Lemmy

We can currently filter communities in our feed by 'Subscribed', 'Local' and 'All', but I'd really love a way to add communities to custom groupings, and have additional filter options based on those groupings. For example, a 'News' group that I could add all of the News-related communities to, and be able to click a filter button and see only those... or maybe the use case most people would likely use: creating groups to isolate SFW and NSFW content.

If there's a way to do this that I'm unaware of, I'd love to hear about it.

I wrote this simile explanation of Lemmy intended for millennials / Gen Z who might be familiar with discord. While I could have left it out completely I included a bit of explanation about Lemmy instances in order to highlight why it's different from Reddit or other centralized Reddit-like platforms.

Everything written here is copyleft/public domain.

The audio was generated with Elevenlabs AI TTS with a paid account and I'm fairly confident that I can also give it the Public domain / copyleft license.

Audio: https://voca.ro/1cZOHPZo8shQ

Transcript:

"So, you're probably familiar with discord right?

On discord you've got one user account and that lets you participate in countless discord servers, each of them with their own channels, moderation style and possibly even dedicated to a particular community or topic.

Lemmy is very similar. With one account you can participate in countless of Lemmy servers, each of them with their own Lemmy communities, which are basically equivalent to a subreddit.

Now, this is basically what you need to know in order to start using Lemmy, but there's a couple of differences that are worth pointing out if you want to know how it works under the hood.

One big difference is that Lemmy servers are actually servers, as in an actual computer. These Lemmy servers basically know how to talk to each other so that it's easy to use them with a single account.

Unlike reddit or even discord, these servers aren't owned by a big centralized corporation. Instead, they're run by anyone who wants to create an online space for their communities. It is harder to run a Lemmy server than a discord server because it requires actual computing resources, that's true, but it also means that there's no for-profit business that controls the Lemmy network or all the Lemmy communities.

Joining Lemmy and giving it a try is quite easy. Because there's no owner of the Lemmy network, in order to sign up you just need to sign up on one of the hundreds of Lemmy servers available. This first server will become what's known as your "home instance" and with that account you can interact with countless other Lemmy servers and each of their subreddits slash communities.

If you want to give it a try, just vist join-lemmy.org and choose a server to become your home instance. And that's it!"

One of the things I like the fediverse is the oppposition to unhealthy social media use. I think infinite scrolling is one of the worst things about mainstream social media. Even when youre consciously against it, it is very hard not to forget and get consumed by the infinite scrolling.

My proposal is that front-ends should default (or at least provide the option) to a paginated interface. You get to the bottom and have to click a "Next" button. It acts as sort of a wake up call to your scroll-numbed mind. It is also a much more ergonomic interface anyways, and more lightweight on resources.

I strongly believe that, if presented the option, most people would prefer pagination over infinite scroll. It seems corporations forced infinite scroll on us for maximum time wasted.

1. I create a well crafted post to a normal site that gets 10.000 upvotes.

2. I change the URL to a malicious site.

3. ??????

4. Profit

And I guess this question is two parts: 1. Regarding the current lemmy implementation, and 2. The activityPub protocol in general

Kbin already supports them

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fromshado.ws/post/793

Disclaimer

You are responsible of cloning whatever content you decide to migrate. I suggest to keep it to posts you made originally or have been given permissions to migrate. DO NOT SPAM

Background

Following all the recent issues I caught wind of Lemmy, I was aware of the Fediverse already and been present of Mastodon for years but unlike with microblogging alternatives I don't mind losing contact with people on link aggregators.

But since I was considering also deleting or overwriting all my original submissions (lol it's all gacha memes) I wanted to keep them available somewhere else. So I migrated a bunch of them to /c/fireemblemheroes

The program

So I coded a small python script (it's actually 500 poorly written lines) that given a file where each line is an URl of a Reddit post it can parse the corresponding content and using Lemmy's API clone them into your instance.

sample execution migrating 40 posts and their comments into a local test instance

Migration of text

For the most part simply copying and pasting original and texts back into Lemmy works.

Still there's a need to clean the body to make sure inlined picture links are expanded and characters are unescaped.

Migration of media

The post might be a single link or might contain links hosted on Reddit in it's body.

If enabled, the script is capable of downloading this media and reuploading to the pictrs instance asociated with it, then replacing with the new selfhosted link. Otherwise the original link is kept.

I suggest to disable video uploading though, as most of the time pictrs will not finish handling of the file before lemmy decides to timeout the connection

Migration of comments

The script is capable of tracing all comments in the particular post and migrate them while keeping the threaded relation between parent and child comments.

It also keeps a credit of name and date to the original author. In any case migrating comments will make you hit rate limits severely, increase runtime drastically.

This option really is only intended if you are migrating your community from reddit and want to keep all the top content.

This is how an URL link looks with migrated thread comments

Migration of upvotes

This is not possible without possible affecting federation. You would require editing the database directly as obviously the API doesn't allow it.

The same happens with original posting dates.

Running it

The prerequisite is having an user to authenticate to the instance you will use and the community where the posts will be migrated to exist already. The code is located at https://github.com/Eskuero/antenna2lemmy

Clone it locally:

$ git clone https://github.com/Eskuero/antenna2lemmy; cd antenna2lemmy

Create a python virtual environment and install the required dependencies on it:

$ virtualenv env; . env/bin/activate; pip install -r requirements.txt

READ THE CONFIGURATION FILE CAREFULLY, it documents each option. Adjust it to your needs.

