I'm resuming my work on Fediverser, and I need as much help as I can get to build the Recommended community map. This crowdsourced data will be one the key points for instance admins that want to make use of the Fediverser services, and it will help immensely for people who want to migrate away from Reddit.

How does it work? The front-page gives you a list of all the subreddits with its corresponding recommendations of Lemmy communities. The ones that have no recommendation go to the top of the page. One example. You can open the page for that subreddit entry and make all the suggestions that you think are appropriate.

Every suggestion goes into a queue which I can then review and merge to the main database.

One of the things that I will be adding soon is the ability to request a community to be created. For subreddits which there is no equivalent community, people will be able to fill a form (similar to the "Create Community" page on Lemmy's default client) which will check what is the best participating instance in the network, and if the instance admins approve, the instance can be created right away.

How can you help?

• Categorize the subreddits that have no entry.
• Reaching out to the mods of the uncategorized subreddits
• Creating community requests for the ones that are still missing.

Thank you!

Hello,

As everybody knows, content discovery on Lemmy can sometimes be a bit tricky.

To help smaller communities to get more activity, I launch this thread for people to promote the communities they are active one.

One important criteria: please only promote communities that have been at least one post in the last 7 days. And if there is none, feel free to post there and then promote it here!

This could be a weekly thread, but let's see how it goes

Finally, !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca are communities that you can subscribe to to see updates about communities

Ok, so one of the bigger problems I see on Lemmy is the fact that I subscribe to dozens of different communities, but my feed is always the same. News news news technology technology technology.

What if I want something lighthearted? What if I DON'T want to see certain topics???

Maybe I'm at work, and a big sports game is going on. I don't want spoilers, so now I can't look at Lemmy.

Or what if Nintendo hosts a Nintendo Direct before I get a chance to see it? Welp. Can't look at Lemmy.

But......what if I could? What if my main feed was exactly what it is now. But what if I had user created catagories? I could make one called "News". Now if I want to see the news, I can include that catagory in my home feed. Or I can exclude it from my home feed. I could switch over to the news catagory, and then every community that I've designated under the news catagory that I've created will show ONLY those communities home feed.

Or maybe I want to see only video game related stuff.

Or maybe I only want to see sports stuff.

I could even create user created tabs. I could name the first one "Happy" and it could include light hearted catagories. Things like /c/aww and /c/humor

I could have a tab called "Serious" and it could be all news, and updates on the world.

I could have a tab called "Nerdy" and it could be all technology and video game related stuff.

Or I could have my main home tab, where I choose which communities/catagories do and don't appear.

And you could do the same concept in Mastadon with followed users. If you follow some users who only post about pro-wrestling, and you don't want to see that? Uncheck your pro-wrestling catagory from your home feed tab. Have a seperate tab just for pro-wrestling.

I'm sure you could implement this with other fediverse services. I just haven't used many to give examples of how they would work, if I don't know how the core platforms themselves work.

I'm trying to learn more about the protocol, and after years of being around in the fediverse there's obviously areas where the protocol could improve. I was reading some of the fep documents and there are really good proposals. How long for these to be part of the protocol? Last update was 2018.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10823519

> So I wrote a little web app that allows a user to move their user data, like settings and subscribed/banned communities, from one account/instance to another. > > It runs completely client-side, but is hosted on GitHub for the moment. Maybe it'll be of some use!

Features:

• Don't trust me or GitHub? Clone the project and host it yourself or run it locally (Example in Wiki)
• Export user data from any Lemmy instance (>=v0.19)
• Download user data as a text file
• Modify user data, e.g. to add or remove followed users/communites (Example in Wiki)
  • "display_name" ​
  • "bio" ​
  • "avatar" ​
  • "banner" ​
  • "matrix_id" ​
  • "bot_account" ​
  • "settings" ​
  • "followed_communities" ​
  • "saved_posts" ​
  • "saved_comments" ​
  • "blocked_communities" ​
  • "blocked_users" ​
  • "blocked_instances"
• Transfer user data to the target account on the target instance

Don't shoot the messenger!

