Apologies for some recent downtime and speed issues. The site was having some issues with random slowness, which was related to the downtime and should now be fixed.

We had some downtime earlier this month due to the hosting provider (Linode) "experiencing an unexpected issue that requires immediate emergency work to be performed". That lasted from about 05:00 to 15:00 (UTC) on April 6th. The instance didn't come back up properly, due to an issue with podman networking. The networking was mostly fixed but still had random timeouts. The config was adjusted April 16th, which unfortunately resulted in some downtime from approximately 18:00 to 19:00 UTC. The random timeout issue should be fixed and Discuss Online should be generally speedy now though! Please comment if you encounter any issues with the site's responsiveness

Community Guidelines

These guidelines exist to keep this space worth being in — a place for genuine curiosity, good-faith conversation, and ideas worth sharing.

What Belongs Here

Post things that reward intellectual curiosity. The best submissions open up a topic, reveal something surprising, or spark a conversation that couldn't happen anywhere else. If you'd see it on the evening news, it probably doesn't belong here. If it would make a thoughtful person lean forward, it probably does.

Post original sources. If you found something through another site, link the original.

Use titles honestly. Don't embellish, editorialize, or use ALL CAPS for emphasis. Crop gratuitous numbers ("10 Ways to Do X" → "How to Do X"). If something is a video or PDF, note it: [video] or [pdf].

Don't use this community primarily for self-promotion. Sharing your own work occasionally is fine — just make sure it's a small part of your participation, not the whole of it.

How to Comment

Lead with curiosity, not conclusions. The best comments ask better questions or surface things others missed. They don't just announce an opinion, they add to the conversation.

Assume good faith. Before responding, ask yourself: what's the most reasonable interpretation of what this person said? Start there. This is the Principle of Charity in practice: treat others as intelligent people making a real point, even if they're making it imperfectly.

Disagree with the argument, not the person. If someone is wrong, explain why. "Here's what I think is missing from that view…" is more useful than any version of "that's wrong/naive/silly."

Be substantive, especially when it matters most. On contentious topics, shallow takes make things worse. Take the extra moment to say something real.

Don't be a curmudgeon. Thoughtful criticism is welcome. Generic negativity isn't.

Skip the performance. No sneering, no fulminating, no internet tropes, no flamebait. If a comment exists mainly to score points or signal a team, it doesn't belong here.

Don't pile on. If something has already been said, you don't need to add +1. If you can add something new, do.

Humor is welcome — if it earns it. A well-placed joke can be the best comment in a thread. Low-effort joke responses are just noise.

Tone and Temperament

Be kind. There's a real person on the other side of every comment.

Don't cross-examine. Ask questions out of genuine interest, not to trap someone.

Edit out the swipes. Even if a point is valid, it lands better without the dig attached.

If a thread is getting heated, be the one who lowers the temperature.

Things That Don't Belong Here

• Political or ideological point-scoring (it kills curiosity)
• Insinuations about bad faith, shilling, or coordinated behavior — if you're genuinely concerned, contact the admins privately
• Complaints about other users' votes or whether someone read the article
• Comments pointing out that a post is off-topic — flag it instead
• Shallow dismissals of others' work

A Note on the Principle of Charity

This community takes the Principle of Charity seriously, not as a rule to enforce, but as a practice to cultivate. It means: when someone's meaning is unclear, choose the most reasonable interpretation. When someone is wrong, engage with their best argument, not their weakest one. When someone seems to be acting in bad faith, consider that they might just be expressing something poorly.

This doesn't mean agreement. It means the kind of intellectual honesty that makes disagreement productive.

When in doubt: would this comment make the conversation better? If yes, post it. If not, hold it.

Hello!

Recently, we announced a call for admins following a transfer of ownership. Several people responded, and we're very grateful to @infinitevalence@discuss.online, @Itwasntme223@discuss.online, and @pulsejet@discuss.online for helping out. They've each been helping the Fediverse grow for some time now, and we're excited that they'll contribute via admin duties as well. Here's an introduction from each one of them:

• @infinitevalence@discuss.online

  • I joined the Discuss.Online website as part of the Reddit API boycott. Originally I had planned on setting up my own personal instance but was convinced by JGRIM the original owner and administrator of Discuss.Online to join his instance. I have been a moderator for a few different communities since then, and when the call came out for new admins it did not seem like too big an ask to raise my hand.

