I simply hate ads with a passion due to my experiences in marketing and will go out of my way to never watch any. Can‘t explain it much more than that. If youtube locks me out due to that, so be it. I don‘t get worked up either, I simply state my opinion on it where I please and if I‘m not wanted I leave. That‘s about it.

Why don’t you pay for YouTube premium? This removes all platform ads.

The Lounge is a great IRC webclient with built-in bouncer functionality.

Seconding The Lounge. It’s a great self-hosted option.

I actually do not understand the widespread hostility that people have toward this kind of thing. I watch a lot of content on YouTube, and I don’t want to see ads, so I pay for premium. I watch a lot of content on Twitch, and I don’t want to see ads, so I pay for turbo. Hosting a major video streaming website isn’t cheap. It’s not like these things are unreasonably priced. If you hate the ads so much, then why not pay for the service that the platform is offering you, and for the content that creators are providing on it? And if you don’t watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?

Simple question: Will you go back to Reddit and other centralized social media platforms, if Reddit step back from the API changes? The benefits of Reddit are obvisiouly, it has million of users and even small communitys have thousands of users.

Most likely yes, I’ll be sticking around. Something I very much appreciate about lemmy as an advantage over the big social media sites is that lemmy is set up such that you can be reasonably sure that there are many more human users than bots. On reddit you can mostly avoid the bots by sticking to the smaller subs, but I think lemmy may be able to grow larger than that and still avoid being overrun by propaganda and marketing bots due to the prevalence of manual approval for newly registered users.

I’m definitely hoping to see even more features that emphasize this advantage of lemmy. I’d like to try contributing some code for this myself, at a time when things feel more stable (i.e. no huge sweeping changes in the pipeline, like the HTTP client is now) and I can find some time for it.

For example…

One obvious improvement would be to add an invite system, where new user registration occurs via reputable users sending invite links to people they know.

And I envision a feature where one instance may mark some of the instances it federates with as low trust. Users on the instance would have the option not to see content posted by the low-trust instance’s users, or the option to have their content explicitly marked in the UI. This could be used, for one thing, to still federate with larger instances that are less stringent about disallowing bot accounts, but provide a means to view only content where there is a higher degree of confidence that it was posted by a human, or to at least clearly mark low-confidence content.

I currently have Kubuntu on my most-used Linux machine but, since a friend recommended it to me, I’ve been considering hopping to KDE Neon when I have some time to learn a new distro. (I’ve tried GNOME and I don’t really care for it, but KDE Plasma fits like a glove.) I’m not extremely experienced with desktop Linux, so I’d love to hear about others’ experiences with either distro and how they might compare.

The #1 thing missing is user notes. In my experience, being able to attach notes to users that are shared among moderators is essential, even for smaller teams or smaller communities.

As the number of things that need to be moderated grows larger, being able to maintain a list of pre-written removal messages will also help a lot.

And as lemmy continues to grow, it will be very important to have something that works like automod that can be configured on either a per-instance or a per-community level. Especially something that can do filtering and auto-reporting. There are a lot of cases where you don’t want to outright forbid a certain kind of content, but you do always want to bring human attention to it.

i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances

For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.

You got yourself a new sub. Thank you for sharing!

Does the gmail SMTP server have a limit on how many emails can be sent per day?

I think it does, yes. The kinsta.com link says the limit is 500 per day. If you’re expecting a higher volume than that, or if the unpredictability of relying on a free Google service for anything is not acceptable, then you would probably want to pay for an inbox service.

But if you’re running a small instance and just need the occasional email to go through without a lot of effort or fees, then it ought to be fine.

I keep getting logged out every time I visit another sub-lemmy page? I’m trying to subscribe from the button but then I get taken to their site and logged out. Logging in takes forever as well. When I copy and paste the ! Link into the feddit.uk search I get no results as well.

I’m really not sure, but it sounds like these could be issues related to feddit.uk? I suggest asking about this on a community there, or messaging an admin of that instance.

Kagi. Yes, it’s paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:

Huh. I hadn’t heard of this one before, but I think I’m going to have to try it out.

In the meantime there’s nothing stopping community mods from making pinned posts or sidebar links or whatever (I assume)

Well… Hopefully in the near future the UX for linking to communities can be improved, since right now the way things work makes it a pretty crappy user experience for anyone on an instance that hasn’t synced that community yet.

Hah, that’s what…four rival gamedev communities now? At least 😄

No need to compete! I’m self-hosting my own instance in any case, so I thought I might as well make communities for things I’m interested in. I’ve also subbed to every other gamedev community I’ve come across so far…

It would be really neat if there were a lemmy feature to easily co-promote related communities, maybe even give users an easy way to see them all in one feed.

If email isn’t working, then you’ll have to turn off email verification in your instance’s settings before anyone is able to log in without encountering that spinner.

To get email to work, you’ll need to provide SMTP credentials in lemmy.hjson on the server you’re using to host lemmy. An example SMTP configuration is shown in the docs here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/configuration.html

You may also have to restart lemmy after you update the configuration, in order for it to take effect. (I do this on my server via docker-compose restart.)

When I set up lemmy on my server with lemmy-ansible, the config file was initially set up with a valid-looking SMTP config. But when emails weren’t working I looked more closely, and it turned out that there is something broken with the SMTP service that lemmy is integrated with by default. It seems that you will need to provide your own credentials.

I’m using an SMTP service provided by a web hosting service I pay for, but you can also use gmail in a pinch: https://kinsta.com/blog/gmail-smtp-server/

Hm, that’s surprising. I didn’t expect mobile Chrome to work like that when copying links. Try copying and pasting the link text instead, e.g. !news@lemmy.pineapplemachine.com? But be aware that it can take a moment for the sync to happen and anything to show up, as well.

If you access them like regular links you wont be able to sub to them since your account is in another instance.

That’s actually not true! If you format the links like this: /c/news@lemmy.pineapplemachine.com, like I did, then anyone who clicks on them will be brought to the community on the same instance they’re viewing the post from. (At least, assuming that the community has been searched for and synced on the instance already.)

How do I access these links in Chrome browser to subscribe?

If the communities haven’t synced to your instance yet, then you can prompt the instance to sync them by copying and pasting them into your instance’s search page. Unfortunately lemmy doesn’t do this automatically when you visit the URL, at least not yet.

Once the communities are synced, then you should be able to just click the links to visit them and subscribe from there.

I could see value in having an option to the effect of “I’m the age of majority and I want to see adult content” in user profile options which is turned off by default, and if it’s turned off then the UI would show a warning about the nature of the content and the user’s current setting in place of posts or communities that have been marked as adult content.

Why can’t a messaging app just send messages? Why does it have to include a social network?!

Silicon Valley corporations don’t know the meaning of a stable business model. Infinite growth or bust, only they always seem to find their way around to bust.

Is there any benefit to joining an Instance closer to your location (e.g. An Australian hosted instance vs one in Europe)

There is! Lemmy instances are generally going to be hosted from one geographic location, unlike a major corporate website like reddit that is likely to be hosted from multiple servers around the world. The closer the lemmy server is to you, the snappier and more responsive your experience will tend to be.

But there are other and larger factors, too. For one thing, if an instance is overloaded with more users than it can really handle, then that will more than outweigh the benefit of geographical proximity.

As things level out, though, and the increased traffic that lemmy instances are experiencing right now reaches a stable level, instance hosts should be able to adapt and overloading should become less of an issue. In the end I think you are likely to have the smoothest experience if you joined an instance whose server is located closer to you.