I think this is the most important (WIP) Fediverse Enhancement Proposal of this year for the #ActivityPub protocol:

FEP-7952: Roadmap for Actor and Object Portability — by @by_caballero@mastodon.social and @dmitri@social.coop

It ties a lot of elementary building blocks for #nomadicidentity neatly together, most succinctly summed up by one particularly magic feature:

Bring-your-own Actor ID! 🪪💫

> Actor profiles can now be hosted separately from the instance (including as a static JSON object on a personal website), which in turn enables service providers to offer their users a “BYO (Bring Your Own) domain name” feature.

That’s really all I ever needed from the notion of a ‘single-user instance’. All I want to manage on my own is my identity; I don’t want to take on the full burden of managing a whole AP server.

In this paradigm, someone’s tiny personal website could also be their Actor-ID Provider, and nothing more. That ID could in turn be used to as a (reasonably nomadic) account on any FEP-7952 compatible instance.

From @by_caballero@mastodon.social:

> the idea is to detach the Actor object (which could be operated by a microserver that consumes almost zero resources, and basically just operates a big redirect table like a link-shortener) from the Service Provider, to be a little more like > email (in the use case where you point a domain that you own and configure at protonmail or mailgun or some other provider) > or SMS service (in that regulation enables you to keep your number when you switch phone co’s). > > We will prototype the micro-Actor in the coming months, but we have no idea how long it would take for implementations like WordPress or forks of Mastodon/Misskey/Pleroma to offer support for this kind of externalized/self-managed Actor. We are hoping existing servers will find it interesting to offer a “service-provider mode” for the nomadic/domain-owning user class, for many reasons. In the meantime, we might also prototype a Fedify-powered server that only allows external Actors to create accounts.

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/112684879834557152

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/18019157

> > Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away (this one, in fact), a few internet rebels decided that they were tired of the corporate overlords controlling their online lives. Thus, the fediverse was born — an attempt to wrest control of microblogging services, such as Twitter and its ilk, away from centralized powers and into the hands of the people.

As you may have noticed, the crawler at https://lemmyverse.net isn't picking up anything from instances on versions 0.19.4 or 0.19.5.

The Issue itself is easily fixed, and there's already a PR for it from lemm.ee's admin, but there's been no response from the lemmyverse developer.

Does anyway have any other ways of contacting him? If this continues (I realise 2 weeks isn't that long), is anyone interested in forking the code and hosting it on a new domain?

Thanks.

No conflict of interest, I only saw the poject via Mastodon.

From the website:

> Fediverse, Mastodon, and beyond

> Gorgeous album pages

> Audio streaming

> Tour dates and tickets

> Music discovery? Online sales? Analytics? There's a lot more in store as the community grows.

Do you think Threads (Meta's Product) will add such a feature that allowed anyone to migrate their account to their own server? I have no belief that they'll do, but I can only hope, as I love that feature on Fediverse platforms (mastodon comes to mind).

I know that it's still not perfect as I've read on some Mastodon thread by a few users saying it doesn't migrate a lot of your stuff (posts included), but hopefully threads could help improve this for us Fedi users.

Again, feel free to downvote this because of the Threads TM relation in the title. I know you guys (and gals) hate Meta, me too. :)

You can now create shields.io subscriber badges for Mbin!

Example: !Mbin

You've been able to do this on Lemmy for ages. It should also work on kbin as long as it has been updated enough to include the API.

I first joined Lemmy back during the big Reddit exodus of last year. I like many others wanted an alternative to Reddit, and I thought that this might've been the one. I made two accounts, one on lemmy.world and another on sh.itjust.works, in the June of last year that I used on and off for about 4 months.

At first Lemmy was exciting because it was so active. There were so many new users who were enthusiastic about turning this platform into a genuine alternative. There was a communal effort to create and interact with content, and for awhile it worked. Lemmy was truly interesting during the summer of last year. However, this stream of dedicated users started to slowly decline.

