Community Approval!

Basically, an instance option that requires a new community to be approved by an admin when created, in the same way that a new user account would.

As far as I'm aware, currently there is no notification that a new community has been created and unless people are watching the local community list regularly, it's easy for them to slip by unnoticed. This allows scummy people to create a dodgy community, post a bunch of garbage to it and use it to attract more scummy people or start inter-instance drama.

Not sure where the settings actually live, so I can't say whether this is backend or frontend, but I have been thinking that nsfw post handling could be improved.

Specifically, I've been thinking about (and actually been considering implementing) some new per-user settings:

• Don't show nsfw posts from other instances in the "all" feed.
• Don't show nsfw posts in the "local" or "all" feed at all.
• Always show nsfw posts from communities the user is subscribed to, regardless of the above two options.

Should cut down on any drama caused by someone registering on a random instance and subbing to gfur. :P

EDIT: Looking at the replies, it looks like a simple site wide toggle a-la Furaffinity might be easier to implement and more egonomic.

So, I don't disagree with the decision to fork (especially because of the hardcoded donation URL). I am concerned about fracturing of the codebase, so I have a few questions:

• Will this fork always be a sequence of commits based on some Lemmy version, or do you expect history to diverge (git rebase vs merge)?
• Will there be an effort to upstream useful changes into Lemmy proper (a lot of the changes suggested are things that might be desirable for Lemmy in general).
• There's a number of other communities with a desire to use a forked Lemmy version, do you intend this fork to be useful for them, or is this purely for pawb.social?

And perhaps most importantly:

• Will the name be changed from Lemmy to something else if there are significant changes.

For me personally, something fantasy related maybe with a nice magic system would be nice. Or maybe sci-fi, actually.

Anything other than "modern urban life, but with a slight difference" style stories. But really, I've not sat down and read anything for many years, so I'm still at the stage of (re-)discovering what sort of things I like.

It'd be interesting to see how much of Mastodon's source code they actually end up using for this, because that would significantly cut down on their ability to embrace extend extinguish. I think there's also rumours that Tumblr are looking into ActivityPub as well, which would also keep them in check.

IMO it's too early to really get upset about this, and I don't think "big company uses X" is sufficient reason to block them. But I'm not an instance admin or anything, so my thoughts are just rambling.

I'm honestly pleasantly surprised to see the growth of Lemmy. I joined like a week ago when the Reddit drama started, but didn't really expect it to take off. And to an extent it hasn't yet, there's certainly a lot of users and a lot of communities (especially on lemmy.world), but not a lot of content in most communities yet.

However, even if half the people that joined end up staying, that's enough to keep it "self sustaining" and keep conversations going on the bigger communities, which is what we want really. It's like Mastodon; even though the migration from Twitter was apparently a "failure", I recently got back into it, followed a hashtag and was surprised at the amount of quality content I got.

I still don't think that Lemmy'll keep growing at this rate for much longer though. The confusing nature of the platform and the lack of maturity of the tooling and apps will turn away a lot of non-techy users. I'd be pleasantly surprised if we managed to hit more than about 50k people. Instead, I think we'll see a "slow burn" over the coming months of Reddit slowly losing people due to their decisions or just fatigue, and they'll probably end up here.

At least, hopefully they'll end up here, rather than Tumblr, Telegram and Discord which aren't really the best platforms for Reddit like content, IMO.

Anyway, thanks to the mods, admins and developers! Having the platform you were working on suddenly grow this fast is really tough and not something I would wish on anyone. You are all doing great work, and we all appreciate it. <3

I don't really want to pile on more with the drama about the Lemmy devs but something has started to bother me, so I figured I might ask.

Are lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml owned/moderated by the same people?

The only evidence I've seen from this is feditips posting a claim that they are hosted from the same IP, which isn't actually accurate (maybe it was at one point, but not any more).

Middle click paste for me. I use Windows for gaming, and it's always felt embarrassing when I select something, and then have to go back to it later to copy it for realzies.

I've not been keeping up with Reddit, bit what is the general mood from users?

I remember seeing some threads announcing blackouts getting tons of comments saying that it won't help and the blackout should be longer. Not to mention the movement of people wanting to torch their comments.

Is there any truth to them saying that this is only a minority of angry power tripping mods? Like, this seems a very odd move for Reddit to make unless they were super out of touch.

Hello, I'm the guy that made that post. I was wanting to just make a short post explaining things, but it turned into an essay it seems. So, uh, enjoy.

Honestly, that edit was mostly just an emotional response. It's... Just so much drama, tbh. I just want the whole "Lemmyverse" to prosper or whatever, but it feels like everything is fracturing and falling apart. I feel like I shouldn't have to make multiple separate accounts on different servers (although that was the norm in the old forum days, and it might end up being a culture thing here).

Feels like there's going to be two separate "cliques" almost; those lucky enough to get into an invite/approval server, and those that couldn't/didn't. And each of those "cliques" will form their own communities and not really talk to each other. There'd be [email protected] and [email protected] or whatever, and they'd just never talk.

Compounding this is that defederation is implemented really badly. Like, super badly. I don't think anyone actually understands how it works and what implications it has for users. There's no interface for when things you post get blackholed. I only found out about it when I posted a comment, went to the original instance and thought it weird that the comment wasn't there.

