Lemmy.ca is now running on 0.18.3!

Sorry about the downtime there, the kernel decided to panic on the initial docker upgrade, then it took a few minutes for the new DB updates to happen after the upgrade.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/2012318

Links:

• Firefox
• Chrome
• Edge - v1.2.3 is still being approved, you can grab the release from Github if you are eager
• Opera: Still under review, please download from Chrome webstore or Github release.

For questions / support: !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca

What's new?

(read on the wiki)

• You can now customize the instance list to match which instances you actually use. This should be helpful for those that have accounts on different instances.
• Added a settings page so that you can turn off features that you don't want active
• Added buttons for helpful tools that let you explore Lemmy/Kbin communities (with lemmyverse.net), and search across Lemmy sites (with search-lemmy.com).
• Added a sidebar for those that prefer it (works on Firefox, Chrome & Opera; Edge doesn't have sidebars yet but the code is there)
• Fix for issues with the search trigger on the community not found page (thank-you to whqwert!)
• Various bugfixes, small theme changes, and improved wording

What's coming up?

(read on the wiki)

• Working with the amazing /u/howdy@thesimplecorner.org to bring over features from the LemmyTools Userscript^1^
• Integrating lemmyverse.net and search-lemmy.com so you can do everything right on your community page^2^
• Adding icons and simplifying the design, as the UI is getting wordy
• Adding support for alternative home instances (ex. Alexandrite - Issue 14)
• Ability to have multiple 'home instances', so you can open it in any without having to change your home instance each time.
• Finishing the setup so that people can contribute translations / other languages to the extension.
• Getting the extension on Opera (no immediate plans, but this would be good to have)

More details:

1. /u/howdy@thesimplecorner.org has created a really useful userscript that you can find here: https://thesimplecorner.org/c/lemmytools. We're going to be working together to bring those features into Instance Assistant, so that you can have all the features in one place.

2. Right now there are buttons to explore Lemmy/Kbin communities (with lemmyverse.net), and search across Lemmy sites (with search-lemmy.com). Both of these take you to the respective webpages. Instead, it might be nicer to have a lightweight version right on the Lemmy/Kbin community page (or in the extension popup/sidebar). This should be possible using their APIs/data access, and I have a little working proof of concept already (see GitHub)

I'm new, what is this?

Instance Assistant is a browser extension that started out as a way to quickly jump from one community to the version on your home instance, so that you could subscribe/participate immediately. Since then, a few other features have been implemented:

Features

• Redirect to your home instance:
  • Buttons will be added to the sidebar of any Lemmy or Kbin community you visit, which will let you open the same community on your home instance.
• Open links in home instance:
  • Right click context menu will allow you to open any links in your home instance
• Improved Error Pages:
  • 'Community not found' pages now have better information, a button to trigger a fetch, a button to open a community in the source instance, and more.
• Customizable popup & sidebar menus:
  • Customizable list of instances to let you quickly switch home instances. This is great for if you have multiple accounts on different instances.
  • There are also buttons for helpful tools that let you search for communities (with lemmyverse.net), and search across Lemmy sites (with search-lemmy.com).
• Settings:
  • You can change the default behaviour of the extension, customize the popup & sidebar menus, and turn off features you don't want to use.

Sorry about that! Service ran out of memory for some reason and I took some time to investigate.

Edit: Going to take a second hit, rebooting again to roll back a kernel upgrade that was applied yesterday.

Edit2: It's fixed properly now.

I keep hearing upvote and downvotes doesn't matter on fediverse. How does the "Top of the day" work? Is it just comments on a post? Thanks for clarifying.

Hello everyone!

I've setup two more public interfaces that you can use to browse lemmy.ca:

• https://old.lemmy.ca/ - This runs mlmym to give you an experience closer to that site most of us fled from

• https://voyager.lemmy.ca/ - This runs voyager for a more iOS mobile style interface

Enjoy!

If I want to link to a community X on a Lemmy instance Y.zzz, I know I should use the link /c/X@Y.zzz, which will redirect to the copy of the instance on the server where the user has the account.

What is the analogous way to link to a post? For example this post has address lemmy.ca/post/1866360 but what link should I give to users on another instance, so that they can see the post in their instance?

Hello everyone!

We'll be having a brief maintenance window on Saturday at 11:30AM Pacific Time, should be under 30 minutes.

I'll be applying OS updates, cranking up the kernel nofile limits and probably some memory / swappiness tweaks.

