Here is an overview of all the other news that has happened this week in the #fediverse.
ActivityPods is a project that aims to combine the ActivityPub protocol with the Solid protocol. The goal of the project is that you can have one account on the fediverse, which hosts your data and followers, using the Solid Protocol. Other ActivityPub applications can then connect to your data. ActivityPods posted an update on their road towards version 2.0, scheduled to be released early 2024. They will also be working on Mastopod; a Mastodon-compatible implementation of ActivityPods.
Tagginator is a small new bot for Lemmy, that does something simple but smart: it replies from a Mastodon account to new posts on Lemmy communities that it monitors, and comments with a hashtag that is relevant to that community. This way, people on Mastodon who follow that hashtag will now also start to see Lemmy posts in their feed. As Lemmy will not add hashtags in the near future, this is a workaround to improve the interoperability between the microblogging side of the fediverse and the threadiverse.
Heise Online’s editor Martin Holland has regularly given updates on data and traffic for their news account. In the latest update he provides some insight in the decentralisation of the fediverse. It also shows the extend of the peak of the twittermigration last year, and how traffic has slowed down since.
The University of Innsbruck put out a press release that they’ll be focusing more on Mastodon for science communication, and that their presence at X will be significantly reduced.
It seems like you misunderstand what Joplin is? Or I misunderstand what you are saying… I don’t know…
Joplin is a note taking app that fully works on markdown. You can use it on your local PC, but you can also synchronize the notes over devices.
Joplin is hosting the image on the user’s instance - you’re in feddit.de, so it uploads to feddit.de.
Joplin and Lemmy have nothing to do with each other. I have just taken a screenshot of the rendered markdown document in my Joplin app, switched to my web browser, opened feddit.de and posted the screenshot in this community.
If you want to say that using Joplin just to draw and post pictures somewhere, would be a bad idea… Yes, that’s right. But it’s primarily a note-taking app, so that’d be expected… And usually, the notes are private and nothing you want to regularly post online…
Meanwhile, the old reddit app I used to use (Relay) would upload to imgur, all seemlessly in the background, then paste the link code in my comment. This kind of functionality is what I would like to see.
I’m generally against hosting files on instances, anyway. It creates extra server load.
Well, Lemmy is a decentralized system. Hosting all image resources on a centralized service (imgur) is probably not what the majority wants…
Like Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are 'link aggregators’
This means, in subject driven Communities (sub-reddits), people post links or images or their thoughts and others comment on them
Reddit is software that’s installed in one central location (server). This means it is owned and controlled by one single commercial entity.
Kbin and Lemmy are both software that are installed in multiple locations (servers), owned and controlled by multiple people and can be installed by anyone. This means no one can ever own or control the entirety of Lemmy.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy can be accessed by users via websites or apps.
Reddit is centralised. If it disappeared tomorrow, it would be completely gone.
KBin and Lemmy are federated. If one instance (server) disappeared tomorrow, all the others would be unaffected and carry on as normal.
All instances of KBin and Lemmy can talk to all other instances of KBin and Lemmy, as long as they are federated.
Rule breaking and/or toxic instances/servers can be defederated by other servers/instances.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are all free to use. However, with Reddit you must contend with invasive privacy and advertising. The way to support KBin and Lemmy is to donate to the development team and the server/instance your account is on.
I just start with “It’s basically just a community owned Reddit” and leave it at that.
I think that gets the important point across. Getting into details about federation and picking servers just makes it sound complicated, when it really isn’t.
Then if someone’s interested I just recommend them a larger server and let them go from there.
I think people way over complicate things from the start and turn people off before they even try it.
It could just be a GUID. The community’s host instance assigns a GUID (which by definition is unique in all GUIDs) and then when sending the post or comment out to federate to other servers it includes the GUID for the other instances to use.
Subscribed new. I have lots of time to kill. And since I’m using my own instance there is no sense in using any other feed, as almost every community reaching my small server is one I am subscribed to.
OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, the long-awaited release of the independent, community controlled distribution’s fixed point release branch (as opposed to its rolling release branch), has been released....
I never used it, so I had no reason to make a switch. I also did make a mastodon account once, but I don’t know what happened to it and I can’t find it.
