creates the illusion that /c/cats on one particular instance is the real /c/cats.

This is the root of re-centralization and it must be pulled out.

Please. Captcha by default. Email domain filters. Auto-block federation from servers that don't respect. By default. Urgent.

And yes, to refute some comments, this publication is being upvoted by bots. A single computer was needed, not "thousands of dollars" spent.

i swear i wanna go back to reddit just to experience some actual content again, instead i have the same 4 posts about reddit crumbling or how lemmy is "fresh" and "friendly" and stuff

i mean I'm all for the fediverse and want to see reddit crumble but ffs i want content not reddit vs lemmy drama

I know i can sort by my subs but i want to see shit from all the site since there isn't enough content yet to just stick to my own subs yet more and more I'm finding myself itching to go back to reddit and stopping myself because fuck those guys

this exists

this suddenly doesn't

Trying to purge them and set up with Lemmy Ansible, I've disabled signups without admin approval for now.

I see a postgres container and a password but I'm not very familiar with postgres, I tried psql but can't get access

Edit: Also anyone who's de-federated with us, please reconsider. We're a small server with active admin and will get a handle on this, I promise! We had an easy process to sign up for a few days while I got my users over and forgot to turn it off

Edit2: Looking much more healthy now, I will put the commands I've used in a comment below

Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.

Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?

A dev initially suggested in the Lemmy GitHub to remove captchas from future releases altogether because "they're easy to bypass".

Here's the thing though, the lemmy.world instance avoided the daily 10k+ bot signups per day the other instances are currently experiencing simply by activating captchas.

Yes basic OCR easily bypasses them, but the whole point is that you're forcing the spammer to use it, and it costs CPU resources, meaning that for the same budget the spammer will be able to create LESS bot accounts, or none at all if he doesn't know how to automate the use of an OCR. Compare that with the current situation where anyone who followed a Python crash course can easily write a small script doing tens of thousands of automated signups using just the requests module.

Please enable captchas by default in future releases. You can try out other proposed solutions like hashcash too but IMO focus on the low hanging fruit first and make captchas a default in 0.18 already. One barrier, no matter how weak it is, is much better than no barrier at all.

And to those who maintain websites that list instances and rank them by size, you are also contributing to this problem by adding an incentive for bad actors to inflate their own instances. Please either remove that ranking, or remove the spammy looking instances by hand.

Also, maybe change the user count such that only users having clicked on the verification link are counted.

The new UI with the parent-child replies is so confusing. It used to be more clear when the child lines stopped when a new child reply dropped. The reply lines are now a mess. Please do something about this.

A posting on the Instance-specific issues/observations about the upgrade: https://lemmy.ml/post/1444409

KNOWN BUGS

1. Searching site-wide for "0.18" generates an error. This was working fine in 0.17.4 before Lemmy.ml upgraded: https://lemmy.ml/search?q=0.18&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

I’m a reddit transplant and I’m excited about what I’m seeing so far in Lemmy and the Fediverse, but my brain keeps bugging me with concerns:

Maintainability and Scalability - There are a ton of instances now. Lemmy had made it easy to spin up and host your own instance. In some cases, this means people with little/no infrastructure experience are spinning things up and are unprepared for scalability challenges and costs. This post by the maintainer of a kbin instance highlighted this challenge quite well ( https://lemmy.one/post/302078 ). How do we know if an instance is properly maintained, backed up, and is able to scale? Or should we just be prepared to start over on another instance if ours fails?

Monetization - The above cost challenges bring up monetization issues. What mechanisms will instance maintainers have to help with maintenance/hosting costs? As the Fediverse grows, how do we prevent against ads and coordinated upvoting from taking over and pushing ad content?

Legal/Privacy - Privacy regulations are becoming a mine field… GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy frameworks are making it tougher to handle privacy properly. Is there a coordinated Lemmy legal defense or are instance maintainers on their own? How would you even approach a GDPR user delete request across the fediverse?

Here you can see 2 day old post warning about the danger of not using email/captcha verification: https://lemmy.ml/post/1345031

And here are stats of lemmy platform where it shows that we gained 200 000 lemmy users in 2 days: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Another tracking site with the same explosion in users: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

What do you think? Is it some sort of a bug or do people run bot farms?

Edit2: It's been now 3 days and we went from 150 000 user accounts 3 days ago to 700 000 user accounts today making it 550 000+ bot accounts and counting. Almost 80% accounts on lemmy are now bots and it may end up being an very serious issue for lemmy platform once they become active.

Edit3: It's now 4th day of the attack and the amount of accounts on lemmy has almost reached 1 200 000. Almost 90% of total userbase are now bots.

Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/231886

That's a 2000% increase in 2 weeks! Congratulations all! I'm so proud of what we are building together here!

