Could lemmy be used as a private self hosted forum?

And could lemmy be used as a private forum were only registered users and whitelisted users can view, post and comment on the instance. This way you can have a private instance which only paid users of your group or club can join like many membership website forums have.

From it's Telegram channel:

Hello,

At approximately 21:33 UTC July 26 2021, I have been hit with a cease & desist letter from a law firm repsenting Facebook. The letter was sent to one of my personal email address as well as Barinsta's public inbox (and as a result, it is published). In response, the source code has been taken down, and all promotional materials within my control has been adjusted to reflect the fact.

While I believe it is nearly impossible to fight a resourceful multinational firm and reinstate the app, we will still try to get as much resources as we could to navigate in this crisis.
At this dire moment, I ask you to do 1 thing: Please let others know what is happening here. Such bullying behaviour against a young university student is in no way excusable. Such bullying behaviour against many internet users is in no way excusable.

It has been an honour of a lifetime to serve as one of the main contributors of Barinsta. I am forever grateful for the countless supporters along the way.

Thank you & Best Regards,
Austin Huang https://austinhuang.me

The letter was posted in the Barinsta GitHub as a sadly notice of the end of the project.

Title, basically.

it looks so cool. and bc it is open source it makes it epic!11!1

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/70319

I thought this would be good to share, its an excerpt from an unpublished interview written in december 2020 about Lemmy's origins and goals.

What is the story behind the creation of Lemmy? What role do you want it to serve for people online / why did you make it?

The idea to make Lemmy was a combination of factors.

Open source developers like myself have long watched the rise of the "Big Five", the US tech giants that have managed to capture nearly all the world's everyday communication into their hands. We've been asking ourselves why people have moved away from content-focused sites, and what we can do to subvert this trend, in a way that is easily accessible to a non-tech focused audience.

The barriers to entry on the web, are much lower than say in the physical world: all it takes is a computer and some coding knowhow... yet the predominating social media firms have been able to stave off competition for at least two reasons: their sites are easy to use, and they have huge numbers of users already (the "first mover" advantage). The latter is more important; if you've ever tried to get someone to use a different chat app, you'll know what I mean.

Now I loved early reddit, not just for the way that it managed to put all the news for the communities and topics I wanted to see in a single place, but for the discussion trees behind every link posted. I still have many of these saved, and have gained so much more from the discussion behind the links, than I have from the links themselves. In my view, its the community-focused, tree-like discussions, as well as the ability to make, grow, and curate communities, that has made reddit the 5th most popular site in the US, and where so many people around the world get their news.

But that ship sailed years ago; the early innovative spirit of reddit left with Aaron Schwartz: its libertarian founders have allowed some of the most racist and sexist online communities to fester on reddit for years, only occasionally removing them only when community outcry reaches a fever pitch. Reddit closed its source code years ago, and the reddit redesign has become a bloated anti-privacy mess.

Its become absorbed into that silicon valley surveillance-capitalist machine that commidifies users to sell ads and paid flairs, and propagandizes pro-US interests above all. Software technology being one of the last monopoly exports the US has, it would be naive to think that one of the top 5 most popular social media sites, where so many people around the world get their news, would be anything other than a mouthpiece for the interests of those same US coastal tech firms.

Despite the conservative talking point that big tech is dominated by "leftist propaganda", it is liberal, and pro-US, not left (leftism referring to the broad category of anti-capitalism). Reddit has banned its share of leftist users and communities, and the reddit admins via announcement posts repeatedly villify the US's primary foreign-policy enemies as having "bot campaigns", and "manipulating reddit", yet the default reddit communities (/r/news, /r/pics, etc), who share a small number of moderators, push a line consistent with US foreign-policy interests. The aptly named /r/copaganda subreddit has exposed the pro-police propaganda that always seems to hit reddit's front page in the wake of every tragedy involving US police killing the innocent (or showing police kissing puppies, even though US police kill ~ 30 dogs every day, which researchers have called a "noted statistical phenomenon").

We've also seen a rise in anti-China posts that have hit reddit lately, and along with that comes anti-chinese racism, which reddit tacitly encourages. That western countries are seeing a rise in attacks against Asian-Americans, just as some of the perpetrators of several hate-crimes against women were found to be redditors active in mens-rights reddit communities, is not lost on us, and we know where these tech companies really stand when it comes to violence and hate speech. Leftists know that our position on these platforms is tenable at best; we're currently tolerated, but that will not always be the case.

The idea for making a reddit alternative seemed pointless, until Mastodon (a federated twitter alternative), started becoming popular. Using activitypub (a protocol / common language that social media services can use to speak to each other), we finally have a solution to the "first mover" advantage: now someone can build or run a small site, but still be connected to a wider universe of users.

@[email protected] and I originally made Lemmy to fill the role as a federated alternative to reddit, but as it grows, it has the potential become a main source of news and discussion, existing outside of the US's jurisdictional domain and control.

Where does the name come from?

It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals. I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that.

Do you have any interaction with the groups that use the open-source code?

