Hey everyone! Just wanted to create a post on different things going on in the instance

Matrix Space

Programming.dev now has a matrix space at https://matrix.to/#/#p.d:matrix.org . We had a matrix room before but a space is essentially a collection of rooms so we have sections for different communities, a support room, etc. If you manage a community and want a matrix room for it listed feel free to reach out to me

Instance Rules

I've collected together our instance rules and extended it to be a bit more clear. Here are the rules (and they'll be going on the sidebar as well)

• Dangerous content on the instance and federated instances including phishing, spamming, brigading, unmarked nsfw, doxing, etc. is not allowed and subject to be handled by the mods or admins
• Hate speech is not allowed on the instance or in instances federated with it. This includes remarks directed at sex, gender, orientation, disabilities, etc.
• Other content is up to the discretion of the mods of the community its posted in
• If a community has no dedicated mods it will be managed by instance admins until a mod team is found
• If a community mod team has gone inactive and no longer maintains a community new mods may be added
• Any federated communities that have shown they will not enforce these rules while their content shows up on our feeds will have their community removed from our instance
• Instances that continually encourage this type of behavior or are built to only do this type of behavior are subject to be defederated
• Certain content may be hidden from our all feed including politics and bot spam. (Not currently implemented due to lemmy limitations but will be eventually). This means it won't show up in all but you can still view it and subscribe to the communities to have it show in your subscribed feed
• Bots interacting in our communities must follow our Programming.dev bot guidelines (see below)
• If an instance is not being managed (due to owners being gone, etc.) it is subject to be defederated

Things that do not follow these rules will be handled. This currently includes

• Communities in exploding-heads will be removed from our instance
• Rammy.site will be defederated from due to the site owner being MIA

Bot Guidelines

1. Mark Bots as Bots Bot accounts should be marked that they are a bot using the checkbox in the user settings. This includes any automation in an account (if you automate part of your personal account, put what the automation is in your bio so people know)
2. Put contact info The owner of the bot and some way to contact them must be in the bot's bio (unless its an automated personal account, in that case the account itself it the way to contact)
3. Use mentions as prefix If a bot has commands it should use its mention as a prefix. (This will allow different bots to use the same commands without interfering with each other)
4. Dont spam Bots should not spam posts or comments. (If a bot command has been used its fine to do a response but dont drown out non bot posts in the local new sort.) Certain cases are unavoidable such as if you want to get a bot posting weekly threads in different communities at the same time but in those cases please contact me first to get it approved
5. Allow mods to opt in Bots participating in a community should be opt in so communities can choose what bots they want. If you want a bot to be allowed in a community please contact the moderators of that community first. EXCEPTION: If a bot is deemed to be a well behaving bot that brings net good to the instance it can override this rule as long as it has been approved by an admin. This can include things such as a tldr bot, remindme bot, link fixer bot, piped link converter bot, etc. If a bot has overriden rule 5 with this exception community moderators should still be able to opt out of the bot

These guidelines should bring us up to parity with lemmy.world along with allowing a bit more leeway within the instance since there has been some nice bots getting made that I dont want unfairly punished

If you have a bot you want whitelisted for the entire instance for the rule 5 exception feel free to dm me here or on matrix

And that's everything for this month. Progress on some features for the site is still ongoing. My laptop is currently being repaired but once I get it back I'll do a bunch of progress and share some updates here

If you have any suggestions for the rules, bot guidelines, new site features, etc. feel free to throw them down below

toast.ooo has hosted a place event for lemmy for the weekend! You can go to https://canvas.toast.ooo and log in using your lemmy account (a bot will send a code to your dms which you can use to verify yourself on the site)

I've started making a programming.dev logo over on the left. Feel free to help out with structure or making something for your community nearby. Theres already c/rust that made a little drawing. Ive been freehanding the looks but aiming to get 5x5 logos of different communities around the p.d text

Will last for the weekend and pixel cooldown is 30 seconds (with it being able to stack up to 6 pixels to place down at once with the stacked ones having a 1 min 30 sec cooldown)

SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

There should be 2 comments from me in this post, but I don't see them and their responses until i change view to "Chat". I got notifications that I have messages there, and i can see responses to my comments only on my notifications page

I've noticed that for one instance in particular (in my experience), feddit.uk, I am regularly seeing posts not federate properly. The most recent example I have found of this is c/britishproblems

If you compare:
https://programming.dev/c/britishproblems@feddit.uk
with
https://feddit.uk/c/britishproblems

You will see there are two posts on the home instance that have not federated to programming.dev, despite both being a month old.

