terribleplan

I think it would need to be a mechanism similar to how user moves are handled where the old thing sticks around forever but has a field that says “the new one is over here” and then the new one has a field that says “yes, I am the same as that old one”. At least I think that’s how e.g. mastodon handles moves of users (just the person/actor, not any of their content. AFAIK nothing in the fediverse can do something like this with anything other than a person/actor at the moment)

The problem is the thing has already been federated. Changing the ID in the db will appear to the rest of the fediverse as new things, not as those same things.

Pretty sure it needs to be https://$user:$pat@github.com/username/repo.git#branch.

1. You host it yourself
2. You can get a cool domain name
3. It’s pretty low maintenance

I would still go with one that isn’t one of the biggest. My general advice is to find one that fits the vibe you’re going for, communities you’re interested in (e.g. some are focused on art or cybersecurity, etc), or is somehow tied to your locality. It shouldn’t matter that much, though some servers will be a little more (or less) strict with things like federation, content warnings, alt text, etc. Usually the server will have some info telling you some of this, and their admin should be linked and likely has a post or two pinned to their profile explaining some of this as well.

I am partial to kind.social, though have opted to run my own instead of joining up anywhere.

It depends on what specific thing you want to add geoblocking to, but often something like the MaxMind GeoIP database, which then can feed into a firewall to pre-emptively geo-block at a connection level, or as part of e.g. nginx geolocating the IP a of the connecting IP then making the blocking decision at request time.

There’s a project that works with Traefik’s forward-auth middleware to do this, which is probably how I would go about it if I wanted it at an HTTP level.

No, these issues are pretty much by-design. In ActivityPub IDs are inherently tied to the domain on which they were created. Based on the nature of federation it is safe to assume someone somewhere will still go looking for that thing via the outdated URL.

If you’re taking that approach make sure you shut down the stack before you copy the data over so everything gets copied over consistently (e.g. the DB isn’t in the middle of a write), and yes it should pretty much be that easy.

Nope, not from a DNS level. All the posts you are reading are cached by whatever instance your account is on. Basically the only thing served from the remote instance is full-size media uploaded to that instance. Even thumbnails are served from whatever instance you use. Mastodon/Akkoma/etc can be set up to even proxy full-size media for users, which is a feature I imagine will eventually make its way into Lemmy. Your best bet at the moment would be to find an instance that defederates those you don’t want to see (or run your own and do so yourself). I know “blocking” an instance is an often-requested feature, so that may end up a feature in Lemmy itself at some point.

Things don’t get backfilled, so until a new action happens on an old post/comment/etc they won’t show up on your instance. New things should make their way in eventually though.

Taking the link of a specific post/comment from the community instance and searching for it from your instance should populate it on your instance, just like you probably had to do to get this community to show up so you could subscribe/post at all.

There are backfill tools/scripts, but unless you really want old posts I wouldn’t use them. It unnecessarily increases the load on already struggling popular/overloaded instances like lemmy.world.

As someone who hosts a bunch of other stuff already including my own email (because I am a madman), does stuff like this as a job, has developer experience, etc. it was simple.

Figuring each of these things out (and how they all work together) for the first time was a hell of a journey.

Asklemmy isn’t really a place to ask about lemmy, it’s for asking general questions to users of lemmy, jut like you wouldn’t ask for Reddit support in /r/askreddit.

Regardless, this question gets asked and talked about in the !selfhosted@lemmy.world community fairly often, here is a (slightly edited) comment I made a while back.

You will need a domain name, you can buy one from a registrar such as hover or namecheap (for the love of all that you consider holy do not use godaddy).

You will need a way to expose the server that you set up via port forwarding or similar on your network.

You will need to set up DNS records on the domain you buy to point to your home IP. You may want to figure out a different way to avoid just handing that information out, cloudflare can help with that. You will want to make sure the DNS records get automatically updated if your IP address changes, which is not uncommon for residential ISPs.

You will need to figure out how to get an SSL certificate, Let’s Encrypt will issue them for free, cloudflare gives you one if you use them as a reverse proxy.

Some of this would likely be easier to do on a cloud provider like digitalocean or linode and could be done reasonably cheaply.

