I'm still trying to get used to Lemmy; the main thing confusing me is the federated bit.

I just want to access Lemmy and its content; how do I do that? Currently I'm just going to old.lemmy.world and using that as a starting point.

Is there another instance you would recommend as the default one?

The two main reasons I ask are:

1. I want to know if there are things I am simply missing out on and there's a better way to browse Lemmy.

2. I really don't like cloudflare and have it disabled in Javascript. I don't want to leave it enabled for lemmy.world.

Can't find anything in settings to control how many things I see per page.

I think I get 15 items per page which feels low as I'm used to 50-100.

Also /c/modabuse. Also /c/yepowertrippinbastards. Also lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, comrade, ACAB, and 552 individual accounts across 67 instances, about half of them on lemmy.world.

None of this is in the source code. It's downloaded at runtime from a file nobody has ever looked at.

If you're just tuning in

Tesseract is a third-party web frontend for Lemmy, maintained by asimons04 and licensed AGPL-3.0. Admins deploy it on their own servers alongside or instead of lemmy-ui, and there are public instances of it people use to browse Lemmy generally. If you've used a Lemmy site that didn't look like stock Lemmy, there's a fair chance it was this.

Last week db0 posted a PSA: Tesseract contains a blacklist of instance domains compiled directly into the application. 32 of them. Admins can't see it, can't configure it, and aren't told it's there. Connect to a listed instance and the app tells you it's "incompatible," which is not true.

I went through the code to see how that was implemented. The hardcoded list turns out to be the small half of the system.

There's a second filter policy fetched over HTTP every time the app loads. It isn't in the git repository. It's unauthenticated and world-readable, so anyone can pull it. Right now it carries 552 user accounts, 2,275 username patterns, 54 instances, 97 communities, 289 keyword patterns and 351 domains, with every category set to hide matches rather than flag them. Not collapsed behind a click. Simply absent, with no indication anything was removed.

Verify all of it in ten seconds

curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \
  | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json

That's the live policy, base64-wrapped gzip, 111KB of JSON when it unpacks. There's a stale fallback copy at /data/policy.dat as well.

It filters criticism of moderators

• lemmy.sdf.org/c/modabuse — listed
• lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/yepowertrippinbastards — listed
• lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/YPTBcirclejerk — listed
• community regex power ?tripping?
• keyword censoring me

Call the rest of it whatever you like. This part is not spam defence.

It filters words

The 32 community name patterns include Communis(t|m), Conservativ(e|es|ism), Leftis(t|m), Libertarian(ism)?, ^Green Part(y|ies), Zionis(t|m), (Police|Cops), guillotine and billionaire.

Keywords include comrade, ACAB, neoliberal, proletaria(n|t) and death to.

Filtered communities on instances that aren't blocked: lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, lemmy.today/c/news, lemmy.ca/c/politicalnewscanada, lemmy.ca/c/usa, infosec.pub/c/strategic_unions.

The 552 users aren't bots

67 instances. 272 on lemmy.world alone, 40 on sh.itjust.works, 19 on lemmy.ca, and 28 instances contributing exactly one person each.

355 of the 552 usernames are plain alphabetic, twelve characters or under, median length eight. Only 36 look like spam registrations. A bot list looks like the opposite of that.

Seven of them aren't even Lemmy. There are Mastodon and Friendica accounts in there: people who have never used Lemmy, hidden by a Lemmy frontend, with no possible way of finding out.

I have the list and I'm not posting it. Most of these are ordinary people who got pattern-matched, and 552 names on this comm is a harassment target inside an hour. Run the command above and grep for yourself.

And it lies about it

When the instance block fires you get: "Incompatible Instance. Not Supported. $instance is not compatible with Tesseract."

Nothing is incompatible. It's a policy decision dressed as an API error, and it's what had db0 chasing a version mismatch that never existed.

For the hidden users, communities and keywords, you get no message at all.

Admins can't switch it off

Tesseract has env vars for PUBLIC_DOMAIN_BLACKLIST, PUBLIC_FAKE_NEWS_BLACKLIST and the shortener lists. There is none for either blocklist. enableToxicMode bypasses the other filters and explicitly not this one.

