Please create or suggest Communities for Lemmy.world. I’m considering making Community creation for admins only, but for now it’s open to everyone.

I still see some federation issues:

• It sometimes takes a few tries before a remote post or community is found
• Remote replies don't show up
• Subscriptions to remote communties are stuck in 'pending'

I'll look into that.

I see we've just reached 100 users!! In 5 days..

In this post I will list the known issues or possible improvements for Lemmy.world.

Please comment with any issue or area for improvement you see and I will add it here.

Remember: this instance was only started June 1st so a lot of troubleshooting and tweaking to be done.

Issues can be:

• Local (lemmy.world) (also performance issues)
• Lemmy software issues
• Other software related (apps/Fediverse platforms etc)
• Remote server related
• (User error? ...)

Known issues

Websockets issues

There are some issues with the Websockets implementation used in Lemmy, which handles the streaming. Websockets will be removed in version 0.18 so let's hope these issues will be all gone then!

• Top posts page gets a stream of new posts ? Websockets issue
• You're suddenly in another post than you were before > Websockets issue
• Your profile will briefly display another name/avatar in the top right corner

Spinning wheel issues

Error handling is not one of Lemmy's strongpoints. Sometimes something goes wrong, but instead of getting an error, the button will have a 'spinning wheel' that lasts until eternity. These are some of the known cases:

• You want to create an account but the username is already taken
• You want to create an account but the username is too long (>20 characters)
• You want to create an account but the password is too long
• You want to create a community but the name is already taken
• You want to create a community but the name is not in all lowercase letters
• You want to create a post over 2000 characters
• You want to post something in a language that isn't allowed in the community

Other issues

• Federation not always working; Apparently not everything gets synced all the time. This needs troubleshooting.
• “404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site” This sometimes happens when the Lemmy app container is very busy. Needs troubleshooting

Enhancement requests

• Can themes be added? > To be checked if this can be done without changing code.

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

I'm not happy with the performance, especially when clicking 'Post' it takes too long.

First I will upgrade this VPS from 2cpu/4GB to 4cpu/16GB.

Then I will tune the database (more shared_buffers to start with)

After that I'll see what more I can tune, together with the Lemmy admin channel.

lemmy.world just reached 1000 users.

Please remember that the server was created June 1st! So still might notice some startup issues... but so far so good! Welcome @all!

Installed latest image of Lemmy because it should fix some performance issues. Let's see if it improves some stuff.

(I'm creating a starting guide post here. Have patience, it will take some time...)

Disclaimer: I am new to Lemmy like most of you. Still finding my way. If you see something that isn't right, let me know. Also additions, please comment!

Welcome!

Welcome to Lemmy (on whichever server you're reading this)

About Lemmy

Lemmy is a federated platform for news aggregagtion / discussion. It's being developed by the Lemmy devs: https://github.com/LemmyNet

About Federation

What does this federation mean?

It means Lemmy is using a protocol (Activitypub) which makes it possible for all Lemmy servers to interact.

• You can search and view communities on remote servers from here
• You can create posts in remote communities
• You can respond to remote posts
• You will be notified (if you wish) of comments on your remote posts
• You can follow Lemmy users/communities on other platforms that also use Activitypub (like Mastodon, Calckey etc) (There's currently a known issue with that, see here

Please note that a server only starts indexing a server/community once it has been interacted with by a user of this server.

A great image describing this, made by @ulu_mulu@lemmy.world : https://imgur.com/a/uyoYySY

About Lemmy.world

Lemmy.world is one of the many servers hosting the Lemmy software. It was started on June 1st, 2023 by @ruud@lemmy.world , who is also running https://mastodon.world, https://calckey.world and others.

A list of Lemmy servers and their statistics can be found at FediDB

Quick start guide

Account

You can use your account you created to log in to the server on which you created it. Not on other servers. Content is federated to other servers, users/accounts are not.

Searching

In the top menu, you'll see the search icon. There, you can search for posts, communities etc.

You can just enter a search-word and it will find the Post-titles, post-content, communities etc containing that word that the server knows of. So any content any user of this server ever interacted with.

