Lemmy Administration

Right now my focus is on testing the app and trying to get some understanding of how the code works.

Enabling federation makes sense because I want to be able to test and study how it interacts with other instances.

If I purge the install and reinstall, how does that impact the identity of the server to other instances?

Obviously the users, communities, comments would all get removed...

Is there some kind of encryption key that identifies an instance? Or is it the domain name alone that does this?

Hi all, just wanted to get the discussion around mod tools and a pushshift for lemmy started. Sorry if this is a duplicate but I haven't been able to find any discussion about this topic.

If one thing we learned about reddit and third party API is that mod tools are of the utmost important for developing a thriving community. Pushshift is a powerful tool that allows its users to query aggregated data in their workflows.

The data lemmy users create (posts and comments) is valuable. Moderators use it to make informed decisions and improve the experience of their communities; researchers use it to build their own studies; LLM use it for training; internet searchers use it to find answers and opinions written by real people.

I think as admins we need to be clear up-front about the licensing of the content created on our site. I plan on specifying a Creative Commons license for my instance and would like to get some opinions on which would be best for the community.

Once properly licensed, I think it would be in the lemmy community's best interest to provide our community's data in aggregate (scrubbed of PII of course) for all those that need access to it to build tools for the community. People interested in our data will attempt to retrieve it anyway, whether through scraping or direct API access, so it is not only beneficial for our communities to make this data more easily accessible, but also for our servers.

Finally, once we establish our best practices for aggregating our data, we should begin work on building/forking/integrating with pushshift for lemmy. That will allow developers to build the mod tools our communities need to thrive.

TL;DR: establish open license for our content, provide access to PII-scrubbe data in bulk, build pushshift for lemmy, create better mod tools, (don't) profit.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/610275 I figured if the Lemmy Admins don't know a thing then it ain't worth knowing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/610221

Exciting to see so much new traffic in Lemmy the past few days.

While I don't think recreating Reddit in the Fediverse is necessarily a good idea, there were a few subs that really helped me discover new content. I looked, and didn't see anything directly comparable, so I created two new communities:

https://lemmy.ca/c/lemmy411 - yep - can't find what you're looking for (or perhaps what instance it might be on?) ask here.

https://lemmy.ca/c/wowthislemmyexists - find something cool? post about it here for others to discover as well.

(this will be cross-posted to a few other places like other instance main communities as well)

Is anyone able to explain the difference between these two functions on a post, or where they end up pinning? I have searched the community here and did not find anything. The official docs also do not provide much specific information on what they do.

Hi all, I'm very new to this fediverse thing!

I've recently setup my own instance of Lemmy which I've called "CompuVerse".

This seems to be going quite well, the instance is setup, I seem to be able to view content from other instances and even comment and such!

However, I'm noticing a few oddities. I'm not sure if I'm just misunderstanding something about how the fediverse works, but I don't seem to be able to see my comments and posts from other instances.

~~For example:~~

~~lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.ml/u/[email protected] Shows no content for my account~~

~~beehaw.org: https://beehaw.org/u/[email protected] Shows comments, but no posts~~

~~However, if I view other users' profiles from my own instance, I can see both their posts and comments.~~

~~Is this normal or have I managed to mess something up with federation?~~

Scratch that, upon making this post I've realised what's happening.

It would appear that I can't see any content that I posted to my own instance from other instances such as lemmy.ml and beehaw.org.

Does anyone have any tips at all?

Much appreciated,

Cameron

I'm still getting familiar with the code. Are these tunable parameters?

As of this moment, the [email protected] Community isn't yet usable over on beehaw https://beehaw.org/c/[email protected] - and it's been local here on lemmy.ml for about 1 day.

I also see it takes about 1 day for a update to a user profile to be picked up on beehaw.

I do see if I edit a comment the change gets replicated to from lemmy.ml to behaw in a matter of seconds.

Is that generally what people have experienced?

Experience and tips based off these Ubuntu 20.04 instructions:
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/from_scratch.html

I thought trying to detail problems and extra steps in public might help some people.

Hello, trying to use Ansible https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible to install Lemmy on a OVH VPS.

• Configured DNS and ping it is ok.
• I can reach the server with a sudo user on SSH

Installed Ansible on my local machine and follow the steps.

