tldr: dmv.social is closing on April 14th. Going forward, the instance will be read-only until the termination date. I apologize for the short notice, but I am setting this read-only to prevent abuse.

I set up a Matrix space for the heck of it in case I decide to open things up again: https://matrix.to/#/#dmvsocial:matrix.org

What do I do?

If you are a dmv.social user, consider signing up for another instance. A few that I like include:

• https://lemmy.world
• https://beehaw.org
• https://literature.cafe
• https://sh.itjust.works
• https://lemmy.zip

If you go to your Profile on the website, there should be a link to export your subscription list. You may import this list to other instances. Do note that some instances aren't federated with everyone, and instances have varying SFW/NSFW policies.

If you wish to start a community for anywhere in the DMV area: I will create a post on the big communities here to help spread the word. Send a private message to @dmvsocial@dmv.social by March 23. I will compile a big post on all of the major communities here after March 23 linking to alternative communities.

If you are a server host where dmv.social communities have federated to: I have locked all posts and communities. You should not have to worry about spam. Feel free to delete the communities after April 14th.

Thank You.

I've received about a half dozen unsolicited "thank you" DMs over the last few months. Genuinely, the unsolicited "thank you"s have been uplifting.

To the few users on this instance: thank you for making this instance your home on the Threadiverse the past several months. I've received a few private messages thanking me for running this and providing a SFW-gateway to the Threadiverse, so I hope I reasonably delivered up until this point.

To everyone else: Thanks for the upvotes, the downvotes, the subscribes, occasional comments, and lurking :)

Will you be back?

Maybe. If this does return, I want to give it 6-12 months. If you're interested about this returning, bookmark https://dmv.social and check back in 6 months. In the mean time, I'll post an update to the Matrix space: https://matrix.to/#/#dmvsocial:matrix.org

I still want to provide a federated social network for this area, I'm just not really confident now is the right time.

OK, cut the b-s: Why?

I want to make a few things abundantly clear so there's no unnecessary speculation:

1. This was not a financial decision. The server hosting costs were $55/mo, which were extremely easy to manage.

2. This was not done because dmv.social is still on the smaller/still-growing side. I've spent years building communities elsewhere, anyone would be unreasonable to expect something to take off in less than a year.

3. I'm not playing the blame-game and putting this on the Lemmy devs. They seem like busy folks and I appreciate that releases have been pretty damn seamless from a server-administration side.

4. This was done entirely because of my concerns about being a server host on the Fediverse. 99.9999% of Fediverse folks are wonderful people. The remaining 0.0001% are urinating in the pool, so to speak.

I've been weighing this decision for the last 2-3 weeks. I wanted to build a mod bot to get ahead of the malicious images problem other hosts had since I didn't want that crap coming here. Common sense eventually kicked in, and I realized that the risk of liability just isn't something I want to deal with.

Last year, a few other instances had malicious images posted. The admins and mods of the communities were quick to remove it and explain what was going on, but that was a huge wake-up call that "wow... this is... dangerous."

A few months later, this seemed to happen again.

Now fast forward to several days ago, there was the incident on Mastodon where someone tried to shut down Content Nation by sending CSAM their way.. This event was pretty much the final straw with my confidence level in the Fediverse and the risk of images.

Quite frankly, this is disturbing and I just don't want to deal with the possibility of this crap.

This behavior on the Fediverse is extremely problematic and I can't be the only server host where this isn't sitting right.

Anyways, I can ramble on more but I've typed enough.

Hey folks!

For those on Matrix wanting somewhere else to lurk or for dmv.social support, a Matrix space is now available!

https://matrix.to/#/#dmvsocial:matrix.org

The space is currently hosted on matrix.org though this may change in the future.

The Discord server will still remain available for support-only purposes.

Hi folks!

It sounds like there's a few issues with Lemmy that've been reported the last few days. When 0.19.1 is available, I'll upgrade as soon as I can.

Some issues to note:

Federation may be spotty to other instances in some cases: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4288

Fetching an unseen community won't get the 10 most recent posts anymore: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4283

Increased server load (the instance has felt a little slower than usual): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4282

I'm deploying a tweak for the last one momentarily.

dmv.social may be unavailable from 4pm ET to around 6pm ET, tomorrow, Saturday, December 16th for a Lemmy upgrade.

This is to install Lemmy 0.19.0 ~~and migrate a database for Pictrs, the image hosting server.~~

POTENTIAL IMPACT: This WILL log you out of your sessions across Lemmy and your apps. If you lost your password for whatever reason, the sidebar has contact methods for support.