A lot of people hoped that if they were active, they would attract and retain more users to this place to the point where the community would foster interest specific communities like Reddit, but that never happened. After a few months, a lot of users lost interest and went back to Reddit where the userbase is so massive that there is an active community for just about anything.

With this reverse exodus back to Reddit, Lemmy ended up with the same groups that were active on it before hand: political extremists, tech nerds, privacy enthusiasts, and shitposters. To be fair, all these groups are larger now than they were a year ago, but that's all this platform has to offer. If you're into any of these things and primarly these things then Lemmy can be a good alternative to Reddit, but for the general masses? Lemmy is just not good.

For example, a NBA post on the NBA subreddit can get you thousands of interactions in a couple of hours. An NBA post on here will maybe get you a dozen over the course of a couple of days. The only content that will gain any traction here are tech news, political propaganda, and maybe some memes. I don't see this changing any time soon. Even if Reddit implodes, I still think Lemmy will remain a niche platform. I think this evident by the fact that this platform hasn't really progressed in a year.

I posted a few months ago asking if there would be any desire for such a social platform, on which I had a lot of wonderful feedback from you guys. So I thought I'd write this post to let anyone that's interested know that it is being built, and you're welcome to lend a hand!

This weeks' news:

• More updates by Ghost on their work on implementing #ActivityPub
• Statistics shared by Mastodon show the power of an open API, and the incredible diverse ecosystem that it enables
• NLnet supports fediverse event planning software Gancio with a new grant

I have an account on Spectra but it seems I cannot access a lot of videos on other instances. What’s the best one that I can see videos from across instances. Thanks!

Link: https://catodon.social/notes/9ustyq83zlhoc519

Stats: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/versions

https://toast.ooo/post/3740832

Hello, Hatsu is a self-hosted Fediverse bridge for static websites.

I recently released version 0.2 with the following features:

Improved RSS compatibility

RSS compatibility was terrible at 0.1.x due to some bugs - should now work with most valid Atom / RSS feeds.

Receive likes & reposts

Hatsu now receives likes and retweets for local posts and outputs them via a mastodon-compatible API.

New comment component

KKna is a new comment component (also written by me) that has Hatsu preset that automatically infer URL.

You can check the integration instructions in the documentation:

https://hatsu.cli.rs/users/backfeed-based-on-kkna.html

(It's still unstable)

Nix Package

Are you using NixOS / Nix? I am, so I packaged it into NUR and Nixpkgs.

There is no documentation on this at the moment, I will update it later.

After a year online the free speech-focused instance 'Burggit' is shutting down. Among other motivations, the admins point to grievances with the Lemmy software as one of the main reasons for shutting down the instance. In a first post asking about migrating to Sharkey, one of the admins states:

> This Lemmy instance is much harder to maintain due to the fact that I can’t tell what images get uploaded here, which means anyone can use this as a free image host for illegal shit, and the fact that there’s no user list that I can easily see. Moderation tools are nonexistent on here. It also eats up storage like crazy due to the fact that it rapidly caches images from scraped URLs and the few remaining instances that we still federate with. The software is downright frustrating to work with, and It feels less rewarding overall putting effort into this instance because it feels like we’re so isolated.

A few weeks later, in the post announcing that Burggit was shutting down, another admin says the same:

> The amount of hoops that burger has to go to in order to bring you this site is ridiculous. To give you an idea of how bad this software is, there’s no easy way to check all the images uploaded to the site (such as through private messages). When the obvious concern of potential illegal imagery is brought up to lemmy devs, they shrug and say to plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery. That response genuinely has me thinking that this is by design, and they want it to be like this. We can’t even easily look at the list of registered users without looking through the DB, absolute insanity.

> The other thing is there’s no real way to manage storage properly in Lemmy, the storage caches every image ever uploaded to any instance forever.

> Also the software is constantly breaking.

They also say that Kbin has many of the same problems, so I'm just curious to know if the admins of bigger Lemmy & Kbin instances feel the same way about these software.

Not yet on F-droid, but looks pretty cool.

