cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/54937958

Hi everyone! I recently switched from Reddit and I'm still getting used to Lemmy.

I'm looking for an Android client that feels as close as possible to the Reddit experience: a clean feed, smooth gestures, easy community switching and strong user expirience.

I've seen many options (Voyager, Thunder, Jerboa, Summit, Raccoon, Interstellar) and I'm not sure which one to pick. Open source is a plus for me.

What do you use, and why? Any pros and cons from daily use would be really helpful.

Thanks in advance!

I have done this accidentally a lot but if you make an error like this

This is a sentence.be happy about another sentence.

...at least in my lemmy client it automatically becomes a link.

I am not confident this is an issue but also I have noticed it and wanted to ask.

Couldn't find any announcements about it, so posting here.

Is there a way to add servers on the same app? Like if you use Lemmy. Zip , could you add other instances/servers and switch between them just as easy as you do communities? If this feature exists could someone explain how to me?

If not, this needs to be a thing. Add to that pixelfed, piefed and mastodon posts..

If it's all decentralized, what would prevent us from having it all in one single app. With maybe siloing of the different servers, so the serverwide rules are still inforceable.

But essentially, the all feed would really be all.

I was under the impression that i could see any and all post/community provided it doesn't violate the rules of the server I'm on. I'm figuring out this isn't quite the case...

Yet i get the feeling there's a lot I'm potentially missing. I keep seeing dead links, seemingly abandoned posts/communities with little to no activity...

I just don't know for sure. Also how do people figure out which server to join? How do you know for example of a certain community you're interested in is present in server A or b?

Maybe this is a really stupid question, and the answer is so obvious its self-explanatory. But i have to admit I'm lost

Edit: tldr: i want to see non-lemmy fediverse content in the same app. Or if this is not (yet) possible, i wanted suggestions on how to configure my setup so i somehow see everything (i thought) i was missing. Also thank you everyone who corner so far for being so kind in your answers, much appreciated!

Like the title says. I find browsing piefed's frontpage which defaults to "hot" ranking is far greater than lemmy's "scaled" ranking.

on scaled as it is now most post are very new and have no engagement and are of no quality, on the instance I am, the first page is full of bot mirrored content the with 0 engagement and that is of no general interest, it is almost the same as turning the ranking to "new"

on piefed's homepage the content is still fresh, of general interest and already engaged with and bot posts don't filter through

My proposition is to take piefed's "hot" ranking algorithm and use it for lemmy's "scaled" ranking.

Sometimes I see top-level comments on a post that, from their content, appear to be replying to other comments within the post. Is there some bug that makes them appear as top-level comments rather than replies to the comment they're responding to? Or are people just bad at replying to the correct comment? I never see this on reddit so I'm confused why I'm seeing so many cases of it on lemmy.

I've switched to Lemmy for about 4 days now. Here's my opinion on the platform:

Is it good?

Yes. I found many common communities I follow, such as Degoogling, open source, Linux, self-hosting, history, maps, space, Minecraft, etc etc. Many of the more obscure communities are a bit off-limits, tho, like Polandball or alternate history. I was able to find more underrated Degoogling things on this platform more than on Reddit, which is a huge plus

What caveats do I have on this platform?

Again, obscure communities are a bit off-limits, and while I was able to find SOME, most were non-existant. Other than that, I haven't encountered any other issues other than not being able to create a community

How's the universal community?

They are really helpful. At times even moreso then on Reddit. Again, I found more obscure and underrated things on this platform than I do on Reddit

Is this viable for casual people and would I reccomend it?