I waiting until tomorrow for other instances to migrate first in case there are any quirks ;)

This will bring a lot of really neat features to Lemmy:

1. Improved Post Ranking - The new "Scaled" sort should prioritize smaller communities around Lemmy. Small communities, like a lot of the ones here, might start getting a little more visibility :)

2. Instance Blocks for Users - If a particular instance bothers you, it's now possible to block from your user account. (Note, this doesn't change the federation policy of this server)

3. Remote Follow - You can now browse other Lemmy instances to find communities then get bounced back to dmv.social to actually follow, versus the currently annoying way of searching and refreshing several times.

4. Improved speed on page pagination, so things should feel snappier.

5. User data export/import - If you decide to switch instances elsewhere, you can now download a copy of your subscriptions and blocklists and import it to another server so you don't have to do much work to re-create an account.

Full Lemmy 0.19.0 release notes

Lastly, this instance doesn't ask for donations and doesn't plan to. If you're itching to give support in some way, consider a donation to the Lemmy devs: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

dmv.social runs Lemmy, a forum software that allows you to access communities regardless of the server you're on (in most cases).

While dmv.social focuses on hosting communities pertinent to DC, MD, and VA, many other Lemmy servers exist that host content that span a wide range of hobbies and interests. Your dmv.social account lets you access these communities.

The instructions below will walk you through a few ways to find and join communities.

Lemmy is still a bit rough around the edges, so this process may be a little difficult. If you need help, reach out for support via the methods in the sidebar.

Local Communities

dmv.social hosts a number of communities for various regions around the DC-MD-VA area, as well as local interests.

1. Click the Communities link
2. Click the "Local" tab
3. Browse around and click "Subscribe" for anything that interests you.

Communities Other dmv.social Users Use

Other users on dmv.social have already subscribed to some communities on other Lemmy instances. These can provide a good starting point to finding something you're interested in.

1. Click the Communities link
2. Click the "All" tab
3. Browse around and click "Subscribe" for anything that interests you.

Please note, communities with 0 subscribers may only have a few posts or very old posts. This is expected. dmv.social only downloads posts from communities with at least 1 subscriber.

Communities similar to Subreddits

sub.rehab contains a list of communities that may have content similar to various subreddits.

1. Let's set our home instance to dmv.social by going to the sub.rehab Settings
2. Set "Home Instance" to "Enabled"
3. Click the Instance dropdown and select custom
4. In the Custom Instance text box, type dmv.social/c/
5. Now search for communities. Make sure you only select "lemmy" and "kbin" for the service type.
6. Click any community to load it on dmv.social. If an error comes up, refresh the page since it may take a few seconds to download posts in the background.
7. Click Subscribe on the right side.

Communities on other Lemmy Servers (the easy way!)

A few Lemmy search engines exist that list communities across all Lemmy instances. Below will contain instructions to use a few services we like.

lemmyverse.net

lemmyverse.net shows a lot of communities with a basic search and count of subscribers/posts.

1. Go to lemmyverse.net communities
2. Click the "Home" icon on the top right
3. Click "Select a Home Instance" and type dmv.social
4. Search for communities using the bar on the top left.
5. Click any community to load it on dmv.social. If an error comes up, refresh the page since it may take a few seconds to download posts in the background.
6. Click Subscribe on the right side.

Communities on other Lemmy Servers (for advanced users!)

Right now the flow to find and join communities hosted elsewhere is very, very rough. Please consider using a method above. This process is for if you already know of another Lemmy instance and want to join a community hosted elsewhere.

Some popular servers include:

• lemmy.world
• beehaw.org
• lemm.ee

First, let's walk you through finding a community:

1. Go to a Lemmy instance
2. Click on the Communities link at the top of the page
3. Click the "Local" tab
4. Search using the search box for words about the topic you're interested in.
5. Click the community name to view it.

Now let's walk you through joining:

1. On the sidebar of the community, look for text saying You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance:
2. Copy the "!community@server.org" to your clipboard
3. Come back to dmv.social, click the "Search" button at the top right.
4. Paste the "!community@server.org" into the "Search..." box
5. Click Search, wait a few seconds. If nothing comes up, click Search a few times, it may take a few moments to download content from the community.
6. Click the community's name, you should see posts
7. Click "Subscribe".

Sorry folks!

