So, as any self-respecting datahoarder and selfhoster, I have my server rack populated with a few machines, churning along as they tend to my hobby-related projects. Now that I’ve started using Lemmy I’m toying with the idea of selfhosting an instance, as I have both the hardware, bandwidth, and skillset for it....
Folks should not use lemmony to bootstrap their subscription count. It’s not that hard to hit lemmyverse.net and just manually sub a bunch of stuff you’re actually interested in, or to visit a big instance and browse their all feed unauthenticated.
But if you really want to automate community bootstrapping, lemmony is the worst of the scripts that doit because it defaults to subscribing to EVERYTHING, including all the porn, piracy, and hate communities on the most absent-admin’ed under-modded instances in the lemmyverse. Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you. Not to mention being a bad fediverse citizen and creating massive amounts of federation load on the instances forwarding you posts and comments from 20k communities that you don’t read.
These two subscription bootstrapping scripts limit you to top subs by default… So you’re more likely to be in well-modded territory and just the number of subs is smaller you you can review them and back out of anything sketchy. Subscriber-bot’s docs do a good job of explaining the risks and problems of mass-subscription so you know what you’re getting into.
Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you.
To be frank, this liability risk exists even in well-moderated communities as it only takes one rogue poster/commenter to “contaminate” your own instance…
Liability is not binary. There is a qualitative change in risk as you transition from “I subscribed to 100 actively moderated communities that I read and am familiar with” toward “I subscribed to everything there is including the worst of the worst and I didn’t realize I was doing so and don’t look at the results”.
Also, moderation activities federate. So even if a rogue poster does “contaminate” the actively moderated communities on a well-admin’ed instance… when those mods and admins delete the offending material they’ll automatically cleanup your instance as well. As a result, it’s the creepy crawly communities that don’t clean up or don’t want to clean up that generate the lion’s share of risk.
Is it 100% safe to sub to well-moderated communities, no. You have to know your local laws and protect yourself. Do you do yourself favors by running lemmony? Also no. These two statements can be simultaneously true.
Hi, My normal account was recently banned from c/memes and possibly all of lemmy.ml, but I wasn’t sure why. I was wondering if there was a mod I could ask, so I could learn from my mistake, mea culpa, and possibly beg for forgiveness.
Thank you so much. l’m glad to know that I probably wasn’t booted from the entire instance. And while ignorance of community rules isn’t an excuse, I hope they see I was posting in good faith.
Personnaly I like some gore videos or r/figthporn on reddit but it seems like this hasn’t transferred. So just wandering if I’m kinda on my own here which doesnt matter either I don’t miss it that much
Right now there are people who sign up with an instance like lemmy.world, who then create loads of communities, because they don’t fully understand the nature of things and can’t quite believe that the URLs for lots of different IPs are available. For Reddit, if you snagged the likes of r/starwars early on, that gave you some power. For Lemmy, it’s meaningless: if you just want to moderate 100 communities, and not spend time actually building a Community up, then you’ll just be overtaken by the Community at one of the many other instances.
Exactly this. On Reddit, you would end up with stuff like r/TrueStarWars and such as a result of bad mods moderating badly — but those communities would have a harder time taking off due to the name being less searchable, and individuals needing to be "in the know" about why one sub has "true" out the front.
With everyone being able to take the same community name, just across different instances, there's a potential for a better, more competitive process to take place instead. It won't be perfect — @starwars is going to be in a much more immediately advantaged position than, say, @starwars — but in theory the playing field is closer to being level.
Nah, once it become possible to group communities from multiple instances into one (aka multi-reddit on reddit - needs another name on the fediverse), power mods will have no power. Someone could just create an instance with the same community name and it could end up in the community group.
Different lemmy and kbin instances have various arts & culture communities (some are reasonably active, some aren't). You can use community/magazine search tools to find ones to your liking.
Eg to search for theatre related communities you could use:
Note that due to the way the fediverse works, these search aggregators aren't necessarily comprehensive. So it's worth spreading your search over several tools.
With distributed hash tables it is manageable. You do something like “store three copies on three peers” and as long as one of them is online the post is accessible. This is actually better than the way lemmy does it now. In principle each lemmy server stores the posts from its communities, and a copy of each post from communities its users are subscribed to. But since all instances are federated so well, in practice each of the 1000 lemmy instances stores a copy of almost every post ever made. That’s like 100GB x1000. With a DHT, the amount of space used on each user’s device is on average the amount of posts one user makes x3, no more.
I’ve been on lemmy.ml for a while but have not figured out how to join other instances of lemmy (like subreddits?). The couple of other groups ask for a login but my current login doesn’t work. I don’t know how to proceed or where to look for a guide. Thanks for any assistance.