Hello, don't know if this is a UX bug or a feature request but anyway, here it is, i'll try to describe my use case scenario

A post in a community, especially the pinned one, is something that can last for weeks, months, years.

Maybe a comment, or a question, a leaf can be tied in a very specific thread position, adding specific new found informations in a late addition

Can we have new posts and comments in a clear different colour or in bold maybe ?

The backend seems to know which comments i have not read because it's said in yellow, and link to those posts with new comments appear with a

?scrollToComments=true

but then if i click it, i don't seems to be able to find just the new comments.

Does anybody know of a good place to upload short video clips like people do with v.redd.it?

Is there some sort of bridge similar to what is seen with Matrix and services like Discord and Messenger, but with Lemmy and Reddit so that users who are moderators of both communities can make it easier for enjoyers of one subreddit to switch?

Edit: What I am looking for is almost a live version of RedditLemmyImporter that would allow you to bridge the two communities.

The post count for some threads seems to be off, and there seems to be a problem with notifications for other instances.

Is the latter is a result of the recent increase of traffic on Lemmy.ml or a problem of the other instance?

I was recently approached by a user claiming to be the developer of Sync for Lemmy who wanted to be a moderator of the community I created, !syncforlemmy.

I was able to verify this user was indeed LJ Dawson as I knew where to contact him on Discord.

It is quite possible that an impostor user on another instance may be created, for example ljdawson@beehaw.org could easily be made.

Should Lemmy have a verified user marker for members who are of importance to any given community? Are there any other options to protect users against nefarious persons playing impostor?

Don't tell people "it's easy", and seven more things Kbin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon (UPDATED)

https://privacy.thenexus.today/kbin-lemmy-fediverse-learnings-from-mastodon/

This adds several new sections to the previous version -- including an update on what's happened since then. Here's the new table of contents:

I'm flashing!!!!!
But first, some background

1. Don't tell people "it's easy"
2. Improve the "getting-started experience"
3. Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
4. Prioritize accessibility
5. Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
6. Invest in moderation tools
7. Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
8. Values matter

This is a great opportunity – and it won't be the last great opportunity
Ten days later ...
A few more thoughts on moderation

@lemmy @fediversenews

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245

I posted far more details on the issue then I am putting here-

But, just to bring some math in- with the current full-mesh federation model, assuming 10,000 instances-

That will require nearly 50 million connections.

Each comment. Each vote. Each post, will have to be sent 50 million seperate times.

In the purposed hub-spoke model, We can reduce that by over 99%, so that each post/vote/comment/etc, only has to be sent 10,000 times (plus n*(n-1)/2 times, where n = number of hub servers).

The current full mesh architecture will not scale. I predict, exponential growth will continue to occur.

Let’s work on a solution to this problem together.

(Also- as federation has been completely broken on this particular server for me- there is a good chance I will not be able to see, or reply to anything posted below... That is, also assuming this even posts correctly to this server.)

Hello!

Is there a way to deterministically find an arbitrary post/comment on another instance? e.g. if I click on Post A on Instance A and I want to see what Post A looks like on Server B, how would I link there?

I assume there's some sort of ID in the backend so that all the servers know which posts match to each other, but is that exposed in the frontend somehow?

Mainly thinking of a way to utilize this in order to have a userscript that can send you back to your home instance if you get linked to a foreign instance's post.

E.g., maybe I could do something like https://myhomeinstance.net/post/lemmy@lemmy.ml/1418036 for this current post

Can you post to multiple Lemmy communities at once from Mastodon?

I recently made a post from here and tagged three communities in it, on three different Lemmy instances, but it only made it to the first one. Is this just how it is suppose to work? And regardless how does this mechanism work? Does it get posted to the first one tagged and then the others deny it? Or was it a synchronicity that my post just didn't federated to the second two?

[posted to @lemmy]

https://lemmy.ml/post/1412462

So I'm sure we've seen posts/comments like this recently. It gets me wondering if there isn't a way to create a unified experience across Lemmy instances.

My thinking would be to build a browser extension that lets you authenticate to your home instance, or pick up on your existing authentication, and then perform the required API calls to your home instance when interacting with posts on another instance.

But I also wonder if this couldn't be implemented at the UI level of the default LemmyUI. I know there are some federation mechanics that need to happen before your vote/comment/post is submitted, I just don't know if that's something that slows this idea down or completely derails it.

Part of the frustration is this: If I send a community to someone via some normal coms (email, text, whatever), the link is going to be relative to my home instance. If they are a Lemmy user but on another instance, they're not going to be able to vote, comment, or subscribe to the community from that link.

That interaction is what built Reddit. You send someone a link to a Reddit post, they enjoy that post, they eventually sign up for Reddit, and they start interacting with posts.

This might simply be a larger ActivityPub issue, but I have to imagine there are clever solutions to work within Lemmy's or ActivityPub's limitations.