Self-host it and you cannot disable this, nothing in your config admits it exists, and the contents can change without you pulling a commit.

Before someone says it

A lot of that domain list is real spam defence. It filters conservatism as well as communism. "It targets the left" doesn't survive the data and I'm not going to pretend it does.

The problem is that spam filtering and political editorial got welded into one undocumented, remotely-updatable blob, shipped hidden, to admins who've never read it and users who don't know it's there. The spam work is what makes the rest unauditable: "it's a spam list" answers every individual question and none of the whole.

And /c/modabuse is not spam.

Asks

1. Publish the runtime policy in the repo, or kill the endpoint.
2. Stop reporting a policy block as a technical incompatibility.
3. Tell users when something's been hidden. One line.
4. Give operators an off switch, like every other blacklist in the codebase has.

It's AGPL-3.0 and db0 already forked it. That's the licence working as designed. But forking isn't disclosure, and the admins who need this are precisely the ones with no reason to go looking.

If you run Tesseract, you are relaying a 111KB moderation policy you have never read, under your instance's name, to users who don't know it exists.

Full contents of every list, unedited, in the comments.

Is there a lemmy type engine, just for private correspondence? Retroshare is not like that. Osiris Serverless Portal is dead. And both of them are written in an outdated language (compared to rust) in C++.

may be related: https://лемми.опенсорс.рус/post/4015

For example this search I did was supposed to limit results to last week and showed something 11 months old:

https://programming.dev/search?q=webml&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopWeek&titleOnly=false

The following links should all have the query string ?P=5%B02%27.

example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

link

www.example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

www.example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

link

http://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

http://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

link

https://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

https://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

link

... across multiple instances, that is, and then automatically switch to the corresponding account per notification.

https://lemmy.ml/c/paradoxplaza

https://lemmy.ml/c/paizo

I've found content on these games from all across lemmy but unfortunately the content is scant. I intend to post all of my musings here and would appreciate if others do the same :)

I hate reddit gatekeeping these hobbies as I feel they are the only thing I look at reddit for. I decided to do a large, single community for both companies as I think being too specific (e.g. hoi4 only or pathfinder only) is a detriment to overall use of the communities. I also chose to host the communities on lemmy.ml because of server reliability reasons and allowing the community to access more of the fediverse. If the communities grow and become active enough I will branch them out into specific game communities.

Difficulty: 6, Speed: 8.689kH/s

I saw that messages have different identifiers on different servers. What should I write in my text to make the hyperlink to work on all servers?

https://xn--e1aghfa.xn--e1aqbccjfc.xn--p1acf/post/15
https://lemmy.ml/post/49064481

15 ≠ 49064481

The site https://lemmy.ml/ is unreachable from my computer because of government politics. I want to refer to the copy of message, which is downloaded into my instance. But it have a new ID in my DB.

Im an ancient in internet years: 33. Y'all remember user flair? Lemmy needs that first-class. I want people to label me as a spouter of deranged ideas and have it visible across clients. Its like you setting an avatar for specific people. Having it as a client specific thing ruins the community aspect and if it aint a default it wont be done.

I am trying to see
!rust_rus@xn--e1aghfa.xn--e1aqbccjfc.xn--p1acf
community in community search

here it's web page:
https://xn--e1aghfa.xn--e1aqbccjfc.xn--p1acf/c/rust_rus
https://лемми.опенсорс.рус/c/rust_rus

but button says "Waiting subscribtion" and stays yellow.
So, I am unable to subscrite to that community as a user of lemmy.ml

ok so this is a follow-up on my previous post [is this a bug?] how do i see lemmy content from mastodon

i might have been stupid.

i tried following the !shitpost@lemmy.world community from mastodon and it didn't show any posts or comments there.

i pasted the wrong link. the actually correct link is to follow the @lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world account from mastodon. then it works!

sorry for the confusion

---

So i'm trying to see lemmy content from a mastodon server.