Link to a list of mbin instances: https://fedidb.org/software/mbin

Ideas for building a federated Roblox alternative

The requests (RedLib links):

https://farside.link/redlib/r/fediverse/comments/143j1j8/is_there_a_3d_metaverse_of_the_fediverse/

https://farside.link/redlib/r/opensourcegames/comments/rdub3p/comment/ho43ld1 (link to comment)

Fediverse games in general

The discussion:

https://lemmy.ml/post/87083

The requests (RedLib links):

https://farside.link/redlib/r/fediverse/comments/iad25v/any_good_federated_gaming_platforms/

https://farside.link/redlib/r/gamedev/comments/12e7fum/game_on_fediverse/

The rejected Minetest suggestion:

https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/7993

A blog

https://kevinhoffman.blog/post/fediverse_gaming/

publicado de forma cruzada desde: https://piefed.jeena.net/post/7038

> TLDR: The main reason was Lemmy hogging server resources. > > Last year, during the Reddit 2023 API controversy I finally deleted my account and moved on to Lemmy. Here’s a look at my experiences and why I eventually decided to switch to PieFed.

This week's news:

• Scraper drama as AI-powered network Maven works on implementing #ActivityPub
• Ghost will use fediverse server framework Fedify for their ActivityPub implementation
• @Castopod releases version 2.0 with plugins
• an on-device 'For You' algorithmic feed for Lemmy with 3rd party client Quiblr
• Lemmy releases local-only communities

Link to their post: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/5ZiPe34m

Link to the stats

• https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
• https://kbin.fediverse.observer/dailystats
• https://mbin.fediverse.observer/dailystats

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11571975

> Fork it! It's time for a Mastodon hard fork

I'm wondering if you have any favorite fediverse resources for dog owners? Breed questions, training techniques, product recommendations, etc.

I think that would make a great community if there isn't one already. I've only run across #dogsofmastodon so far, but that is really more for just pictures I think.

Sorry if this seems like a silly question but I have noticed over the last few months my feed(?) has started to act odd.

No matter what I do I don't see any posts from .world. I checked and mander does not seem to block .world (kinda why I liked this instance) and even weirder is how my feed gets filled with mostly .ml posts with almost no activity no matter how I sort.

This did not happen before and got me thinking, I don't even know how this works across federated instances.

Does anyone know:

• How does the sorting work on an instance? Is it all the same no matter what instance it is?

• Did anything change in the last few months, that would cause all .world (and I assume others) posts to not show?

• Other then changing instances what can I do to mitigate the weird slanted results?

• Main post: https://toast.ooo/post/3740832
• Community: !canvas@toast.ooo

July 12th, 2024 @ midnight EDT

https://canvas.fediverse.events

✨ this year’s event also supports the entire fediverse not just Lemmy!

(you have to be able to make/receive text posts, like mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed, etc) (peertube accounts will not work)

you can get update announcements on other fedi platforms with @canvas@fediverse.events link

chat about Canvas on Matrix or Discord (they’re bridged)

Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.

Hello, I'd like to build a mobile client for mastodon, lemmy and pixelfed that would be video/image focused with a scrolling ui similar to tiktok or the reddit video viewer.

You would have a sortable/filterable feed with contents from different activitypub networks and would see it full page with a like/voting button on the right and the comments under.

Does anyone know if such a client already exists, and if not, could any dev share starter point links for building such an app ?

I was browsing the fediverse explorer and did not find lemmy.ml in the instances list.

Ok, so here's a situation I ran into, and thought of a solution for, but I'm not a programmer, so I don't know if this is possible.

I live in Cleveland. Last I checked, we have a population of 300,00ish people. Might be closer to 350,000. Not the point.

As it stands, in general I'd say roughly 10% of general society uses reddit. Using rough numbers, that would mean 30,000ish people. I just checked, and /r/Cleveland has 151,000 subscribers, but only 58 users on the site at the moment I checked. That tells me there's a lot of people subscribed to /r/Cleveland who no longer live in Cleveland.

