Lemmy.ca's Main Community

I sometimes get this weird error when trying to comment on posts: "language_not_allowed". I've tried leaving the language as undetermined or setting it to English and neither seems to work.

How do I go about fixing this?

It often feels like they are a parody of tankies, but sometimes I think they might actually be legit Stalinists, but then I see stuff like this.

Please stop talking about reddit. If you want this to be the next reddit, I beg of you to stop mentioning it. Otherwise all this placewill be is a temporary hold over until we all just fall back on what we know cause we keep hammering in the name into our brain over and over again. I think the same sort of thing happened with the original "black out" of Twitter but we all came back to it because we kept thinking of Twitter in regards to whatever new site we tried. If you want Lemmy to succeed, let Lemmy be Lemmy

Hello friends!

Lemmy.ca will be undergoing scheduled maintenance from approximately 12:00 - 12:30 PT (3:00 - 3:30 ET), while we move to a more powerful server.

Happy Canada day!

As you may have already noticed, 3 new admins have been added. Welcome @[email protected] , @[email protected] , and @[email protected]! There are also many more people that are helping behind the scenes as well. They have many years of experience moderating various subreddits, and I believe that they can bring lemmy.ca to the next level.

We have been collaborating so that they will be taking over hosting this instance. When I initially volunteered to take over this instance early in 2022, I was thinking it would just be a hobby project, and I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. With the surge of new users in the past few weeks, and potentially a lot more to come soon, I decided that I don't have the time or energy required to dedicate to running this site, and it just so happened that they were looking for a new home too.

@[email protected] and I will stay on as an admin while we transition to a new server, just to make sure everything goes smoothly, but I plan on removing myself as an admin once everything is settled. I will try and stay active here as a user, because I believe that lemmy and the fediverse can become something great!

I have also suspended donations for the time being, but thank you to all that have already donated. All your current donations will be transferred to the new admins.

I have also upgrade the server to 8 CPU's and 8 GB, since it seemed to be struggling with an influx of new users tonight, so sorry about the brief downtime!

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to ask!

I'm wondering how my community has 10 subscribers, but only shows 2 users in the past 6 months (the community is less than 1 month old).

How did users subscribe without visiting? Are they bots? Am I misunderstanding how these stats work?

I saw the Jerboa app just added support for 2FA, I guess itll be really cool to be among the first instances to support it.

Is it possible to see a list of the instances we federate with?

Since the update to Version 18, I have been unable to subscribe to any communities (local and federated), with the subscribe button simply not appearing. I am using Firefox 114.0.2 with uBlock Origin running. Anyone know what I might do to fix this issue? Thanks!!!

Edit1: Just tried the same process using Brave Browser, and experiencing the same issue:

Edit2: @floofloof's workaround of searching for the community via the "communities" tab seems to work intermittently on both Chrome and Firefox!

I see a post here: https://lemmy.ca/post/921003. There is only one comment from me, but on lemmy.ml there are more comments and votes. Why is this the case?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/919010

I have taken the advice from this post and blocked all instances with > 10,000 users, from this list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRthB7RtY4Rr0t5fhVKaliJnwSmptMc5oJi7uha_OBcF4wpu4eElxAxNzaCqjlq6NsOE9GpgSnMzZ2x/pubhtml

I will continue to monitor things and will make another announcement if more blocks are necessary.

If anybody is interested in getting a cleaned up instance federated again, feel free to contact me over DM (if you’re currently blocked, you can contact me on Matrix: @smorks:40to.ca).

Update: @[email protected] has been kind enough to add Rediggit as a native theme to the lemmy.ca instance. You can now access it from your account settings page, without the need of another browser add-on.

Just posting an update on my Rediggit theme, in case anyone else prefers a reddit/digg-style interface for the desktop.

Highlights include:

• Flexible full-width layout, with fixed width for vote buttons and thumbnail columns
• Strong focus on content and discussion (improved comment legibility)
• Decreased font size throughout
• Increased post list density
• No user or community circle-icons
• No community banners or logos
• Few rounded buttons or boxes
• Re-sizable comment box

Release Notes

edit: don't forget to enable 2FA, since it's now supported!

edit2: seems like federation with mastodon (and maybe others?) is broken, tried with a few different instances, including lemmy.ml. 😥

I've noticed that I can't access anything on there itself jerboa, and when I attempt to hit the site in a browser I get a connection reset.

However I haven't seen any posts regarding what's up. Does anyone know?

I'm planning on upgrading lemmy to v0.18.0 tonight, probably around 9pm CDT. So there will be a bit of downtime, but I don't think it should take too long.

Release Announcement: https://lemmy.ca/post/862306

edit: kids baseball game went long, should start around 10pm CDT.

edit2: going to start in about 5 minutes. 9:55pm CDT.

edit3: looks like we're updated. let me know if you notice any issues!

Users coming here from reddit might know that the main canada subreddit and offshoots such as metacanada and canada_sub are havens for the far-right. I'm concerned that as Lemmy.ca is growing, a small number of far-right posters might be able to influence the culture that Lemmy.ca develops.

