With Reddit’s encroaching IPO and their poorly planned API changes, we need a place to keep up with privacy topics that isn’t tied to an anti-privacy, centralized sinking ship site.
Our forum running Discourse has been a great place to discuss website changes and answer questions, but it doesn’t quite provide the same experience as Reddit does for things like sharing news, so we’re trying something new:
[email protected] is our new ActivityPub-enabled community for sharing links and other information from the privacy and security realm. Welcome!
We’re going to be trying out posting to this community for a few months to decide if we want this to replace or coexist with the r/privacyguides subreddit, so we’ll see how it goes. If you want this to succeed, stay active! Our mission is to become the most inviting and friendly place to discuss privacy and security on the fediverse 😎
How do I join the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy?
You can join a few different ways:
- On Kbin.social, a Lemmy alternative with a more Reddit-like UI and instant registrations. I didn’t like Kbin from a hosting perspective because of some missing features, but for just browsing communities and joining ours it’s a great option: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]
- On Lemmy.one, this is the server which hosts the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, and also the server that I admin myself. You are welcome to create an account, but it might take up to 24 hours for your account to be approved.
- On another Lemmy instance: You can join the community by entering
!privacyguides@lemmy.onein the search box on your instance. There are plenty of servers you could join, or you could host your own relatively easily if you’re familiar with self-hosting. - On another ActivityPub instance: You can also probably join by entering
@privacyguides@lemmy.oneor https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides in the search box of the ActivityPub software you use, although Mastodon does not seem to pull in posts from Lemmy communities properly in my limited testing, so YMMV.
Verification post: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13x7oe3/who_wants_to_try_out_lemmy_privacyguideslemmyone/
This looks pretty good so far, and I’m glad to be here and pseudo-anonymous!
Absolute newbie here so bare with me: I’m seeing a couple features I’m used to from reddit that aren’t present. Where do we go to learn more about Lemmy? Is there anywhere to put feature requests? Mods available to be added? My old experience with stuff like this was back in the Invision Power Board and phpBB days.
I see threaded replies can’t get collapsed in this thread - that was useful for browsing. on reddit.
Also no downvoting of comments, just an upvote button?
You might want to check out [email protected] for asking questions, and [email protected] for reporting bugs and requesting features :)
Mods available to be added?
Not sure what you’re asking here? About creating communities (subreddit equivalent) and adding mods for them, see my comment here: https://lemmy.one/comment/536
You can collapse comments, it’s just not really intuitive, click this button:
No downvoting on lemmy.one:
Downvotes are disabled on this instance, because it is a very small community. If you see something against the rules, report it. If you see something you don’t like, go find something you do like and upvote that instead :)
I may consider changing this in the future.
If you have more questions about this instance, lemmy.one, generally, you can also ask at !meta.
Awesome dude, thank you. This was very helpful. I was curious if we could deploy mods and stuff into communities but perhaps I’ll spin up my own instance and give it a go to learn more about it.
Edit: By mods, I mean similar to some of the modificationss I deployed to old forums back in the day when I was an Admin. Guess it probably doesn’t work like that here.
Oh, modifications. Yeah, no way to do anything like that as far as I know, to preserve consistency across different instances.
Do you think disabling downvoting will work? While it does encourage people to just downvote things that are already downvoted, the alternative is that you have no way to mark bad/lazy/rude content that isn’t actually worth reporting, and you end up in the Facebook-like situation of low-effort stuff filling the space. Hopefully this won’t happen while the community is small, but that will probably change eventually!
Don’t know! We’ll evaluate it as we go, I don’t have an issue with enabling them if it’s clear that not having them is problematic, but I also don’t think people need a negative indicator to know not to engage with low-quality content.
Do you know if it’s possible to hide all upvote/downvote scores on comments? I’ve often wondered if that would kerb the “groupthink” as people wouldn’t be pre-influenced by the number, but it would still allow sorting by popular and filtering-out of mass-downvoted comments.
It’s not a configurable option. Maybe with a custom interface change, but I’m not convinced that making changes to Lemmy.one that remote users don’t experience is the best move.
