Lemmy

I'm on lemmy.world and found myself wanting to create several communities that I thought hadn't been created yet. It took me a while to figure out that communities don't propagate between instances until at least one person has searched for it by full name (with !).

I understand the technical reason for this, but now that lemmy.ml is maxed out and people are being encouraged to use other instances, it makes the lemmiverse feel much smaller than it actually is, because the search field on these smaller instances won't turn up anything that someone else hasn't already started searching.

The best case scenario is that there is a bunch of duplication as people create communities they think are missing. More likely, a lot of people who would otherwise participate will see the sparse community list on their instance and think that means there's nothing for them to see.

Is there something we can do to make communities more discoverable between instances?

Whereas I might’ve been less generous with upvotes on Reddit, I think it’s important in these early formative stages to let others know that I appreciate their contributions. I hope it encourages growth and activity!

I'm just still figuring this all out sorry if it's a dumb question

I joined Lemmy recently because of the whole Reddit situation and I'm a little bit disappointed with the mobile app situation - don't get me wrong, I'm really appreciative with what the community achieve so far and I know it's all on people's free time it gets developed.

But Jerboa looks pretty good (really reminds me of simplified Infinity for Reddit) but there is some serious features missing. My main point is, on my phone at least, it's unusable. Whenever I'm trying to load some posts it keeps showing

Value of type java.lang.String cannot be converted to JSONObject

I'm using the web app because it's the only way I can view posts, but it's missing some features.

Keep up the good work!

P.S. Can I change something in the settings to make my posts to be tagged as written in English by default?

I was writing a comment on this thread but after I posted it, it showed up here.

That second thread is in the same community and was posted while I was typing, so that's probably the reason. I'm from lemmy.world myself, if that makes a difference.

I quickly recorded a video that helps describe what Lemmy is and how to use it! Would love your feedback and share with new users to help get them started!

cross-posted from: all over the fediverse

(I think this is probably an okay place to post this, lmk if not)

Looking for collaborators to create a new instance of Lemmy. Among other things this instance will differ from existing ones by having a self-governing structure. Check out the very rough draft linked below to learn about my current vision for this community. Much on the doc will change based on other people's ideas. This community's goal is for it to belong to the community. No specific skills needed, but please read through the concept outline before getting in touch. Any type of contribution is amazing. You just have to be interested. Join me in creating a unique and innovative platform.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.cafe/post/350

In case your instance does not federate to something you would like it to, follow these steps:

• Go to your instance URL in a web browser - https://lemmy.cafe
• Click Communities
• Enter something in format !community@instance, e.g. [!general@lemmy.cafe](/c/general@lemmy.cafe). Click the search button.
• Nothing will show up, give it a couple of seconds
• Click Communities again
• Select All
• Your searched community should now be on the list
• Click Subscribe next to it
• ???
• Profit!

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating/

I didn't realise the sheer scale of protest over at Reddit. I'm using Stealth from F Droid to find out what's going on.

I hope I'm doing Lemmy right by posting this? Edit; apparently the link won't work for some reason. I've fixed it now. Feels like a pleb.

Like my home instance is lemmy.one, but if I wanted to create a community on some other instance would I be able to do that? I assume not, and that I'd need to create another account on the instance the community is local to. Is that correct?

Still learning this whole fediverse thing.

I can initiate it via a browser on a desktop as well as the mobile, but the app never returns the search results. Am I missing something?

There is a community for my city on lemmy.ml, but it only has one moderator currently, and that user is deleted. Is there a process for taking over moderation for it?

I don’t know if I really want the job, but I’d feel better if there was someone at the wheel in case some yahoo gets on there and starts posting garbage.

I heard that Lemmy and kbin are interoperable, which is good since people are making different choices.

So now I'd like to subscribe to a community on kbin.social, but darned if I can find out how. I've tried putting the name (e.g., @science@kbin.social) into search, I've tried using ! instead of @, I've tried using the URL, nothing comes up.

Am I missing something, or is this simply not an option?

Thanks.

what's stopping 8 different instances from hosting a 'politics', 'funny', 'fediverse', community?

these duplicate communities defeat the goal to replace reddit.

Honestly, this community is great, feel like I can breathe and have some real discourse again

Google Trends of Lemmy or Lemmy + Reddit in the past 30 days

Before reddit goes dark on Monday, I would like to add a short video to the join-lemmy.org site that shows new users how to create a lemmy account and subscribe to (remote) communities.

The video should be about 2-minutes long (shorter is better) with a screen recording and voiceover narration. If you do this, you'll get a lot of traffic to your youtube/peertube account ;)

Here's the outline of the video requested:

1. Mention that lemmy is a federated reddit alterntaive based on ActivityPub where 'subreddits' are called 'communities'. Go to join-lemmy.org in your web browser and click the big Join a Server button.