I only ever use it for updates for a few games. Also, I can’t ditch it because the club I’m in at my community college, the club discord server is how we communicate and there’s probably no way I could convince the club to switch since the next year, various members might have gotten their degree or left the club for various reasons.
If my favorite channels switched over to something like Peertube or even some place like Odysee, then I’d definitely switch. Most of the people I watch would never leave and I just don’t feel like putting in the effort to find new people to watch since I’ve been watching some of my favorites for over a decade.
You’re about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you’re overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)...
I'm trying to contact a user on lemmy, but can't dm them (it's not clear to me if this is a bug or if dms don't work across instances or software, but either way it's not working). My next workaround would be to ping them in a microblog post, but lemmy doesn't have a microblog section. Would a lemmy user receive a notification...
I think they're specifically wondering if using @<username>@<instance> mention syntax will result in a notification popping up for the user on Lemmy.
I've been wondering that too (in the context of threads though) -- and if it does work, are there limitations regarding visibility between instances that people should be aware of. e.g. what happens if I @ someone in a post to a community on a lemmy server that is defederated from their home instance? Or, in a community that no one on their home server has subscribed to? Will they still get a notice?
I guess I don't really have a good mental model for how @ works on the Fediverse.
One option is them being tied together while remaining separate. Like have the clients all treat them as one channel on the client side, with them still all being separate on the server end.
I think the main problem people want dealt with is when they are in 7 of the same community accross different servers and someone cross posts something to all 7 of them. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to solve that problem on the user end, like discouraging cross posts or whatever, but there could be a way that posting to one automatically and invisibly crossposts to all the channels that are deemed “like” that one. Whether communities could have tags that align with post tags, or something like that. I don’t know. But it sucks that right now the option is either pick one and deal with missing out on anything not cross posted, or pick a few and deal with all the things you see multiple times.
Whats the point of writing prn, f@ck, sht or anything like that instead of the actual words? You can still read them, its not like they are gone if you replace a letter or two.
Generally I don’t care about words like bitch, fuck, shit, but there are certain servers and communities where cusses or other words are used harmfully towards groups that the community or server is inteded to be a supportive place for, and when they come up in discussion, even just as examples as what was said to them are rightfully censored or have a trigger warning placed in front.
Community mods and server operators can get overboard with this but they get that privilege because they do the work to moderate it anyway.
Something I’m terrible at as well! I don’t think there’s a DM feature in Lemmy which is what I would say is the way to become more “friends” with someone than following them down comment threads.
Not trying to self-promo but I do have a Twitch channel and discord server of the same name (link in my bio) if you feel like stopping in and chatting more and whatnot! Open to anyone else who wants to be part of that community too!
Edit: realized there is a message feature, but it’s not available for me on the Memmy app for iOS, but appears to be available in the browser version of LemmyWorld!
If the community is on your local instance, it doesn’t show the instance in the dropdown. If it’s a remote instance, it does.
However instead of using the actual unique URL of the community, it uses the display name. So in this case lemmy.ml/c/ireland and lemmy.ml/c/ireland_on_lemmy both have their display name set to just “Ireland”.
I think differentiating between local and remote communities is actually pretty useful but obviously the second thing is a problem when you’ve got competing communities on one server. Which I guess is a thing that people are doing.
Maybe instead of:
Ireland
Ireland
it should be showing
Ireland (/c/ireland)
Ireland (/c/ireland_on_lemmy)
which not only fixes this problem but also means you can see how to get to a community to go check it out before posting there (this comes up sometimes in the process of crossposting) and it’ll stop, say, a mod giving their community an unrelated name to confuse people into posting something inappropriate or whatever.
There should probably also be a character limit on the display name because that UK one is obnoxiously taking up all of the horizontal space and leaving no room for its actual identifier.
Two things, one they’ll openly admit, one they’ll pretend is not a factor but it’s the main reason.
The first are snaps. Snaps are a way of package distribution created by Canonical with the goal of solving a few problems on Linux: snaps allow a piece of software to be installed bundling the exact dependencies it wants, run inside a sandboxed container, and be updated with ease regardless of the rest of the system. If you’re familiar with Flatpaks, you might think they sound similar - that’s because they are, the difference being snaps came first and are hosted by Canonical, while Flatpaks came later and are hosted by the community.