If they don't care about the specifics, then sure, this is a viable option. But if they follow obscure communities and care about the specifics, they would have to push through. I so far did, and it's a great experience so far. Would I RECCOMEND it, tho? Yes, I would. Again, tho, it depends on wether you care about obscure communities or the specifics

Conclusion

Lemmy is, so far, great for my experience. The communities are good, the platform is good, and overall it feels fresh that I don't have to be tracked by a centralized platform at all times to fuel their greed. I love the idea of it. I just don't think I'm gonna ever switch fully to it, however decentralized Reddit frontends like Redlib help with me viewing the obscue communities I follow without having to use ths proprietary platform directly

Hi! I am a researcher at the CISPA-Helmholtz-Institute for information security (https://cispa.de/en/people/kuennemann). I would like to get some community feedback on a project we are working on. I am a Lemmy-user myself, but of course I use my other account for lurking; this account is for my research business.

My question taps into the age-verification debate, which I know is very controversial, and people are sceptical for very good reasons; I just ask everyone to stay polite and engage the topic.

In short, I am worried about the effect bots have on public discourse, which to a large part takes place in the Internet. I would like to propose cryptographic methods that allow an instance to attest that a poster or commenter are a real human being. I think the European Unified ID (euid.eu) provides good infrastructure to do that, at the cost of relying on the member countries to provide them with an ID. Crypto-magic can (potentially - I haven't worked out the details yet) ensure that:

• users from an instance that opted in are sure to belong to someone with an id, other instances may use this knowledge in their moderation tools
• users from that instance can retain several pseudonyms that even this instance cannot link. Yet (configurable) policy can ensure that no users uses two pseudonyms in the same thread
• we could cap how many posts or comments a user makes per day/week/month, across their pseudonyms
• users who post on this instance but are not displayed (in the web or to other instances) can provide evidence that they are being censored, which the public may review to discredit that instance and chose a new one.
• the infrastructure also happens to allow for age verification (EUID can attest to statements like "this anonymous person is > 18"), and it could be part of an instance's policy. Thanks to lemmy's federated infrastructure, multiple verifying instances with different policies can exist. It's not a focus of mine, though – I think social networks should not exploit children or adults.

Some of these ideas we have worked out (and tested on) reddit in this article, which was before Lemmy became popular and EUID was on the horizon.

I am interested in practical advice about who to talk to about engineering and how to best involve the community – we've got a prototype fork of lemmy including end-user verifiable authentication. I am also interested in how the community feels about the burden of moderation and this as a potential remedy. When discussing age verification, some users say they will never accept any ID-based authentication. Are there some amongst those who would change their minds provided they had full pseudonymity and censorship could be detected and made public with cryptographically signed evidence?

People act and speak differently depending on who they're with.

Web-forums of old didn't unify a user's identity like Lemmy does. One forum was held at one domain, hosted by one set of computers and administrators; another forum had a separate domain, set of machines and administrators. Identities on one forum were not correlated to another. A forum dedicated to cars had no reason to know about the you that also posted to a forum about crocheting.

Software has been trending towards centralized identities. This never made sense to me as it's diametric to how identities operate in real life. Your employer knows one side of you and your friends another, which is still different to the you you might show to your partner.

This centralization stems from surveillance-capitalism's desire to surveil and tie independent pieces of information to one real human, creating a higher-resolution profile of that individual from which the subject becomes easier to exploit. Monied software has been the impetus. Free-software is affected by that dominant culture of surveillance-capitalism. The temporal context is pertinent and Lemmy functions with one central-identity interacting with a multitude of separate communities.

Creating separate identities on separate instances of Lemmy is possible, but it doesn't change Lemmy's design and that design seems to be a reflection of surveillance-capitalism. The very fact that you can view a user's previous posts appears voyeuristic, being pointless outside of that context for users.

I am a proponent of anonymity. The ability to write posts anonymously or under different identities would be welcome. That central-identity (that is the Lemmy account that's established on a particular instance) could still exist for the purposes of administration. I would also like to see finer grained controls for the user's content and profile.

What if the user does not want a public profile at all? What if the user does not want a long-term identity? Creating a multitude of identities on one instance could be perceived as spam or malicious activity. Allowing the user to create sub-identities that are not publicly attached to that central-identity would still allow for ordered administration whilst empowering users to share what they want to share with a particular community without also exposing the entirety of an identity.

