I’ve compiled lemmy a few times - it’s fairly straightforward. I’ve tried to compile kbin before, but gave up bored and pissed off with the instructions - they seem endless, and like a big list of ‘edit this file’ (with no indication for whether you’re adding or updating info), ‘now edit this file’, ‘now go back and edit the first file again’. I know mbin isn’t kbin, but the instructions are the same.

I was trying because someone from there subscribed to a community I made just using ActivityPub, but nothing I’ve sent there has actually appeared. If you send the wrong stuff to lemmy, it errors. It’s not always the most useful message, but it’s at least a ‘400 Bad Request’, not the ‘200 OK {}’ you get back from kbin. What does it want? Does it not like ‘Create/Page’? Is there a problem with the content? I don’t know, because I can’t [be bothered to] compile it, and the tech specs for these 'bins lead to a 404.

Oh wow. That really illustrates it. Your approach to a social media site is very admirable (so much modern stuff assumes that just throwing more CPU cycles / RAM / bandwidth at the problem is a solution).

Flippin’ eck. Seeing a familiar Lemmy post on there, clicking it and seeing the whole thing render instantly was a bit of a shock after getting used to Lemmy’s more pedestrian loading of stuff.

Ooof. That makes me feel better about that time I accidentally brought ‘Test Post 1’ into production by commenting on it.

From the install doc:

My way around this is to use ngrok.com, which is a quick and simple way to create a temporary VPN with a domain and SSL. On the free plan your domain changes often, which will break federation every time you reconnect.

You can now get 1 free static url with ngrok’s free plan. The ‘free’ part of it is that it needs relaunching after a certain period of time (every 2 days, maybe?) but it works well enough to develop things.

programming.dev changed how active users are calculated on their instance to include voters as well as posters & commentators. It’s a massive difference - programming_humor went from about 700 monthly active users to about 7000, for example.

Viewing communities from other instances from programming.dev’s perspective will give a figure that includes voting activity.

https://communick.com are intending to provide those services. (.news is their Lemmy server)

I don’t have a problem with email verification, 'cos I just don’t use my main email account for it. I’ve signed up to 3 instances previously, and 2 of required it fwiw.

But you’ll need something to deter bots, if only because other instances will defederate you if too much spam/trolling is coming from your site.

I registered and logged in, but it didn’t make it easy

After registering, it didn’t say anything about verifying the email. When I went to the Login screen, it just did nothing after pressing the ‘login’ button. After I went to my email and clicked the verification, it came up with a message ‘saying Email Verified’, and then it let me log in, to a screen that said ‘Verify Email’. Obviously, I just had to click on something like ‘Communities’ to see the main page, but it was a bit odd.

I’m using the Brave browser on an ancient MacBook Air, if that helps.

The admins for https://lemmyhub.com and https://lemmings.world were promoting their instances on one of the other posts.

The admin for a bigger community - https://lemm.ee - has said they’ve assessed the situation re: piracy, and don’t see a need to block the community at dbzer0.

Ah sorry. You’re right, of course. I saw the word ‘fediverse’ and responded without really thinking.

I read that even subscribers on lemmy.world might not even notice that the community is blocked, so there’s not much hope for the rest of us.

It’s all individual choices. You can see what dbzer0 blocks at the bottom of this list - lemmy.world isn’t included in the ‘blocked’ part.

Ah, man. I had a funny reply to that post. Mods not considering the real victims here.

I think it would be useful to automate the posts for discussions following from the broadcast of a TV show, or a sports game.

Interesting.

I suppose the only thing is that you wouldn’t be able to upload an image to the instance as part of a post - you’d have to upload it somewhere else first, to then be able to refer to it.

For the detractors, register a throwaway account at some random instance, and use that if you want to test it out.
If you’re able to properly pore through the source to check it’s not stealing anything, then you’re capable of scheduling your own posts. The Lemmy API is very simple, it’s not rocket science.

GitHub Link for one of those bots, which mentions in the README that there are similar bots here and here

1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs

(withdraws whatever comment I was about to make)

It’s maybe an idea to filter out communities with less than 10 posts.

When I tried it, it gave me a community with 1 post and no comments (there’s a lot of dead communities on lemmy, so you might need to do something to increase the chance of an interesting response)

Just tried this on Sync, although lemmy.world itself was too flaky to let me reply on there (I think, sorry if this is a dupe).

During that brief wheel-spinning, Sync fetches a local version of an absolute link (a ‘https’ link to a Community or a post). This is very impressive in a way, and if all mobile apps and browser front-ends did this, we’d barely need the ! type links at all. As it is though, Sync has just casually reinvented a Fediverse concept that’s been there since the beginning (which is a bit rude, although for posts definitely an improvement)

You can’t ‘banglink’ a post.

All you can do is provide an absolute link, for others to see in a kind of ‘non-participation’ mode. If they want to see a version they can interact with, it’s up to them to find their instance’s version of it - by searching for it manually, or automating the search via a browser script or by calling the LinkFixerBot.