Interesting. Funnily enough, my comments are coming through to Lemmy as ‘Undermined’ too (just a PieFed bug, easily fixed), so the fact that you saw it (as well as the comments by the others I mentioned) means it’s not a language thing. That’s good, in a way, because it should be physically impossible to actually de-select it.

So, sorry - at least we can rule one thing out, but I don’t have any more suggestions.

That community only accepts posts in ‘undermined’ language, so if you aren’t seeing anything from there, but you can when you log out (to simulate everyone else’s view of it), then it’s probably a user setting that prevents you from seeing stuff from that language. If you go to the ‘collapse’ community and posts by ‘Midnight’ are missing, then it’ll be that (similarly there’s a comment here from ‘originallucifer’ - if you haven’t seen it, it’s 'cos of the language thing).

Maybe, but image posts drive more engagement than text ones. You can see on !lowqualityfacts@lemmy.zip that the text posts, which are no worse LQFs than any other ones IMO, score noticeably lower.

I like sites / Lemmy frontends that provide some kind of ‘teaser’ for text posts (they also show a bit of the post’s body in the main feed), meaning you can often see both the feed line and the punchline for a post without going into it (it works well for ‘dad jokes’ for example). But the default frontend - lemmy-ui - doesn’t do that, so it hobbles the potential of text posts.

Last time that happened to me, it was because the ‘name’ I was using was too long (I removed some characters and it worked). There isn’t the same limitation for the ‘display name’ field though.

It is happening. If you look for news of, e.g. “Arnold Schwarzenegger endorses Harris”, most outlets just say ‘X’.

In my results, The Guardian, the BBC, The Independent, Fortune, MSNBC, The Washington Post and The Hill just used ‘X’. Politico said ‘on social media’. Only Forbes did the ‘formerly Twitter’ thing.

There used to be one - https://lemmings.world/u/communitylinkfixer

It looks like it was de-activated 3 months ago.

If you make a new one, please consider limiting it to just this community (and maybe communitypromo), and to not translating a link if the OP has also already provided a ! one, and to not translating links inside code blocks.

Drive-by bots can seem easy to make, but the problem is that they can be a bit too easy, and then end up as yet another annoying one.

Well, there’s the The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities, which suggests:

Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

So whatever number you’re looking for, it’s 1% of that. Not that subscriber count means much, especially for older communities that have 10’s of thousands of subscribers who aren’t even using the platform any more.

That comment chain demonstrates a real appeal of Reddit. Even for something like a post-episode TV discussion, a critical mass of people means that not only can you have the discussion in the first place, but there might be some extra info from someone who worked on the set, or attended an audience taping.

You can click to see the rest of the comments to see plenty wrong with Reddit too, but it’s not like there’s any particular drive to prevent the elements of Reddit culture that I find annoying from coming to Lemmy too.

I’d be surprised if there’s ever a critical mass of people on a federated app though. If there is, it’s more likely to be on something with the proper funding, that hides the details from regular users (e.g
it’ll be BlueSky, not Mastodon). On Reddit, Lemmy has a reputation for being too complicated, for the mundane reason that is. Too much stuff that should happen doesn’t, and the answer to why are the stuff that ‘normies’ don’t want to hear (LW and PD instances are both a bit unstable atm), or they’re so unintuitive that that they’ll need answering forever (e.g everything around discussion languages, instance blocks, newly-discovered communities , etc etc).

I’ve just seen a user accidentally submit the same post to the same community multiple times (the worst I’ve seen is 4 times). Preventing that is some real ‘web dev 101’ shit. Federated apps can be an interesting hobby for inexperienced devs (like me), and mildly diverting for anyone who wants to use them as a user, but a critical mass of users?! Forget about it.

Nope. Just tried on moist.catsweat.com and it says “Please select an item in the list” for the “Select Magazine” box if you try to post something and leave that empty.

