I have a personal instance I run for stuff like testing bots, so it isn’t very highly federated (I just sub to a couple communities to make sure it is working). However, I just checked and the whole docker compose stack is using 250 MB of RAM and ~1% CPU on a single core VPS and consuming ~300 MB of disk space.
Of course YMMV depending on how much you use it and federate.
I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits....
Reddit accounts were associated because their professional name was plastered on products they each advertised, whether it was books/comics/memes/nfts/tshirts, it was all linked to the same personal brand(s). They also all shared mod duties on the same subs, and the way they wrote comments/conversed was very idiosyncratic, they had catch-phrases and quotes that seemed to be of their own making. The subs they spammed and account length were also indicators, because they almost always all crossposted to whatever subs would allow their content, from a sub only they managed, in order to drive content to their personal subs. Another thing is mod teams (I was occasionally in contact with over this spammer) would report the user as ban evasion and reddit admins would be able to associate the account, which is how most of their accounts get banned. We realized they always tagged their own accounts as “Quality Poster” on their subs too, a tag that was reserved for only their accounts and a few others, and it was pretty easy to tell the difference.
For the self-publishing side and professional pseudonyms, he would use the same publishing company between his different pseudonyms, which is something that book sites often encourage you to search based on. On lets say Book Depository for instance the publisher of a book is a hyperlink, so you can “find other books by…”, so it was like different versions of his name with different sort of professional personas. LLCs like a book publisher are all publicly filed entities through the business registrar in their respective states, so you can find out who filed the taxes, which consultant helped create the entity, just by searching the LLCs name on the government website. (I actually reported someone to the FBI once in relation to an act of violence because they had bragged about their shitty personal business on their online profiles, which they stupidly registered with their actual name to their home address, instead of properly with a PO box through a registrar.)
So really all it took was clicking on his own link to his own book, clicking the publisher name, and seeing all the books listed. In other words, doing the very thing he wants users to do on the site. However anyone who did this and mentioned it on reddit would be reported for stalking/harassing him, especially if they shared some of his content he didn’t think fit with his current persona. Ie a quote from the rape-pill book, or a comic he wrote making fun of people who protest police violence. It was all about crafting an image that redditors would approve of so he could sell his personal brand on the site and avoid paying for ad services.
I used to mod defaults on reddit back around 2011-2015 and only really cared about spammers, so I developed a good eye for it and I’d often report spam on reddit through the formal process, or there were subs like r/thesefuckingaccounts to present spam networks, and a lot of times they would get reported and banned.
In this case the spammer is more aware, and they still operate on the site to some capacity, but they understood they had to be careful and try and hide it/not present it as “spam.” They also basically harassed people who talked about them outside of their own subreddits and try to report and get rid of any negative discussion about them. When they spam it’s like they act as a public figure, but they report as if they are a normal user who’s being doxxed, even though they themselves spread their name(s) around the site. So I created a private subreddit and recruited (sane) people who had been mod-abused by this guy, and we collectively invited more people until we were a few hundred. Most of it was just making fun of him with cheap jokes and people venting, but we had a “current alts” list etc. and would contact mod teams if he was evading a ban with a new account. He only uses the most spammy trash subs now because of this, because any sub that cares about spam or quality of content has banned him many times by now.
I know of a few of these chronically online characters and they generally seem mentally ill in a certain way, so that complicates whether it’s good to directly interact with them or not. There’s a guy named John Mandlbaur who functions on a similar level. He thinks he’s discovered a law of physics is wrong and is everywhere on the internet trying to present his findings for years on end, being a complete asshole to everyone, digging himself into a worse and worse place mentally. I remember someone checked on this reddit spammer in January after the holidays once, and realized on all the days people normally mark by spending time with friends and/or family, he was active on a bunch of his alts the entire time. In all these instances, instead of accepting they may be wrong about even a minor superficial thing, they see it as an affront to their grandiosity and appeal to grand conspiracy theories or very significant things to explain why someone disagrees with them.
I just created the !realmadrid commuity for football/ real madrid fans and have had a decent number of subscribers in a day. I still dont know how to get more people in tho, especially active members who would post. Yesterday was surprisingly good since I made a post on a bigger football community basically advertising my sub...
Are you aware of any way to check what instances I’m already federated with. There’s 30+ subscribers to the community so idk how many of the major instances are subbed on
You should only do this on a couple of the big instances. You shouldn’t force a community to federate to everywhere. If someone wants to see it, they’ll sub.