We do, most of them are in a shared Lemmy developer chatroom, as well as interacting via github.

Are you familiar with the group running Chapo Chat at all, specifically?

Yes, we communicate with some of their developers regularly, both in tech-oriented, and admin-oriented chats. A few of their developers have made great contributions to Lemmy's code, and we've been happy to work with them.

Were you aware that the group that used to run the anti-trans forum r/GenderCritical on Reddit thought about using Lemmy for their site? Did they contact you at all?

They have not contacted us, and of course our code of conduct which explicitly contains a section against anti-trans bigotry means we wouldn't help them in any way. Many reddit alternatives have been happy to embrace "reddits rejects", no matter how bigoted those communities are, in the name of "free speech". We don't agree with this view, or with those who have nostalgia for a non-existent reddit past where it was more "free" and bigoted than it is now.

Do you have a sense of how many sites are running the code?

Currently, less than 10, but this is also because the killer feature of Lemmy, federation, is still only in beta, and that was only released a few weeks ago. Its a slow burn, but we're confident that it will grow organically as we turn federation on for the officially run instances, and more connect to them.

There's also a 3rd-party iOS and Android app called lemmur, in development that we're excited for, and will make using lemmy extremely easy to use on smartphones.

Hi all, I was looking to buy RGB lights, particularly something like the Philips Hue Light bar.

Aside from it being very expensive, as far as I can tell the software used to control it isn't open source.

I know OpenRGB exists but I'd prefer a manufacturer that supports open source software, if that exists. Any other recommendations welcome! Thanks

Tabs often gets very cluttered. But I know which tabs that I always want to stay open. Email, social media, RSS feed, messenging. In short navigation tabs where you are only in the home screen.

So when you press a link in the management tab, it is opened in the content window. Or something along those lines. Whaddaya think?

Much like e-mail, calendaring has long established open protocols (like we DON'T have for social media) across services such as WebDAV, ics, etc. So it is usually quite easy to export/import a calendar elsewhere, or even to link to one or more remote calendars.

An app such as Thunderbird for example, can install on Windows, MacOS or Linux, and then connect to Google Calendar service online or many other external calendars. It's just one way of extracting what you have in Google Calendar (or even GMail), and then either copying that to a local calendar, or to a calendar elsewhere that Thunderbird can also connect to.

If you want a cloud server version of e-mail (vs just on your desktop) you can host a NextCloud instance at home or online in a cheap VPS. The article also mentions the possibility of AgenDAV. If you have a Hubzilla social media account, you already have a calendar service in there too with WebDAV capability which you can use to sync through. Other online options are Zoho Apps or Trello too.

See https://opensource.com/alternatives/google-calendar

#technology #opensource #alternativeto #calendar

It's pretty cool. It can use either blink or WebKit and has it's own lower level extension system that somewhat reminds me of firefox's XUL addons.

Many other guides dive deep into 10 plus pages of how to set up such a service with Dovecot, Postfix and a web server all from the command line, but this one is a lot simpler because most of what you need is inside Citadel. Citadel also has calendar, Contacts, Notes, Tasks and chat rooms so can be a good alternative to Google or other providers. Your only cost really is the Raspberry Pi and a domain name if you don't already have one.

You could tweak this a bit further by using your own DNS provider (or alternative to Cloudflare) and considering an external hard drive connected to the Pi for reliability.

See https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-email-server/

#technology #email #privacy #raspberrypi #alternativeto #opensource

If you use microG, consider donating to support its development.

What is microG? Quoting its website:

A free-as-in-freedom re-implementation of Google’s proprietary Android user space apps and libraries.

Hi. Not sure where to post this, hopefully it fits here. If you haven't heard of Brave browser by now, it's made by the ex-CEO of Mozilla, and is prided on being private, and integrates crypto/bitcoin.

I like the idea of crypto, and would like to get more into crypto/blockchain, but I'm not sure I can support brave, or it's CEO. Do I swallow my pride and just use Brave? Would it be worth it, just for the privacy additions and crypto?

One reason I'm hesitant, is Firefox now has site-to-site cookie protection, whereas Brave does not. Mostly, I'm arguing with myself at this point, on whether to use Brave, and swallow my pride. Sure, as CEO of Mozilla, he made a bad political call. People can grow, right? Someone rebutted to me that Obama didn't support gay marriage either, and neither did Hillary Clinton.

Sorry to harp on this topic so much. What would y'all do?

Sidenote: A breadtuber I really like uses brave, so Brave can't be all that bad?

Hello everyone,

I recently moved to Lemmy completely from Reddit and I am happy to use this open source alternative, with a Wonderfull community. I have been using brave since it was launched and had been a long time enthusiast, I have created a new community for all brave users and people who are interested in brave & take part in fixing the web!

Brave Community

Couldn't find anything on F-Droid. Was wondering if there even is an open-source video editor available for Android.