If defederation like this continues, especially without standardized blocklists, we'd get into a situation where people would send messages and then them not be received by the other end. Communities would fracture into local "forks" which are only visible to a single instance. Even worse, it would not even be clear that this is happening, or how it works.

I do think @Crashdoom should have posted an announcement about defederating sh.itjust.works. Especially since it is one of the "OG" instances that were spun up at the start of the migration. Ideally with the motivations behind it and why lemmy.world (which has similar issues) was not defederated.

However, I want to make it clear that I don't disagree with their decision. I can see open signups being a problem, and... Honestly the fact that a thread that the troll made is still there (even though the user is banned) doesn't reflect well with how the admin's polices mesh well with other instances. I sympathize that this situation... Honestly sucks for everyone involved. There are a lot of arseholes online. Thanks to all the mods that largely keep them away from us.

The admin of sh.itjust.works made a thread about the defederation here as well, they seem pretty chill about wanting to work things out: https://sh.itjust.works/post/129725

Legitimately, I think all of this will cause people to leave Lemmy en-masse because it "doesn't work". Combined with the janky UI, federation being confusing in general, the political issues with lemmy.ml and lemmygrad dot ml (which I've not seen any evidence that they're owned by the same person, but eh), it doesn't look good for Lemmy. I was optimistic that maybe it might have had the momentum to be a serious competitor to Reddit but honestly... I don't think it's production ready yet. Maybe next time Reddit does something unpopular, if it still exists, but I think this migration is ultimately doomed to fall to this drama.

I get that Pawbs and Beehaw don't want to be a "new Reddit", and instead focus on high quality, heavily moderated communities (like /r/AskHistorians. Never used it, but from what I've heard it seems to be the vibe they are going for?), but I was hoping there'd be a world in which they could co-exist with the heavily focused communities which are being mass created on lemmy.world and friends.

Regarding "limited" access... I've been thinking about it, and I'm not really sure how it would work? Mastodon is a mostly one-on-one situation. You follow and interact with one person at a time, whereas with Lemmy you interact with a number of people at once. There's a number of technical issues that need answering here which I may go into in a follow up post, since I've rambled on enough already.

I intend to use my beehaw account to continue interacting with pawbs; you can't get away from me that easily!

Edit: Does editing a post cause it to be resent?

[[Our Market Research Shows That Players Like Really Long Card Names So We Made this Card to Have the Absolute Longest Card Name Ever Elemental]]

So cute! Really good job!

While I hope Lemmy/Kbin takes off (heck, I'd love early internet forums to come back in style) and kicks off a second internet renaissance, the imminent collapse of Reddit legit is giving me anxiety. Hope y'all don't mind if I vent a bit.

Firstly, there are a lot of "niche" communities on Reddit, mostly dedicated to individual games and the like. The kind of thing where fanart, announcements and discussions happen. In the short term, I don't see them surviving the collapse. And if they do, they'll probably move to a not-great platform like Discord or whatever Facebook comes out with.

Secondly, with SEO optimized AI generated garbage topping search results, Reddit has become an important reference when looking for reviews and opinions on things. As well as that, it has become somewhat of an archive of internet culture in a way. With subreddits moving to black out permanently and a push for users shredding their own data, there's a very real chance that all of this content will be lost forever.

Hello! I don't get involved in the community much (because shy), but I would consider myself as some kind of wolf.

Oh wow, that looks amazing. Well done!

For the third and fourth points, I think the comparison to email is apt here. If you do a GDPR data request/removal service on your email provider, it's unreasonable to expect that they chase down all the people you've sent emails to and ask them to delete them.

As far as I know, Lemmy doesn't send any data to other instances unless you explicitly request them to (by either subscribing to a community or sending a message/post).

(Also, I am not a lawyer or expert in GDPR, so don't take this as legal advice!)

Agreed, but I think the best way of doing that is to have an instance setting where NSFW subs/posts don't appear in the "All" list or similar. So people can (if they so choose) subscribe to these sorts of things from other instances, but it doesn't appear in public feeds.

I think one thing Lemmy is lacking is "Limited" federation a la Mastodon, where you can designate some servers (or communities?) as "limited", meaning that their messages don't apear in public feeds.

Of course, at the end of the day, instance admin makes the rules and if they don't like anything (NSFW or otherwise) they can just ban federating with it.

In addition to nobody really wanting to set one up for (non furry) smut, some instances don't allow you to subscribe to NSFW communities on any instance. I think lemmy.ml is one that doesn't allow it, but I'm not sure how you would check.

I think I sticked to only using Fire type when I played one of the recent games, if only because a lot of my favorite pokemon (Ninetales, Arcanine, Houndoom, Salazzle) were that type.

Getting the TM for Flamethrower late in the game was a massive power spike. Type coverage isn't really an issue as well, because of sunny day + solarbeam.

Thanks!

I think all of my art at the time did, not really sure why. I think I wasn't that happy about how I did shading, so I got in a bad habit of choosing low contrast colours to try and "hide" it. I do think if I did it nowadays, I'd try and be bolder with selecting colours.