When i execute:

$ ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts lemmy.yml

I have this error (I replaced for this help request real username and real ip address)

PLAY [all] ************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [check lemmy_base_dir] *******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
skipping: [myuser@myip]

TASK [install python for Ansible] *************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
fatal: [myuser@myip]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: myuser@myip: Permission denied (publickey,password).", "unreachable": true}

PLAY RECAP ************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
myuser@myip      : ok=0    changed=0    unreachable=1    failed=0    skipped=1    rescued=0    ignored=0

What am i missing?

Hi,

I wonder what are suitable methods to protect a Lemmy instance against DDOS attacks.

For example, can we use Cloudflare? Or it could break the federation?

Any ideas/suggestions?

Hi all,

I have been playing around with notes on getting Lemmy installed from scratch, without using docker or ansible. While these notes have worked for me, there's probably a million iterations of 'better' that could be done to them - I'd consider them a draft at this point. That said, I have used them to create each of Lemmy's components on lemmy.ca.

If you do use these, I would recommend sticking to lemmy release versions as the developers state that are likely breaking changes to things like federation in between releases.

Also, I'm aware that things like the init scripts need some further work - they're just a starting point for now.

If interested, please go ahead and grab https://lemmy.ca/dl/lemmy-resources.tar.gz and have a look at the lemmy-setup-notes.txt file included. There's also example configs for the various component that require them and the aforementioned init scripts.

I hope this is useful to someone!

Hi all!

For those who are using a very small, limited-RAM VPS (smaller than 4GB), how are you finding keeping Lemmy up to date?

I'm doing each component piecemeal, and on my 2GB RAM VPS I couldn't finish lemmy backend's cargo build, just too much RAM required even with 1.5GB of swap (VPS provider is really going to enjoy that, I'm sure)

I did the production build on a machine at home and copied the lemmy_server over. Seems to be fine, but... rust or lemmy seem to have some massive resource requirements on the build.

First of all. Your script is awesome. It's so fckn fast and absoluty simple and genius.

So i was wondering if some of you guys can help me install the script on my server too?

Greets Manuel

TL;DR: Do you think that a self-hosted instance of Lemmy might be usable enough for me to use as a discussion forum for my online classes?

Hi, I'm a HS teacher. Like many schools around the world, mine will be starting the academic year with a distance learning model.

I'm looking for a platform to host asynchronous discussions with my students this year.

I like the reddit/lemmy model of structured discussion and think it would be very useful for in a distance/asynchronous learning environment. I love the simple lemmy/reddit model of structured discussion for this. It's better than what I've seen in LMS's (flexible, easy to use, etc.)

Do you think that Lemmy might be usable enough for me to use as a discussion forum for my classes?

I would not be using Lemmy as the main LMS for my class, just as an occasional or ongoing discussion forum.

It would be a 'real world' use, so I care about usability and easy onboarding for non-technical users, and of course I don't want my server to break, BUT **the contents would never be mission-critical. ** Disruptions and even full collapse of the site would not be the end of the world. I would like the option of using Lemmy for certain kinds of assessment (did you contribute substantively? did you follow the norms of reasonable discussion that we talked about?), but I could totally cope if the worst were to happen... the point is the conversation.

Me: I'm a redditor with some slightly crufty experience as a linux sysadmin. I expect installation to be possible and documented, but I can troubleshoot, if you'd all be so kind to listen if I get stuck. Once the school year starts I won't have lots of time to invest in maintenance.

** Hosting: ** I'd host this on my own machine at home or (more likely) using a $5-$10 VPS.

Federation: I would not be planning to take advantage of the 'federated' aspect of Lemmy, at least at the beginning. An isolated site is better for this use case.

**Any comments or advice? Has anyone tried Lemmy for classes of students? **

Edit: If I have <150 users and pretty low usage overall, will 4gb of RAM be enough on the server? Would 2gb? ~~ I currently own something like the Value Server here 1 core / 2GB RAM / 40 GB storage? ~~ The Lemmy Install guide doesn't mention specs.

Edit 2: I currently have a ** Linode Nanode (1GB: 1 CPU, 25GB Storage, 1GB RAM).** This is certainly too little to run Lemmy, no?

looks like the build of diesel failed. I'm using a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04. Which Ubuntu release are y'all using?