I’m assuming that this is about your earlier post that ended up in LW’s technology community. Microblog posts like that seem to be more intended for whoever is following you as a user. If MBIN insists that you also have to choose a ‘sub’ then I think it’d be best to put it in whatever it considers a dumping ground (ideally something that doesn’t federate out), so the ‘random’ magazine sounds about right to me.

There are instances like https://soccer.forum
https://nba.space
https://nfl.community

The communities aren’t super-active because the idea is that they’re remote-only, but that means they don’t get the benefit that comes from local users browsing their local feed.

Here’s a community node for mastodon

Should this be a link to something?

Most frontends already display available crossposts so you’re not wasting anything more than grabbing all the comment sections as well.

We’re talking about different things. I’m talking about the view you get when you first open an app - the ‘home’ screen that lists the posts. The API response for api/v3/post/list doesn’t indicate whether something has been crossposted. You can see for yourself by getting a list of the 2 oldest posts on lemmy.ml:

curl --request GET --url 'https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/post/list?type_=Local&sort=Old&page=1&limit=2' --header 'accept: application/json' | jq .

For those 2 posts, you can only find out if they have crossposts by individually querying each post using the api/v3/post endpoint - the first one in that list would be:

curl --request GET --url 'https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/post?id=2' --header 'accept: application/json' | jq .

where crossposts would be in the ‘cross_posts’ array.

So for an app to display whether a posts listed on the main feed have crossposts, they’d have to query post/list, and then for each entry, query /post as well. This isn’t the way these things typically work - there’s normally a 1-to-1 relationship between an API query, and displaying the results of that query on the page. Looping through the list you’ve been given, and making extra queries adds complexity and delay, when the expectation from the user is that this list should appear pretty quickly.

What you’re talking about, is the view once a user has clicked on a post, not the post list. This provides the crossposts info. It’s important to realise though, that the cross_posts array provides everything an app could want to display info about the other posts. It’s not like they are pulling the data for one post, and then pulling data for each listed crosspost, so if they were to start getting the comments for each crosspost, that would be an extra effort (and a potential waste).

I don’t agree at all. There’s space for complex frontends which attempt to adjust the feed according to their own logic, as well as minimalistic frontends which follow the backend’s design explicitly.

My counter to that, would be that if you aren’t using the API in the way the developers expected, your app has ceased to be frontend, and is instead its own program that’s scraping data from it. There are already some heavy desktop-orientated frontends, and none of them do what you’re proposing. I think that the reason why, is because the proper way to do it is for the Lemmy’s backend to be changed to provide the information they need in one go. That’s unlikely to happen, but that doesn’t mean that hacking away at an improper solution is necessarily the right answer (you just end up supporting a project that isn’t supporting you in return).

No reason that I can see. Your instance is sending stuff out, LW is getting stuff in, you’re not banned on LW (as far as I can see), LW and feddit.org are likely in the same part of the world (so no fed delays). There’s been times when LW has received a post and federated it out, but not shown it itself, but that’s not the case either.

I don’t know. It might be worth asking on LW’s matrix channel, to see if an admin will look into it.

Frontends generate the main feed by querying api/v3/post/list. This doesn’t provide any crosspost info - for that you have to go into the post itself by querying api/v3/post. As such, frontends would have to do a fair bit of extra work to wrangle the required information for a main feed that combined crossposts. The only attempt I’ve seen at doing this was in a dev branch of Tesseract.

I’d argue that you have a problem as soon as you start saying ‘frontends need to do some extra work’ - it breaks the dynamic between backends and frontends. Backends should be big, complicated things, worked on by people familiar with the project, to provide all the logic, whereas frontends should be light, relatively easy to write, runnable on devices with limited resources, and mostly focused on how the information provided to them should be displayed. They should store the user’s preferences, and login details, and that’s it - everything else should come from the backend.

As for combining comments, this can lead to fraught situations. This link was posted to both ‘cars’ and ‘fuckcars’. This link was posted to both ‘taylorswift’ and whatever-the-fuck ‘barelower4thwomenmusic’ is: so the comments for a music video would be from Taylor Swift fans, as well as from people with a foot fetish. Moreover, if this is the expected behaviour, trolls can use it to get up to no good, and make a bunch of comments appear in a new crosspost to a community subscribed to by people guaranteed to disagree with them.