Snaps, like all similar packages on Linux, suffered with slower app launch speeds, issues with drivers or other system components not interacting correctly with the sandbox, and so on. Those issues have been mostly fixed, and snaps are loved by people who use Canonical’s solutions to workstations and servers.
“Snap bad too slow, canonical le evil” stayed though. It’s worth noting that while enabled by default, snaps can be disabled. So that’s reason number one.
Reason number two is simple: Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro for desktop usage, and the most often recommended for beginners.
This means Ubuntu goes against the “we aren’t normies” mentality that dominates a portion of the Linux community. It’s hard to feel like a super genius for using Linux when your neighbor who can barely understand a keyboard can simply install Ubuntu in an afternoon and everything works great. Ubuntu being the home for newcomers also means said newcomers will often appear in Linux forums asking for help, and lots of tutorials are written for Ubuntu - which angers users from other distros.
So that’s it. That’s why Lemmy hates Ubuntu. Every other argument like “oh no Ubuntu is too closely tied to Canonical’s objectives” or “Oh no, Ubuntu is too opinionated and will change tradition in other to appease newcomers” could be applied to a million other distros, but you won’t see people complaining about them.
Not a remake or remaster or rerelease of something old, but something inspired or influenced by something either popular or a cult classic. Also this could extend to hardware/tech too, not only media.
Great multi-player class- and objective-focused team shooters with great movement, respawn wave timer and reviving and healing. ET was very popular and has always been free. (etlegacy.com) Dirty Bomb is free to play and found only moderate success, had IMO bad monetization attempts, and was ultimately put into passive mode not being developed or maintained further, with monetization removed.
W:ET as a moddable quake game had a vibrant modding, server hosting, esport, and community scene.
Just staring a loading screen essentially, most games will let you click around on the menu still and look at your skins or your settings or whatever. TF2 lets you queue mid match to find another game so you can play on a community server while you wait, and overwatch does let you do warmup DM last I remember (which was years ago so it might have changed). Can't really think of anything else another game does off the top of my head.
I think the problem is I’m a Lemmy.world account. I don’t see nothing, I see a page saying “community can’t be found”.
I know Lemmy.world was defederated from sh.itjustworks at one point, but they’ve refederated so I should be able to see it. But it’s got to be something related to the different servers talking.
Yeah it’s one of the thing I liked about Reddit. This everything goes mentality.
I think the problem is that many lemmy servers are based in Germany and despite their open reputation they do have some sub-communities that are very regimental and strict due to their calvinist heritage. We have the same stuff in Holland unfortunately. Some people are super open, but other communities are extremely strict and religious.
The way they deal with it is different though. Germans try to pave over these differences by blocking anything anyone could find offensive. I think this is what promts these blocks. In Holland we just don’t care and are more belligerent against the more conservative groups. Which I like.
In the last couple of months I have noticed an increasing trend of supplying me search results that are completely unrelated to the current query and tie back to my location or previous searches. I can say this with a high degree of certainty this is without a doubt beyond the 100th instance this has happened....
Looks like you are using Firefox. Use arkenfox sure, but cut Mozilla off it’s 115 server network it uses to track you via FF by using a host deny list, FOSS git clone harden-firefox. You’ll have to disable to update ublock origin or remove the extensions line, but it’s better to just cut the adverts and tracking by removing it from the networks than by browser interception (slower, loss of performance, still hits your computer). Links included to do that in that repo.
Alternative browers are Librewolf and Qutebrowser. When you really don’t want to be tracked for some things use Lynx.
A great search engine replacement is Grasp. It’s being funded by Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator and although you only get 100 free searches a months, it can come in very handy. The search results it gives you, unlike Kagi which is just a reformat of DuckDuckgo yet with AI, it’s results are completely different than any other engine and imo, on point, surely for anything technical.
My general search engine is an envs.net free hosting of Searx. envs.net is a free Linux shell community with many services like blogs, email, matrix hosting, etc etc. If you do end up using their German Searx as main search donate to them, I did.
Yes, many communities have these kinds of fuck ups. In the best case scenarios you have a new community half the size and with its attention split. The newcomers still get split between the schism after it happened. The result is multiple weaker communities.
And it take a really monumental fuck up to even get this low level of user action.
Look at reddit, the admins fucked over absolutely everyone and they’ve made it clear they’re only starting. Look how hard it is to get people to come over.
