AtomHeartFather

I’m just an old guy with a lot of opinions. I am a sysadmin by trade. I like Linux, cool gadgets, Sci-Fi, DC comics, bass guitar, prog rock/metal, and annoying my kids with dumb dad jokes.

  • 2 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.

    Peoples are lazy. They don’t want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn’t know it exists, its wonky at best.

    If a user cant type “Stephen King community” in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn’t exist OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.


  • Of the themed instances that exist now, I’d be willing to bet that in addition to their local communities they host that they also subscribe to other communities that aren’t strictly related to whatever theme they are going with.

    For example, I’m sure the Star Trek instance also subscribes to the [email protected] community so the admin can stay abreast of Lemmy news. And probably also follows other technology related communities as well.

    I think most people would just want to gravitate to whatever they want to be identified with. There’s nothing stopping you from joining a music themed instance and then adding some non-music subscriptions to your list. It doesn’t force those subs on anyone else on the instance.

    And if you don’t want to be identified with any specific topic or community, you can always join a general Lemmy instance like Beehaw or Lemmy.world and subscribe to whatever you like piecemeal.



  • Honestly, I hope not.

    For example, if all the “programming” communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn’t take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.

    There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps.




  • Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I’d prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could - hopefully - at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There’s a reason why every community shouldn’t be on a single instance. It’s a single point of failure.



  • I guess at the end of the day that I don’t have many concerns for privacy. I am not searching for things that might get me on a watch list. Searching from my private instance is no more/less secure in terms of privacy than it would be if I did a Google search. The search endpoints (Google, Bing, DDG, etc) all know the IP that the search is coming from even if its passing through SearXNG first. So if I was doing something shady, I could easily be tracked down that way.

    The main reason I run my own SearXNG is so I can strip ads and search multiple search providers from a single search.



  • I’m assuming you’re using docker.

    Make sure you have websockets support turned on.

    You might also try to add custom locations under NPM. I made those changes at the same time I made some changes to the “advanced” tab of NPM. I’m not sure which thing fixed it, or maybe it required both. Try this, and if it still doesn’t work, then add the advanced tab settings farther down this reply.

    You will need custom locations in your NPM proxy host settings for Lemmy for the following paths.

    /api

    /feeds

    /pictrs

    /nodeinfo

    They should point to the container that is running the lemmy application, not the UI one, just the lemmy one and to port 8536. If your NPM is not on the same docker network as lemmy, you will need to expose port 8536 on the lemmy container and add it to the lemmyexternalproxy network.

    If those changes don’t bring you joy, try also adding the following lines to the “advanced” tab of your NPM proxy host settings for Lemmy.

    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;

    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;

    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $remote_addr;

    real_ip_header X-Real-IP;

    real_ip_recursive on;

    If anything I have said is confusing to you, please reach out via DM and I’ll try to help.


  • Having some additional messaging about how communities work, and how to subscribe to them would help. I’m sorry that I assumed you didn’t know how to do that. I meant no offense but there’s no harm in providing free information that you (or someone else reading this post) might not know about.

    There’s no way for an instance to know that you have an account on some other instance so the subscribe button assumes you are a local user. Maybe that could be addressed in the future, I don’t know what the plans are.

    At a minimum I would think the subscribe button could have some logic that can detect whether you are logged in or not and then give you some options. Like, log into your account if you have one on this instance, or if you don’t here are instructions for adding this community to YOUR instance.


  • Yes you can subscribe to and read/reply to that community from any lemmy instance. You just need to add it if the instance doesn’t already federate with it.

    Go to ‘Communities’ at the top of your instance homepage then in the search bar put the url of the community you want to add. (example: https://beehaw.org/c/programming)

    This next part is undocumented, and might just be a bug. But this is the magic part.

    On the next page, change the top search dropdown from Communities to All.

    You will see the community you want to sub to in the results. It will say something like.

    Programming@beehaw.org - 0 subscribers

    Click it, then on the top right pane click “Subscribe”

    Done