Yeah.

I really don’t want to see text like this.

It would make things a lot more annoying to read.

I much prefer combining sentences by default. It’s natural to put a blank line between paragraphs, and Markdown was designed to make the natural thing render decently. You can put things on separate lines if you want, and it’ll always read nicely.

But definitely break things up into paragraphs if it makes sense.

Sure, and I think most moderators would choose to not subscribe to hashtags at all, because hashtags don’t fit well with the community-based system. If you want hashtags, use Mastodon. If you don’t, use Lemmy.

Not all parts of a topic belong in a community. For example, let’s say I have a community about car mechanic advice. The relevant topics are probably #cars #auto_repair and #mechanics. However, #cars can also apply to new cars, deals on used cars, or the movie cars, none of which are directly relevant to auto repair. Likewise, #mechanics can apply to airplane mechanics or even video game mechanics. Trying to match communities to sets of hashtags is going to be noisy, so you’ll get a lot of false positives and false negatives.

Likewise, not all individuals in a community are worth following, and individuals often post about different topics than the ones in a community. If you’re interested in cars and I post about cars, you may want to follow me. But I may also post about cryptocurrencies and lawn care, and you may not care about those at all.

Trying to mix Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook style posts doesn’t particularly work. It’s better, IMO, to use services that do each of those well separately, and cross-post from one to another when you think it’s relevant. Treat them as islands, and build bridges between them, don’t try to mash them together into one SM soup.

Not a fan.

If you want to follow:

• topics - use something like Twitter
• groups - use something like Reddit
• individuals - use something like Facebook

If you think a post is relevant from one of those in another, link it.

I’ve considered it, yeah. There aren’t many posts, and I’ve been thinking of posting a bunch there to get it more popular.

Or maybe I’ll make a new, related community with a little broader appeal, idk. I find avoiding lemmy.ml is usually more enjoyable.

Here’s what I do:

• occasionally post stuff and comment

I really haven’t had any issues on the two I mod, but they’re pretty small communities. And honestly, at Lemmy’s scale, if you’re feeling the need to use tools, you’re probably moderating too strictly, or you’re moderating a massive community.

I prefer dogs, but have cats, and I like cuddling our cats (when they let me). I’m pretty sure it goes the other way too.

What’s that about Gitlab? I use it hosted, and it can be self-hosted, so I’m not sure what the issue is.

Honestly, I don’t find a lot of value in the fediverse generally. I guess it’s kinda cool that things connect together, but URLs also get the job done pretty well, and cookies and password managers handle logins and stuff between platforms. The real value is in being an alternative to the big, centralized services.

I’m not here because of the fediverse, I’m here because Reddit pissed me off almost a year ago and this is a suitable-enough replacement. Seeing my posts on other platforms is honestly a little odd (in theory) because having a post from one context (say lemmy) appear in another (say git hosting) is often not wanted. So I want separation between different types of social media (e.g. I avoid Mastodon because I don’t like that form), not more sharing. But that’s not a real concern, it’s just not why I use it.

That said, I have no idea what kind of social media project you’re working on, so maybe federation is the perfect fit. The fediverse is certainly a good way to quickly build an audience and generate content.

Second line of Mama Told Me by Three Dog Night.

self-sustaining

I’m hesitant about that. It’s still run by volunteers, and that’ll end when the volunteer gets tired of paying the bills for whatever instance.

I think Lemmy needs to find a way to disassociate instance hosting from some individual kindly paying the bill. It doesn’t need to be profit driven, just a way to get people to donate enough to keep the servers going.

There are only two official ones though:

• Lemmy web UI
• Jerboa Android app

Set the bar in one or both, and others will likely follow.

The list is super long, any good ideas on breaking it up? Or just allow typing to filter?

I’m a fullstack dev, and I wouldn’t be opposed to throwing a PR up for something like this. No promises though.

Why would you deny that? I think they have some valuable contributions to make to the community.

That’s it, I’m starting my own instance.

I really like the spoiler text block.

It’s just triple colon and description, then your message, then close with another triple colon. If you forget, click the spoiler button (at least on Jerboa, probably on web as well).

Inline spoilers would be nice too, and there’s room for both.

Yeah, that would work within lemmy, and it would make it easier to detect whether a link is to lemmy or something else (look for /c/<community chars>@<hostname chars>/<rest>). But you’ll still have the issue of clicking a link elsewhere (say, a blog post) to an instance that’s not yours, so you still wouldn’t be able to directly comment w/o copy/pasting part of the URL to your instance.

That said, that change alone would reduce a lot of friction for users. My point is that it still doesn’t fix the root of the problem. I guess we could use a browser extension to auto-redirect to your instance of choice, but that’s just yet another barrier for users.

No, I’m pretty sure that’s a quirk of how the fediverse works. Posts, comments, etc are in two places:

• the instance the community is hosted on
• your instance (i.e. unique to users of your instance)

You’ll want the first (the permalink) for general posting, and the second for your own use. However, lemmy doesn’t handle the first very well, so both options kinda suck.

I honestly don’t think there’s a good solution to this. We can make improvements though, such as lemmy figuring out that a link is a lemmy link, either through special syntax (like @user@instance or !community@instance) or checking a list of known instances, but the real problem is that users need to be aware of instances, and that’s poor UX imo.

I’m working on an alternative to lemmy that solves this (and has a bunch of other drawbacks that I hope are acceptable), but I hope it’s not necessary and someone more clever than me can solve it.

Yeah, I was confused about what it was (I thought it was some indication of how fresh the comment was for sorting purposes). A percent isn’t interesting when most comments have like 5 votes or whatever, and it’s still not that interesting even if there are more.

I mean it’s possible, but lemmy only has ~50k monthly active users. Reddit, on the other hand, is in the millions (>400M monthly active users last year, and >50M daily active users). Lemmy just isn’t anywhere in the ballpark of being a threat to anyone.

I also think Lemmy has some architectural issues that will make it very difficult to scale to anywhere near Reddit size, even if it somehow gets the users.

It’s a cool service, I just highly doubt it’s the target of any big campaign. And that’s a big part of why I’m here, it’s big enough to have interesting communities, but small enough to avoid most of the spam.

I highly doubt it’s an org attack, Lemmy just isn’t popular enough to see something like that.

I don’t know if Lemmy has the ability to shadow ban, but those can be pretty effective for cases like this. It obviously wouldn’t help with a botnet attack, but it would help with your average, run of the mill pranksters.