While on the other hand, if most users go to /c/books and by default they see every /c/books on every federated server, then the problem is sidestepped entirely.
No single mod team can get a stranglehold on a community.
Each user gets to choose, by applying or subscribing to a blacklist/while of users or servers. Or they can raw dog it with the click of a button.
But if most users who go to /c/books end up on the “one big /c/books instance” then every other /c/books community except the biggest one, will be a desert that is not worth your time to post to.
My point is, if you are going to be dealing with it anyway, why would you participate in the social network that is order of magnitudes smaller? You can access content on reddit without an account, the problem is participating alongside the community.
For all intents and purposes, since you are still locked out on lemmy from doing because of its server-centric communities regardless of which instance you choose, it boils down to the same outcome for the same desired goal - creating an alt - except with an order of magnitudes smaller reward - far less population and engagement than on reddit.
So rather than sticking to lemmy, it seems natural that people go back to their old but bigger platforms.
Federated is great for maintaining persistence of your account beyond the whims of fickle admins, but that’s a tertiary problem. No one is that exited about keeping their user history, they are excited about participating with everyone else about the topic that is being discussed.
It’s not worthless, but I can understand it explaining some of the decreasing population numbers if they encounter it even just once after months of participating on the platform because of how disruptive it is. No one is normally going to stick around a community when only the fraction of the local users in your own lemmy instance can view it.
Exclude communities
Hello,...
Joplin got an in-app drawing feature (on Android) (feddit.de)
Many of you probably know Joplin (the FOSS Markdown note-taking app)…...
How would you explain Lemmy/Kbin to a Reddit person or to a social media person? (kbin.social)
Trying to "recruit" more folks in Kbin but I think I lack enough information to describe Kbin effectively....
Well looks like a Lemmy comment is making the rounds on Mastodon! (nerdica.net) en-gb
nerdica.net/photos/masimatutu/…...
What setting do you use for Lemmy for active posts?
Currently I’m trying to decide if I want to use “Top - 12 hours” or “Active”. Which setting do you think is the best one for reading the comments?
OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 released – OpenMandriva (www.openmandriva.org)
OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, the long-awaited release of the independent, community controlled distribution’s fixed point release branch (as opposed to its rolling release branch), has been released....
Who went "full fedi" yet?
Bit of a simple question: Some people on lemmy are still posting stuff from youtube, xitter and the like....
"Help me choose my first distro" and other questions for beginners
You’re about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you’re overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)...
Can lemmy users see when they're mentioned in a microblog post from kbin? (kbin.social)
I'm trying to contact a user on lemmy, but can't dm them (it's not clear to me if this is a bug or if dms don't work across instances or software, but either way it's not working). My next workaround would be to ping them in a microblog post, but lemmy doesn't have a microblog section. Would a lemmy user receive a notification...
Forgive me, but… (lemmy.ml)
It’s my hope to see unity and cohesion is the Lemmy-verse. Looks like [email protected] has over 39k subscribers....
Why are people censoring "bad" words?
Whats the point of writing prn, f@ck, sht or anything like that instead of the actual words? You can still read them, its not like they are gone if you replace a letter or two.
I didn’t plan this far ahead (lemmy.world)
This is annoying. Comm names aren't unique and the user doesn't know which one they're posting to. (lemmy.ml)
Ubuntu Linux Squeezes ~20% More Performance Than Windows 11 On New AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Review (www.phoronix.com)
Not that this is a surprise to some of us.
What are some things you would like to see a sort of spiritual successor to?
Not a remake or remaster or rerelease of something old, but something inspired or influenced by something either popular or a cult classic. Also this could extend to hardware/tech too, not only media.
'Segregating high skill players from the population at large, forcing long wait times on them, is a form of discrimination': former Halo multiplayer lead on the 'failure' of SBMM in modern games (www.pcgamer.com)
What are your favorite non-tech communities?
F#€k $pez (lemmy.ml)
Time to ditch #duckduckgo (lemmy.world)
In the last couple of months I have noticed an increasing trend of supplying me search results that are completely unrelated to the current query and tie back to my location or previous searches. I can say this with a high degree of certainty this is without a doubt beyond the 100th instance this has happened....
Why? Are we not doing enough? (file.coffee)
by fedidb.org