These are all common things for setting up any website, so lemmy docs won’t cover them. In addition to those (this answer was just addressing “how to get a URL”) you will need to install and configure lemmy, lemmy-ui, postgres, and pictrs somewhere (the join-lemmy docs cover this well).

If you want your instance to send emails you will have to figure out how you want to do that (too many options to cover in this answer).

When 0.18.1 gets released if you want captcha you’ll probably have to figure out an mCaptcha provider or set that up yourself.

Not to mention thinking about backups, high availability, etc, etc.

Best of luck.

Yeah, I think how most Lemmy clients (including the default web UI) handle display name is a real mistake.

They have been tuning the algorithm for that in the past releases, so may be related to that. Also, there is/was a bug where if you don’t restart lemmy (on the server) regularly stuff will get stuck at the top of hot and/or active.

It can cause some wackiness… basically you will need to maintain that old domain forever and everything will still refer to that old domain.

For example, your post looks like this from an ActivityPub/federation perspective:

{
    [...]
    "id": "https://atosoul.zapto.org/post/24325",
    "attributedTo": "https://atosoul.zapto.org/u/Soullioness",
    [...]
    "content": "<p>I'm curious if I can migrate my instance (a single user) to a different domain? Right now I'm on a free DNS from no-ip but I might get a prettier paid domain name sometime.</p>\n",
}

The post itself has an ID that references your domain, and the the attributedTo points to your user which also references your domain. AFAIK there is no reasonable way to update/change this. IDs are forever.

It would also break all of the subscriptions for an existing instance, as the subscriptions are all set to deliver to that old domain.

IMO your best bet would be to start a new instance on the new domain, update your profile on the old one saying that your user is now @Soullioness@newinstance.whatever and maintain that old server in a read-only manner for as long as you can bear.

Seems like most of the Tesla shills haven’t really made it over to the fediverse yet, so that’s nice.

Users are empowered to set what they want their default homepage view to be (“Subscribed” , “All”, or “Local”). I am unsure what the default is, but mine is set to “Subscribed” which I think it makes the most sense for most users.

Unless you are on a heavily moderated/defederated server (such as beehaw) whose moderation policies, politics, etc. you are aligned with it is very likely that “All” is going to contain something that someone doesn’t like. I am personally not in favor of over-policing what users do outside the confines of their home instance, it’s a fine line that I haven’t had to define too clearly yet so perhaps my thoughts here will change.

If you don’t like what’s in “Local”, then to me that is a sign that the instance isn’t for you. Local is a reflection of the sort of content that users on that instance want to see more of. The admin allowing such content is not necessarily an endorsement (unless they were the one to actually post it), but is tacit acceptance of that content and the community that content exists in.

I think some way to make a “Curated” feed of posts only from certain approved communities would be a welcome feature and present a useful middle ground allowing for a moderatable discovery experience, like the default subscriptions provided on that other site.

For communities or users many clients (including the default web ui) understand relative links, like [!asklemmy@lemmy.ml](/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml) or [@tymon@lemm.ee](/u/tymon@lemm.ee). The problem with these is that if instance the person reading your messages is on doesn’t know that user/community (because no one is locally subscribed to it or there have been no actions seen by that user) you will get an ugly 404 page with the only remedy being to perform a search for that unknown user/community/whatever manually. I think this issue is being worked on to make things more seamless, but IDK when this experience will be improved.

There is also technically no guarantee that any instance will keep track of non-local objects perpetually, so the “canonical” location of a thing is generally on the server that the user is based on. Posts and comments are referenced by a sequential ID that is different on every instance, so… yeah.

Technically there is a unique ID for every object sent through ActivityPub, so those may be linkable in the future with a similar scheme such as /post/288327@lemm.ee or something uglier like /post/https%3A%2F%2Flemm.ee%2Fpost%2F288327 depending on compatibility needs (as the IDs in ActivityPub are all full URLs to the source object)

Randomly stumbling across it, or finding it on e.g. https://browse.feddit.de/ or other search tools (which your community already shows up on) are the other ways I have found communities. Mostly that posts there though, honestly.

The New Communities Community: !newcommunities@lemmy.world