Lemmy

Lemmy growth is crazy!

Blahaj zone (the Calckey instance) has been running for around 6 months now. We've had a slow but constant growth of new members, with a big spike when Calckey drew a lot of attention. And as a result, even though we're not a huge instance, we are one of the larger Calckey derived instances around.

lemmy.blahaj.zone on the other hand has seen crazy growth! In the last week, our lemmy instance has gone from almost no members, to nearly as many users as our Calckey instance. The mind blowing part though, is that the lemmy instance isn't even close to being one of the largest lemmy instances. We don't even appear on the first page of Fediverse Observer! And the sheer number of lemmy instances online now is huge compared to where it was a couple of weeks ago.

And that's before we even talk about kbin and the threadiverse as a whole, of which Lemmy is only a part

I can honestly say that this whole thing has shifted my view of just what the future of the fediverse might be. I assumed it would always be microblogging centric, but now, I question that...

#fediverse #lemmy #kbin #threadiverse #calckey

@lemmy@lemmy.ml @fediverse@lemmy.ml

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but posts created on Lemmy with images don't show up with images on Mastodon.

I've started running an instance based on artwork and this is a bit of a problem since it would allow us to advertise our communities to thousands of Mastodon users. Futhermore, since our images are often NSFW, Mastodon users clicking on the link that's currently visible on their version can't load the content since they often don't have an account.

It would be awesome if images posted on Lemmy would also show up on other parts of the Fediverse, since it's a huge missed opportunity for Lemmy and community self-promotion in my opinion.

(attempt to cross-post from /c/programming )

Idea: Scrape all the posts from a subreddit as they're being made, and "archive" them on a lemmy instance, making it very clear it's being rehosted, and linking back to the original. It would probably have to be a "closed" lemmy instance specifically for this purpose. The tool would run for multiple subreddits, allowing Lemmy users to still be updated about and discuss any potential content that gets left behind.

Thoughts? It's probably iffy copyright-wise, but I think I can square my conscience with it.

I replied to thread from Linus Torvalds and agreed with what he said but added my opinion which was not hate or rejection (literally) https://lemmy.ml/comment/477089 (ask for a revert)

My response to a mod (not committed in order to be able to post this thread)

They even removed my upvoted comment about a ChatGPT's response regarding question "Is disagreeing is hating?" i was going to share again with this person Arthur: https://lemmy.ml/comment/445401

This is a pathetic move and so low compared to what the extreme you're criticizing could do, at least them, are honest in their stupidity.

Dessalines posted https://lemmy.ml/post/1140303 "Be respectful..." my twist is "...as long as you agree with us".

One thing for sure, you are not serving your cause. BUT, I won't be a hater, I definitely won't be your supporter!

If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit's daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don't think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.

I know the goal of Lemmy isn't to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.

I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?

It's very well maintained and user friendly. It's made by the developer of Pixelfed.

https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

The problem: when a new user who is unfamiliar with the fediverse visits join-lemmy.org, they will likely be turned off when they see how few users are on each server. This is because many people will assume that having a low number of users on your server means that you'll have a low number of users to interact with. (This is what I assumed when I first discovered Lemmy.)

The solution: instead of showing the number of users on each server, we should instead show information that feels more intuitive to new users and doesn't mislead people into assuming the user count is more important than it actually is.

I think it would be a good idea to show the date that the server was founded, and show the server's network traffic in terms of Low/Moderate/High. I think this would make the prospect of joining a server much more appealing to new members, and it would also help them understand that it's actually a good thing to join a server with fewer users, not a bad thing.

Here's my quick mockup of what it could look like. (I made up random dates but you get the idea):

I recently setup a new Lemmy instance and was surprised when my feed was mostly empty. I've since learned that a key part of Lemmy's federation is based on a user from your instance subscribing to communities on other instances. Only then, will your instance pull in posts from the subscribed community to your "All" feed.

This means that subscribing to new communities is especially important if you're on a young Lemmy instance since it helps to build out everyone's feed on that instance.

