Admin of lemmy.blahaj.zone

I can also be found on the microblog fediverse at @ada@blahaj.zone or on matrix at @ada:chat.blahaj.zone

  • 3 Posts
  • 398 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 2nd, 2023

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  • There are upsides and downsides to such an approach.

    We admin several instances for example, because we are trying to create safe spaces for queer folk and want to foster those communities. We pay out of our own pockets to do so.

    I’ve got no interest in running a generic piece of network infrastructure that can be used by bigots just as readily as the people that they harass.

    The people that do want to run that are “free” speech types, which is how you end up with nostr


  • 1: is lemmy good for macro blogging? Like how you’d use something like Tumblr or the like.

    No. You’re looking for Mastodon/Sharkey/Misskey/Friendica or kbin for that! Lemmy is more the federated equivalent of a site like reddit.

    2: when you create a community for yourself and post in it, does it reach other people or is it only if they actively search for it? Is it common here to create a community just for yourself to post blogs and the like? Can you even do that?

    There is no such thing as a community for yourself. Every community is either visible to everyone, or you can lock it down to just people on the same instance as you. But you can’t ever make it just for you. You can make it so that no one else can post to it, but you can’t stop them reading it.

    3: how does the federation thing work exactly? I’m from an instance that has downvotes disabled, so what happens when someone tries to downvote me?

    Basically, the instance just ignores downvotes that it receives. Other instances don’t. So that means that the timeline you see will be different to the timeline someone on a different instance sees, because their timeline will factor in downvotes and yours won’t.

    4: is lemmy safe from AI scrapping or nah?

    Nothing that is publicly visible or searchable is safe from AI scraping.

    Is this platform good for artists compared to something like mastodon, twitter, or bluesky?

    Different things.

    Lemmy is “reddit like”. Mastodon and Bluesky are “twitter like”. On lemmy, you subscribe to and follow communities. On mastodon, you subscribe to and follow users.

    So it really depends on what you’re looking for.

    5: is there search engine crawling on lemmy? Are all posts on here possible to show up in search engines or nah? How do things work on that front?

    Yep, it can and is crawled. If you don’t want that, lemmy isn’t going to be great, as it’s impossible to avoid.

    You do have more control over that on mastodon, as you can lock posts down to be more private, but even then, it’s imperfect.

    6: how’s development? Is lemmy going to continue to build and improve or are things gonna stay as they are for the foreseeable future?

    Active and ongoing, with a couple of competing alternatives that are also actively developed

    7: how privacy friendly and secure is lemmy really? I’m guessing a lot better then reddit, but just curious.

    Admins have full access to the database, and in theory, can pull out pretty much anything. Which is just the same as reddit. Your best bet for privacy is anonymity

    8: are there normal people or communities here? From what I’m seeing all of lemmy seems primarily focused on politics and tech, am not seeing much beyond that.

    Lots of meme communities too! It’s a size thing. Not as many lemmy users as there are reddit users, and the ones that are here tend to be more tech oriented.

    Lots of queer communities our instance!



  • This is such a strange take to me.

    I was on the broader fediverse for a year or so before lemmy took off, and I got used to the very strong left leaning environment I found there, where compassion for your impact on the people around you was built in to the norms of many of the communities. I wasn’t used to it, but I was so glad to have found it.

    And then lemmy happened. And unlike the rest of the fediverse, which was largely populated by people escaping twitter because it had been taken over by a fascist, the lemmy population was largely people escaping reddit because they could no longer use 3rd party apps. And the difference in ideology between those two groups is night and day.

    To me, the broader fediverse feels left wing and comfortable. Lemmy feels centrist, where half of my time as an admin is banning trolls and bigots spreading hate.

    tl;dr - Your definition of leftist is not my definition of leftist.






  • Think of it this way. All bans and content removals are local only, and don’t federate to other instances, with a few exceptions

    The most notable of these exceptions are

    i) a community moderator removing content or banning a user from their community. This federates. An instance admin doing the same thing does not federate, unless the community was created on their instance.

    ii) an instance admin banning a user based on their instance, and choosing to remove all of their content. This will federate the ban and the content removal to other instances.


  • If I as an instance owner search & subscribe to another instance’s community, I get “federated” with that community. Does that mean my instance is, or my user is?

    When a user on your instance subscribes to an external community, the instance that hosts that community gets a notification about the subscription. Then when new content is posted to to that community, the remote instance forwards a single copy of that content to all instances that have subscribers to the community, including your instance.

    Then, when your instance receives it, it checks the content to see if it should send anyone a notification, and does so. It then makes the content visible to people and it will start appearing in the appropriate timelines of your local users (ie, in the “subscribed” and/or “all” timelines depending on the user)

    If I want users at my instance to see posts from communities on other instances, is there a way for me to pull those posts in to my instance? Or, how do I get my users to see other communities’ content?

    As soon as a single account on your instance subscribes to a remote community, you will get future content from that community.

    As an admin, assuming you don’t want to subscribe to random groups just to federate them, you can create a dummy account, find common/popular communities using a site like Lemmyverse, and then subscribe with your dummy account.

    You can also point your users at https://lemmyverse.net/communities. That site lets them set their home instance, and once they’ve done so, links to any community will point the user to the community on your instance. And if your instance didn’t have it, the act of someone trying to find it will cause your instance to go and fetch the community and recent content posted to it from the remote instance. Though in this case, unless the user then subscribes, you won’t continue to get future content from that community.