    I enjoy self-hosting, computer hardware, video games, 3d printing, keyboards, and I love diving into new areas of tech I am not familiar with as it feeds my ADHD brain.

    I am passionate about Open Source and Free software. I want to move away from corporation owned platforms back to the good old days of distributed services. The Fediverse may not be perfect but its the right idea behind what the web was supposed to be, and what we can make it into again.

• @Itwasntme223@discuss.online

  • When it comes to the internet, I have been on it long enough to remember when the word was capitalized. I spent most of my time on YIM, AIM, gchat, reddit and the like, moderating on reddit and Discord most recently. It was only when things started to go to hell that I began to look for alternatives. It was the time of the Blue bird disaster that I joined my first fediverse instance. Since then I have been living on the Fediverse, helping and supporting where I can!

• @pulsejet@discuss.online

  • I'm a big believer in federated and open systems, I think all voices need to be heard in a constructive and collaborative environment. I run a few niche communities that pique my interests by my intention as a admin is to just ensure the server rules are followed with minimal bias. I'm happy to help keep lemmy going and look forward to seeing the overall community grow and become foundational to the internet.

Thanks, @m_f@discuss.online

Hello!

I'd like to let everyone know about a change in ownership of Discuss.Online. Previously it was hosted and paid for by @jgrim@discuss.online, but he is taking a break from the Fediverse for now to deal with personal issues. He's handed it off to me to host and stepped down as Lemmy admin. When he's back, he plans on focusing on Sublinks. He's done a great job of running and growing discuss.online, and I wanted to help continue the mission and keep the Fediverse stable (RIP lemm.ee). I don't plan on making any major changes for now, just focus on keeping things stable and smooth.

There was some downtime last Saturday during the handover, announced here. There were some further federation issues with Matrix that persisted until Wednesday and should now be resolved. If you see any other issues, please let me know. I'm working on stability and monitoring to ensure everything keeps running well.

@lazyguru@discuss.online is stepping down as admin as well, which leaves us with no other dedicated admins. The other listed admins are from lemmy.world and have done a great job of helping out but can't dedicate their full attention to discuss.online. If anyone is interested in helping out with admin tasks, please speak up! It would mostly involve responding to reports and applications. I'm generally pretty responsive to them already, so it shouldn't involve a lot of work.

Thanks, @m_f@discuss.online

Apologies for the short notice. Should be back up within a few hours

EDIT: Think we're back up. Sorry again about the short notice, we had to migrate hosts. Will post more later

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

Lemmy.One and R.NF are currently blocked. This is a temporary measure to prevent the spread of CSAM. The instance appears to have inactive admins who have not responded to requests. We will remain defederated with them until they respond and clean up the traces of CSAM.

Hello all,

Some of our sister sites will be closing down June 1st, 2025.

Bye Utter.Online (Mastodon)

It has been decided that the Mastodon instance Utter.online will be shut down on June 1st, 2025, due to a lack of interest from the community. There are many Mastodon instances available for people to choose from. We could not create an Instance that stood out and encouraged growth. I'm okay with this because I, too, lack interest in micro-blogging. In the coming days, I will migrate some users to a new Mastodon Instance, such as @discussonline@utter.online.

Bye Social.Photo (Pixelfed)

It has also been decided that the Pixelfed instance Social.photo will be shut down on June 1st, 2025. This instance has been growing in popularity slowly, and the decision to shut it down stems from frustrations with sustaining a Pixelfed service.

Is it because of money?

Closing these two services down also provides cost benefits from not having to renew domains and run the services. Mastodon and Pixelfed use a lot of storage because they have very active photography communities. Cost benefits were not a driving factor but were tipping points to make decisions. Neither the Utter.Online nor the Social.Photo communities donate to continue services.

What about "my" data?

I will not be giving any data to anyone. If you wish to have your data, you must export it before June 1st, 2025. All data and backups will be forever deleted on that date.

Continuing the services.

I can transfer the domains to the right person if they wish to continue the service. However, I will not be providing user data or databases. I can provide any key used for Instance identification; however, users will need to export their data and import once the transfer is complete.

Thanks a lot, jgrim

Hello!

I’m going to implement a variant of this.

-jgrim

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/40761824

Sorry everyone I know how much you love the attention she gives you, but I've implemented some quick and dirty filtering for private messaging.

We now have the ability to automatically mark PM's as deleted or read, depending on content inside of them. If we accidentally filter something you legitimately wanted (ie, not Nicole) please let me know.