And it’s not really an issue, it’s intended behaviour that makes it so that each instance only federates the minimum needed. It saves on instance traffic and storage.
Seems like there’s no explanation regarding this decision whatsoever. This place is less toxic than any other haha look at those conservatives community(not that I’m a big conservative or anything). I’ve been here since the beginning of this sub and this place has never been homophobic, transphobic, basically, never been dick to anyone. We made fun of tankies and their mental gymnastics and tankies are just as qualified of being a target of mockery as those conservative right-wing qanon bs.
If one of the bigger instances of lemmy such as lemmy.ml and the developer himself is blocking this instance just out of sheer fragility, lemmy as a whole is at quite a stake. I know it’s federated and you can always host your own instance to tickle your fancy but c’mon. This kind of shit is why lemmy.world got bigger than lemmy.ml or beehaw in the first place. That’s honestly a loss in the big picture.
I hope the dev take some time to recover from reading all the tankie bad posts and unblock this place.
Not really. Reddit is a single platform, you get the same overbearing comment-editing admins, with the same tunnel-vision automod tools and black-hole recurse process no matter what new sub you make.
Moving people off a platform is the hardest part, they need to learn new tools an ways of doing things… and TL;DR you lost them.
On lemmy and the fediverse, leaving unwelcoming mods/admins behind is as easy as going to another instance, no need to change the ways of using it. Still need to attract that community, but it’s orders of magnitude easier on a federated platform.
Honestly the sh.itjust.works instance is pretty on the level. I don’t find too many antagonistic folks on the instance and the conversations tend to be pretty varied depending on the community. I’ve seen you guys mostly around video game subs.
Not really. In fact, I’m only subbed to a handful of the subs on my own instance. I do think it’s run well, so I stick around and will probably throw some money at the admin once I figure out how to do so.
But I don’t care if a community is based on my instance or a different one. In fact just the opposite, I want to sub to communities across lots of instances so I won’t be impacted as much if one goes down.
I joined sh.itjust.works because I wanted an instance that just works, and it has delivered what it says on the tin.
Lemmy as a whole is definitively more toxic than Reddit
For me, at least, non-contributive (“toxic”) [see footnote*] behaviour would be: assumptions (including witch hunting), decontextualisation, “didn’t read but still replying lol lmao”, insults, “I dun unrurrstand”, whining + entitlement, and “chrust me” = “I take you for gullible”. And those things happen far, far less in Lemmy than in Reddit.
For the poster complaining about Lemmy, “toxic” would be, instead:
pedants - pedants are fine as long as context-aware. And even then, I don’t recall a single pedant screeching at my L3 broken English here, unlike in Reddit.
purity testers - this can be interpreted 1000 ways.
concern trolls - yet another thing far more present in Reddit than here…
contrarians - “oh no what I say should be put in a holy altar, how do you dare to disagree with MEEEEEE?”. Sorry but contrarians are leagues above the sort of circlejerking that you see in Reddit, where you’d get 1000 weaboos screeching because you wrote “animes”.
“ackshyually” - refer to what I mentioned already about context. Those “ackshyually” are caused by decontextualisation, that happens far more often in Reddit.
I know that what I’m going to say is anecdotal, but it’s still worth sharing: I see the difference specially because I used to moderate a small Reddit sub, and I mod a Lemmy comm nowadays. People here are more reasonable and contributive; I barely need to intervene here, and even then 99% of the time it’s like “don’t do that” “okay”. In Reddit though? Well.
I was on Lemmy.word for slightly over a month and posted many times across numerous communities and instances, so I definitively gave it my best shot.
Depending on which instances yours federates with, you’ll get a different experience. lemmy.world and lemm.ee in special tend to gather Reddit-like critters alongside a few good posters, so instances where behaviour is a bit more monitored (such as beehaw) tend to defederate them.
Also Lemmy has backend issues
I’m no coder to claim that the issues are “backend” or “frontend”. Instead I’ll say the issues that I see:
papercuts, like the bell icon staying even after you checked all messages
a lack of mod tools
rarely lemmy.ml (the instance that I’m in) slows down.
In the past it used to show errors and refuse to load, but I don’t recall this happening nowadays. And it never showed a downtime banana.
can’t cross-instance linking posts in a convenient way
So… come on, the platform works. It has its issues, it’s likely worse from lemmy.world due to the amount of posters, but it works.