Is there a technical reason that posts so old would not have federated in all this time?

Edit: I seem to be incorrect. The posts are not missing. The instances just show them in a different order (despite both being sorted by 'Active'). I am an idiot.

I'll leave this up as there may be some interesting discussion on how federation does / does not work.

The site's been down in the morning for the last couple days. Running a new server that gets attention is tough - do the admins for this site need anything from this community? Volunteer time? Money?

So, it used to work just fine. Then jerboa became basically unusable due to some bug. That was a few weeks ago. I saw an update was available, so I thought to give it another try. It's much more stable after the update, and my lemmy.one account works just fine. But when I try to log in with this account on jerboa, I get an incorrect login error. I set the instance to "programming.dev" and I know I used the right credentials because my password manager filled them in, just like it does in the browser.

Any ideas on a cause or fix? It might be a jerboa issue but I don't get why it seems to only impact this instance.

Ive recently been made aware of a language bug existing from building up my remindme bot

The bug was that comments from platforms such as kbin will naturally be set to an undetermined language regardless of what the community language settings are. This makes it so that if people try to reply to that comment, lemmy will break and not let the reply be posted (since its a language that goes against what the community has set)

As a fix to this I have set every community I have access to to be able to handle every single language. (This should be about 90% of the communities, you can check the list in my profile). You shouldnt run into any language invalid errors anymore and should be able to talk to people from kbin now in almost all communities in the instance

You may still run into the bug in other instances though depending on what they have their community language set to

I noticed that every time I visit the site, I have to log in. I remember not having to do this a few days ago. I was assuming a cookie was being set for a timeframe until I explicitly log out. I can't remember if there was a "remember me" button. I'm using Firefox and tried disabling my extensions, but that didn't seem to help.

I am unable to subscribe to RSS feeds for programming.dev from a yarr instance hosted on an AWS EC2 instance (ap-south-1).

This issue seems specific to programming.dev. I can access RSS feeds for other lemmy instances without any issues.

I can access the feeds from browser, but when I try to fetch it on AWS I get a 403 error. Curious if this is done intentionally.

$ wget https://programming.dev/feeds/c/programming.xml?sort=Active
--2023-07-17 18:27:15--  https://programming.dev/feeds/c/programming.xml?sort=Active
Resolving programming.dev (programming.dev)... 172.67.137.159, 104.21.73.21, 2606:4700:3031::ac43:899f, ...
Connecting to programming.dev (programming.dev)|172.67.137.159|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2023-07-17 18:27:15 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

Programming.dev is nice a community and overall i like the content I get when i stay on my local instance.

The moment i am switching to "all" everything becomes extremely left leaning and too politicised for my taste.

Is there a way to block all the communist/anarchist/anti-capitalist stuff, or this is Lemmy in general?

Noticed you can save the programming.dev site as an app on iOS (add to Home Screen). When you do this though, there doesn’t seem to be a “back” button or anything similar. So when you navigate to read post comments, you can’t get back to the list of threads.

Thought maybe a swipe left would work, but no luck.

No biggie, just something to consider in the site design.

Even 1080p is failing. Got 480p to upload. Lemmy.world has no problem uploading full size images from iphone.

I wanted to start a discussion about the use of AI-generated solutions on Programming.dev. Personally, I've found that AI-powered tools have been incredibly helpful in solving programming questions. I won't name any specific commercial software, but I use one that combines GPT-4 and web search to get more factual information. I write some answers I think I might revisit to the ShareGPT community, but I would prefer posting programming solutions to this instance. However, I'm not sure if AI-generated solutions are welcomed on programming.dev. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. If AI-generated responses are accepted, how should we format the answers, should we just copy paste without quoting, should we quote the model, just mention that it's AI-generated,...?

took a gander around and didn't see anything at first glance

I'm not sure how much activity there would be, but it'd be neat to have imo

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.

The reason I don't want to simply go ahead and create one is that there already are a lot of language-specific communities that have a lot of similarities, leading me to suspect that they're under a common management umbrella, and I think it would be best if the F# community were covered by this as well.

I miss this function from reddit. I used it often to find if a post has already been submitted. Also, it was useful to see what else was posted from this domain. I hope some day this will come to Lemmy.

Examples:

1. https://www.reddit.com/domain/hillelwayne.com/
2. https://www.reddit.com/domain/hillelwayne.com/top/?sort=top&t=all

Hey all, I created my account but didn't enter my email address in the account creation field (it's marked optional). When I try to update my email address on the account settings page it's returning back a 504 timout. Is this a known issue? Is there some workaround I can do?