Like helping to find a bug, discussing about how to setup an application for a certain use case or anything like that? Answering questions on Stack overflow is an example but is that the best way?

Generally the best way to help out is to do a thing that’s needed and that you can figure out how to do. Your list includes a bunch of good options, and I’ve been thanked for doing all those things at one point or another. Some common growth paths include:

1. Using the software
2. Encountering bugs, problems, or small opportunities for improvement.
3. Discussing those informally in forums and helping people find workarounds.
4. Identifying some of those issues as common things other things experience as well, so filing bugs for them with clear explanations and links to related forum discussions.
5. Reading source code to better understand bugs.
6. Discussing potential fixes in developer bug threads (or in GitHub or whatever).
7. Submitting small fixes for simple bugs as pull requests.

Another path might be:

1. Using the software and reading forums/docs for help.
2. Answering basic questions on forums, looking to old threads and relevant docs.
3. Learning about common questions.
4. Writing blogs or forum posts about common questions.
5. Submitting improvements to official docs to clarify common areas of confusion.

There are other paths as well, the main thing is to use a thing so you learn about it and then use that knowledge to make it a little easier for the next person. Good luck!

I don’t think titles directly transfer between companies, and yet the industry allows it. It’s a very useful tool for advancement.

This may be true on some corners of the industry, but at the more competitive end (both in terms of competitive pay, and a competitive pool of candidates)… I believe it’s common to relevel on hire. I’ve seen folks go from director to senior and from senior to junior at my org. The candidates being offered those seemingly big “demotions” often seem to be somewhere between unphased and enthusiastic about the change, presumably because the compensation package we offer at the lower level beats what they were getting with an inflated title and because they know their inflated title is nonsense and they’re frustrated with the other aspects of organizational dysfunction that accompany title inflation at their current company.

What you say is real, and sometimes a promotion in one org can help bridge you into an org that would have been hard to get hired into as a junior, or harder to get promoted in. It’s not without risk though. All things being equal, I’d much rather spend my time working on a strong team and learning a lot and being challenged than to be in a weaker org that’s handing out inflated titles. Getting gud isn’t a guarantee of advancement, but it’s at least as reliable over the long haul as title inflation.

I dunno how to hotlink, but if you scroll to the active users graph at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy you can see there’s been like a 25% dropoff in active users since the peak in July. Lemmy has still grown 50x since May, and it’s much MUCH more active than it was then. But we’ve definitely crested a peak and not everyone who gave Lemmy a shot then is sticking around in a monthly basis.

This isn’t necessarily bad. Lemmy is still young and has many rough edges, it wasn’t realistic to win all the users that tried it on ease-of-use in a head to head with reddit. And Mastodon has had multiple growth waves interspersed with periods of declining usage, but with the spikes has grown ie remained stable overall. Early-stage commercial social media have big ups and downs in engagement and growth as well, and just like lemmy those ups and downs are often externally driven… when competitors mess up, when a big global news story hits, when a major sporting event happens… these can all be catalysts for one-time growth. It’s not a straight line.

Time will tell what user level we stabilize at in the short-term and what events spur new growth, but it’s normal to have a big expansion be followed by some degree of contraction.

Is there an issue for this in the GitHub project? It sounds like you’ve done the hard work of diagnosing the issue and an upstream fix seems likely a modest effort given this info.

No, Beehaw defederated your instance. The open-source community on lemmy.ml someone else already mentioned is your best bet.

I’m mostly in the pro-written word camp myself, but I have sought out video tutorials in cases where written docs seem to assume something I don’t know. When I’m learning something new, a written doc might have a 3-word throwaway clause like “… add a user and then…”. But I’ve never added a user and don’t know how. If it’s niche open-source software with a small dev team, this may not be covered in the docs either. I’ll go fishing for videos and just seeing that they go to a web-ui or config-file or whatever sets me on the path to figure out the rest myself.

That is to say, video content that shows someone doing a thing successfully often includes unspoken visual information that the author doesn’t necessarily value or even realize is being communicated. But the need to do the thing successfully on-screen involves documenting many small/easy factoids that can easily trip someone inexperienced up for hours.

I’m as annoyed as anyone when I want reference material and find only videos, and I generally prefer written tutorials as well. But sometimes a video tutorial is the thing that gets me oriented enough to understand the written worthy I wasn’t ready to process previously.