I go to https://troet.cafe/ (which is one of the larger german-speaking mastodon servers), register an account there, enter https://lemmy.world/c/shitpost into the search field, it displays a user. So far so good.

However, when i click on that user, it does not display any content. Following that user does not seem to change that so far.

("Keine Beiträge vorhanden!" means there are no posts)

Is this a bug? Is this an intended feature? In that case, why?

---

What's weird is that this seems to work with some other communities. For example, when i enter https://feddit.org/c/dach (which is the largest german-speaking community), it does display posts and comments.

I have yet to understand what causes the difference in behavior.

I just saw !germanrap@feddit.de as #6 in Communities/All (sorted by Hot) (web archive) on feddit.org. This feels weird because the feddit.de server has been down for almost 2 years and the community seems to have no content (the home server cannot be contacted to verify but no posts seem to have been federated to other popular instances like feddit.org) and obviously never will have. As for the subscriber count, feddit.org keeps its own tally, which is currently (archive) at 64. This does not include new subscribers after the last federation with feddit.de, except local ones. These can also be checked separately, and the number is... one. This suggests that only one person ever subscribed to !germanrap@feddit.de in the past 1.5 years (as far as feddit.org, a 1k-weekly-active-user instance, is concerned), and yet the community is very high in Hot for a day.

Obviously, the visibility of the Communities/All (by Hot) list varies by client, for example Voyager shows it unsolicited as "Trending communities" in the Search pane, and even though Lemmy devs didn't include it prominently in default Lemmy UI, they definitely have considered the value of this list in mind since it's made the shortlist in Lemmy's API benchmarks.

I think it would be better if we have better integration across the fediverse, including integration between Mastodon, Pixelfed and Lemmy.

I know that Mastodon doesn't really have communities, well, Mastodon has hashtags, which come close but are not really the same. Maybe when viewing a mastodon instance from lemmy, it just creates a pseudo-community ("/c/all@mastodon.instance") for each instance that you can browse and subscribe to from lemmy? This way, there would be more content and you could more easily interact with other parts of the fediverse without needing to create multiple accounts on multiple services.

There is this really cool website: https://fediversemap.com/

that shows fediverse instances that are physically close to you.

i think this is a really cool idea because it allows connecting to people that you can meet in real life. it allows organizing of offline events, and that's something that i think we can all use very much.

I would like lemmy to integrate a list of instances that are physically close to you, sothat you can easily find and connect with them. maybe you can automatically browse through their communities and find communities that are relevant to you. communities i.e. about cities that enable organizing and scheduling events.

A while back on kbin.earth, I could only see relies in some threads if someone directly replied to my comments. The instance owner corrected it, but now it's happened in one thread on kbin and another on lemmygrad, each on it's own account. Would instance admins be able to get together and help sort this, please?

Thank you so much in advance.

I've recently added anubis to lemmy.ml, and it seems to be working well.

I have a PR to add anubis to lemmy-ansible (our main installation method), and I could use some help tweaking / optimizing its botPolicy.yaml config, for federated services.

Anyone with experience running anubis, this would be much appreciated.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for the easiest way to crosspost content from Reddit to Lemmy or Piefed. Ideally, I’d love a Firefox extension or userscript that can either:

• Directly crosspost, or
• Copy the post’s markdown (including title, text, and images) so I can easily paste it elsewhere.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

When a code block contains syntax for an image, lemmy seems to replace the image's url with a proxied one.

This instance's web UI's preview displays the original url correctly. The proxied url is also distributed trough federation, so users on other instances or for example Piefed should also see the lemmy.ml url in the example below.

This behavior is unexpected, as the contents of a code block should not be parsed as markdown, and thus no image should be displayed and no requests to the server should be made.

Example: I entered "https://media.piefed.zip/posts/bT/UD/bTUDGZRAcKZdXyO.png" as the url in the following code block in the web UI: ![alt text](https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.piefed.zip%2Fposts%2FbT%2FUD%2FbTUDGZRAcKZdXyO.png)

Lemmy UI version: 0.19.17
Lemmy backend version: 0.19.18-beta.0