2. Tell the viewer that it doesn't really matter which instance they pick because you can subscribe to a 'community' from one instance from any other instance. Again reiterate that what reddit calls a 'subreddit' is called a 'community' on lemmy. Then just click Join from a random server from the "Recommended" list of instances. Tell the user to just pick one at random because it doesn't matter which they choose.

3. Signup for an account. Tell the user they may need to wait for the account to be approved.

4. Try logging-in. Wait some hours (for approval), if needed. Login to the account.

5. Show the UI for ~10 seconds, then tell the user that they can browse all communities using the "Lemmy Commnity Browser" run by Feddit. Again, reiterate that what used to be called ‘subreddits’ in reddit are called ‘communities’ on lemmy, and that each lemmy instance can have many communities. Open a new browser tab going to https://browse.feddit.de/.

6. On https://browse.feddit.de/, search for some popular community (eg documentaries) and then click the link. For the purposes of this video demo, make sure you select a “remote” community that’s hosted on an instance that’s distinct from where the user signed-up.

7. Tell the user that there's three ways to subscribe to a remote instance: [1] Search by remote URL, [2] Search by shorthand identifier, or [3] Manually construct the URL for your instance to their instance

8. Show copying & pasting the URL of the remote community (eg https://lemmy.ml/c/documentaries) into the search field of their own instance, and then clicking on the result.

9. Show copying & pasting the shorthand identifier for the remote community (eg [!documentaries@lemmy.ml](/c/documentaries@lemmy.ml)) into the search field of their own instance, and then clicking the result.

10. Open a new tab, and show how to manually construct the URL for the remote community in their own instance's site (eg https://[their.instance.tld]/c/documentaries@lemmy.ml) and load this page in the browser. Then click the Subscribe button

11. Tell the user that after they've subscribed to a bunch of communities, they can click the logo of their instance on the top-left of the UI to return to the Home Page of their instance. Then they can click the "Subscribed" tab to view posts to all the communities they subscribed to across the entire fediverse.

12. Show the changing of the sort from 'Active' to 'New' and 'Top'.

13. Tell the user that for more information on how to use Lemmy, they can read the documentation at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/ or post questions to the Lemmy community on lemmy.ml (https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy or [!lemmy@lemmy.ml](/c/lemmy@lemmy.ml)) that’s moderated by the lemmy developers.

Bonus: Tell that there's an iOS and Android app and show a quick ~5 seconds browsing in one or both.

I'm crowdsourcing this because I'm not much of a video creator, but I think this would be an incredibly useful resource to new lemmy users. And I can tell you that, if you make this video, it will drive a ton of traffic to your channel ;)

Can anyone with some video production skills help-out new lemmy users by making this short video? If you upload this to YouTube, please make sure you mark the license as Creative Commons CC-BY-SA so that we can add it to documentation and share it as widely as possible :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.one/post/38848

If anyone here is running an instance on Lemmy, I'd like to know the system requirements recommended. I want to run an instance on a VPS, probably just as an account server.

What type of VPS can I get by on, for just accounts on an instance? How much storage space would I need to do just an "account instance", and how much would I need for a full instance with maybe a few small communities?

Just curious. Couldn’t find out on Google.

Since Lemmy instances are self hosted, I imagine that it would be much less than most social media sites.
What about types of files? Could you upload an animated image sequence or video if the file was small enough?
Does this vary between instances?
Could you even upload stuff such as .zip if admins wanted to specifically allow it?

Scrolling through the linked instances and noticed Lemmygrad was banned? Is it their politics or are they just annoying or smth.

Looking through the block instances list and saw lemmygrad is blocked? Is it the politics or just cause they are annoying or smth?

cross-posted from: https://fanaticus.social/post/1955

Hi all, just wanted to get the discussion around mod tools and a pushshift for lemmy started. Sorry if this is a duplicate but I haven't been able to find any discussion about this topic.

If one thing we learned about reddit and third party API is that mod tools are of the utmost important for developing a thriving community. Pushshift is a powerful tool that allows its users to query aggregated data in their workflows.

The data lemmy users create (posts and comments) is valuable. Moderators use it to make informed decisions and improve the experience of their communities; researchers use it to build their own studies; LLM use it for training; internet searchers use it to find answers and opinions written by real people.

I think as admins we need to be clear up-front about the licensing of the content created on our site. I plan on specifying a Creative Commons license for my instance and would like to get some opinions on which would be best for the community.

Once properly licensed, I think it would be in the lemmy community's best interest to provide our community's data in aggregate (scrubbed of PII of course) for all those that need access to it to build tools for the community. People interested in our data will attempt to retrieve it anyway, whether through scraping or direct API access, so it is not only beneficial for our communities to make this data more easily accessible, but also for our servers.

Finally, once we establish our best practices for aggregating our data, we should begin work on building/forking/integrating with pushshift for lemmy. That will allow developers to build the mod tools our communities need to thrive.

TL;DR: establish open license for our content, provide access to PII-scrubbe data in bulk, build pushshift for lemmy, create better mod tools, (don't) profit.