I see talk here and there about how any company or individual can easily use anything we post on Lemmy however they want. This could include AI training, behavior analysis, or user profiling. With the recent news of Reddit data being sold and licensed for AI training, I thought this would be a great time to preemptively discuss how we feel about this topic and brainstorm ways to discourage unwanted use of the content we post.

I’ve seen some users add a license to the end of each of their comments. One idea might be this: Add a feature to Lemmy where each user can choose a content license that applies to everything they post. For example, one user might choose to no rights for their content (like CC0) because they don’t care how their data is used. Another user might not want companies profiting off their posts, so they’d choose a more restrictive license.

I’m eager to here everyone’s thoughts on the whole topic, so to kick things off:

1. Do you care how your public data and posted content is used? Why or why not?
2. What do you think of choosing a content license for your Lemmy account? Does this contradict the FOSS model?
3. Should Lemmy have features to protect user data/content in this way, or should that be left up to the user to figure out on their own?

Data is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity in the digital world. Hopefully these big-picture conversations can help us see what we value as a community and be more prepared for the future.

The RFC PR is here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs/pull/6

Reposting RFC contents below:

• Feature Name: report-inboxes
• Start Date: 2024-02-20
• RFC PR: LemmyNet/rfcs#0000
• Lemmy Issue: LemmyNet/lemmy#0000

Summary

Rather than combining all reports into a single report inbox, we should allow users to select whether they are reporting to mods or admins, and we should split reports into different inboxes based on that selection.

Motivation

The current approach has some shortcomings:

• Users are not currently able to bypass mods and report directly to admins - this may allow mods to conceal instance rule breaking in specific communities
• Admins are not aware of community rules, so they may wish to take no action for most community rule breaking reports. However, if an admin resolves such a report, the relevant community mods most likely never see it.
• Different instances may have different rules, but somebody resolving a report on one instance will resolve it for other instances as well, thus potentially resulting in missed reports.
• Mods might take local action on a report and mark it as resolved even in cases where a user should be banned from the entire instance. In this case, admins are very unlikely to see the report.

Guide-level explanation

When creating reports, users will be able to select if it's a mod report, or an admin report (or both)

Note: labels on the sreenshot are illustrative, actual labels can be more user-friendy. Maybe something like:

• Breaks community rules (report sent to moderators)
• Breaks instance rules (report sent to admins)

Instead of the current single report inbox, there will be three different kinds of inboxes

• Admin reports - show all reports sent to admins (only visible to admins)
• Mod reports - show all reports sent to mods for any communities the user moderates (visible to admins in case they are explicit mods in any communities)
  • This is equivalent to the report view that mods currently have in Lemmy already
• All reports - Shows a view of all (admin and mod) reports, only visible to admins
  • This is akin to the current 0.19.3 admin report view, and would allow admins to still keep an eye on mod actions on their instance if they wish

The UI wouldn't need to change for mods, but for admins, there would be a new selection at the top of the reports page (the "mod reports" tab would only be visible if the admin is also a mod in any community):

Resolving reports should be more granular

• Reports in the "admin reports" tab can only be manually resolved for admins of the local instance
  • To reduce overhead, banning the reported user on the user's home instance + removing reported content should automatically resolve reports for remote admins as well.
• Reports in the "mod reports" tab should be manually resolved by relevant mods (including admins, if they are explicit mods in the relevant community).
  • To reduce overhead, admins banning the reported user on the community instance OR the user's home instance + removing reported content should automatically resolve reports for mods as well
• Admins could still resolve reports in the "all reports" tab
  • If it's not an admin report, and not a mod report from a community the admin explicitly moderates, then there should be an additional warning/confirmation when resolving a report here. This is to prevent cases of admins accidentally preventing mods from moderating according to their own community rules.

To further clarify automatic resolution of reports: in any case where there is no further action possible, the report should be automatically resolved.

Mods should be able to escalate reports to admins

This would generate a corresponding report in the admin inbox.

Reference-level explanation

• In the UI, changes are needed for both reporting as well as the reports inbox views
• In the database and API, we should split reports by intended audience
• Federation needs to be changed as well in order to allow distinguishing the report target audience

Drawbacks

It might make reporting slightly more confusing for end users - the mod/admin distinction might not be fully clear to all.