Earlier this morning dmv.social was inaccessible due to an expired SSL certificate. During the migration last month I misconfigured the certificate renewal process. The issue is now resolved.

Hey folks!

As suggested in a request thread, !dmvbeer@dmv.social has been created to talk about beers and breweries around DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

I'll be cross-posting this to the !washington_dc@dmv.social, !maryland@dmv.social, !virginia@dmv.social communities as well to promote it.

dmv.social will be down at 10pm ET for approximately 1 hour for maintenance.

Hey folks!

dmv.social will be going down on Friday, October 6th from 10:00pm ET to 12:00am for a migration to a dedicated server.

It's starting to make more sense to move the server off of a VPS and onto to an inexpensive dedicated server as the storage needs increase. As a bonus, the instance gets more RAM and CPU, though I doubt this will have much of an impact given the small instance size.

Hi folks,

Last night there was a Lemmy security issue (see: https://lemmy.ml/post/1901079) regarding an XSS exploit affecting custom emoji.

Last night as a precaution dmv.social was taken offline.

To the best of our knowledge it does not appear that this instance was affected as we do not use custom emoji, which sounds like the mechanism this exploit needed.

Comments federated from other instances containing text that looked similar to the XSS exploit were found, however. To my understanding, this alone should not trigger the XSS attack but as a safety precaution this content was removed from the database manually and will continue to be automatically checked and removed every few minutes.

As another safety precaution, all user sessions have been invalidated. You will need to log in again.

An audit of community and instance settings was performed and it appears nothing has been modified.

Update: Yesterday a RC version of Lemmy-UI was installed to mitigate this issue. We've now upgraded to the official 0.18.2 release of Lemmy-UI.

dmv.social wants to be an environment of thoughtful, kind, and neighborly discussion. Please participate in a manner that doesn't promote hatred such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism. Assume others are participating in good faith. Please keep content on dmv.social "generally safe for work".

Have an issue or concern? Reach out to @dmvsocial@dmv.social to let us know.

Do note, the guidelines below cannot fully enumerate all behavior we wish to promote and discourage and will be amended as needed.

Federated Communities

This section applies only to those with accounts hosted on dmv.social. Accounts hosted on other Lemmy instances may ignore this section.

Users with accounts on dmv.social are welcome to join other communities in the fediverse provided the community is focused on content that is:

• Considered generally safe-for-work; not pornographic or sexually explicit.
• Not hateful in nature
• Legal in the DC/MD/VA area and doesn't promote illegal activity across states

Communities that go against the above criteria will be removed. If you intend to join communities for the above, we kindly ask that you consider a more lenient Lemmy/Kbin instance to host your account and follow dmv.social communities from there.

When engaging with communities hosted on other instances, please make an effort to review and abide by the community rules. Actions of users on this instance may be seen as representative of everyone on here.

General Content

What to Submit

Anything anyone in the area would take interest in knowing or learning. This includes news, information about what's happening, history, interesting things you've stumbled across, ramblings. The !chat@dmv.social community is available for general chat.

Prohibited

• Inciting harm against an individual or group by promoting violence, harassment, or revenge is prohibited.

• Please do not solicit donations or money. Posts for awareness of non-profit organizations may be posted in a very limited capacity if you actively participate and post seldomly.

• Refrain from submitting content that could reasonably be deemed illegal. In cases where state law and federal law conflict, abstract discussion is permitted but shouldn't give exact instructions on how to violate the law.

• Please do not submit content that could reasonably be deemed pornographic or sexually explicit.

Posts

• Please refrain from stylizing post titles to make them stand out among other posts such as by posting in uppercase, adding symbols, and punctuation

• Try to submit a generally reputable or original source.

• Please limit self-promotion. Community members with an established history of substantiative contributions to content may seldomly contribute self-promotional posts. Members with new accounts or those with little activity should refrain.

• Please use the original title when posting links. Lemmy will suggest a title from a given URL.

Comments

• Be kind. Don't be snarky. Assume good intent.

• Focus on the content of the argument instead of name-calling.

• Avoid generic tangents and perfunctory remarks. Demonstrate or explain why you hold your point of view for us to explore and learn.

• Controversial topics should be met with nuance and well-intended curious discussion. Please don't try to flame, incite, bait, or provoke other commenters. When possible, cite reputable sources and avoid broad generalizations.

• Please don't use this instance or it's communities for political or ideological battle.

washington_dc !washington_dc@dmv.social

maryland !maryland@dmv.social

virginia !virginia@dmv.social

nova !nova@dmv.social