Execute with the following command, where "personal" is the name of the community where the posts will be migrated to and "links.txt" a simple text file containing a single Reddit url per line. They are comma separated.

$ python antenna2lemmy.py personal,links.txt

The program should start running with a curses interface to report on progress. You can disable it by passing the environment variable DEBUGMODE=1.

The full log output will be saved to migration.log on execution directory

Reminder to be respectful of the other users of your instance, just because the tool runs automated and you are essentially crossposting from Reddit spamming a lot of migrated links might get you banned

#Lemmy + #Kbin have reached over 200,000 users!

#Threadiverse @lemmy

https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

I have created some software that is capable of synchronising posts from Reddit to Lemmy. It's still a little rough around the edges, but it works as a such:

People can request new subreddits to be mirrored on !requests@lemmit.online. A bot (open source) will monitor the threads there, and if it finds a new request for a subreddit, it will make a new community on the Lemmit server, and add it to its monitored list. It will then make periodic checks to see if any new posts (it doesn't copy any comments) have been posted on reddit, and copy those over.

Users can then subscribe to those communities from their own lemmy instance, and from there federation will pick it up. Or at least, that's the theory. At the moment, federation is not working awesomely, and that is where my lack of fediverse knowledge comes in. Maybe it needs more time, or something is not so properly - I don't know.

Furthermore: registrations on this server are closed. The point of this service is not to become a community on its own, but to deliver, ehh, "original" content to all the rest of the Fediverse while it's going through a ramp-up phase. Besides, the instance is running on a pretty small vps, and I rather have this thing manage itself. There is a !about@lemmit.online community for further questions about the project itself though, in case people want to discuss it further.

So ehm... Let me know what you think :)

If posting a link to a YT video, isn't the thumbnail supposed to be shown alongside the post? It does not appear to be working or am I doing something wrong?

Think about it: Lemmy provides you with a ready-made frontend and backend

all you have to do is host your own instance of it. The following could all have been implemented as Lemmy instances, had it existed at the time:

• Reddit (www.reddit.com)
• Quora (www.quora.com)
• Stack Exchange (stackexchange.com)
• 4chan (www.4chan.org)
• Disqus (disqus.com)
• Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com)
• Something Awful (forums.somethingawful.com)
• GameFAQs (www.gamefaqs.com)
• Bodybuilding.com Forum (forum.bodybuilding.com)
• Gaia Online (www.gaiaonline.com)
• IGN Boards (www.ign.com/boards)
• NeoGAF (www.neogaf.com)
• MacRumors Forums (forums.macrumors.com)
• Digital Spy Forums (forums.digitalspy.com)
• WebmasterWorld (www.webmasterworld.com)
• AVForums (www.avforums.com)
• DeviantArt Forum (forum.deviantart.com)
• XDA Developers Forum (forum.xda-developers.com)
• WordPress Support Forums (wordpress.org/support)
• The Student Room (www.thestudentroom.co.uk)

Of course, these all have very different rules and frontends, but those can still be changed.

In addition, members of other instances can visit these forums without having to create new accounts, thanks to everything being federated.

Isn't that cool?

Libreddit does this, and it shows a pointer when you hover over the bar/header where the username and upvote count are, to indicate that you can collapse the comment by clicking.

The longer I use Lemmy the more I run into posting on places where my posts will never reach anyone apart from my own instance. And then there's a growing amount of communities which display normally for me but if I actually open them it shows they were deleted. We desperately need a way to make them send information to all instances which used their information to remove it as it got deleted. Or a signal from an instance to other instances and their communities essentially asking them if they're still federated/existing. Of course not frequent, that'd waste resources. But happening enough not to make people lose time screaming into the abyss. Not to mention the utter waste of server space keeping content which cannot be used... :(

I'm pretty sure some of them show up in my feed despite me blocking them.

i saw a user with the (BOT ACCOUNT) flair.

how do i get that? i wanna be a bot account too...

After getting a LoginResponse from the Lemmy API, it returns an auth JWT token.

I'm trying to figure out how I can get that users person_id or username so I can make a GetPersonDetails request for the currently logged in user.

Any ideas on how to do this?

I am wanting to test things and contribute back to lemmy's codebase, and to do that I want to run an instance

I have had no issue setting up an instance, but I want to make sure the things I test / change are not going to cause issues for the fediverse

For example, if I federate a remote instance and then wipe my DB (while keeping the same URL), will that other instance be able to handle the change?

Is there a best practice for this that I should follow?

I get how to view the community in my instance by searching [!community@other-instance.url](/c/community@other-instance.url), but then I have to find the specific post again.

there's an open issue which i think is talking about this, but i'm wondering what people have come up with for now. seems like a great browser extension opportunity (Lemmy Link only opens the community).

you all need to improve ur meme game

My instance works and I can interact with folks, but it's been live for several days now, and still not listed on https://the-federation.info/, and my local communities don't show up on https://browse.feddit.de/. Am I missing something?

I'm curious where everyone else has found communities to subscribe to on Lemmy.

Regarding https://join-lemmy.org/api/classes/LemmyHttp.html#resolveObject

Thanks in advance!