Bad actors
Name them. Otherwise it boils down to “chrust me”. Unless referring to the CSAM event below.
lemmy.world comm being bombarded with CSAM […] Imagine if a subreddit had to be shut down because of this.
I seriously believe that the approach taken by the lemmy.world admins to close down !lemmyshitpost was more sensible than the actions that I’d expect any Reddit instance (oh wait, there’s only Spez’s) to take. If the same happened in 2023 Reddit, here’s what would likelyhappen:
subreddit mods ask for help to the admins, “we’re being bombarded with CSAM”. They hear admin crickets in return.
mods lock subreddit to avoid the bombardment. u/ModCodeOfConduct forces them to reopen.
mods eventually give up and leave. The sub becomes unmoderated and attracts paedophiles until you got a full paedo ring…
the paedo ring grows large enough to get a mod outrage of 9001 subs.
Spez deletes the sub while making a public announcement, like “WE SNOOS STAND AGAINST PAEDOPHILIA!” (cough former Reddit admin Aimée Challenor cough cough)
the original userbase of the subreddit has no equivalent community to go to, because unlike in Lemmy you’re expected to have a single sub per subject.
and sees an influx of kinder people
Dude. You’re in Reddit. That’s the pot calling the kettle black. Reddit makes even Faecesbook’s community look wholesome in comparison, it’s on par with modern Twitter. Lemmy is considerably nicer than Reddit.
And if you still want something nicer there’s always Beehaw. I’m being serious - for people who want/need an environment with more monitored behaviour, it’s a go-to place. Provided of course that you don’t want to eat the cake and have it too, by behaving in a way that you don’t want others to, otherwise they’ll show you the door.
FootnoteIt’s a bit of off-topic, but this post is a great example on why I don’t like the word “toxic”. It refers to everything and nothing at the same time; it boils down to “I don’t like this”, but dresses it as if it was an intrinsic feature of the object (in this case, Lemmy or Reddit). Note how the list of things that I’d consider “toxic” are completely unlike the person complaining about Lemmy, and if you gather a third person odds are that you’ll get a full list of other things to be considered “toxic”.
Absolutely. Reddit had default subs and you would add to it as you explored. Lemmy is like the opposite… it’s quieter here so you start with seeing everything and then subtract the bad out. Ive blocked instances (mostly other languages), communities, even some users that seem to exist to just post about Linux/communism/that guy who seems to mostly post NSFW material that looks way too young. And after subtracting out what you don’t want in your feed it’s a pretty good experience.
I’ve never watched star trek in my life but idk I kinda like some of these memes. They can stay.
eh, reddit leans left but there’s a good chunk of far right extremists that have infiltrated a lot of subs especially politics ones and turned them to shit.
lemmy leans left but instead of the extreme right we have lots of extreme left and tankies,namely from 2 particular instances.
both kinds of extremists never make any sense, are complete snowflakes, and live in some sort of weird alternate reality where in some cases I can’t even tell of they are extreme left or right, they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking
Yep, bias exists everywhere. There’s no avoiding it. Reddit does have the benefit that biases tend to change from sub to sub though. Lemmy instances that I’ve seen (not defederated ones) tend to hold the same FOSS bias, but the intensity of it varies from instance to instance.
I can handle the blocking, that’s something I can control. what I can’t control is the same link being posted on multiple instances that just gets annoying to scroll through.
Recently Google announced Android 14, now all the technology, android, google related communities start posting the same link to the announcement along with the commentary by tech blogs and it repeats 10s of times in the feed.
I follow multiple tech subs across multiple instances for broader coverage but if the news is popular, it’s on every one of them.
As a 10+ year Reddit user, I recently made the jump here to Lemmy and was hoping to re-join some of the old groups. Is there a running list somewhere of all the groups on here that started as subreddits?...
It might have been sub.rehab that was mentioned (you can migrate using their Settings page apparently). Their FAQ also mentions alternative sites (mostly just big static lists by the look of it).
Or it could have been an app - Voyager for instance will take a big list of your subscriptions as a MultiReddit and sub you to Communities with the same name.
I’m excited to announce the first alpha preview of this project that I’ve been working on for the past 4 months. I’m initially posting about this in a few small communities, and hoping to get some input from early adopters and beta testers....