If you don't know what the "Knights of New" was, it was a community moniker for redditors who voluntarily set their default view to all+new, and aggressively down voted poor quality posts across the whole ecosystem. This, I believe, was a big part of what made reddit great so many years ago, and I have noticed the lack of such a named effort happening on Lemmy, though I know there are already some out there who brave the swamp.

Its also my belief that a coordinated effort to simply give folks the idea of being the tip of the spear when it comes to posts, by creating a simple community with information about things like media literacy, good universal standards, or being discerning would be tremendously helpful.

Obviously I could just create the community myself, but I'm curious if folks think its worth the effort.

so i got an email this morning reminding me to renew and they told me not to look at the breakdown. they told me "just donate and move on." but I looked.

these screenshots are proof that the "means of production" are heavily skewed toward one developer over another. someone get lenin on the phone, because this distribution of wealth is a joke. i’m not mad, i’m just documenting history for the proletariat uprising.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/51238045

The Lemmy interface tells you if there are new unread comments on posts you viewed before. Does that mean Lemmy tracks all the posts you've ever viewed and when? Is that information public?

On reddit every time I open it I aee new posts, but lemmy algrothim no matter which way of sorting I choose it shows ms the same things.

I think there should be a toggle that applies to all sorting algrothim where it hides posts you stopped at for 1 second while scrolling or opened it.

Also, peepeepoopoo

Or, even better, give multiple sorting options.

I have many links from a permanently offline/down instance of Lemmy (closure announcement #1 , #2 ) like:

https://lemmings.world/post/10000001

https://lemmings.world/post/10000002

so how do i convert these links so it links to a federated (backup) content on other Lemmy instance/s?

Is my only chance to try https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://lemmings.world/post/10000001 to find out post content/name, so i can use search engine to search that post name if it indexes federated version of the original post?

If i know the post name, do i have better way to find the federated content address beside using internet search engine?

It seems like Lemmy sucks (still too centralized), possibly similarly to https://spasm.network/apps (i am yet to try its federated forums).

I have my subscribed, instance, and all feeds. But I was thinking it'd be nice to have a strictly news feed to check. Is there a way to make a second custom feed that I'm missing? I couldn't find anything on search so sorry if this has been asked and answered. I don't even know if this would be a lemmy thing or dependant on the app.

Also think it'd be cool if I could filter subscribed comms from my all feed.

Thanks!

so i used reddit for help with mostly linux and stuff, and it worked fine but i was starting to get pretty fed up by all of these chuds 😭🥀 like you post something asking like an alternative to google pay for example, and they just say "pay with cash" or "use your card" even if you say that you want to use something like google pay and not cash/card. And they also seem to downvote for no reason at all. maybe im just an idiot or have really bad arguments and opinions, but on lemmy i get upvoted even if no one has commented anything!! its like people upvote stuff cause they're interested in it and/or want the op to find an answer!!!!! also MOST redditors can't be open minded or not be jerks. lets go back to that google pay thingy, if you answer to the "use cash/card" comment with something like "i know that technically is more privacy friendly and such but i just like the convenience of using google pay, idrk why but its just how it is" and they mass downvote that shit like its the black plague and reply with some beef jerky type shii (dont remember any good examples)

THANK YOU LEMMLINGS 🥹❤️‍🩹

I'm still trying to get used to Lemmy; the main thing confusing me is the federated bit.

I just want to access Lemmy and its content; how do I do that? Currently I'm just going to old.lemmy.world and using that as a starting point.

Is there another instance you would recommend as the default one?

The two main reasons I ask are:

1. I want to know if there are things I am simply missing out on and there's a better way to browse Lemmy.

2. I really don't like cloudflare and have it disabled in Javascript. I don't want to leave it enabled for lemmy.world.

Can't find anything in settings to control how many things I see per page.

I think I get 15 items per page which feels low as I'm used to 50-100.

