Local Only Communities

Local communities are an interesting concept, though I am concerned about unintended side effects. I have noticed many times that people from other instances chime in to meta-communities to provide some alternative viewpoints and context when instances are discussing interactions with the rest of the network. I worry that some will become too isolated/sheltered. But I suppose, in the end, that’s ultimately up to the individual instances to decide.

Lemmy can now federate with Wordpress, Discourse and NodeBB.

Increased federation capabilities is always awesome to see!

In order to improve interoperability with Mastodon and other microblogging platforms, Lemmy now automatically includes a hashtag with new posts. The hashtag is based on the community name, so posts to /c/lemmy will automatically have the hashtag #lemmy. This makes Lemmy posts much easier to discover.

This is a clever solution. I think this is a good way to go about it.

RSS feeds now include post thumbnail and embedded images.Security

I really appreciate the continued attention given to keep RSS alive.

A security audit was recently performed on Lemmy.

Awesome! And congrats!

• Added Community local_subscribers count
• Support for custom post thumbnail
• Indicate to user when they are banned from community
• Added alt_text for image posts

Great features for improving the polish and user experience on Lemmy!

Would you mind pointing out examples of them boycotting the software? From what I saw in their comment history, it was mostly them talking about moving away from centralization on lemmy.ml.

That only exports settings (general account config, saved posts and comments, blocked users, communities, and instances, etc.). That won’t export all of the user’s own posts and comments.

You’re welcome 😊

There’s already an issue open for this.

extra work that serves no purpose whatsoever.

No purpose? I outlined the main rationale in my post, and this comment followed up with more detail.

Indeed! But, I think that it would be preferable for it to be handled officially.

It’s actually already mirrored to Codeberg

My mistake! I swear that I did check before I posted this! I must’ve improperly searched for it, or somehting, because I really don’t remember seeing it when I looked.

it seems the devs haven’t pushed the changes for a couple of months.

Indeed, that seems to be the case. I wonder why?

EDIT (2024-01-19T00:45):

I think that I found what I did “wrong”, initially: I searched for “Lemmy” under “Repositories” on Codeberg (which didn’t display the Lemmy repos), where I should’ve searched under “Organizations”. Personally, I feel that this is a bit of a UX issue on Codebergs end; the main search should be a fuzzy search with options to fliter afterwards.

If I understand correctly, if Peertube were to comply with this spec, then the owner of that peertube channel would show up as the moderator in the Lemmy community?

If they moderate from Peertube’s side, does that not federate then? What I’m wondering is why the Peertube account isn’t listed under the “mods:” section.

It does appear that downvotes have the effect of burying posts:

Score = Upvotes - Downvotes
Rank = ScaleFactor * log(Max(1, 3 + Score)) / (Time + 2)^Gravity

Perhaps this could be an argument for adding a more diverse set of voting options. For example, a service could have votes separated into emotional categories (e.g. voting with emojis similar to what facebook has). One could then tailor the algorithm to reduce the algorithmic weight of negative emotions (e.g. angry emojis), as, conjecturally, people are more likely to negatively vote on something than to positively vote on it.

Microblogs are different types of discussions from threads

That’s really just a matter of how information is displayed, is it not? Fundamentally, the architectures are pretty much identical – is this not the fundamental reason for why the fediverse exists?

Well ActivityPub isn’t 1:1 interoperable all the time

It will be interoperable up to the base spec (assuming, of course, that both services adhere to the base spec).

Like you’re not going to see the upvotes/downvotes of a Lemmy post when viewing from Mastodon.

If both Mastodon, and Lemmy adhere to the spec, then they can interoperate. If Lemmy’s upvotes are federated as ActivityPub like activities, and Mastodon intereperets like activities as favorites, then there should be no issue. Downvotes will certainly not federate as Mastodon doesn’t use them, and they don’t exist in the base spec.

What does interoperate is the post and comment content which is the important part

Likes federate as well. See Section 6.8 of the ActivityPub spec.

I think this is a non issue while we are small.

For sure, but I feel that it is better to think hard on an issue while one has the luxury of non-urgency.

They may want to like something, but not up vote it.

Isn’t that the point of the “Add activity” (Section 6.6 of the ActivityPub Documentation)? I think it is equivalent to a “Favorite” in Lemmy.

They may not even care about the voting system and not want to participate.

This point feels moot, to me.

Also on a technical level, it’d be messy to make the two compatible.

They already are compatible, though, aren’t they? That’s the whole point of the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon, of course, won’t accept downvotes since, afaik, that is an extension made to the protocol by Lemmy, but likes/favorites/upvotes should federate normally.

There are already Lemmy instances that don’t allow downvotes, like beehaw

TIL

i thought the protocol allows for all 3… upvotes, downvotes and ‘likes’

Do you have a source for that, by chance? From what I can see in the documentation for the ActivityPub protocol, it only states:

6.8 Like Activity

The Like activity indicates the actor likes the object.

The side effect of receiving this in an outbox is that the server SHOULD add the object to the actor’s liked Collection.

There doesn’t appear to be any other client to server interactions for different types of likes. Afaik, Lemmy extended the ActivityPub protocol to add the downvote.