How does voting work across federated instances? I appear to have both up and down vote buttons, since I’m viewing from another instance, do they not actually work? Otherwise, what prevents trolls from other instances from brigading a thread?
Downvotes just don’t work inside communities hosted on lemmy.one. They might work on your own local midwest.social instance, I’m not sure, but if you downvoted my comment here nobody would be able to tell on lemmy.one, and nobody would be able to tell on other federated instances like lemmy.ml or beehaw.org, because lemmy.one simply would not federate that information to them.
Glad you made the move. It is contradictory for any privacy focused community to be hosted on Reddit with all the spying and censorship that goes on there. People just have to get up and leave. Same with Google, facebook, etc. Stop whining and move is what I say.
Awesome. Love the site, and I’m glad to see Lemmy getting some more recognition; always seemed like Lemmy was missing in Fediverse discussions
I mentioned Lemmy on Mastodon and some people noted some controversy surrounding the “main” instances. I don’t know exactly what concerned people, but I definitely think that more bigger, possibly saner instances like beehaw.org and—hopefully—now lemmy.one can make a better first impression on users.
Also, federation with non-Lemmy platforms seems to be much better than it was last time I looked at this place 6-12 months or so ago.
I mentioned Lemmy on Mastodon and some people noted some controversy surrounding the “main” instances. I don’t know exactly what concerned people
One of, if not the most active lemmy instance is a Marxist, pro-Russian war, pro-CCP, pro-North Korea community. When I signed up on lemmy.ml a while back, it was almost all you saw.
The problem with reddit alternatives is that, until now, the only people leaving reddit were the ones kicked off. They needed new homes and they found them in unmoderated communities they could host themselves, like lemmy.
Some of us have been waiting for some time for more “average” redditors to make the move, so this exodus is like Christmas coming early.
Know if there’s any way to block entire servers when they’re as toxic and low-quality as the one you mentioned? So far it seems like the only way is to browse ‘all communities’ and get rid of them one by one
An instance can block federation with another instance (an instance admin must do this on the instance server), but for you as a user of an instance, you cannot block the whole server. What I did is exactly what you describe. This way, I have only the content I am interested in my post feed. It takes a while, but it serves the purpose.
Joined from the link from the subreddit 😁 this is looking mighty slick!! Glad to be accepted here and look forward to the future of privacy guides here!!
Looking good so far. Last time I looked at Lemmy, it wasn’t so good. Hopefully this time will be a much better experience!
I think it’s improved significantly in the last 6 months, and I’m enjoying using it here so far!
I was referring more to the community. I remember most, if not all, of the listed instances being incredibly left wing. Not that I have a huge problem with that by itself, but I believe anyone should be able to get their opinions out there. Or, it could be that the userbase of Lemmy just happens to fall under those parameters.
Ah right, as the developers are self-described communists I imagine that had something to do with who was drawn to Lemmy initially, but I definitely think it all evens out as more people join. I haven’t seen much in the way of politics in general on some of the newer big servers like Beehaw.org, and we don’t really have political communities hosted locally on lemmy.one at all.
Hope this gains some traction. We really need to move away from Reddit.
Absolutely!
There seems to be some bugs with federation here and there… for example there are lots of interesting communities you can subscribe to, here are some of them: https://lemmy.one/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
These will all work and they would show up on your front page if you enabled your front page to work like that in your settings. However some are mastodon accounts and who knows what else, it’s not super clear.
https://lemmy.ml/communities and https://beehaw.org/communities has some nice communities that I might wanna subscribe to but and sometimes you can just search for
!firefox@lemmy.mllocally and it works. like this:https://lemmy.one/c/[email protected]
and you would think this should work: https://lemmy.one/c/[email protected]
but 404… can’t search for it either.
Maybe that instance disabled federation in some way? Maybe this instance is too new so the other one has to allow it? it’s unclear.
Lemmy seems real cool and it should work fine for local discussion just like any subreddit but federation might be sorta fuzzy…
That one you linked does work (now, apparently). I’ve noticed search can just be slow the first time you search for something on a remote instance, usually when you refresh and search again it shows up.