I refuse to believe that of roughly 300,000 people, half are on /r/Cleveland. Especially if only 58 are online. So, maybe a lot of bots.

That being said Lemmy has probably less than 1% of society. And Cleveland has a finite number of potential users.

So when I look for the Cleveland sublemmy, I find three of them. Two I could join right away, the third is still pending because it seems the mod is the only user, and he hasn't been active in months.

Point is, this city, even if there was only one Cleveland sub would still have a very small userbase. Now we're dividing it among multiple communities all serving the same purpose. There's only so much that happens in Cleveland. The majority of the reddit posts are "where should I eat? What should I do when I visit? Why do you guys have billboards of just eyes?"

There is NOT a lot going on here. And if we split these users up multiple times, you'll have what we have now. Multiple dead communities, with a split userbase. So logically the first idea is "Well you only need one Cleveland community. The other one should close." But that flies against the very foundation of what this place is built on.

So how do you integrate both communities userbases as one, without merging the subs? And that's when it hit me.

Groups.

User groups, and sub groups. Lets start with sub groups.

So lets say I'm the head of Cleveland@instance1 and Fred runs Cleveland@instance2. We both see the userbase problem. So I send Fred a message, and ask if he wants to group up. He says yes. Now we're grouped up. So what does that mean? It means that Joe, a Cleveland resident, could subscribe to Cleveland@instance2. It would then have some checkboxes that say "group Cleveland@instance1 and Cleveland@instance2?"

And for every checkbox you leave ticked, you'll group those subs together. If you don't want to group them, uncheck the boxes of the ones you don't want to group.

So now Joe is subscribed to Cleveland@instance2. But because he's grouped my Cleveland@instance one, everytime he posts, the comments and the up/downvotes for his comment will now be grouped together. So when he makes that post on Cleveland@instance2 it will show up on Cleveland@instance1 too. Anything in that post is technically being posted to Cleveland@instance2

So if you ARE subscribed to Cleveland@instance1 but NOT subscribed to Cleveland@instance2, then you wouldn't even see the post in Cleveland@instance1. You're only seeing it, and able to interact with it from Cleveland@instance1 because they're both officially grouped, and you agreed to the grouping on your end when you subscribed.

You could, in theory reject the grouping when you subscribe, and then subscribe to the second one seperately. Which would keep everything seperate and as it is now. I don't know who would want to do that, but it would be possible.

Now, for the user groups.

Pretty much the same concept, but on an individual basis. So, lets say I subscribe to videogames@instance and I also subscribe to gamers@instance. Those communities have NOT grouped for whatever reason, so YOU group them for yourself.

So now when you post, you'll post once, and it will post your new post once in videogames@instance and once in gamers@instance.

So now you posted two seperate posts, but because you grouped them on an individual basis, you'll see all the upvotes and replies in one post in your inbox on your end. In reality there are two seperate posts, but your interaction with it feels as one.

For instance, this one (link to a post to !memes@reddthat.com): https://reddthat.com/post/20260613

Pasting it in your search bar should give you this kind of results:

!

You can then click on it to access the post from your instance (in this example, lemmy.zip: https://lemmy.zip/post/16918691)

One thing I miss from Twitter that Mastodon has only partially is to be able to search through the network for some keywords, like breaking news, events, and so on, so I can see other people takes on that.

So I made a small project that aims to fill this gap.

I've seen some previous attempts that made many people upset, I hope this time nobody will take their forks and pitches to burn me as it's:

• calling mastodon instances public local timelines via their API
• takes only posts that are made by accounts that OPT-IN to being indexed (there's noindex flag that I honor)
• keeps the posts in database for a short time (currently one hour) to avoid abuse and also to lower costs of running it

It gives me a lot of fun and for me it's quite useful, so I guess someone might find it useful as well.

Also, it's open source, but GPL license so it stays FOSS forever.

Happy to take any feedback, also happy to add some instances that are not yet being listened to. It turns out opt-in people are not that many so adding even large instances doesn't make my server belly up.

Instances: https://github.com/Kukei-eu/kukei-masto/blob/main/server/instances.js