Hi, this is a great point and one that I’ve already given consideration to. I’ll address separately the issue of the primary datastore ,i.e. Postgres, and the Redis dependency:
Postgres as the only option for the data store
There are 2 reasons for this:
Performance: while SQLite could offer a simpler/embedded data store, it simply doesn’t have the performance and features of Postgres. Bitmagnet has a faceted search engine and is write-intensive (it will be discovering ~5k torrents per hour and writing these to the database along with associated metadata). As such, its database may not be suitable for running on older hardware. A SQLite adapter, if it was developed, may simply not be up to the job (although as I haven’t attempted this I can’t say what the performance would be like). That said, Bitmagnet itself is not especially resource intensive, you could probably run it on a Raspberry PI but point it to a Postgres instance on some more powerful hardware. At this stage I’ve only been running it on a M2 Mac Mini with Postgres located on its SSD and so would be interested to know people’s mileage on other hardware.
Development, support and maintenance overhead: I’m a lone developer and this project is already too big for one person. A SQLite adapter, if feasible performance-wise, I think could only happen if other contributors joined the project as my to-do list is already pretty long. It would have to achieve feature parity with the Postgres implementation which makes use of several Postgres-specific features and extensions. It would also mean a longer testing cycle and therefore probably a slower release cadence. That said, if there was enough demand and assistance then I’d be open to looking into the feasibility of this once the rest of the application is a little more mature and the current database schema more finalised.
Redis dependency
Redis is currently used only for the asynchronous task queue. I would like to have put this in Postgres, but there simply is not a good out-of-the-box solution that works well with Postgres and GoLang, and is actively maintained. I looked at quite a few queuing libraries and eventually settled on asynq (github.com/hibiken/asynq), which is a great library and does the job well - but could really do with support for non-Redis backends.
Using Redis here was a pragmatic decision that allowed me to make progress, rather than an optimal one. I guess I could have built a simple Postgres-based queue myself but that would have been a distraction and probably sub-optimal compared with a mature/separately developed library. It remains an option. Since I looked into this a new project has sprung up which I’m keeping an eye on - www.tork.run - it has a Postgres backend and looks like it might be up to the job, but is very new.
So yes, I’m very aware that the additional Redis dependency is not ideal and it may well disappear at some point.
Try going there several times and it should work. I think it may be that the first time anybody connects from another instance to a ‘foreign’ community, it takes time. Given your instance is smaller, newer and literature focused it just means you might be the first person from the instance entering the sub.
This may be the case for many other communities you try and access, so keep an eye out for this. It’s something I’ve experienced on lemm.ee as well.
I believe that the addition of an edit history would be a massive boon to the usefulness of Lemmy on the whole. A common problem with forums is the relatively low level of trust that users can have in another’s content. When one has the ability to edit their posts, and comments this invites the possibility of misleading the...
Should be minimal since it’s text. In fact, a lot of my edits reduce posts since I use it to add an edit that I would’ve needed to post in multiple sub-threads.
99% of users won’t use the feature
Which further proves that it’s not likely to cause many hosting costs.
invites users to review people’s edit history
They already do this with comment history. If you don’t want people digging in to your edit history, don’t make controversial edits.
People being jerks for calling out typo fixes likely will result in downvotes, thus discouraged by the community. Look at grammar police, they’re frequently downvoted to the point where they’re not very common (though more common than they should be).
be overly careful that their comment or post is 100% accurate
First, that remains to be seen. You yourself said 99% of people won’t use the feature, and I think it’ll turn out much like the grammar police, people calling out others for small mistakes will be shunned. I could even see mods making and enforcing harassment rules related to behavior like that.
Second, if it improves the quality of comments and posts, I don’t see that as a bad thing. Perhaps individual communities could disable it, but it should absolutely be enabled for serious communities that cover politics and news.
abuse by mods by reverting edits
Then don’t give them that power. Just allow them to lock posts and leave a note or a flag to warn users of abuse by the commenter.
Extra UI clutter
Not necessarily. You can pick a client that doesn’t implement the feature. Or you can have it be an optional feature, or hide it by default in an expandable menu. It doesn’t cause clutter in Wikipedia, so it’s not inherently a poor UX choice.
We can bike shed the UX once we agree on the functional requirements, that’s how the design process is intended to work.
If a user posts credentials
This is a federated platform, you should assume everything you post is there for good on some instance.
Users could abuse the feature
Sure, but they can do it anyway in the clear by sending DMs, changing text of links to look innocent, etc.
