Fedigrow

We've been working on these for some time, and with the recent uptick in signups, we tried to finish up the first few pages so that new users could use them.

You can find them all on fedecan.ca under Guides & Resources. For those that are not familiar, this is the website for the non-profit (Fedecan) that manages lemmy.ca.

We're planning to gather some feedback on the technical Fediverse communities first, before sharing the guides more broadly, in order to catch any issues early.

If you want to add to them, feel free to reach out, and we can help you coordinate if someone else is also working on it.

The new sections:

• What is the Fediverse?
• Getting started with Lemmy
• How does Lemmy work (in detail)
• How to find communities on Lemmy
• Mobile Apps for Lemmy
• Lemmy Alternative UIs

Sections that are incomplete and relevant to new users. We have some work in progress for these, and hope to have them out soon:

• Lemmy Privacy and Security
• How to open something in my instance
• How do I block a user, community, or instance

A previously written section that didn't get posted about yet (thank you to Rooki):

• https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/markdown

Future plans include

• Guides for Moderators
  • Set up a new community (best practices for name, sidebar, image, banner, and getting it federated outwards)
  • Moderation Best Practices
• Guides for Admins
  • Information on our infrastructure and setup

https://piefed.social/

Context: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37413606/16581555

Kind of a companion thread to the recent one on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com asking people which community there were missing.

I had a quick look, and most of those seem to be niches that can't be filled until we reach a higher population.

There is still maybe some potential improvement about some less well-known community that other people are interested in and that could some additional activity.

I try to help to make less known communities known with the regular threads on !newcommunities@lemmy.world (now moving to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca ), but there is probably only a level of detail we have to stop at with 47k monthly active users.

One example is !jrpg@lemmy.zip, it seems reasonable active, and is probably a better compromise than having each game having its own community.

Similar with !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works, or !showsandmovies@lemm.ee. I posted a thread about Ted Lasso a few days ago, it got some nice comments, but probably not enough to have a full fledged dedicated community.

!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Hello everyone,

Here is a new community to discuss how to promote the Fediverse to other places.

Its objective is quite different from !fedigrow@lemm.ee, and I am planning to post regularly about Reddit threads mentioning Lemmy and this kind of stuff, which is probably not relevant for !fedigrow.

A few people are tired of hearing about Reddit all day long (which is completely understandable), and that why two separate communities are probably better.

See you there for people who are interested in promoting the Fediverse!

Alongside the various !city/province/state communities I know some have been working to get going, and given the trend of posts lately, I came across a few broader focus communities for civilian activity that may be worth a look.

!organize@lemmy.world
!movement@lemmy.world
!protest@lemmy.world

Another more recent community that brought this to mind was for local organizing:
!act_local@lemm.ee

Whether one wants to contribute to the first few or use them as a model to make their own communities elsewhere is neither here nor there to me, but I think the basic ideas may be solid. Having distributed communities for sharing organizing resources and helping direct people to existing groups to join and coordinate with would be of great use.

Is this allowed? Feel like id be avoiding some rules by doing this on Reddit. I've always loved offtopic comment sections, people seem to lock them as they get interesting.

cross-posted from !reddit@lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/post/25130981

Warning: Elon Musk now has Huffman bending the knee. Whitepeopletwitter, iselondeadyet and loads of other Elon critical subs have been banned or suspended.

Just a warning, Reddit is no longer a safe place for free speech, it is compromised.

Any time Reddit makes a misstep, some fraction of the users will look for alternatives. Can we bring them to the fediverse? Are there coordinated actions we could take?

Okay, there's a frustrating backstory that I won't bore y'all with, but in this case, my Lemmy-mates have suggested that I should share image-content more slowly, rather than do roundups like this.

To explain: I personally hate withholding content when I have a load of some resource to share. I feel like a fraud, an a-hole, a userer, and all that stuff...

Yet I've been told repeatedly that it's better to just (in my words, 'act like a drone') drip the content, and yes, it's not hard to see the logistical point, but... bah.

I guess, end of the day, I always like to include something interesting about my posts, and it would be harder to do that via the "drip" posting method, which... pretty much circles back to why I post the way I do, which is to aim for roundups.

Bah... Baa-Ram-Ewe!

Edit: I've gone and done it. This won't be a common occurrence but I think it is necessary for some users. Hopefully this won't bite me in the ass lmao. Thanks for helping everyone!

Hey everyone. On privacy I generally recognize a lot of people, most are good. But occasionally I encounter someone who I've seen say horrible shit. This is about one:

Mainly they've said some incredibly racist shit, including about my race >:(. Of course I'd ban them, but they said all of this outside the community. I feel it's odd to ban people I don't like for their behavior outside the community.

I've gone pretty lax modding, only banning if you said really shitty stuff only on my community. But I don't want to build a community filled with these types of people.

I also don't want the community to have a bad reputation of banning people I don't like but this guys a known racist.

I'm feeling very conflicted, can anyone help?

PS: the things he said was about Arabs being murderers and rapists. And some racism to Slavs too

I am working on rebuilding one of my communities. Originally it was a small fanfiction thing but as I have another fan related domain I decided to make this one a Dark Fiction site and community.

Thing is that Dark Fiction can get... Dark.

So while I am working on the ideas and which software to use for community, I need to figure out what is allowed for rules and discussion.

Obviously moderation would need to be far more lax than say Mastodon.art or anything from Europe. You can't start banning everyone who talks about dark topics if they follow that topic to its darker logical conclusion.

Obviously Harrassment, KYS statements, Actual Racism, and a few other things should be banned. But discussion of how a racists bigoted character might address something shouldn't be.

I live in the US so 1st Amendment is pretty open ended.