Edit: The ubiquity of video material probably has little to do with it’s usefulness though, and everything to do with how easy it is to monetize on YouTube.

If this is true, what is the admin of the reporting user even supposed to do

Decide what instances to defederate. They can check up on:

• Mods of other instances to see if they take appropriate action on reports.
• Admins of other instances to see if they take action against bad-faith mods.
• Admins of other instances who generate a disproportionate number of reports per capita, to address structural, cultural, or policy issues that lead the offending instance to be a bigger source of pain/reports than others.

And finally they can defederate if they don’t like what they find.

Lemmy world is under persistent denial of service attack in recent weeks: https://lemmy.world/post/2923697

The admins are aware and responding daily, the technical specifics of the attack keep changing as they close off one avenue of attack, the attackers switch to a slightly different approach in a game of cat and mouse.

There’s nothing you can do but wait, it will come back online… or use alts on other instances. Lemmy world has a competent admin team who is working hard to weather these attacks, but lemmy the software is not prepared for this kind of adversarial resource consumption so it’s a very hard job to both layer protections on top of lemmy and also to fix underlying issues so it’s natively more resilient.

New communities don’t automatically federate. Someone who is logged into the instance has to interact with them to cause their instance to discover the new community.

1. Someone needs to search for the community in a specific way for the community itself to be discovered.
2. Someone needs to subscribe for posts/comments to get federated.

See https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827 for more details.

But your community will show up on lemmyverse.net, and will show up for people on your instance. Beyond that you have to advertise it in new-community communities and in juggling adjacent communities where interested folks might hang out.

I wouldn’t expect this to be a likely approach used by Lemmy anytime soon. Applications that run at massive scale (like Facebook and reddit) use a wide variety of storage engines, whereas Lemmy uses Postgres for almost everything. When running at massive scale, read-only storage engines are cheaper and easier to deal with than read/write storage engines… so it makes sense for reddit to to move old-data (which naturally changes infrequently) to read-only storage (making any writes at all impossible) to save a little money on storage even if the machinery for doing that makes reddit more complicated to run for the engineers that work there.

For Lemmy, it’s probably more important to optimize for being easy to run (so more admins run Lemmy instances), even if it makes the storage a little more expensive. Postgres tables can definitely scale to hundreds of millions of rows, and there’s little overhead in allowing the old ones to be written to as long as they’re in Postgres.

Now, someday… it’s possible that the number of posts in a single larger Lemmy instance become untenable for even a single very large PG instance to run, and I’m that far future maybe it makes sense to work on tiered storage for Lemmy. But there are other strategies for scaling PG to big datasets that are at least as likely in that scenario. So I’m not predicting Lemmy will employ cold storage anytime soon.

I read the design notes and found them pretty interesting even though I haven’t really been pining for a faster linker: https://github.com/rui314/mold/blob/main/docs/design.md

I don’t have a link handy, but I saw this reported before and when someone went to lemmynsfw to check the posts, they actually had been properly marked as nsfw.

My unsubstantiated theory is that federation is working pretty crappily right now and so lots of federation messages get dropped. When a new post or comment gets dropped you don’t notice because… well… you don’t see anything. But when a post makes it through and an edit gets dropped, that can be more visible.

So likely what’s happening is that on some small percent but medium absolute number of lemmynsfw posts, someone makes an honest mistake and fails to tag it. They either notice themselves and fix it, or a mod asks them to and they comply… so on lemmynsfw it looks right. But the federation message with the edit gets dropped by your instance, and for you and others viewing from there it forever remains sfw in error, even though all the right steps were taken. I’ve also heard mods discussing this happening with post removal moderation actions, the post gets removed on the community’s home instance, but the federation message containing the removal gets dropped by some big instance and the post blows up there anyway where the mods are actually unable to shut it down.

I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do about this other than maybe the lemmynsfw admins tuning their federation worker counts (though they may have already and that may no longer be needed in recent Lemmy versions), or the Lemmy devs working on federation scalability so a larger percentages of federation messages get reliably delivered.

You cannot block a user that already send you a message.

Do you mean that blocking them doesn’t remove the DMs but does prevent future DMs? Or you literally actually cannot block someone once they’ve DM’ed you, and so standard practice for someone who wants to harass people should be to DM them first?

This isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s also important to understand single-user and tiny invite-only instances as analogous to “leechers” in the torrenting world. The federation load that an instance instance imposed on other instances depends much more on the number of communities it subscribes to than the number of active users. If a user stops using Lemmy but leaves their instance up, it’s generating federation load for no reason.

Tiny instances are inefficient, and while it is desirable for the network to be able to scale to the point where it can reasonably support lots of them anyway, right now federation queues are backed up and messages are frequently getting dropped. Encouraging lots MORE tiny instances is probably not the efficient thing right this second. Rather, we’d want more users joining mid-sized instances that are not overloaded locally and that are making efficient use of the federation load they generate by using it to serve 100-1000 users rather than 1 or 2.

I’m missing all the important points I guess. Seems like you’ve done the right thing. The admins here are also the core devs team and they’re under a lot of communication load right now. Hopefully they’ll catch up to you, or reposting might be an option. I’m not sure what else you can do to get attention.

Liability is not binary. There is a qualitative change in risk as you transition from “I subscribed to 100 actively moderated communities that I read and am familiar with” toward “I subscribed to everything there is including the worst of the worst and I didn’t realize I was doing so and don’t look at the results”.

Also, moderation activities federate. So even if a rogue poster does “contaminate” the actively moderated communities on a well-admin’ed instance… when those mods and admins delete the offending material they’ll automatically cleanup your instance as well. As a result, it’s the creepy crawly communities that don’t clean up or don’t want to clean up that generate the lion’s share of risk.

Is it 100% safe to sub to well-moderated communities, no. You have to know your local laws and protect yourself. Do you do yourself favors by running lemmony? Also no. These two statements can be simultaneously true.

Sorry, I follow too many support communities and got confused about what community we’re in. The lemmy.ml equivalent is : !community_requests@lemmy.ml. Same description applies, but that’s the one for your instance.

The upsides are that you control your defederation list and you’re your own admin so you’re in control of whether your instance goes down and what it’s policies are.

The downsides are:

• Potential privacy leaks. Your all feed is public. If its full of creepy shit and you’re the only person in your instance, it’s there cause you subscribe to creepy shit.
• You’re in control of whether your instance stays up. Security vulnerability gets mass exploited? Your problem.
• Potential hosting liability. Your instance mirrors what you sub and serves it to the public unauthenticated internet. If you subscribe of stuff that’s questionably legal in your jurisdiction, that liability can become yours unless you’re familiar enough with your laws to know how to protect yourself.
• All the standard self-hosting stuff like cost and hassle.

Folks should not use lemmony to bootstrap their subscription count. It’s not that hard to hit lemmyverse.net and just manually sub a bunch of stuff you’re actually interested in, or to visit a big instance and browse their all feed unauthenticated.

But if you really want to automate community bootstrapping, lemmony is the worst of the scripts that doit because it defaults to subscribing to EVERYTHING, including all the porn, piracy, and hate communities on the most absent-admin’ed under-modded instances in the lemmyverse. Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you. Not to mention being a bad fediverse citizen and creating massive amounts of federation load on the instances forwarding you posts and comments from 20k communities that you don’t read.

These two subscription bootstrapping scripts limit you to top subs by default… So you’re more likely to be in well-modded territory and just the number of subs is smaller you you can review them and back out of anything sketchy. Subscriber-bot’s docs do a good job of explaining the risks and problems of mass-subscription so you know what you’re getting into.

• https://github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot
• https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs

If you yourself followed that community, you’d know I spend time there. Last week I commented on this thread with Antik the admin: https://lemmy.world/post/1150672

Other threads with admin participation last week:

• https://lemmy.world/post/1122528
• https://lemmy.world/post/1122294
• https://lemmy.world/post/1097886
• And one where someone got an admin response via the email ticketing system that is frequently discussed in that community: https://lemmy.world/post/1161739

If try your hardest, can you find any reasons at all that admins might be a few days behind on dealing with non-emergency support requests?

That is unquestionably the community where mod requests get the most prompt attention from admins, admins point people there frequently for mod support and do respond to questions there. But nobody has a commercial support contract with them and you don’t get a refund if it takes more than 24h to answer your request. If they fall a couple days behind they fall a couple days behind it happens.