pineapple

I occasionally eat one as a “meal replacement” when I can’t get normal food.

Came here to say the same. I would not eat a candy bar under normal circumstances, but I keep some Snickers handy just for the rare occasion when what I really need is a meal’s worth of calories that I can eat in under a minute, or carry with me and take up only a little space.

Simple question: Will you go back to Reddit and other centralized social media platforms, if Reddit step back from the API changes? The benefits of Reddit are obvisiouly, it has million of users and even small communitys have thousands of users.

Most likely yes, I’ll be sticking around. Something I very much appreciate about lemmy as an advantage over the big social media sites is that lemmy is set up such that you can be reasonably sure that there are many more human users than bots. On reddit you can mostly avoid the bots by sticking to the smaller subs, but I think lemmy may be able to grow larger than that and still avoid being overrun by propaganda and marketing bots due to the prevalence of manual approval for newly registered users.

I’m definitely hoping to see even more features that emphasize this advantage of lemmy. I’d like to try contributing some code for this myself, at a time when things feel more stable (i.e. no huge sweeping changes in the pipeline, like the HTTP client is now) and I can find some time for it.

For example…

One obvious improvement would be to add an invite system, where new user registration occurs via reputable users sending invite links to people they know.

And I envision a feature where one instance may mark some of the instances it federates with as low trust. Users on the instance would have the option not to see content posted by the low-trust instance’s users, or the option to have their content explicitly marked in the UI. This could be used, for one thing, to still federate with larger instances that are less stringent about disallowing bot accounts, but provide a means to view only content where there is a higher degree of confidence that it was posted by a human, or to at least clearly mark low-confidence content.

I currently have Kubuntu on my most-used Linux machine but, since a friend recommended it to me, I’ve been considering hopping to KDE Neon when I have some time to learn a new distro. (I’ve tried GNOME and I don’t really care for it, but KDE Plasma fits like a glove.) I’m not extremely experienced with desktop Linux, so I’d love to hear about others’ experiences with either distro and how they might compare.

The #1 thing missing is user notes. In my experience, being able to attach notes to users that are shared among moderators is essential, even for smaller teams or smaller communities.

As the number of things that need to be moderated grows larger, being able to maintain a list of pre-written removal messages will also help a lot.

And as lemmy continues to grow, it will be very important to have something that works like automod that can be configured on either a per-instance or a per-community level. Especially something that can do filtering and auto-reporting. There are a lot of cases where you don’t want to outright forbid a certain kind of content, but you do always want to bring human attention to it.

I am also partial to “lemmings”

i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances

For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.

Scrolling through the linked instances and noticed Lemmygrad was banned? Is it their politics or are they just annoying or smth.

The lemmy.ml instance federates with lemmygrad.ml, the collection of Marxist communities. It blocks lemmygrad.com, which currently redirects to the forum of choice for President Donald J. Trump. The latter does not seem to be hosted using lemmy and I think could not be federated with in any case? But presumably this was once the domain of a similarly-minded lemmy instance.

Some instances other than lemmy.ml do block lemmygrad.ml. Besides being a place for Marxist communities, the instance is also home to some very radical and very hostile users. I haven’t been around long enough to really know the situation for myself, but I have seen mentions of lemmygrad.ml communities engaging in brigading in the past.

It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?

User accounts can be independent of anyone else’s instance. You just have to host your own.

But it’s always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else’s instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn’t want to do that.

The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is…less practical than you might think.

The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user’s name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.

I do think there’s room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you’re registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.

My two most frequent listens are a combined playlist of the SimCity 3 and SimCity 4 soundtracks, and The Yes Album. If it’s not those, it’s almost certainly progressive rock of some kind. Nothing else comes close for productivity music for me.

Though really, these days I find myself working with a twitch stream in the background more often than with a playlist on.

You got yourself a new sub. Thank you for sharing!

Does the gmail SMTP server have a limit on how many emails can be sent per day?

I think it does, yes. The kinsta.com link says the limit is 500 per day. If you’re expecting a higher volume than that, or if the unpredictability of relying on a free Google service for anything is not acceptable, then you would probably want to pay for an inbox service.

But if you’re running a small instance and just need the occasional email to go through without a lot of effort or fees, then it ought to be fine.

In the meantime there’s nothing stopping community mods from making pinned posts or sidebar links or whatever (I assume)

Well… Hopefully in the near future the UX for linking to communities can be improved, since right now the way things work makes it a pretty crappy user experience for anyone on an instance that hasn’t synced that community yet.

Hah, that’s what…four rival gamedev communities now? At least 😄

No need to compete! I’m self-hosting my own instance in any case, so I thought I might as well make communities for things I’m interested in. I’ve also subbed to every other gamedev community I’ve come across so far…

It would be really neat if there were a lemmy feature to easily co-promote related communities, maybe even give users an easy way to see them all in one feed.

If email isn’t working, then you’ll have to turn off email verification in your instance’s settings before anyone is able to log in without encountering that spinner.

To get email to work, you’ll need to provide SMTP credentials in lemmy.hjson on the server you’re using to host lemmy. An example SMTP configuration is shown in the docs here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/configuration.html

You may also have to restart lemmy after you update the configuration, in order for it to take effect. (I do this on my server via docker-compose restart.)

When I set up lemmy on my server with lemmy-ansible, the config file was initially set up with a valid-looking SMTP config. But when emails weren’t working I looked more closely, and it turned out that there is something broken with the SMTP service that lemmy is integrated with by default. It seems that you will need to provide your own credentials.

I’m using an SMTP service provided by a web hosting service I pay for, but you can also use gmail in a pinch: https://kinsta.com/blog/gmail-smtp-server/

Hm, that’s surprising. I didn’t expect mobile Chrome to work like that when copying links. Try copying and pasting the link text instead, e.g. !news@lemmy.pineapplemachine.com? But be aware that it can take a moment for the sync to happen and anything to show up, as well.

If you access them like regular links you wont be able to sub to them since your account is in another instance.

That’s actually not true! If you format the links like this: /c/news@lemmy.pineapplemachine.com, like I did, then anyone who clicks on them will be brought to the community on the same instance they’re viewing the post from. (At least, assuming that the community has been searched for and synced on the instance already.)

How do I access these links in Chrome browser to subscribe?

If the communities haven’t synced to your instance yet, then you can prompt the instance to sync them by copying and pasting them into your instance’s search page. Unfortunately lemmy doesn’t do this automatically when you visit the URL, at least not yet.

Once the communities are synced, then you should be able to just click the links to visit them and subscribe from there.

Here’s some of the communities on lemmy.pineapplemachine.com. They’re pretty small and quiet at the moment, but maybe they’ll grow a little over time:

[email protected] - For software development
[email protected] - For game development
[email protected] - For compiler development
[email protected] - For video games
[email protected] - For Deep Rock Galactic
[email protected] - For Fortnight
[email protected] - For twitch.tv
[email protected] - For general tech stuff
[email protected] - For world news

The ones you have really got to watch out for are RTFM and PEBCAK. That’s when you know you have a problem.

God forbid you ever catch your child texting about RAII.