You can also search for a community by it's link, e.g. [!Netherlands@lemmy.nl](/c/Netherlands@lemmy.nl). Even if the server hasn't ever seen that community, it will look it up remotely. Sometimes it takes some time for it to fetch the info (and displays 'No results' meanwhile..) so just be patient and search a second time after a few seconds.

Creating communities

First, make sure the community doesn't already exist. Use search (see above). Also try https://browse.feddit.de/ to see if there are remote communities on other Lemmy instances that aren't known to Lemmy.world yet.

If you're sure it doesn't exist yet, go to the homepage and click 'Create a Community'.

It will open up the following page:

Here you can fill out:

• Name: should be all lowercase letters. This will be the /c/
• Display name: As to be expected, this will be the displayed name.
• You can upload an icon and banner image. Looks pretty.
• The sidebar should contain things like description, rules, links etc. You can use Markdown (yey!)
• If the community will contain mainly NSFW content, check the NSFW mark. NSFW is allowed as long as it doesn't break the rules
• If you only want moderators to be able to post, check that checkbox.
• Select any language you want people to be able to post in. Apparently you shouldn't de-select 'Undetermined'. I was told some apps use 'Undetermined' as default language so don't work if you don't have it selected

Reading

I think the reading is obvious. Just click the post and you can read it. SOmetimes when there are many comments, they will partly be collapsed.

Posting

When viewing a community, you can create a new post in it. First of all make sure to check the community's rules, probably stated in the sidebar.

In the Create Post page these are the fields:

• URL: Here you can paste a link which will be shown at the top of the post. Also the thumbnail of the post will link there. Alternatively you can upload an image using the image icon to the right of the field. That image will also be displayed as thumbnail for the post.
• Title: The title of the post.
• Body: Here you can type your post. You can use Markdown if you want.
• Community: select the community where you want this post created, defaults to the community you were in when you clicked 'create post'
• NSFW: Select this if you post any NSFW material, this blurs the thumbnail and displays 'NSFW' behind the post title.
• Language: Specify in which language your post is.

Also see the Lemmy documentation on formatting etc.

Commenting

Moderating / Reporting

Client apps

There are some apps available or in testing. See this post for a list!

Issues

When you find any issue, please report so here: https://lemmy.world/post/15786 if you think it's server related (or not sure).

Report any issues or improvement requests for the Lemmy software itself here: https://github.com/LemmyNet

Known issues

Known issues can be found in the beforementioned post, one of the most annoying ones is the fact that post/reply in a somewhat larger community can take up to 10 seconds. It seems like that's related to the number of subscribers of the community.

I'll be looking into that one, and hope the devs are too.

I'm going to miss AITA. Even if someone makes it a community, it will take a long time to populate.

Apparently in some parts of the world it's already Monday June 12th. I see registrations going up.

This results in the server CPU staying around 70% even spiking over 90%. So I will upgrade the VPS from 4cpu/16GB to 8cpu/32GB.

Expect a few minutes downtime at 17:00 CET

I'm trying to fix this annoying slowness when posting to larger communities. (Just try replying here...) I'll be doing some restarts of the docker stack and nginx.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Edit: Well I've changed the nginx from running in a docker container to running on the host, but that hasn't solved the posting slowness..

So after we've extended the virtual cloud server twice, we're at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.

Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.

So the bad news... we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )

For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon

Thanks!

Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores "Rome" CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.

I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it's back. After that I'll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @veroxii@lemmy.world for assisting with that.

We're still working to find a solution for the posting slowness in large communities.

We have seen that a post does get submitted right away, but yet the page keeps 'spinning'

So right after you clicked 'Post' or 'Reply' you can refresh the page and the post should be there.

(But maybe to be sure you could copy the contents of your post first, so you can paste again if anything would go wrong..)

Ok I hope I won't come off as an ass here. I'm not always the most eloquent.

One thing that was quite grating on Reddit, was how most "global" subreddits were basically defaulting to the USA.