Rationale and alternatives

Alternatively, we could make reporting even more granular. It would be possible to allow users to select only a specific instances admins as the intended report audience, for example. However, I think this has several downsides:

• Makes the report UI even more confusing
• Potentially takes away valuable information from other admins (imagine a user only reports CSAM to their own instances admins, while leaving the offending post authors home admins in the dark)

Prior art

Most other social networks allow users to select whether they are reporting a violation of community rules, or site rules as whole.

Unresolved questions

Does ActivityPub properly support splitting up reports like this?

Future possibilities

In the future, it might be a nice addition to have some automation to always escalate to admins, even if they're submitted as mod reports, based on report keywords. For example, "CSAM", "Spam", etc.

Hi I made a Lemmy account specifically to save posts for future view.

To support the OPs, I opted to like instead of saving them as doing both is not ideal as I don't like to save every post, only some important ones.

But to my surprise, there is no way of viewing posts you liked/upvoted. Only saved posts appear in your profile.

This is in stark contrast to Reddit and even Mastodon which show both. I wonder if such a feature is in the pipeline or some way which exists to view them.

The best alternative is to just have lists support in Saved Posts like Instagram or Pinterest has.

Can any third party Lemmy clients do this? To be clear- I'd like to view posts I upvoted retrospectively and not from now on or something.

This is not a new request. I made this post to ask for things other requesters have not mentioned such as third party clients and comparision to Mastodon and Pinterest.

Also see these posts-

1. https://lemmy.world/post/1565886
2. https://lemmy.world/post/1440987
3. https://lemmy.tedomum.net/post/82667
4. https://lemmy.world/post/1624113

I think this is something Lemmy should also consider. Open registration is an invitation to abuse an instance as a spam vector.

From https://fediverse.observer/stats

Which seems to not at all come close to representing what you might actually see on Lemmy, not that Lemmy is tiny either.

Has there been any attempt to measure the total active Lemmy userbase? This would depend on the definition of Active but any working definition would be more useful than counting account creation. Something like "posted at least once this quarter".

Hey I just joined Feddit it would be nice to meet someone and that’s all I got to say you can come to talk to me if you want

@[email protected]

byee

And also how do you make a account on Lemmy.ml I try and application never get approved

We seem to be getting attacked. Different accounts from different instances are posting to random places on various instances in short succession.

Hi folks, I wanted to feedback on my recent update to 0.19.3.

Since I host many services, I'm using docker for deployment, more precisely https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html.

Since I dont use ansible (yet), I had to replace most of the content of the compose file to make it work. So far this has been successful.

But updating atm is a great gamble which I'm not a fan of. Other services do this way better, especially when hosted in docker. I can even let them run in latest-mode and nothing ever breaks. Granted, they're far more mature than lemmy but I'd like to see a normal admin being able to host this so lemmy can grow.

My pain points are:

• I would like to have the option to just use docker without manually putting together the compose file when not using ansible
• pictrs breaks on every update since my server icon is a png and it for some reason says the picture is broken although I can upload and view it after. I need to delete the reference in my postgres database manually to get everything working again
• I analyze the compose files every time I update to see if any changes need to be added to my version. This time, I stumbled across the lemmy container hostname. This didnt break the whole thing but sorting by anything didnt work anymore, neither did using voyager. Commenting out the hostname made everything work again.

The point I'm trying to make here is that we should have a working docker compose file for every update. Pros can still change everything they like. If there is a reason that we must use ansible please state the reason clearly in the documentation. I'm fine with doing so if there is a compelling reason.

Also, I use docker for years in production now and I would like to help if this is needed. Let me know if you're interested.

Have a good one.

TL;DR:
Posting and voting is important, but with Active sort being the default across many instances, commenting is just as if not more important in helping surface various posts.

Although the instance I'm posting from hasn't updated yet, I've taken a look through other instances of the new sort options, and I think they're nice additions.

However, in doing so, and bouncing between different sorting options, I've noticed something pretty obvious but nonetheless worth recognizing imo. Since the default sort across many instances is Active, commenting feels like it has as much importance, if not maybe more, than voting alone.

You can find a number of posts here & there expressing some frustration at the state of content across Lemmy instances, and to a degree it's not unfounded; yet what's also helping surface much of the content exasperating others, and keeping it at the top, is much of the commenting to each of those posts. At least, under the Active sort setting, as that's basically its intended purpose (that is, to display posts with active conversations, not uh...surface stuff exhausting to some people).