This is a little late, but I figure that it's better late than never!

For full transparency, I'm just going to give a high level overview of the financial situation of lemmy.ca through June 2023, when I started to accept donations.

Total Expenses: $30.00

This includes all hosting fees, including backups, etc.

Total Contributions: $1,503.03

• $1,184.84 through LiberaPay
• $318.19 through OpenCollective

All contribution amounts are not including payment processor and/or OpenCollective fees.

Remaining Balance: $1,473.03

I plan on transferring the remaining balance to the new admin team, whenever they are ready to accept it.

Thank you to all that have contributed so far, I couldn't have gotten the instance to where it is now without your generosity. I'm very excited to see what comes next and look forward to watching the instance grow more!

Hi, I'm sorting by hot and still seeing posts from yesterday. Whereas with my lemmy.ml account I see up to date posts. Is anyone else experiencing problems? I've already tried logging out and back in.

Hi all, Is there a way for me to block a particular domain no matter in which community it finds itself in? There are some news outlets that I just don't want to be polluted by.

Thanks!

Now it's a matter of sustaining and slow growth. Hopefully. Best thing you can do to see Lemmy succeed is participate: comment, post, doomscroll All+Top Hou ;)

It'll take a while for some of the smaller communities to get critical mass. And that's okay, probably. Critical mass is here for the larger topics already. I'll do my best to help :)

We're hitting a bug that is causing the database to be locked when some users try to delete their accounts.

I've temporarily disabled account deletion until this is resolved.

Hi All!

I've created a status page for lemmy.ca available at https://status.lemmy.ca/

The uptime bar and response times graph at the top are automatically populated, with the details below manually added.

I'll try to keep this up to date with smaller changes that might not be worthy of a post to this community.

How do I go about it without damaging the server, it's reputation in the fediverse, and just generally keeping the admins happy.

Example: In c/printSF I want to write a bot that autodetects books titles, and comes up with links to those books on booknaut or similar (confined to one comment per post). But that bot will need to poll c/printSF periodically, and it'll need to post under its own bot username.

Do I register the username just like I did mine, and specify that it's for a utility bot in a community I moderate?

Can I play in c/test without it flooding the local frontpage?

Are there any general guidelines or criteria, other than obviously no spamming?

Would it be useful if c/moderators or something similar existed so we can exchange ideas and best practices and such without polluting main's SNR?

Cheers

Hi Everyone!

Not that there's anything wrong with the maple leaf, but I feel like we could use a better logo that is a little more lemmy themed.

Any of the more artisticly inclined folks like to help us out with a new logo?

Are we going to be getting that going again?

This Cthulu looking tree in Edwards park around Lawrence ave.

I'm referring to the background colour of the comments. At first I thought it was the difference between top level comments and replies, but that's not it.

If I created a community, and later determine there is a better/more active community on the 'verse, is there a way to close the community (or better yet redirect it to the community I'd rather folks join if they are interested in the subject matter)?

I suspect this is documented somewhere but neither a search on lemmy.ca nor a DDG inquiry found anything immediatly recognizable.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/1418762

I've made a number of improvements since the last time I was posting about my extension. The update is now available on both Firefox and Chrome web stores.

For questions / support: !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca

TLDR: See the respective download pages on Firefox & Chrome. The screenshots and features list are mostly self-explanatory.

Note on versions:

• Firefox has a more recent 1.2.1 version, because my build script missed some files while uploading v1.2.0. It doesn't look like Chrome had this issue.
• I'm uploading v1.2.2 to both stores today, which will bring the two missing features to Chrome as well. After 1.2.2, all browsers should have the same features. See below for details.

So how is this different from other similar extensions?

You may have noticed the extension's name changed to be more generic (and include Kbin 🥳). I'm trying to make this a more well-rounded extension, and that means I've incorporated some features from the other extensions, in my own way.

Lemmy Links, Kbin Links, and the other forks:

This is a great extension that replaces links on your page with versions that go to your home instance. However, in order for this to work, it needs to recursively check every element on your page whenever DOM content (the stuff the browser is reading) changes. This is somewhat resource intensive, and while testing I ran into lag and freezing issues. As such, I decided to not include this functionality in the same way.

Instead, I've added a right click context menu that does the same thing. This way the user can pick which links they want the extension to convert, and it's a lot more efficient resource wise. While it's an extra click, I felt this was a reasonable compromise. However, I'm open to feedback!

NOTE: The context menu is available on Firefox, and it will be available in Chrome in about a week, depending on when they approve my update.

