cross-posted from: https://waveform.social/post/310138

Hi there,

I have decided to take down waveform.social. There are too many nefarious actors trying to break it and I don't have the time or energy to keep fighting them off.

For your information: Over the pas month I have had to:

1. Add various DDOS prevention measures to block unwanted (repeated) signups.
2. Delete a bunch of literal white noise uploads that filled my 4TB picture storage... Twice.
3. Repair Lemmy (or rather pictures) after it crashed because of full storage.

I will keep waveform.social active until Friday next week so you can pull data from here, though I expect most of it has been federated to other servers anyway.

I am using liftoff on Android

I wonder why I haven’t seen any communities so far that link to related communities in the sidebar.

That was common in some subreddits, but it would be much more crucial for lemmy/kbin because of how bad communities can propagate sometimes.

Probably going back to customs of websites 20 years ago, who linked to each other to increase their visibility and ranking. I’ve also seen that on zeronet, where they included banners of other sites to increase their spread in the network.

cross-posted from: https://azorius.net/p/qG94yLvqfYjf3l14Ty-The-chat-has-entered-azorius

Pushed a big change to enable group chat.

This kinda seems like feature creep, but looking at successful forums, I think many of them have an irc (or a fucking discord) on the side. Or you resort to an adhoc chat post. So I think it's fairly important. It's not very complicated, either.

It's not on by default, and can be enabled on a per group basis.

But does it fedi? Obvi! Well, within reason, and with certain caveats.

It's based on the ChatMessage type, addressed to the group, and federated via Announce/Create/ChatMessage like other group activities. So nothing special.

Honk required a small fix because it wasn't expected chats to be announced. Not sure how other software would react. The fix was pretty simple and obvious, just not something I anticipated. The tricky part is getting addressing right and replying to the group, not only the poster.

Did they give up?

I've made an app that makes it possible to schedule a post in Lemmy at an arbitrary time. It's available at https://schedule.lemmings.world and can be used by people from any instance.

Let me know what you think!

P.S. This post is made using the app!

Edit: And it's open source!

So, I'm new to the fediverse and Lemmy, and I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it all. I'm sure people have talked about this, but by far my biggest issue so far has been finding communities. I specifically didn't want t to join a large instance, but that has led to issues of finding communities. I often need to go to lemmy.world or lemmy.ml and search for communities there because searching on a smaller instance won't yield results if no one's subbed to that community, even if the instances are federated.

Which leads to the point I'm trying to get to. It feels almost to me like if I'm trying to search for a URL but the DNS says it doesn't exist because no one on that DNS tried accessing that URL before so I need to query another DNS for it. But in reality, if I ask my DNS for a URL, if it doesn't know it, it'll ask other DNSs in turn until a result is determined. Why can't something like this exist for searching for communities? Does something like this exist at all, or is it impossible / a limitation of activity pub? But I feel searching for a community in one instance should in theory, if it doesn't know that community yet, be able to query federated instances if they know, until a result is returned.

Apologies if I'm unintentionally beating a dead horse. Or if there was a better community to post this to other than this one. See aforementioned community finding issues, lol.

I have a meme account on Instagram, which I'd like to also have on the Fediverse. Can anyone recommend me a Pixelfed instance for this? Or maybe another type of server?

cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/3172728

One small step for Lemmy, one big step for us :) While I don't aim to be a big instance, it's exciting that people are using it 🙂 Thanks everyone for this!

On this occasion, I would like to ask a little question. What do you think, if we make the instance humor/meme focused instead of general-purpose? I think the hostname is very appropriate. I've also read that Lemmy developers prefer more focused instances over general-purpose. So IDK what do you think??

Pretty straight question.

I see Lemm.ee is now the second most populated instance based on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, with 3634 monthly active users.

I also know that Lemmy devs said that

lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/2372503

As lemmy.ml has 3561 monthly active users, should we consider that around 3,5k-4k users is the sweet spot for an instance population, and stop recommending the ones that reached that threshold?

The link is to a GitHub discussion, where gargron shuts down a discussion because he’s made a unilateral decision and then locks the thread to avoid debate.

On its own, it might not seem like much. Someone’s gotta make the decisions, right!? Except that this is a pretty dramatic shift for mastodon (leaning into search more) and the main ask was to provide two options rather than roll multiple things into one, which is pretty reasonable. Plus, why not get user feedback? Mastodon has plenty of users after all? Add to this that the main masto instance intends to federate with meta’s threads and gargron has signed an NDA, and the tin foil hat starts to come out.

Alone, not much of a big deal, but it’s an insight into why people find masto devs difficult (AFAIU).