If any other instances would like to implement this, here's the code. Note that you'll need to set your hostname at the top here for some reason I haven't exactly identified.

SET lemmy.protocol_and_hostname = 'https://lemmy.ca/';

CREATE TABLE private_message_filters (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    phrase TEXT NOT NULL,
    behavior VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL CHECK (behavior IN ('delete', 'mark_read'))
);

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION filter_private_messages()
RETURNS trigger AS $$
DECLARE
    banned_phrase_record private_message_filters%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN
    FOR banned_phrase_record IN 
        SELECT * FROM private_message_filters
    LOOP
        IF LOWER(TRIM(NEW.content)) ILIKE '%' || LOWER(TRIM(banned_phrase_record.phrase)) || '%' THEN
            IF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'delete' THEN
                NEW.deleted := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            ELSIF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'mark_read' THEN
                NEW.read := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            END IF;
        END IF;
    END LOOP;
    RETURN NEW;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages
AFTER INSERT ON private_message
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE FUNCTION filter_private_messages();

To add filter words:

insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('delete', 'spamtestdelete');
insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('mark_read', 'spamtestread');

If you want to quickly disable / enable filtering while testing:

ALTER TABLE private_message DISABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;
ALTER TABLE private_message ENABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;

I'll leave it up to you to figure out what phrases to filter on. MAKE SURE YOU TEST. If there's an error, private messaging could break completely. You should not get an error message from the UI while sending a message with a banned word.

Hello,

Another service we run is a Mastodon instance called https://utter.online/. It doesn't have many active users; however, it's a beast to host.

I'm considering changing to a new domain and/or changing the software or shutting it down.

The current domain name options are:

1. toot.onl
2. toot.discuss.online

I haven't done much research into alternatives to Mastodon.

Let me know your thoughts!

I've also tooted about it here: https://utter.online/@jsonarray/114161376708082696

Thanks, jgrim

Howdy,

I wanted to share with instance users that I've been mucking around with services to improve stability and security.

I used to announce before I did it but I haven't been recently. I'll get better at it again.

Let me know if you have any issues or questions!

Other services we run are social.photo and utter.online.

Edit: I should also mention we have status pages for all services:

• status.discuss.online
• status.matrix.discuss.online
• status.social.photo (coming soon: I just realized I forgot to add it)
• status.utter.online

Thanks, jgrim

We've gotten a lot of new users over the past few days, and thought it would be good to make a post to help steer people in the right direction.

First of all, welcome!

You're on discuss.online, which is a platform for, well, discussing things online! 😃

We're a general-purpose forum hosted in the USA, and welcome casual and serious conversation alike about any topic you're interested in. To start, here's a thread that lists lots of active communities you can join (communities are like subreddits) that aren't focused on politics, news, memes, or tech:

https://discuss.online/post/15026558

Go there, click on interesting communities (they start with !, like how /r/ works for subreddits). As an example, this post is in !announcements@discuss.online.

There's a much wider universe of people that you can talk to and interact with on here! You've probably heard about the Fediverse, ActivityPub, and other stuff like that, but don't sweat it. Start by finding your footing and finding some nice communities. Once you've done that, or if you're interested in jumping right in, @otter@lemmy.ca wrote a great guide to how discuss.online gives you access to a wider world of other people here: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started

We also have a chat! Join us at #online.discuss:discuss.online if you want a more casual chatting experience.

If you need help, have questions, or just want to chat and don't feel like joining the chat room above, feel free to post in the comments below!

Hello!

You may have noticed some instability and performance issues with the web client of Discuss.online. I have made some infrastructure changes to hopefully improve stability. In the process, I also updated to the latest version of Lemmy.

Let me know if you have issues or comments!

Hello!

The Wiki site has been locked down while some article and user cleanup takes place. A series of bots created thousands of users and pages containing spam, scams, & misinformation. It appears to be part of a larger attack on MediaWiki instances because a lot of the articles created are linked to other infected instances of MediaWiki.

While the users, content, and security are being handled the Wiki site will be locked down.

The next steps have not been identified to help prevent this from happening again. These steps may include invite-only access, Captcha, etc. An update to this will be posted here later as an edit to this post.

Many of you may not even be aware we have a community Wiki available. It was set up as an open wiki for moderators and users to contribute to. Some communities use the Wiki for additional community information and resources. The Wiki also lists active 1st party bots that are used on Discuss.Online.