I think there should be an option to show edits always, which would catch this issue. So basically you’d be looking at the equivalent of inline git diff (with strikeouts or whatever to show deleted content). That’s how I’d prefer to navigate Lemmy, and I’m guessing enough others would as well to catch any attempted abuse.
less inviting place to socialise
Then I guess you and I see the platform very differently. I see it as a place to discuss news and politics, not a place to “socialize.” It’s a link aggregator, so I expect the bulk of the discussion to be about the content of links.
That said, there are plenty of casual communities that work more like forums that want to foster casual discussion, not serious discussion. For those, edit history should probably be disabled. So make it an opt-in thing by community so those of us that want it can have it.
Please post one top-level comment per complaint. Then others can reply with ideas or existing GitHub issues that could address that complaint. This helps identify both common complaints and potential solutions....
In another thread, I read a user’s comment about how the lemmy experience has got progressively worse over the past few months, with a lot more trash content making it to their front page....
I believe all only shows the magazines or subs or whatever that have been synced to local. on a large instance, that will be plenty but in a small instance you’ll have to sign up and then everyone in the instance will see that sub in all.
Do keep in mind that the comments on the soccer threads are also likely to be from bot accounts, but I’d expect that as more people start subbing to the community, there will be more “organic” participation.
As for the inclusion on the bot on a lemmy.world community. Please get in contact with the community mod, but I really doubt that the instance admins would be interested. If they don’t go with it, I might set up a Lemmy instance specific for tennis (matchpoint.zone was available for cheap. ;)
What are the requirements to run a personal Lemmy server?
is reddit itself using upvote and repost bots now?
I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits....
Just created a new Real Madrid community! (fanaticus.social)
cross-posted from: fanaticus.social/post/589461...
Lemmit.online changes - Expansion stop and community cleanup
cross-posted from: lemmit.online/post/1047028 - because ironically this will not reach instances where Lemmit is blocked....
How does a first time community maker find subscribers?
I just created the !realmadrid commuity for football/ real madrid fans and have had a decent number of subscribers in a day. I still dont know how to get more people in tho, especially active members who would post. Yesterday was surprisingly good since I made a post on a bigger football community basically advertising my sub...
This is the only community personally blocked by the Lemmy Developers using special code no other instance can access. (sh.itjust.works)
Reddit no longer links your content when they ban you, and you can only appeal once (lemmy.world)
Do you feel a sense of loyalty to your instance?
I feel like I’ve formed some sort of faithfulness towards dbzer0 and have a bias towards subs and users of my instance. Anybody else in the same boat?
r/RedditAlternatives doesn't like a Reddit Alternative (lemmy.ml)
Great news — social media is falling apart (www.businessinsider.com)
Is there a list of, uh, sublemmies that spawned from Reddit communities?
As a 10+ year Reddit user, I recently made the jump here to Lemmy and was hoping to re-join some of the old groups. Is there a running list somewhere of all the groups on here that started as subreddits?...
Introducing Bitmagnet: A self-hosted BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler, content classifier and torrent search engine with web UI, GraphQL API and Servarr stack integration (bitmagnet.io)
I’m excited to announce the first alpha preview of this project that I’ve been working on for the past 4 months. I’m initially posting about this in a few small communities, and hoping to get some input from early adopters and beta testers....
How the fall of the Roman empire paved the road to modernity | Aeon Essays (aeon.co)
cross-posted from: lemm.ee/post/10358195...
New to lemmy with some teething problems
Hope this is a relevant sub Community to post this in....
What are your thoughts on the idea of adding an edit history feature to posts, and comments in Lemmy?
I believe that the addition of an edit history would be a massive boon to the usefulness of Lemmy on the whole. A common problem with forums is the relatively low level of trust that users can have in another’s content. When one has the ability to edit their posts, and comments this invites the possibility of misleading the...
What are your complaints about Lemmy? Developers may want your feedback
Please post one top-level comment per complaint. Then others can reply with ideas or existing GitHub issues that could address that complaint. This helps identify both common complaints and potential solutions....
How has your Lemmy experience changed over the past few months?
In another thread, I read a user’s comment about how the lemmy experience has got progressively worse over the past few months, with a lot more trash content making it to their front page....
Lemmy instances that are focused on mirroring Reddit content?
I’ve posted before about my fediverser project, and I am now looking to see who is interested in participating....