I've found discovering new communities to subscribe to on other instances can be difficult. To help me search for new communities I may be interested in, I tried aggregating as much of the Lemmy fediverse together into a single feed by subscribing to the widest range of Lemmy communities possible. This offers a Lemmy feed that's kind of like reddit.com/r/all. If it's interesting to anyone else, you can find the instance here: https://lemmy.directory.

Hopefully this offers another way to find new communities to subscribe to on other instances.

Here's a better description of my understanding on how Lemmy federates communities and why you might be interested in checking out lemmy.directory: https://lemmy.directory/post/34207.

Hope this helps ease the orientation to how Lemmy federation and communities work.

I've noticed this in many places in the Lemmyverse in my first few days here. When first signing up almost all the instances were listed as having 2 or less active users. The biggest was Lemmy.ml at something around 1000. Then I've seen those numbers listed in other places including a post yesterday that is supposed to help bring redditors to Lemmy.

These numbers will just get most people to turn around and not even consider Lemmy as an alternative.

I saw a GIF today showing the growth of user accounts on Lemmy instances and Lemmy.ml (for example) was over 30000 and many of the other servers were in the 100s, approaching 1000. That's a HUGE difference and indicates a community that is 10 times (or more) more active than the initial numbers presented indicate.

Any thoughts? Am I out to lunch?

I'm seeing across various instances that registration is going through manual approval as an anti-bot measure. As someone whose also run Fedi instances, I know how bad the bot problem is.

I do think invite links can get around this though. If we allow existing users to simply send a referral/invite to their friends (and have a tracker on who is inviting who), that'll do a ton to both mitigate spam registration and allow people to join quickly.

The more obstacles we put in the way of registration, the more people will be dissuaded and go away. We've seen it with Mastodon (and now there's this whole reputation of it being too complicated). We have a window here to fix stuff if we're fast. People will eventually forget about the Reddit API and put up with it if we don't offer a compelling alternative when the iron is hot.

I'm considering making a GitHub issue, if anyone has any thoughts or plans to work on it, let me know. I have a decent amount of connections on the Fedi and if enough people are serious about getting this ASAP, I can help out with the logistics/coordination.

Hello, all. I'm considering creating a Lemmy instance in order to facilitate migration of a moderately sized reddit community to the fediverse.

The community is about 150k users with around 1.5M pageviews per month.

I don't expect everyone to come with the migration, but I would expect a significant portion to do so. Perhaps half.

How do I go about capacity planning / sizing for such an instance? Is Lemmy designed to operate at this scale?

Thanks for your input.

I saw the impressive setup used by the sh.itjust.works instance with 24 CPUs and 64 GB RAM. This inspired me to reconfigure join-lemmy.org so that it can quickly update the instance list, and point users to sites which are actually reachable. This will be an immense help if a lot of Reddit users decide to join Lemmy at once (e.g. during the blackout on Monday). Individual instances will likely go down at that time, but others will stay available and users can easily join them.

Additionally, changes to the site, documentation and translations are also updated automatically. If you see anything that can be improved, consider making a contribution to help new users.

The instance list has a couple of recommended sites at the top. They are defined in this file and seperated by language. For most languages there is only one recommendation or none at all, so you can simply add yours by making a pull request.

In case of English, the situation is a bit different. The current recommended instances (beehaw.org and sopuli.xyz) are already quite large and would be shown near the top of the list anyway. So it makes sense to recommend smaller instances instead.

To be recommended, an instance should meet these requirements:

• It should be a general purpose instance
• At least one member of the admin team needs to be in the Instance admin chat to coordinate with other admins
• The admin team needs to be prepared for a large influx of users, both in terms of hardware and moderation

We can use this thread to discuss which instances should be recommended. There is no maximum number of recommendations, but it should be an even number to work with the desktop layout.

On a side note, the instance list itself could use many improvements such as showing more details about instances or using different sorting methods. If you are a programmer or web designer, you can contribute to improve the website.