Please, let me know if you have any questions, concerns, or feedback.

Update: the wiki is back up and existing users can login. Registration is locked.

Thanks, jgrim

Hello!

Please welcome our newest admin, @m_f@discuss.online!

They joined to help increase community engagement, moderation, & perhaps some help raising funding. We're looking forward to their help and experience in improving our instance and the fediverse as a whole.

Here is a quick introduction from m_f.

I started getting involved in Lemmy mod duties over at !msp@midwest.social when the only mod went AWOL. That gave me the confidence to create a few communities for comics that didn't have any Lemmy communities yet, and then a community for posting loops. When !AskUSA@discuss.online needed a moderator, I volunteered to help out there, and now I'm helping out on admin duties for the instance. Moral of the story is, stepping up to help out is a great low-effort way to help Lemmy grow

• jgrim

Hello,

I made a lot of adjustments to the infrastructure to Discuss.Online. Please let me know if you notice any strange behavior or federation issues.

Thanks a lot, jgrim

ATTENTION: There is a known issue with the database cluster for discuss.online. It's a managed cluster by #DigitalOcean. They are working on resolving the issue. I'll update you once the issue is resolved.

You might see strange errors like the inability to log in or view specific posts.

Update 03/01/2024 @ 9:40 pm ET: The database has been migrated to a new server. Please, let us know if you experience any issues.

We are thrilled to announce the upcoming release of Sublinks, a groundbreaking Link Aggregation Social Network, joining the Fediverse. This innovative platform is designed to revolutionize how we share and discover online. Our dedicated team of volunteer contributors has worked tirelessly, utilizing technologies like Java, Go, TypeScript, and HTML to bring this vision to life. Sublinks promises a user-friendly interface and robust features that cater to diverse online communities. Stay tuned for our launch date, and get ready to experience a new era of social link sharing!

Sublinks will have a fully compatible API with Lemmy so all current Lemmy apps will also work with Sublinks. In fact, discuss.online will switch to Sublinks to fully replace Lemmy once we reach our Parity Milestone.

For more information, visit GitHub - Sublinks and sublinks.org.

Stay tuned for more regular updates as we progress.

This is the first of the monthly financial reports. This one is short and sweet; I'll provide more details next time.

These costs include hosting for:

1. discuss.online (lemmy)
2. discuss.online (matrix)
3. wiki.discuss.online (open wiki)
4. utter.online (mastodon)
5. social.photo (pixelfed)
6. Sublinks.org (sublinks)
7. participating.online(wiki)

Expenses for November

• Hosting: $575.32
• Github: $436.16
• Email: $21.45
• Total: $1,032.93

Income for November

• OpenCollective: $65
• Patreon: $15.11
• Total: $80.11

Year-to-date

• Year-to-date total expenses: $4,087.63
• Year-to-date total income: $454.77
• Year-to-date balance: -$3632.86

Donations... if you can spare it

• Patreon
• OpenCollective

Lemmy doesn't provide any analytics. Give this post a like and/or comment if you use this instance. I'm trying to gauge usage by humans.

I'll let this census run for about a week to gauge usage.

Results might cause different changes to the services.

I'm doing this because the cost of running this instance is higher than most other instances due to reliability and disaster recovery implementations. I'm curious if I should back down many of these costs if we're not used fully. I don't see much activity directly in this instance.

I know that discuss.online wasn't listed on join-lemmy.org for about a month due to a bug with the Lemmy crawler. They just recently fixed it with their redesign. We are now listed but no longer featured.

tl;dr; is this instance dying? Let me know if you're here.

We are running the latest release candidate for Lemmy, version 0.19.0-rc.1. This release candidate includes many changes.

Every release comes with its own challenges; however, it resolves previous ones. We hope this release will resolve a longstanding issue with sync not working, causing a lot of manual work from the admins to keep things in sync.

Please let us know if you experience any weird behavior.

Some known issues so far are:

• HTML entities characters in posts bodies (Changing & to &)
• The spoiler tag crashes the site if used in the sidebar
• Mobile apps are borked again

Update 10/25/2023

• We are now running release candidate 3.

We are aware of an issue with some clients not being able to sync (receiving 502 errors, etc..). It does not appear to affect all clients and the web view is still working. We will update this post as we know more and when we have resolved it.

