Hello all! 👋

A few things to cover here.

First of all, I would like to thank all who donated for their generosity. I don’t know if I’ve said it before, but 100% of the donations are going directly to the hosting costs.

I believe I fixed the issues with federation (it was just a problem in my nginx configuration), so interoperability with mastodon should be working again. Sorry about that! I haven’t tested other software, such as friendica and kbin, but I’m hoping they should be working again too.

We’ve surpassed 2,000 users! 🎉 I love seeing the all engagement! Also, thank you for the reports as well, I would like to keep this instance safe & welcoming to all, and can’t do it without your help.

I’ve also noticed there’s a few servers that my e-mail server is not happy trying to send e-mails to. by default it’s set up to be fairly picky about the servers it connects to, and I’ve noticed that it’s refusing to deliver to some with self-signed or certs that don’t match the domain. I’ll be working on getting that resolved in the next few days too.

Last but not least, I’ve added @crb@lemmy.ca to help me out with some admin duties. Please give him a warm welcome! I plan on adding a third soon too.

As always, let me know if you have any questions, concerns, suggestions, or whatever.

  • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Some UX comments. I’m not sure if you have a line up to the development team, but these minor suggestions should help a bit I think.

    (1) when you start typing !community… and it automatically creates a link for you, that link is currently a direct link. That works fine for communities also on lemmy.ca, but for federated communities, it’s bad – because we don’t have user accounts there. More ideally, it should default to creating the local-server-accessible version of the link – aka /c/community@server.tld rather than https://server.tld/c/community. This will allow people to jump to between communities more easily.

    (2) Right now the modlog shows federation wide events. This is great from the perspective of transparency, but it’d be nice if there was a subset limited only to those communities you’re moderating. How hard would this be to implement?

    (3) For things like the /c/hockey game-day-thread that happened yesterday, it’d be nice as the poster to be able to set the default comment sorting. In that case, setting the default to new would have been useful.

    (4) It’d be nice to be able to set a default for the Frontpage. For example, to Subscribed+Top_Day. Having to click twice each time to see your subscriptions is a little annoying.

    (5) It’d be nice to be able to set a default language, rather than having to choose it from the dropdown every time. Like in user options, “When I do not select a language, my comments and posts will default to …”

    (6) Reddit refugees are used to being able to type r/subname and have the link be autocreated. Would it be reasonable for the autolinking that occurs with !community to also occur if someone types c/community or /c/community? Transferable skills ;)

    I don’t speak rust, but am a programmer. It may be easier for someone Involved™ to do, than for me to spin up a server for development/testing.

    Thanks for hosting! Let me know if you want help with /c/Winnipeg.

    • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      wow thanks for your detailed feedback. looks like others found feature request/fixes for most of them.

      i can submit feature requests for 3 and 6 if you’d like, they sound like good ideas to me.

      for (3), so the poster sets the default comment sorting, and that applies to all users that view the comments in that post?

      and for (6), i believe i know what you mean, but just to clarify: if you were to type something like https://lemmy.ca/c/some_community_that_doesnt_exist_yet, it would say something like “this community doesn’t exist, do you want to create it?”.

      • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Yes, you understand (3) correctly.

        For (6) what I mean is behaviour like (1), where if you start typing with /c/ or c/ it automatically suggests links to communities. This behaviour already exists with !

        It could make things feel a bit more familiar to Reddit migrants. But isn’t strictly necessary.

        However, you’re interpretation of (6) is also a great idea! It’s something that exists on Reddit. It’s a softer landing than a 404 :)

        • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          ah, i see what you mean, autocomplete for when you start typing /c/..., or variants of it. got it. good idea.

    • Mars@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I don’t have notes for all your points, but for a couple of them:

      (1) This is being actively discussed in this GitHub issue.

      (4) This can be accomplished in your account’s Settings: Type and Sort type

      Hope that helps!

  • Michael@lemmy.caEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for fixing the federation issues! I had been trying to subscribe to /c/hockey from Kbin for a while but I was never able to discover the community.

    I can confirm that I was able to see it starting approximately an hour ago.

  • Mongostein@lemmy.caEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    This is awesome. You’re awesome. I missed the donation link, but I’d be happy to donate a couple bucks every now and then to help out if you had an ongoing fund.

  • zaphod@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I have noticed that there’s a significant difference in the ranking of posts when visiting a federated community here versus on the home server.

    For instance, comparing !technology@beehaw.org directly versus from this instance. For example, as of this writing (and obviously these things change rapidly) the post entitled Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout appears right near the top of the Active list on Beehaw but isn’t even in the first page of results here on lemmy.ca.

    I’ve poked around in the docs on voting and ranking and the only thing I can guess is that there’s a long sync lag from beehaw to lemmy.ca (for example). But, honestly, I’m not too sure.

    Any theories on why there’d be such a large discrepancy between the local and remote copies of federated community activity?

    • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’m going to assume that you’re sorting by “Active” on both instances? I would guess that the calculation is different because of federation, maybe the calculations give remote users a different weight or someting? I really have no idea. If you sort by “New” on both instances, they are at least a lot more similar.

      • zaphod@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Well, now I’m definitely gonna have to stand up a test instance just to poke around at the codebase, as I’m suddenly deeply curious!

  • SteveDinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Yesterday and today I’m having trouble joining communities from lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. I don’t know how to figure out of it’s us or them with the problems. I can search for and find the communities, but they are not up to date with the originating server’s version of those same communities. The join requests are listed as “pending” in my list of subs.

    Separate question: Has this instance defederated from any others? Have any defederated from this one? How could we tell either way?

    • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      i’ve seen this as well, i’m assuming it’s a problem with .ml/.world at this point, because other instances are working, and I’ve seen complaints on other instances that they can’t subscribe to .ml/.world as well. assuming it’s probably just a load problem, since they are the two biggest instances I believe.

      you can see the list of instances that are blocked here: https://lemmy.ca/instances

      AFAIK, there’s no easy way to check which instances have blocked us.

      • SteveDinn@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I didn’t expect that there would be any way to tell if anyone had blocked us, just that you might have heard about it.

        Those instances both are very snappy when I go to them directly in a browser. I assume that Lemmy has some kind of queue processor in the background like Mastodon does though, correct? I guess there are numerous ways that can get bogged down.

        • SteveDinn@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          From looking around in those instances’ version of this group, their users are reporting similar problems. At least it’s not just us :)

          • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            yeah. i did some searching through the logs yesterday as well and didn’t find anything useful. hopefully it gets resolved at some point. i’ll also do a search through some of the lemmy rooms i’m in on matrix to see if anyone has any other ideas as well.

            and yes, lemmy does have a queue of sorts for federation stuff. it’s not as visible as it is on mastodon though.

  • bracerange@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I want to make c/regina but it’s deleted it says. Can you make it again and then like give me mod?

  • stormio@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure if this is the correct place to bring this up, but I’ve noticed a discrepancy in the comment counts between instances. For example, a post on lemmy.ml shows 26 comments, but I only see 21 when viewing it from lemmy.ca. The missing comments seem to be from users from multiple instances including lemmy.ml, kbin.social and lemmy.fmhy.ml

    Lemmy.ca link: https://lemmy.ca/post/793243

    Lemmy.ml link: https://lemmy.ml/post/1401407

    EDIT: People on other instances are seeing the same thing, so it seems to not be an isolated issue.

    • smorks@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      yeah, it appears to be an issue with the busier instances. hopefully they can resolve this in the next version.