You need to join through your home instance (lemmy.ml) like going to lemmy.ml/c/foodporn@lemmy.world if someone from your instance has subscribed to the community or go to lemmy.ml and search for !foodporn (you might have to wait a bit)
to subscribe to communities in other instances, search for them, go to community, look in the sidebar and hit subscribe. For example to subscribe to !nostupidquestions click that link, look in the sidebar, hit the subscribe button.
If you go to lemmy.ml/communities then click All you will see communities from all federated instances. Communities from other instances will have @<instance> displayed. If you don’t see one in specific you can search for !<community>@<instance> (you may have to wait a minute and search a second time if it’s the first time anyone has searched for that community).
Hi guys, I’m on lemmy since the reddit api announcement and am subscribed to tens of communities. When I’m setting my feed to watch topics only from Subscribed communities (hot/active), I see a lot of topics from the same communities, like 10 topics in a row from 1 community then 3 from a different one and again from the...
Us early adopters have some advantage in that we have grown with the communities. You’re now looking at a much larger list than we did.
I would search for stuff you’re interested in and subscribe to them. Then maybe look at the mods and see what else they have posted and commented on. These will likely be people that are engaged well on lemmy and may have similar interests as you. Maybe subscribe to places they are engaging with.
After you have a solid base of 20-40 communities, use the All feed and sort by newest posts to try and find stuff you may be interested in and are active. That will show stuff from lots of other instances.
I’m working on an activism campaign kicking off next week opposing some bad internet bills in the US – here’s the kbin magazine I just set up, and I might set up a Lemmy community as well if that makes sense. Once things get going, we’ll be sharing links including information and actions people can take....
Another solution if you don’t want to turn them off completely is either to:
Join an instance that has lemmynsfw and its alternatives blocked.
Or
Block them yourself, I don’t know how to do this on browser but if you use this site on mobile, the app “connect for lemmee” has an option to block all comments and posts from people of any instance you choose, which is a lot more effective than blocking communities separately.
I used to check the front page at least once every day, and occassionally check specific subreddits. Now I don’t look at reddit unless theres some drama, like mods getting purged, then I’d go there and enjoy the drama. Occasionally there will be questions that only reddit has the answer to so I have to reluctantly use it. I...
I’m currently in the process of replacing Reddit with Lemmy. I’m keeping Reddit for the sole purpose of being linked there from Google Results and until I get used to Lemmy, how it works, and find communities that are relevant to me.
I do find Lemmy interesting in how , despite being in an instance, you can still see posts from other instances and such. I am still getting used to it, so will keep Reddit around until I am completely accustomed to it.
Sure. I was looking for a local instance that would be less usdefaultism, understanding that I would probably subscribe to general communities. 🤣😂
I couldn’t find anything on join-lemmy that was helpful but happened on a comment by sometime trying me to go to the fediverse site for helpful stuff. I found an instance lemmy.podycust.co.uk and tried to join that. I recall that it went reasonably and I entered my email address.
Shortly after I found I couldn’t log on. The page just gave the spinning-wait indicators. That instance was disappeared from join-lemmy and I had to go through the same process for another instance.
lemmy.tedomum.net was selected and I joined that. Shortly after that was declared verboten and removed from join-lemmy. I’m not picking these at random and with low user counts. I am directed.
Third time lucky. I found another one that’s accepting logon for three days in a row.
I do accept that Lemmy is Alpha and things change but the Devs are systematically removing email addresses and other sources of help from the join-Lemmy . Unironically they are stating that the first point of help is a sub on lemmy which is no fcuking use if you can’t log on and well used stable instances are being removed from the join-Lemmy listing because they are well used. Just look at the difflog on GitHub. People are trying to join these instances because they are going through the same pain that I am.
There’s no real world WhatsApp or Telegram etc group published for normal people. Most people don’t know matrix exists. I don’t like WhatsApp or Telegram but that’s the popular choice for groups. Asking for a published popular group resulted in me being told that we don’t have time to help people full stop. I’m not suggesting that the Devs are on a published group for a moment, but that we give a place for users to help themselves.
Meanwhile a whale is backing Nostr. And the apps work.
I reiterate that I understand Lemmy is Alpha but going out of your way to piss off the users and ‘not assisting’ any self help is like inviting Lennart Pottering to tea.
MapReduce is term pertaining to a software data retrieval architecture/process (also known as divide-and-conquer). The simple version is that instead of asking one super big database that knows “everything” you ask multiple smaller databases the same question i.e. “what all posts do you have from bob@domain.com?” (this is “mapping” a query to mutliple sources) and each database returns 0 or more results, then the query interface joins the results together (“reduce”) to a single response. This is common in “big data” because you can more efficiently optimize the query by parallelizing it across many machines/workers/nodes. There are additional optimizations that can be implemented such as caching common queries or data-sharding (items a-f on node 1, items g - k on node 2…).