Edit: If you are a Lemmy admin and want your instance to be recommended, go ahead and open a pull request for this file. Developers can also contribute in the same repo to improve join-lemmy.org.

question for the #lemmy users and #activitypub developers out there:

now that @lemmy is seeing a spike in interest, and @Gargron has said he's interested in building out groups on #mastodon - this seems like the right time to update ActivityPub protocol to support groups natively. anyone looking into this?

lemmy's integration into mastodon is pretty janky right now and can be a lot better!

I'm planning to move my instance to a new VPS provider that will allow me to scale more simply.

Has anyone done this already and can sanity check my plan? My current setup was spun up using the ansible playbook here.

Current plan is:

Lower DNS TTL to 60 seconds (already done)

Shutdown on current VPS: docker-compose down

backup /srv/lemmy// and copy to new host

sudo tar -zcvpf backup.tar.gz /srv/lemmy//

scp backup.tar.gz user@newhost

update dns A and AAAA records, wait 1 minute, verify DNS has updated

run ansible script

Shutdown on new VPS: docker-compose down

restore backup to /srv/lemmy//

Startup on new VPS with restored DB etc: docker-compose up -d

test

destroy old VPS

Increase DNS TTL to 86400

Anything I've missed? :)

Reddit Enhancement allows you to tag users. I'd like a similar feature on Lemmy, or at least a way to make notes on their profile like Mastodon lets you. Sometimes you want to tag someone's pronouns, or that they're a cool person, or that you suspect they have a trait that would make you block them but you don't know for sure yet. It's pretty useful.

I created a ticket with Font-Awesome to add the lemmy icon.

• https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/19758

Why?

I went to add my new Lemmy profile to my website's social media links, but -- err -- there's no icon for Lemmy in my "social media links" wordpress plugin.

I looked around and saw that a lot of plugins on popular platforms (wordpress, drupal, etc) just use the Font Awesome library for icons.

So, if the lemmy icon gets added to Font Awesome, it means that the lemmy icon will suddenly become available in thousands (millions?) of software/apps (themes, plugins, etc).

The Process

For context, it took them about 1 year to add the mastodon icon to Font Awesome.

I've never done this before, but it looks like you can either pay them $300 or vote in their Icon Requests Leaderboard for new icons to be added:

• https://origin.fontawesome.com/support#requesting-icons

Until the leaderboard is up, how about we show them community interest and let's all give the GitHub issue a thumbs up reaction/emoji?

I just recently set up my own instance vlemmy.net and am wondering whats the consensus on email verification? I myself am quite privacy conscious and would understand people not wanting to sign up with an email, but if no email is required would there be a spam risk, your insight would be much appreciated, thanks.

I created a repo on GitHub that has a table comparing all the known lemmy instances

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

Why?

When I joined lemmy, I had to join a few different instances before I realized that:

1. Some instances didn't allow you to create new communities
2. Some instances were setup with an allowlist so that you couldn't subscribe/participate with communities on (most) other instances
3. Some instances disabled important features like downvotes
4. Some instances have profanity filters or don't allow NSFW content

I couldn't find an easy way to see how each instance was configured, so I used lemmy-stats-crawler and GitHub actions to discover all the Lemmy Instances, query their API, and dump the information into a data table for quick at-a-glance comparison.

I hope this helps others with a smooth migration to lemmy. Enjoy :)

Wow, that smells like desperation.

Hi all!

So, I'm assuming everyone has seen links like https://beehaw.org/c/news and clicked through to find it doesn't work right because it's a different site (I'm assuming a different instance here).

Well, I just stumbled across an interesting feature: if you enter a link in the following format, it works for everyone regardless of instance of origin:

[News](/c/news@beehaw.org)

News

[My User](/u/barbarian@lemmy.reckless.dev)

My User

You're welcome!

@lemmy

[@barbarian](https://lemmy.reckless.dev/u/Barbarian) [@beto](https://lemmy.studio/u/beto)

hello :)

This works with Chrome. Knighthawk 0811 says it works with Firefox as well.

1. Go to your Lemmy instance
2. Open the browser menu
3. Tap on "Install app"
4. Tap "Install" in the dialog
5. Tap on the newly created Lemmy shortcut on your home screen

https://lemmy.ca/c/woodworking