Figured I would put this out to discuss cause it is such a disconnect between what most people would generally expect from an instance due to the subject matter.

For those of us here for awhile, there's a good chance we've adjusted our settings and built up blocklists that distance us from new people's experience of these sites, so we gotta remember and work the Defaults.

One example of this is the sorting method. Most Lemmy instances stay with the default Active sort, which means the posts that many are seeing are those being voted on a bunch and receiving comments.

What this means for those trying to build communities is partly what one may already have thought of, make posts that inspire discussion, but another part that one may fumble, which is to reply to whatever comments that may appear.

This may be a little part to why some communities struggle to get others involved. Posts may be getting upvoted, but without any comments they may not be as widely seen or gain as much traction as they otherwise could with the way Active sort works.

Interestingly Mbin and Piefed appear to default to Hot for their sorting method, which if it's like Lemmy's Hot sort, may be a little more helpful in surfacing some communities' posts.

That's just one example though, what other Default details do you try to keep in mind as you try to get communities going?

Tl,dr: use a local account for moderation.

Hello everyone,

Just a quick reminder on the moderated federation topic: due to some bugs on Lemmy, reports won't federate to mod accounts on other instances (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4744). Even if they do (it works sometimes), closing them from a remote instance won't federate back to the instance where the community is located, staying in the admins' reports backlog.

From personal experience, some other actions like appoint another mod, pin/unpin threads do not work either.

While this stays an issue, please use local accounts to moderate.

That's all, see you around.

Hello everyone,

Following this post, it seems that quite a few users can't see catbox.moe pictures.

Catbox was my preferred option as they have a handy Firefox extension that allows to upload pictures with just a click, and get the link directly in the clipboard.

My understanding was also that by having the pictures on catbox, we avoided storing copies of pictures on every Lemmy instance. Is this still the case? I read a bit about proxying pictures (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4035) and it seems like this is more related to keep all media required by an instance locally, to avoid broken links.

So long story short: what should be the recommended way to share pictures on Lemmy?

1. Use a hoster like https://imgbb.com/
2. Upload pictures locally

I was trying to explain federated websites to a friend and she asked if there is a federated dating app. She recently went through a break up and the apps are dreadful as I'm sure many of you know.

It'd be hard to launch a dating system on the fediverse because it the type of service that relies heavily on network effects. People want to be on the dating app with the most people. However, I think there is an opportunity because the mainstream apps are so notoriously awful, monetized, and enshitified.

It could be a community within an existing network or it could be its own website. I don't know, I'm just putting the idea out there.

Hi all. So I made:

!usa@ponder.cat

The thinking is that there isn't a good home for non-political US news on Lemmy. There are three obvious communities, but one is on lemmy.world, one is defederated from lemmy.world, and one is on an instance that I find just slightly off-putting.

My questions are two:

• Is this useful? I assume I'm not the only one who feels like this is needed.
• How do people feel about a news+politics community, versus a strictly non-political news community? There are plenty of good places for US politics. I could go either way, but personally I tend to like the news+politics combination, and I think a lot of the big news in the US for the next few years is going to be political.

Let me know your thoughts, have a good weekend.

Edit: !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com is now under active moderation!

Follow of this previous thread: https://lemm.ee/post/34088759

At the time we thought that !privacy@lemmy.ca could be it, but after thinking about it again I always feel like having generalist communities on a country-based instance seems counterintuitive. What if at some point Canadians want to discuss specific privacy laws or measures? Also other people tend to think that this community is for Canadians only.

As I guess the main objective is to offer an alternative to !privacy@lemmy.ml , there are basically two options

1. Use !privacy@lemmy.world , but that's another community on LW
2. Create an alternative community on a generalist instance like lemmy.zip

About !privacyguides@lemmy.one , the instance still seems unmanaged (https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/we-re-giving-lemmy-a-try-welcome-to-privacyguides-lemmy-one-x-post/12734/7). There was a mod action 22 days ago, so I guess it's still somehow moderated. Trust level still seems low due to the non communication of the admin on !meta@lemmy.one

You can do this with /api/v3/community/hide, or in the database by setting community.hidden. Unfortunately this is not available from lemmy-ui yet.

From a comment by nutomic: https://lemmy.ml/comment/16090216

Context: https://lemmy.ca/comment/13891923

Not sure if that feature was known to everyone, so sharing this as its own post.

Communities in Lemmy/Mbin are not federated by default. So when you create a new community, it will only be available to your instance. At least 1 person from all other instances must follow it in order to make it available. This tool does that. It follows your community from all remote instances until at least 1 other person follows it.

Hello everyone,

Thinking about this as the on-boarding experience on Lemmy can be subpar, especially because new joiners have to

• find a list of communities they could like (something like this post https://feddit.org/post/6554534, but should be there as a default)
• browse All and stumble upon all the news, political and tech that we know (https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&sort=TopDay)

In order to avoid this, what would you think of having a "new joiners" instance, where

• hexbear, lemmygrad and ml would be defederated
• politics and news communities would be blocked at the instance level

That could help to onboard people, so that the first time they look around, they see more gardening, cute comics and casual conversation rather than another set of depressing memes.

Disclaimer: politics and societal issues are important and should be discussed extensively (they are quite popular on Lemmy, let's be honest). I'm not advocating to hide them all, just to not show them as the first content people potentially interested in Lemmy would see.

If a niche community has people that persistently downvote every post

1. is that healthy for the community?
2. is that healthy for lemmy in general?

Examples that come to mind are political communities, linus tech tips, diet communities, etc. There will be a group of people who will not make comments, posts, but will strictly downvote everything that is in the community.

This is a continuation of a discussion @Blaze@feddit.org and I started elsewhere, but it deserves it's own space for meta-moderation discussion.