Is there a lemmy type engine, just for private correspondence? Retroshare is not like that. Osiris Serverless Portal is dead. And both of them are written in an outdated language (compared to rust) in C++.

may be related: https://лемми.опенсорс.рус/post/4015

Also /c/modabuse. Also /c/yepowertrippinbastards. Also lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, comrade, ACAB, and 552 individual accounts across 67 instances, about half of them on lemmy.world.

None of this is in the source code. It's downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at.

If you're just tuning in

Tesseract is a third-party web frontend for Lemmy, maintained by asimons04 and licensed AGPL-3.0. Admins deploy it on their own servers alongside or instead of lemmy-ui, and there are public instances of it people use to browse Lemmy generally. If you've used a Lemmy site that didn't look like stock Lemmy, there's a fair chance it was this.

Last week db0 posted a PSA: Tesseract contains a blacklist of instance domains compiled directly into the application. 32 of them. Admins can't see it, can't configure it, and aren't told it's there. Connect to a listed instance and the app tells you it's "incompatible," which is not true.

I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system.

There's a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads. It isn't in the git repository. It's unauthenticated and world-readable, so anyone can pull it. Right now it carries 552 user accounts, 2,275 username patterns, 54 instances, 97 communities, 289 keyword patterns and 351 domains, with every category set to hide matches rather than flag them. Not collapsed behind a click. Simply absent, with no indication anything was removed.

Verify all of it in ten seconds

curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \
  | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json

That's the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks. There's a stale fallback copy at /data/policy.dat as well.

It filters criticism of moderators

• lemmy.sdf.org/c/modabuse — listed
• lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards — listed
• lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/YPTBcirclejerk — listed
• community regex power ?tripping?
• keyword censoring me

Call the rest of it whatever you like. This part is not spam defence.

It filters words

The 32 community name patterns include Communis(t|m), Conservativ(e|es|ism), Leftis(t|m), Libertarian(ism)?, ^Green Part(y|ies), Zionis(t|m), (Police|Cops), guillotine and billionaire.

Keywords include comrade, ACAB, neoliberal, proletaria(n|t) and death to.

Filtered communities on instances that aren't blocked: lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, lemmy.today/c/news, lemmy.ca/c/politicalnewscanada, lemmy.ca/c/usa, infosec.pub/c/strategic_unions.

The 552 users aren't bots

67 instances. 272 on lemmy.world alone, 40 on sh.itjust.works, 19 on lemmy.ca, and 28 instances contributing exactly one person each.

355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that.

Seven of them aren't even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.

I have the list and I'm not posting it. Most of these are ordinary people who got pattern-matched, and 552 names on this comm is a harassment target inside an hour. Run the command above and grep for yourself.

And it lies about it

When the instance block fires you get: "Incompatible Instance. Not Supported. $instance is not compatible with Tesseract."

Nothing is incompatible. It's a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it's what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed.

For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all.

Admins can't switch it off

Tesseract has env vars for PUBLIC_DOMAIN_BLACKLIST, PUBLIC_FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLIST and the shortener lists. There is none for either blocklist. enableToxicMode bypasses the other filters and explicitly not this one.

Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit.

Before someone says it

A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. "It targets the left" doesn't survive the data and I'm not going to pretend it does.

The problem is that spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden, to admins who've never read it and users who don't know it's there. The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: "it's a spam list" answers every individual question and none of the whole.

And /c/modabuse is not spam.

Asks

1. Publish the runtime policy in the repo, or kill the endpoint.
2. Stop reporting a policy block as a technical incompatibility.
3. Tell users when something's been hidden. One line.
4. Give operators an off switch, like every other blacklist in the codebase has.

It's AGPL-3.0 and db0 already forked it. That's the licence working as designed. But forking isn't disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking.

If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance's name, to users who don't know it exists.

Full contents of every list, unedited, in the comments.

For example this search I did was supposed to limit results to last week and showed something 11 months old:

https://programming.dev/search?q=webml&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopWeek&titleOnly=false

The following links should all have the query string ?P=5%B02%27.

example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

link

www.example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

www.example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

link

http://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

http://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

link

https://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

https://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

link