Remove the locally compiled install and install freetype-devel, and see if that works.

That is what GNU Stow does, with a lot of package-management-like helper commands which make it all organized and convenient.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

!rcv@ponder.cat

It's on the ballot statewide in six states so far, and it's already in action in a bunch of places. Almost everybody who isn't a malicious establishment politician likes it wherever it gets tried. Read the sticky post to learn more.

Most of the most popular RSS communities are free. I like some of them that are paywalled and a little way down the list, like !thenewyorker@rss.ponder.cat and !theatlantic@rss.ponder.cat, but most of the top ones are free. One of the really nice things about one community per source is that you know which ones to subscribe to and which ones you'd have to pay for that you can block.

If you don't know the New York Times has a paywall, and you click on a link to them, that's a learning experience for you at this point. I think some of the griping about paywalls is just entitled. It's okay if people made content for you and they want to get paid. At the same time, I'm not trying to spam people who don't want paywall content. If I can make a quality-of-life improvement for people who don't want to get burned by paywalls on random links from places they've never heard of, then fine.

I also want to give shout-outs to some feeds that are way, way down and trying to charge money for very high quality stuff:

• !eenews@rss.ponder.cat
• !grist@rss.ponder.cat
• !themarshallproject@rss.ponder.cat
• !technologyreview@rss.ponder.cat
• !foreignpolicy@rss.ponder.cat

I completely agree. Maybe my phrasing was careless. I wasn't trying to be critical of the pace of accepting PRs or anything. I only meant that I think more flexibility in the frontend would help, instead of needing any minor UI change to go all the way through a cycle all the way up to you, incorporating it into the core codebase, and then filtering back down to an upgrade by the instance admin. But please don't take it as blaming you for any of that situation. I was raising it in the effort to propose a solution and also to advocate against people just complaining about the moderation tools and then moving on, and waiting for you to make them happy.

I did look at the backend plugin system PR, although sadly not enough yet to have any opinion or feedback on it. I do think a frontend plugin system, of sorts, could help a lot. I'm not sure when I will have time but I will try to put together something on this instance to show what I'm talking about, and if I do wind up doing it and it's well received, I am completely open to putting it together as a fixed-up and official PR for the main codebase.

I think hackability can go a long way towards this.

Especially on the frontend, there's no reason Lemmy shouldn't have custom "plugins" to change its behavior in certain ways. I think the issue isn't that the Lemmy developers don't want these things to exist that you're talking about, so much as them being the only ones in a position to make the changes or accept the PRs to make them happen. Of course in that situation, change will be slow and progress limited.

Me making changes to the frontend that intensive, or anything like it, was a bigger scope of change than I was expecting. I just wanted to make some tinkering things for my instance. But it wouldn't be impossible. And you could have your charts. Even little blinking lights and things.

Let me mull it over for a while.

I spent a long time looking at it.

I think what it boils down to is hackability. The friction comes from people being unable to modify their experience, or the experience of their users, without going through this crazy process that involves it going all the way up to two Lemmy devs for the entire universe of users, and then something getting changed, and then it going all the way back down to the moderator or whoever, after the site admin upgrades the entire site. Or, going rogue and starting to change the code for their instance, which of course only the admin can do and voids the warranty.

I wasn't trying to become a Lemmy dev. I just wanted to make my instance neat, and I like to tinker. But I'm glad that people took the question seriously enough to give real, detailed answers about what would make things better. Lemmy is already designed to separate the backend and frontend very cleanly. I think it wouldn't be too hard (famous last words...) to make the frontend more hackable to make at least some of these into easier things to do at an end-user or end-administrator level.

It might be good to look at other software, too. I was thinking Lemmy, but the goal is the neat stuff, not the Lemmy part of it.

Yep. I'm happy it's working.

Comic strips seem like they have their own communities which I don't want to collide with, and it's logical, since the frequency of posting is so much smaller that a human can do the postings no problem.

I understand now. I thought you meant something different by crowdsourcing. No worries.

Yes. I want to avoid having it become spam, so I decided to be careful which RSS feeds I add to keep the human-to-bot ratio up.

I think they can both be useful. Some people will prefer to have an RSS reader pulling the feeds from Lemmy communities, and some people will prefer to have Lemmy as their home base, so to speak, and like to be able to add updates from some RSS feeds to that.