Disclaimer: I know that being a developer is hard, I'm not trying to say that people should start doing these ideas to please my desires. I just thought it was fun to have a list of ideas that could improve the libre software community and these are some of them that I would really love to see. If you have some other Ideas contribute as well, and if you are a developer and you are looking for something to do but don't know what, you may gain some inspiration from here.

Projects that do not exist:

• Libre and privacy respecting alternative to DeepL. Details: I know there are already some libre translators, but I will not stop using DeepL until there's something as good as it.

• Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Genius. Details: It's a website where users create community based lyrics for their favourite artists and can create annotations and add metadata.

• ~~Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Goodreads. Details: It's a website where you keep a log of what you've read, what you want to read and what you are reading, you can also rate books.~~ Here is an alternative.

• Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Grammarly. Details: It's a set of applications or add-ons that help you with typos and it will improve your text.

• Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Letterboxd. Details: t's a website where you keep a log of what you've seen and what you want to see, you can also rate movies and TV shows.

• Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Pixabay. Details: It's a website where you can get images to use without copyright restrictions. I know CC has a website for this but their content is really poor.

• ~~Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Push notifications.~~ Here is an alternative.

• Libre and privacy respecting alternative to ReCaptcha.

• Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Shazam. Details: It's an application that tells you what you are listening if you let it listen to it

• Libre and privacy respecting alternative to Unsplash. Details: It's a website where you can upload and use photos of people that are licensed under a license that allows for use under most circumstances for free.

• Libre and privacy respecting mouse gesture and ~~radial menu~~ to an operative system level. *Similar to Gesturefy and ~~CompassMenu~~ but in a way that it can work in any application. Look this video for more details since this is probably a really deep and hard to explain topic. Here is an alternative for the radial menu.

• Libre and privacy respecting website where to upload and download 3D models licensed under a CC.

• Libre and privacy respecting website where to play a lot of different card games. Details: Similar to Lichess. I am satisfied if you only can play poker until it gains some traction.

• Fully libre and privacy respecting alternative to Xayn. Details: It's an application that recommends you articles based on the input you give to the algorithm. Some of its code it's liberated on GitHub, but not all of it.

• Libre , decentralized and privacy respecting alternative to Imgur. Details: It would be great if this could work along the fediverse, for example people would host images there instead of here on Lemmy or Mastodon, making these platforms much more lightweight.

• Libre, privacy respecting and not self hostable visual bookmark manager. *Details: There are a few alternatives here and there, maybe, but they are really awful looking and generally you need to self host. I don't know how to self host and it would probably make my machine slower, I would prefer something that someone's alreay hosting. This is exactly like what I'm looking for, but they haven't launched it yet since they don have enough resources, it could die, too, maybe.

Projects that exist but have some issues:

• A set of common android apps. Details: I know there are a are a lot of basic Android applications to replace the default ones that come with your phone but I feel someone should create a set that align the aesthetics of them to be coherent with each other. I know Tibor Kaputa does this, but in my opinion I would like something that looks a bit more modern and that has more features, since theirs are based around minimalism. For example, the camera application does not have as many options as my default one, etc.

• Libre, privacy respecting, aesthetic and functional map application. Details: I haven't been able to find a working application to see maps, I generally end up using DDG's in browser map because of this. The only one that worked was one calle Maps which was a fork of a really good one (but it was filled with proprietary and other shady stuff ) but it stopped working after some time. I mention the aesthetic parts because I want to be able to recommend this to people who wouldn't use it otherwise if it looks like something really "primitive".

• Revive waifu2x as a serious project. Details: I really love this website, but I really hate the whole idea of the waifu thing, it is misogynous and I feel like unprofessional.

• Libre, privacy respecting and highly customizable home launcher. Details: I know there are a ton of home launchers for Android, but most of them focus on minimalism or simplicity, I don't want that, I want a super customizable full of features application that can let me do almost anything. The closest to this was Lawnchair which is dead, luckily Omega launcher exists now and it looks like it'll be able to achieve this, but it's not there yet.

• Revive AquaDroid Details: It is a really beautiful application but it has some bugs, not so many features and development has halted.

Usually each component manufacturer has their own software for controlling RGB lights, with some requiring an online account to function. For Linux users, even that is not usually available since most of these applications are proprietary and Windows only. This is where OpenRGB comes in. OpenRGB is a free and open source application to control RGB lighting for a multitude of devices, independent of the manufacturer.

It's working on my Manjaro Linux using the AppImage executable. It was not detecting my USB devices though until I ran it with admin privileges. So the keyboard is working fine, but does seem I may have to patch the kernel for the fans and CPU coolers to work. That always requires some caution so don't just jump in and take that step until doing some homework on their Gitlab issues forum.

See https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/02/openrgb-open-source-rgb-lighting.html

#technology #opensource #linux #windows #OpenRGB

You can now grab lemmur from f-droid and the Play store.

If you want to follow lemmur releases/news checkout the repo and/or follow the [email protected] community. You can always support the development on Patreon or BuyMeACoffee

PS. We do not flavor our releases: github release tab, fdroid, and play store apks are built from the same source code. Feel free to download lemmur from any place you like.