Lemmy Home Instance Helper

This is another extension which checks if you are logged in to an instance, and it creates a button to the search page if you are not. As my extension creates a button on any foreign instance, the search page is only helpful when a community hasn't been loaded into your home instance yet (ex. because you're the first one to try accessing it).

To deal with this, my extension modifies the "Community not found" pages with more instructions, as well as buttons to trigger the fetch process or to open the community elsewhere. See this screenshot for an example. Again, open to feedback!

As always, I'd love to collaborate with other people while building this. I'm still cleaning up my code, but feel free to look at the GitHub. If this extension gets popular, I will definitely need help for translations and for things like getting the extension on Safari (I don't have a recent Apple device to sign the extension with).

Note on permissions:

• The current versions request "Access to all sites". This is because the extension needs access to any page that contains "/c/", "/m/", or "/post/" in order to create the sidebar buttons. While the extension only looks for those pages, it will show up as "Access to all sites" when installing. Once I have a proper welcome message and settings page, I plan on making this permission optional so you can just use the popup menu if you would like.

Summary of Recent Changes:

• Added support for Kbin
• Fixed issue where button wouldn't load when navigating to a community within Lemmy (available on Firefox, should be on Chrome in a week).
• (NEW) Right-click context menu on Lemmy/Kbin community links to let you open them directly. You can test them out here: https://lemmy.ca/post/1282303 (available on Firefox, should be on Chrome in a week)
• (NEW) Information and buttons added to "Community Not Found" error pages to let you fetch the community or open it elsewhere.
• Updates to sidebar button to state the current selected instance and provide more detailed instructions as a dropdownList
• Refactored the code to remove more unnecessary permissions.
• Another pile of bugfixes, UI improvements, and better wording for instructions.

Future Plans:

• This is complete and will be in v1.2.2. ~~Bringing over the new changes to Google Chrome. Since chrome requires Manifest 3, I still need to iron out some issues with the service workers. The missing features are all related to the background processes that are running on the Firefox version~~
• Pushing to other browsers: Microsoft Edge & Opera are still reviewing v1.2.0. Unfortunately, I don't have any immediate plans for Safari, as I don't have a device that can sign the extension. I am looking into getting help for that.
• Setting up a proper Welcome page, Settings page, and Options menu to allow users to turn off features that they don't like. This will also let me make "access to all sites" optional.
• Finishing the translations' setup so that people can contribute other languages to the extension.
• Adding an option to save your own instances to the popup, for those that have multiple home instances.

I mostly follow communities I'm subscribed to. Ideally I'd like to see when a new post is published, and also when new comments appear in already published posts.

The first correspond to "New" sorting; the second to "New comments". But at present it seems that the two cannot be combined. "Active" and "Hot" do not quite achieve this.

Is there any sort setting which would satisfy my criteria? Or will one available in the future?

Please let me know if this isn't the right community for this question – apologies in case!

@bot@lemmit.online has been subject to multiple reports from our users over the last while.

We would like the users' input on how to deal with it. It is the opinion of the administrators that @bot@lemmit.online, and @lemmit.online doesn't add anything positive and constitutes spam. We especially want to make sure we get feedback as we are more likely to be sensitive to bots like this and other forms of spam compared to most users as we'll often scroll through "All" sorted by new.

Here are the options.

• Defederate from Lemmit.Online
• Ban @bot@lemmit.online from lemmy.ca
• leave it up to users to block @bot@lemmit.online

Please vote by up voting on one of the comments below. Downvotes will be ignored. Additional comments and discussion is more than welcome. Results of this discussion will provide us guidance on how to deal with other bots in the future as well.

If you're not a lemmy.ca registered user, please refrain from voting but feel free to comment with your opinion.

Is this just me or is anyone else having issues where suddenly when clicking on a community or post they are logged out? These seems new as of the 0.18.2 update.

Edit: I found this post where various users on lemmy.world are having what sounds like the same issue.

I looked at my settings and couldn't find anything relevant. I previously had 100 posts displayed per page set up on old reddit, and this is the only thing I'm finding ever-so-slightly annoying about lemmy. Is this a thing that I've just not been able to find? Or something the instance might be able to implement in the future? I wish I knew enough about scripting, markup and programming languages to actually contribute myself here, the lemmy.ca admins have a ton of work on their plate (and are doing a FANTASTIC job, thank you for your efforts!!) but my knowledge is veeery basic in that regard.