I don’t think Nostr protocol is immune to the development of big centralized popular instances. Especially if something like Threads integrates and becomes the “default” client with millions of users over night. Users, in general, will always gravitate towards content and community. But, I think Nostr has a slight edge over ActivityPub in handling that problem by the user having no direct dependence on any one particular host.
I’ll have to read more into the Nostr protocol specifically as it pertains to privacy, tracking and content injection (ads).
I’m by no means an authority on ActivityPub nor Nostr, I apologize if that may have been surmised. I too am just chatting.
You wouldn’t even need to host your own instance, really. You could create a community and check the option that only mods can post. But you can’t follow people on Lemmy.
Some people might find the answer to be obvious (yes) but I’ve rarely found it so. In fact, this is a question I often find in the linux community (regarding linux going mainstream, not lemmy) and people are pretty split upon it....
The great thing about Lemmy is that there’s no admin, no one site, no single set of rules everyone has to obey. So Lemmy becoming mainstream doesnt necessarily mean everyone tolerating a new culture. Niche communities can continue to exist, instances can isolate themselves if they want and turn off registrations, “eternal September” isn’t really possible on a network like this.
Advantages to selfhosting a Lemmy instance?
So, as any self-respecting datahoarder and selfhoster, I have my server rack populated with a few machines, churning along as they tend to my hobby-related projects. Now that I’ve started using Lemmy I’m toying with the idea of selfhosting an instance, as I have both the hardware, bandwidth, and skillset for it....
how to find communties on lemmy?
how do you find more communities on different lemmy instances? are there any lists for migrating from reddit?
Migration for backup
I’m trying to establish this new account at sh.itjust.works as my backup instance due to lemmy.world server issues / growing pains....
banned from c/memes
Hi, My normal account was recently banned from c/memes and possibly all of lemmy.ml, but I wasn’t sure why. I was wondering if there was a mod I could ask, so I could learn from my mistake, mea culpa, and possibly beg for forgiveness.
is there any interest in gore on this platform?
Personnaly I like some gore videos or r/figthporn on reddit but it seems like this hasn’t transferred. So just wandering if I’m kinda on my own here which doesnt matter either I don’t miss it that much
should we be worried about powers-moderators/users?
Power mods are one of the main problems with reddit. The same thing is already happening with Lemmy....
Where do you find your arts and culture news?
Maybe a niche question but I’m looking for a community focused on arts and culture around the world rather than sharing your own work....
Do you think Federated networks are the future or do you think Peer to Peer networks are the future? Which do you think is better?
Alright so I’m not an expert so I might not be explaining it correctly....
Need Lemmy Usage Assistance
I’ve been on lemmy.ml for a while but have not figured out how to join other instances of lemmy (like subreddits?). The couple of other groups ask for a login but my current login doesn’t work. I don’t know how to proceed or where to look for a guide. Thanks for any assistance.
How to make subscribed feed more diversed?
Hi guys, I’m on lemmy since the reddit api announcement and am subscribed to tens of communities. When I’m setting my feed to watch topics only from Subscribed communities (hot/active), I see a lot of topics from the same communities, like 10 topics in a row from 1 community then 3 from a different one and again from the...
Suggestions for activism campaigns on Lemmy and kbin? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
I’m working on an activism campaign kicking off next week opposing some bad internet bills in the US – here’s the kbin magazine I just set up, and I might set up a Lemmy community as well if that makes sense. Once things get going, we’ll be sharing links including information and actions people can take....
How do I block all porn/nude posts?
Hi,...
Anyone else missing posts in smaller Lemmy communities because they are overshadowed by the popular ones?
I tend to miss posts in smaller communities, no matter what sorting options I use when I display the “Subscribed” feed on the frontpage....
Be honest, do you still use reddit?
I used to check the front page at least once every day, and occassionally check specific subreddits. Now I don’t look at reddit unless theres some drama, like mods getting purged, then I’d go there and enjoy the drama. Occasionally there will be questions that only reddit has the answer to so I have to reluctantly use it. I...
Any Nostr ppl here?
Been hearing a little about Nostr. Apparently it’s a protocol?...
Can lemmy be used as a blog (with comment section)?
I am looking for a fediverse solution for a blog and I tried it with writefreely, but it has some disadvantages I can’t live with....
Do you want Lemmy to become mainstream?
Some people might find the answer to be obvious (yes) but I’ve rarely found it so. In fact, this is a question I often find in the linux community (regarding linux going mainstream, not lemmy) and people are pretty split upon it....