Updates:

09-Sept 11:19 PM UTC We attempted to roll back from Lemmy v0.18.4-beta.8 to v0.18.4 (as well as even earlier beta versions) but the service failed to start. We've reverted back to v0.18.4-beta.8 for now and will continue investigating the cause of the sync issues.

10-Sept 3:30 AM UTC And... we are back, where we started. If you hadn't noticed, we were down for almost 2.5 hours while we tried to rollback the database migrations introduced in the beta releases so we could go back to the stable v0.18.4. When that failed, we tried to restore from the backup we took just prior to the rollback attempt. When that failed, we used Digital Ocean's restore to point in time and created a new DB cluster and switched to it. So... we are back on v0.18.4-beta.8 again, with the expectation that 3rd party clients are still broken. Unfortunately, we are not sure what we can do about this as we believe it is something in Lemmy that is breaking it. The mitigation we have put in place to avoid this going forward is that we no longer use the "latest" tag when loading a docker image and now hard lock to a specific version. We will update that version in a more intentional manner going forward.

10-Sept 4:15 AM UTC After some additional digging through the Lemmy diff for beta.5 to beta.8 (and then looking through the PRs that were merged to create this diff), the issue is indeed with the Lemmy code and is even called out in one of the PRs,. What this means is that the 3rd party clients that are not able to access the site will need to update their code to fix things on their side (or else they will be broken when v0.19 is released and all other instances update to it).

16-Sept 11:23 PM UTC Both Sync and Mlem have now released new versions that resolve connectivity issues. If there are any remaining clients we suggest you reach out directly to them to ask them. We'll be unpinning this post in a few hours

27-Sept 10:30 PM UTC We have made the decision to update to the RC (release candidate) for v19 as the beta we were previously on was missing some much-missed admin tools that we need to run the site with. This update appears to have affected 3rd parties again (I have tested Mlem and Memmy and get errors about authentication, however they still seem to load?). There also appears to be an issue with the home page loading that we are currently looking into how to resolve. As before, we don't anticipate any way to roll back. To steal a line from my daughter's favorite movie: Keep Moving Forward

28-Sept 12:03 AM UTC We found an issue with the markdown parsing that was causing the homepage sidebar to throw errors. We've resolved the issue and will update the core developers of Lemmy.

03-Oct 1:28 AM UTC We have implemented a workaround that should have fixed all apps. Please let us know if you are still having issues with an app (we may not be able to add a workaround for it, but we would like to at least track the ones not working)

Did you know that Discuss.Online has a Matrix server?

If you're not familiar with Matrix you can read more here: https://matrix.org/about/

Matrix is a federated real-time chat server.

Join the community space! Go to: https://matrix.to/#/#community-channels:discuss.online.

Need a username? Contact @jgrim@discuss.online or comment on this post. A registration code will be sent to you for [yourhandle]@discus.online

Matrix Clients Discuss.Online provides two web based client options. You can find more at: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

Here are the Discuss.Online hosted ones:

• https://element.discuss.online/
• https://cinny.discuss.online/

See you there!

Please welcome @lazyguru@discuss.online to the discuss.online admin team.

I’ve known lazyguru for over ten years. He’s a close friend. His skills are like mine. He will be able to help contribute to all projects of the discuss.online ecosystem.

lazyguru will help with moderation, system administration, monitoring, and development of new features. Joe has already improved some monitoring and is working on some changes to the infrastructure to make it more scalable. He will soon be helping with SocialCare.cloud once the first beta is released.

Please, take some time to welcome him!

Thanks, Jason

tl;dr;

We use SendGrid to send our emails out. By default, SendGrid enables link tracking. Link tracking was causing issues with allowing users to verify their accounts. In short, I disabled link tracking, and links should work for all new emails in the future.

Contact support if you need your account activated. hello@discuss.online from the email you used to sign up.

Issue

When new users sign up or when existing users reset their password, an email is sent to verify ownership of the account. These emails are sent from us through a service called SendGrid.

SendGrid, by default, will mask all the URLs to enable what they call link tracking. It's a marketing thing to track engagement with email. I have no use for it, but I didn't disable it before.

The issue is that sometimes this link doesn't resolve. An HTTPS error is shown to the user.

Resolution

The quickest and most logical resolution was to disable link tracking. I never use it. I did just that; however, any previous emails sent will still be broken.

I will continue to investigate the issue in hopes of resolving previous links.

If you are unable to verify your account, please email hello@discuss.online from the email you used to sign up. We'll manually verify each account that hasn't been able to be activated.