For example, people would ask questions in general question subs - "Can I legally...?" ”Is a teacher allowed to...?", "How much does it cost to...?" and unless they specify the country, you were just supposed to assume it's the US, with people from other countries keeping such questions to specific subs.

And this is just a bit weird to non-Americans who always need to specify their jurisdiction or place when it's relevant.

On Reddit it kinda made sense as Americans were almost half of all users, but with Lemmy, anyone can run an instance from wherever.

There is a bunch of instances dedicated to countries or regions.

But Lemmy.world has "world" right there in the title. So don't assume everyone is from the same place as you.

Don't get me wrong, I do love the global community! But I also don't want to get confused and make assumptions.

So all I ask is some of these things:

• If you're asking the global community a question, making a comment etc., that is specific to some area(s) of the world, always specify the place, even if it seems self-explanatory.

• Similarly, when using generic terms such as "congress", "conservative", "west coast" or "health insurance", keep in mind that lots of countries have those too in some form or another. Specify what you're talking about.

• Careful with names of places, especially abbreviation. By CA, do you mean Canada or California? Is IN India or Indiana? Is SD an SD card? UK is an university now? And so on. I personally think abbreviation should default to countries or global organizations, if anything - such as UK, EU, UN.

• When creating/managing a community, use the Display Name to specify what you mean. (I won't call anyone out but I kinda want to...)

• If you see someone making these assumptions, maybe let them know it can be confusing for the others.

• Consider using (or creating) an instance or community that's more region-specific or interest-specific . I don't want to kick anyone out, don't get me wrong, but everyone can subscribe everywhere, so...

I've seen instances for many countries (and the US midwest)... But not one for USA as a whole yet. So, just keep in mind the community is global.

Again, sorry if I come off harsh, it's not my intent, and I don't even mean to call out people from the US specifically. It's just that on Reddit, this has often lead to some toxicity (r/USDefaultism and some other "defaultism" subs) and it would be a shame to bring that here as well.

And you know, just to try to avoid confusion.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

ou might have seen that we've been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there's some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.

How federation works

The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you're subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?

It's hosted on both! It's hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It's also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That's why if you host your own instance, you'll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.

And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you're reading the post that's host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!

"True"-ness

A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a "true" version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the "true" version, that every other community reflects. The "true" version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the "true" version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the "true" version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the "true" version on beehaw to update themselves.

The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the "true" version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.

How defederation works

Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The "true" version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let's say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the "true" version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won't get that comment, because we've been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the "true" version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren't send to other versions. As the "true" version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).

The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the "true" version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the "true" versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.

Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won't be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the "true" version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.

Why can I still see posts/comments from beehaw users?

Until they defederated us, posts/comments were being sent to lemmy.world, so we can see everything from before defederation. After defederation, we are no longer receiving or sending updates. So there are now multiple versions of those posts.

Why can I still interact with beehaw communities?

This won't ever stop. You'll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won't see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.

Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we're only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they're pretty pointless for us to be in right now.

Why do I still see comments from beehaw users on lemmy.world communities?

Again, comments from before defederation were still sent to us. After defederation, it will no longer be possible for beehaw users to interact with the "true" version of lemmy.world communities. Their posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. They also aren't getting updates from any other lemmy, as the "true" version of those communities is on our instance.

Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?

That's because the "true" version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn't defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.

The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.

This seems like it's worse for beehaw users than for us?

Yes. In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It's worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance. They said in their post that this is a nuke, but I don't think they fully assessed the blast area. Based on their post, I don't think they fully understand what defederation does.

Hey there lemmings!

It's your friendly neighbourhood Sun-Spider here. I recently volunteered as a mod on this community, so I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know my plans.

Many of you will have seen that there are a lot of off-topic posts in this community right now. I suspect that new users, especially ones not yet familiar with how Lemmy and the fediverse work, are seeing it as a kind of default community or a place to generally discuss the world of Lemmy.

However, as it says in the sidebar, this is a community about the lemmy.world instance specifically. If it's going to serve as that, then it can't be drowned in off-topic posts.