EDIT: woah ... downvotes straight off of the bat ... which is fine ... but honestly, I'm not sure why the downvoting ... this was just an example of something some might find problematic ... feel free to discuss.

If they're trying to attack all of Lemmy, or the whole Fediverse, they're doing it wrong. lol

It's like obvious spam emails that put no effort into appearing legitimate. You have the spirit of it, but your heart is in the wrong place.

Hello everyone,

Based on the recent instability of Lemmy.world, a lot of people have been wondering whether they should move to another instance.

I used to look at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list and recommend people to pick a generalist instance with as much users as possible (using the 1m column), usually

• lemm.ee
• sh.itjust.works
• sopuli.xyz
• lemmy.one
• reddthat.com
• etc.

Of course, there are also the regional options

• feddit.de
• lemmy.ca
• aussie.zone
• feddit.nl
• feddit.uk
• midwest.social
• etc.

And of course, the thematic instances

• programming.dev
• lemmy.blahaj.zone
• discuss.tchncs.de
• lemmy.dbzer0.com
• etc.

I used to recommend the most populated instances, as we know that All depends on users subscribed from the instance.

However, now with the introduction of the Lemmy Community Seeder (https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs), which

tells your instance to pull the top communities and the communities with the top posts from your favorite instances

do you think this should still apply? I have seen promising instances (high uptime, already on 18.4 that was released today)

• discuss.online
• lemmy.ninja
• unilem.org
• etc.

Would you recommend users to join those as well, assuming that the admins use the LCS to populate the All feed? Most of us remember the Vlemmy.net disappearance, and it's difficult to tell users to join small instances based on good faith, but at the same time, every instance needs to start somewhere, and they should be given a chance.

What do you think?

By fediverse first, I mean that the app/site/platform was built from the start to be federated instead of being like corporate site but FOSS & federated.

In some respects it feels like many federated platforms have approached things backwards, trying to rework a centralized structure to be distributed/decentralized, creating some of the awkward UX folks experience.

I joined a couple of other instances and it doesn't show one of them.

As I understand it, the main fediverse softwares all implement ActivityPub in a little bit different way, and so don't fully overlap with one another in terms of how well you can see content from one on another and in what ways you can interact with it. Is there a summary anywhere that just has a quick breakdown of what operations (subscribing to follow a Mastadon user from Lemmy, replying to a Lemmy post from Mastadon, etc) actually work or partially work?

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/3509989

Manton Reece is the creator of micro.blog

Today we added Pixelfed cross-posting to Micro.blog. This joins our existing set of cross-posting services like Mastodon, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr, and others.

Now you can post photos to your own blog, at your own domain name where you control your identity, and have Micro.blog send a copy elsewhere automatically. When posting, you can optionally select which services you want to include: Screenshot of cross-posting options showing Bluesky, Nostr, and Pixelfed.

Because Micro.blog has built-in support for ActivityPub, your friends on Mastodon can also follow your blog directly without you needing to copy anything, or without you needing an account on any other platforms. There’s a lot of flexibility in how you want to configure this and which services you want to use. Some people even like to create a separate microblog just for photos.

As with all Micro.blog features, we’re looking forward to hearing how people use this. Photos are special, and there’s always more we want to do with them. We’ll continue to tweak the Pixelfed cross-posting based on feedback. Enjoy!

A while back I signed up to rammy.site a small lemmy instance run by a single person. It was a very nice instance, very stable and had pretty good access to other instances, or at least it used to. Recently though all of that has changed when the instance was taken over by far right-wing users from the right-wing instance known as exploding-heads, an instance which has been blocked by many others for the hateful content they post and the abusive behavior of its members. The reason that this was even allowed to happen was that the admin stopped moderating the server but left the server online, this is a problem because it means that anyone can hop onto the server and start posting whatever they want and create whatever communities they want and no-one can stop them.

There isn't much you can do to prevent going innactive but there are ways to mitigate what happened on rammy.site to prevent a full blown catastrophe like what has happened here. If you run a server and you are going to be going away for a while I'd recommend turning off account registration and community creation on your instance, that wouldn't prevent federated users and existing users from spamming existing communities but it would help against users joining the site and creating new communities which is what happened here on rammy.

I understand that it's not always possible to always be there to moderate your instance but you can at lease take steps to ensure that in your absence the instance won't be utterly decimated and/or used as a weapon to spread hatred or attack other instances.

An in-depth report reveals an ugly truth about isolated, unmoderated parts of the Fediverse. It's a solvable problem, with challenges.

Possibly a dumb question, but is there, or could one of the extra smart people here build, a federated marketplace to allow for direct buying and selling without the middle-man enshittification of ebay, reverb, and the like?