I think anyone trying to ‘fix’ this issue will run into the fact that certain assumptions have been made in a software’s design, and those assumptions determine how database relationships are formed. The real answer may lie in something like ‘ClubsAll’, rather than an attempt to fundamentally redesign existing platforms.

In the meantime, crossposting is being actively encouraged. Movie news is posted to 5 different communities, open-source news is posted to 8, Taylor Swift music videos are posted to 12. The useful crossposts (one that help you discover a new community) are in the minority - most of it just ends up being annoying. And it’s because there this idea, that some time in the future, there’ll be a tech solution to make it less annoying, and the suggestion that maybe you should just pick the community you like and post to that, is - to me - surprisingly unpopular. Not only might this solution never come, but anything URL-based can’t do anything about the same question being posed to ‘nostupidquestions’ and both ‘asklemmys’, or with an image being uploaded and posted to one community, and then re-uploaded to post to another.

This whole thing feels like trying to find a tech solution to what I see as a user problem of mindless posting to as many communities as you can find. To be honest, it’s a problem that makes me a bit disillusioned (I saw a post the other day that was posted to both ‘interestingasfuck’ and ‘mildlyinteresting’, and thought - if that’s the community names we’re going with, and this behaviour is apparently okay, then we may as well be on Reddit).

This feels like something that would be scriptable using Lemmy’s API - see https://lemmy.readme.io to view and demo the endpoints.

Neat. It took me a while to realise what was going on: the post on Lemmy and the blogpost are two separate entities. The Lemmy post is a link to the blogpost, and the blogpost uses the post_id to fetch the comments (so I guess this means you have to make the blogpost, make the Lemmy post, and then go back and edit the blogpost with the correct id?)

The script is inspectable on the blog - I can see it does:
const url = 'https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/comment/listpost_id=21617067&limit=100&max_depth=8&sort=Top&type_=All';

So I suppose there’s an inbuilt limit for comment depth and number of replies, but if you start down the road of working on that, you’ll eventually find that you’ve re-invented a front-end, and there’s no end to it.

What the duckquill guys are doing is a bit fudgy, in that they’re getting another website to do the federation legwork for them, but the results are pleasing enough.

There’s a lot of drama in that Issue, and then, at the very end:

Thanks for sharing your concerns here. We have been progressing use of our SDK in more use cases for our clients. However, our goal is to make sure that the SDK is used in a way that maintains GPL compatibility.

the SDK and the client are two separate programs
code for each program is in separate repositories
the fact that the two programs communicate using standard protocols does not mean they are one program for purposes of GPLv3

Being able to build the app as you are trying to do here is an issue we plan to resolve and is merely a bug.

To my mind, the ideal would be that if you, as the person who wants to share some ‘open-source’ news, chose one community that you think is ‘best’ (based on what instance it’s on, if the mods are real people and are active, participation levels, whatever you think really). And we, as subscribers, would do the same. This way, the ‘good’ communities would thrive, and the ‘bad’ ones would wither away. What happens at the minute, is that there’s 8 communities for open source, and there’ll always will be, because they aren’t in competition with one another.

(this is mostly just a general point about cross-posting behaviour, it’s not meant as a dig at you personally).

I dread to think how many books GRRM’s former assistants have smashed out in the time it’s taken him not to write one.

Anyway:

James S.A. Corey’s hit sci-fi series The Expanse was set in our own solar system, and leaned heavily into the politics of various human factions vying for dominance while an alien threat looms at the edges of awareness. Yes, the protomolecule was dangerous and mysterious and shook up the status quo, but at the end of the day it was always the humans and their decisions which drove the story forward. By contrast, The Captive’s War feels more like Mass Effect, the sort of space opera which features a wide array of aliens where you never know what you’ll see on the next page.

As a big fan of Mass Effect, this book sounds something I’d like to read.