I realize we can get around this individually by changing the default for ourselves (I personally tend to keep mine set to New), but I think it's worth considering from the outside looking in what kinds of posts we're surfacing and keeping at the top with our conversations. Posting a bunch of varied stuff is one thing, but if you see a post that catches your interest, it might be worth not just upvoting and moving on, but adding a comment here and there to try and help others see it.

Well, so long as the Active sort setting remains the standard across instances anyway.

By now I imagine many may take this as a given already, but I thought it worth noting considering some of the frustrated posts, and that I haven't really seen as much talk about the importance of commenting in relation to surfacing content under Active sort. That's part of why I keep my sort set to New and try to chip in comments to different posts without comments in different communities that catch my interest, even if they've already seen several votes.

TL;DR:
Posting and voting is important, but with Active sort being the default across many instances, commenting is just as if not more important in helping surface various posts.

So I recently doomscrolled imaginarystarships, and saved a few posts I liked. When I wanted to revisit those I discovered that saved posts are sorted by when they were originally posted, not when I saved them, causing some of the older images I saved to be very far down the list. This is very annoying to deal with if you (like me) sometimes go on a saving spree regarding a specific topic and would like those saves to be logically grouped together.

I would like to introduce you to the tool I have developed in last 2 days.

As you know, when you create a new community on Lemmy, it is initially only available to your instance until users in other instances follows too. To fix this, this tool automatically follows the community from remote instances.

I have previously published a similar but simpler version at boost.lemy.lol and now I remade it because I didn't like some of its features. This time, instance admins will be able to strictly choose which instances they will allow or not. I'm open to your suggestions about different settings.

Please ask your instance admin to add their instance to this tool. To add it as an admin, all you have to do is log in and activate it from the settings.

https://lemmy-federate.com

Here's some tasks I'll implement in the future: https://github.com/ismailkarsli/lemmy-federate/issues

cross-posted from: https://baraza.africa/post/1144422

The first commit was on Feb 14 2019. Amazing what @[email protected] and the team have managed to build, attracting a great community along.

My replies via Mastodon to Lemmy posts don't get distributed as expected. For example:

• Original post: https://lemmy.ml/post/11552444
• A reply via Lemmy: https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852
• My reply to that: https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860

It seems my reply only shows in these Lemmy servers:

• lemmy.ml (the server of the group to which the post was made)
• lemmy.world (the server of the post's author)
• ttrpg.network (the server of the comment's author)

From some other lemmy servers, my comment is not present:

• lemmy.sdf.org: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/8124910
• lemmy.one: https://lemmy.one/comment/6912806
• aussie.zone: https://aussie.zone/comment/6414209

I expected that my reply would show on any other Lemmy server with subscriptions to [email protected]. Does that make sense? I'm hoping to help troubleshoot federation like this as I'm super excited about ActivityPub and what it means for the internet! :)

Post stuff about TikTok

Hello.

I'm extremely tired, so it very well could be that this is extremely simple and I'm just not getting it. However, what I would like to know is how to open a post from a community on one instance on another instance.

For example, here's a recent post from [email protected]. I know that to open that community in the instance lemmy.blahaj.zone, I would merely type into the address bar

lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/[email protected]

However, how would I open that particular post in that community on the latter instance? Is it even possible?

Cheers.

P.S.

I did do some searching on both this community as well as the Reddit Lemmy FAQ page but I didn't find anything. However, I could've missed something. If it's something obvious, I apologize in advance.

Edit: Assuming I understand what people are saying, well, evidently, it seems to be a current limitation of the ActivityPub protocol. Perhaps that will change one day. Hopefully soon. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Seen some conversations recently about taking a general discussion thread here onto discord/matrix for "real time chat".

It then struck me, as someone who's been on lemmy since before the Reddit API migration ... that lemmy used to be more "real time" than it is now with the front-end receiving updates over websockets.

Coupled with the "chat" sort for comments (which is buggy I think), you could turn any post into a live chat.

Obviously you wouldn't want too many of these as they burden the backend. But it could be a nice feature, using mostly old lemmy tech (?), to allow selected posts to become "live chats".

It would probably make sense to add time limits for how long this can be on for, and maybe to add limits for how many posts per community ... all configurable by admins. But also it could make mega-threads and free-form discussions much more dynamic and attractive here.

EDIT:

There could be both user-specific and post-specific modes for this too.

Any particular user could be able to turn on chat mode for them, so that comments are flattened and updates happen automatically, but just for them. Limiting this in someway on a user based would make sense.