Namely, a transphobic user shared a transphobic conspiracy theory from a far right disinformation outlet yesterday. Their post history has enough disinformation links that they should be getting paid for it:

• https://lemmy.ca/comment/475603
• https://lemmy.ca/comment/464473
• https://lemmy.ca/comment/451659
• https://lemmy.ca/comment/423565

Here is my proposal:

• This user is breaking 3 of the 4 rules posted in the sidebar (no transphobia, be respectful, no spamming.) Ban the user from lemmy.ca.
• Add far-right disinformation outlets to a domain blocklist. If Lemmy doesn't support this feature yet, post those domains in the sidebar and ban users who submit links to them.
• Make it clear that bigotry and intolerance is 100% instantly bannable.

Thanks for reading this, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Just thought it might be interesting.

I've started a few communities here. Largely it's just me posting content to get things populated and try to get the ball rolling. But I'm not responsible for the 13k comments this month :)

I noticed something that I'm hoping someone could clarify.

When I visit lemmy.ca, and show "all" communities and then compare it to lemmy.world, the results come up totally different... different posts or same posts with wildly different number of comments.

It doesn't seem to matter which sorting method I use, either.

Even replies to a comment within a post will have more on lemmy.world than if I were viewing it on lemmy.ca.

For example, !nostupidquestions on lemmy.world shows the post "Do you think the guys on the titanic submarine will be rescued?" with 589 upvotes and 474 comments. The same post shows 167 upvotes and 384 comments on lemmy.ca.

I checked the blocked instances between the two, and only junk instances are there, so I know it's not that.

Any clarity would be appreciated.

I made a comment on a kbin post via mastodon. About five minutes later I saw that same post on Lemmy. The comment was not there. Is it just federating slowly (how long does it take?) or is my understanding that mastodon and Lemmy are connected in this way incorrect?

I've been talking to many people about the controversy with Reddit, why I left it and why I went onto Lemmy, Kbin and Mastadon instead. Some of my friends have commented that the control is still a problem as other platforms and it is all dependent on who owns the software, who owns the hardware, who are the admins, who are the moderators and which community or group has the most influence.

Who are these people that influence the most control on the fediverse? Are they Conservative? Are they Liberal? Are they Republican? Are they Democrat? Do they lean to the left of politics? to the right? or are they center? Are they even political? But also if they had to be would they easily or not so easily influenced?

So .. for the ELI5 version of the question ... Who owns the fediverse?

Just curious as this is all fun and open till it scales to expensive. What is the lemmy.ca plan to sustain / fund it self?

Constant donation nagging like Wikipedia?

Stux from geddit.social think that the massive recent wave of ~100k new Lemmy accounts is likely mostly spammers. Captchas suck, but are they better than the alternative?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/778315

Introducing the Lemmy Instance Assistant (browser extension)

Hey everyone :)

I started using Lemmy during the blackout, and I was finding it annoying to subscribe to new communities that I came across. I wanted to be able to quickly open a link on my home instance instead of copy/pasting the code, searching for it, and then subscribing. I looked around for an extension and didn’t see any * , so I started working on my first browser extension!

Firefox version is live, the Chrome version is still going through the review/approval stage. I’m working on getting it on other browsers as well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/lemmy-instance-assistant

This extension will let you set your home instance (https://lemmy.ca for me), and then it will insert a button onto community pages on other Lemmy instances (see screenshots on extension page). I tried to mimic the existing design for the button, and I included some popular instances so you can quickly copy and paste when selecting your home instance.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Why doesn’t it redirect automatically?

Initially I tried to make it redirect, similar to ‘Old Reddit Redirect’. This is still possible, but it might be a little dangerous to have it set up that way. Since there is no way to predict what URL a Lemmy site will have, we can’t restrict the extension to specific domains. This means that the extension MAY run on other sites, depending on how it is detecting the Lemmy site. A button popping up is less harmful than being redirected unexpectedly.

Future plans:

GitHub link: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

• As mentioned above, we can’t specify which domains the extension should run on since that’s not something we can predict. I’d like to improve the specificity of which pages the button will appear on, to minimize unexpected behaviour. As this is my first extension, I’d appreciate help with this while I learn it myself!
• Right now the button does not appear if you are already viewing a community in a different instance, even if that is not YOUR instance (ex. You are looking at lemmy.world/c/[email protected], while your home instance is lemmy.ca). This limitation comes from the method I used to distinguish between the community page and your home instance page. I’m planning to change it to use the URL itself instead of card elements.
• It would be nice to be able to jump to a specific post. Currently, it appears that Lemmy post URLs do not include a slug for the community/instance, making it challenging to implement something like this. I plan on exploring this some more (relevant thread: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/875)
• I want to add a button next to other Lemmy links in the post body / comments. However, I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do this and which links it should appear next to.

Other thoughts:

Some of the third party Reddit tools that I used the most were the browser extensions. Reddit Enhancement Suite made it a LOT easier to start using Reddit, and other extensions like Old Reddit Redirect (the inspiration for my extension) fixed other annoyances. While there are a lot of areas where Lemmy can improve, I think it makes more sense to implement certain enhancements through browser extensions and separate tools. That is to say, I’m happy to let this be pushed into Lemmy’s code, but right now I feel like it makes more sense as a separate extension.

(*) Also when I started building my extension, I didn’t see any similar ones listed. A few other ones have now popped up, and it looks like a lot of them were forked from this project. So if you don’t like mine, there are others that you can try :) Similarly, I’m happy to collaborate if you want to help / integrate my extension into a bigger project!

I've found that "Hot" often gives me posts I have seen days before, same with "Most Comments". So far I've found that "Top Day" is best, but then I lose a lot of posts from my smaller communities

How do you sort your Lemmy instance? Any tips I'm missing?