When I joined lemmy, I had to join a few different instances before I realized that:
Some instances didn't allow you to create new communities
Some instances were setup with an allowlist so that you couldn't subscribe/participate with communities on (most) other instances
Some instances disabled important features like downvotes
Some instances have profanity filters or don't allow NSFW content
I couldn't find an easy way to see how each instance was configured, so I used lemmy-stats-crawler and GitHub actions to discover all the Lemmy Instances, query their API, and dump the information into a data table for quick at-a-glance comparison.
I hope this helps others with a smooth migration to lemmy. Enjoy :)
@poVoq Information in both list is completly different. For instance, in the list in github almost all instances accept new users, what is not the case in the-federation.
You're awesome man! This is direly needed. I'm just wondering how on earth to publicize this before the madness that hits on Monday.
Any chance you could find a place to fit this in the join lemmy site and do a pull request before then? I know it's a lot to ask, but it would be huge.
I think it's better with less choices for beginners actually. I remember a lot of people didn't get started on mastadon because they were afraid to pick an instance.
It's almost so it would be good if this could just be a checkbox "pick a good instance for me" and it would pick a medium populated instance from the list.
I also recently just created my instance vlemmy.net, I dont mind anyone joining and creating their community's there. Dont really have any restrictions either. Would be nice to learn some new things from our internet friends
@maltfield So apparently I can interact with my Lemmy posts on my Mastodon account. Cool!
For anyone else trying to figure out how: I just took the URL of the Lemmy post (https://lemmy.ml/post/1168743) and pasted it into the Mastodon search field.
Because my instance (feddit.de) doesn‘t allow pornographic material. I guess that doesn‘t exclude all nsfw content. But the column header is called adult and it makes it seem like „adult content“ aka porn was allowed.
It doesn't say porn, it says adult. The legend describes how it's determined
Adult "Yes" means there's no profanity filters or blocking of NSFW content. "No" means that there are profanity filters or NSFW content is not allowed.
It would be nice for those elsewhere on the fediverse to know when an instance is aligned with or run by the same people as an existing mastodon or other kind of instance.
Pretty sure nothing conventional is exposed for that sort of information, but it could be useful in the future. Maybe a general description field that can contain that sort of information.
Great work! Can you include the instance description in this list also?
Also i would love to see country but that's doesn't seem to be included in the Lemmy app. I guess you could do a ip lookup on some service to see country if you really wanted to.
I think the description would be too long and clutter the table. I'd be down for descriptions on-hover, but I'd have to switch platforms (from GitHub markdown) for that afaik.
You can also get the country from this list. I don't know how they do it (maybe IP lookup)
If your API is read-only and you're blocking bot traffic from querying it, you're doing it wrong. Please be nice to the bots. And also users that use VPNs, privacy plugins, etc. You'll false-positive block them, and that's not very nice.
definitely agree. I don't control our host's policy but i will pass that along. some bot traffic is allowed- we were on the join-lemmy site two days ago and i have a bot running this very minute- i think they're still just trying to dial in the right balance between two much and not enough security
The new user registration doesn't map to the recommended setting of admin approval only. There have been massive spam account registrations waves in the past and if you can't monitor your instance 24/7 this is the only way to prevent having your instance blocked because of that.
By default users on an instance will be able to talk with communities/users on all other instances. This only changes if the instance admin puts hosts in the allowed list or disables federation.
If you add instances to the blocked list then users will be able to talk with all other instances, except those on the blocked list