To that end, I plan to start going through and removing posts that are not discussing this instance, with two exceptions.

Firstly, I know that some of these posts are providing good info to new users coming from Reddit, so I'd like to not take those down just yet. Since this is such a visible community, keeping them has value. Therefore highly upvoted posts that are specifically for newcomers from Reddit may get left.

Secondly, I know that removing posts with many upvotes and comments could be seen as overly harsh. While we don't have a karma system here, if you had a post that has done well then suddenly seeing it removed is painful. Therefore if a post is off topic, but is nonetheless highly upvoted, then I may instead simply lock the post. This preserves the content, but prevents further engagement. This should mean that it gradually falls off the front page, whose default sort is Active.

TLDR

• Posts that are not about the lemmy.world instance specifically will be removed, with the following exceptions:
• Some posts providing value to new users will be left
• Some posts with high engagement may be simply locked

Update

Check out the new communities !newcomers@lemmy.world and !general@lemmy.world! These are intended to be a good home for a lot of the content that's getting removed/locked.

people posting here are going out of their way to post -- and it feels like every thought has more weight or sanctity or meaning when it's being posted here, at the dawn of a new era and the fall of an old.

i'm spending more time actually reading and engaging with every comment, parsing the details and thinking about it, conceptually. versus just looking at garbage all day, garbage with a little bit of fentanyl in to keep you hooked

I just installed the 0.18.0 release candidate 1 of the lemmy-ui component.

This version removes websockets and should solve many strange issues. Like the glitching vote totals, sudden changes of posts etc.

Let me know if you see improvements, or new issues.

I enabled the ipv6 address for lemmy.world. Should work now.

Next step would be enable dnssec, have to figure out how that worked again.

Not that it is not interesting but I would like just a tad more variety on the front page.

Edit btw for those who are wondering the two communities I started are https://lemmy.world/c/newmusic and https://kbin.social/m/musicfeedback/microblog (not sure if I have the links correct for people)

Reddit refugee here.

I have really started to like Lemmy and love the fact that it's free and open source, but I wasn't feeling so home with the UI, so I found nice looking style from https://userstyles.world/style/10345/lemmy-world but I personally prefer dark theme so I adjusted some colours and made the radiuses and margins bigger. I thought that maybe someone will find this useful and hence I decided to post it here. I am not a professional programmer, just a guy who likes to tinker with computers so this style may not be perfect. Critique, feedback and suggestions are welcome.

Edit: The colors are from reddit and if you want the colors to look more like the original lemmy, change the bg primary and default to hex #303030 and #222222. I really like this color scheme too

--bg-primary: #303030;
--bg-default: #222222;

Edit2: I have now made some small adjustments using the feedback and suggestion I got from you. I'm really grateful for the feedback :)

I also have now two styles, which have slightly different color scheme https://userstyles.world/user/VILPAUTOEE

Keep the feedback coming ;D Thx

Thanks to a comment by @LargeHardonCollider@lemmy.world , I checked and saw that 'Federation debugging' mode was enabled. I had enabled that when the server just started (less than 3 weeks ago) and I had an issue with federation.

I thought I had switched that off again, but apparently not. This mode causes the federation to be done in the foreground, so your 'Post' or 'Comment' action will wait for that to finish...

This solves the most annoying issue, and makes the site way more useable. There are many other issues, but we'll get there.

So some spam signups just happened (all username12345678@gmail.com format e-mail) This caused bounced mail to increase, causing Mailgun to block our domain to prevent it getting blacklisted.

So:

• Mail temporarily doesn't work
• I closed signups for now
• I will ban the spam accounts
• I will check how to prevent (maybe approval required again?)

Stay tuned.

Edit: so apparently there is a captcha option which I now enabled. Let's see if this prevents spam. Registrations open again.

Edit2 : Hmm Mailgun isn't that fast in unblocking the domain. Closing signups again because validation mails aren't sent

Edit 3: I convinced Mailgun to lift the block. Signups open again.

I wrote my fist post about Lemmy.world. When June is finished, I'll also include Lemmy in the financial update on the same blog.