Then a particular post could be put into "chat mode", such that everybody who opens the post does so in "chat mode" automatically, unless they opt out. Again, limitations on how many posts and for long they stay in "chat mode" make sense here.

As suggested in a previous post here (see https://lemmy.ml/post/11232276) I've created a community for learning rust and lemmy.

Please come and join in: [email protected]

Before spreading the word outside of this community, I figure I'll let those interested from here join first and start a conversation about how the place should work (on which you'll find a meta thread in the community).

Tagging those who expressed interest:

@[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] .

Do you think it works okay, at least so far as local/federated communities go? What are some adjustments you might like to see to it?

Personally, I still find the dropdown/search combination somewhat unintuitive and at times it can feel clunky, although it has definitely improved. I sort of think a regular search bar to filter through communities/posters might be better, with a separate dropdown beneath or next to the bar, so one knows one can directly search by community/username, but I can see why it was done the way it was to a degree.

EDIT: Since posting, I've started such a community: https://lemmy.ml/c/learningrustandlemmy, [email protected]. Please come and join in.

The idea comes from the discussion that occurred over the new lemmy-clone or alternative, SubLinks and how its main feature is that its tech stack is different from lemmy's which should enable all of the developers who don't know rust to contribute.

One of the core lemmy devs (dessalines I believe) said responded to these general sentiments by saying something to the effect of rust being a good technical choice and that learning rust in order to contribute would be a good expenditure of time (as tech people need to learn new things all the time anyway).

Soooo ... for those interested ... how about we all learn together rust through learning about ActivityPub and Lemmy's codebase and solving problems and making contributions? We could have a community dedicated to asking questions, sharing solutions or ideas and generally discussing all things we're learning about rust, activitypub, fediverse and lemmy? If an actual community can be built around the desire to learn rust and give back to lemmy with all us newbs working together as much as posslbe ... that would have to be a win right?

Even better if those who know more about the topic could use the community as a chance to post or write up what they know for us to learn from. For instance, I've glanced at lemmy's code base (without knowing rust of course) and I feel like it could do with an architecture birds-eye perspective on how the code base works.

Obviously chatting on matrix might be a good place for this, especially as devs and admins are chatting there already ... but I feel like the structure of lemmy might be a better place for a sort of reading club.

Any thoughts or takers? I feel like creating the community on lemmy.ml would make sense, maybe having one of the core devs as a mod too?

Before I begin, I have to say that this post includes links to an instance, ani.social, that has been defederated from this instance, lemmy.ml, because that's where I discovered this problem.

But in this case, I hope the admins understand that this is worth reporting and investigating, and don't insta-delete this post, because this problem appears to happen with more than that one instance, including sopuli.xyz, which is not defederated from here at lemmy.ml

Let us begin:

With Lemmy account setting “Auto Expand Media” turned on, when I’m viewing community https://ani.social/c/[email protected] on my desktop browser, Firefox on Windows, one particular post, https://ani.social/post/1923262 , causes the /c view to ask me to download an .mp4 video from streamable.com:

After declining the download, the space where the thumbnail for the expanded media goes is just blank.

This doesn’t happen when viewing the same /c on .ml https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected]

On .ml, I just get a clickable thumbnail of the video.

It’s just that one post.

On other earlier and later posts of links to streamable.com videos in the same /c, I just get the expected clickable thumbnail.

Maybe some kind of corrupted data as that particular post was transferring over?

When I asked about this on ani.social's meta /c, another user reported the auto-download request on ani.social, sopuli.xyz (the /c's home!) but not on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world

We had a random post in an anarchist community on our Polish speaking instance. Some 45 English speaking accounts came out of nowhere to downvote it, with a single one engaging in discussion. None of them were ever active on the instance, nor particularly in this community. Seems they just followed every crosspost.
Mods could not really do anything about it, so the accounts were banned from the entire instance by admins, as this was considered hostile behaviour against our community.
Which rises the question; should people be able to vote, end specially downvote, in communities they are not a part of? Maybe this could be at least a setting?

Another interesting concept that came from the discussion over that was "constructive downvote" - requirement of commenting why one downvotes a post.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11244755

Link here --> https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation

Feel free to give it a spin, all major browsers are supported (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge). Feel free to leave any suggestions on github https://github.com/vmavromatis/Lemmy-keyboard-navigation/issues

Hope you like it!

Last time I tried I was locked out because the instance I was on reset cookies on the same day