Like helping to find a bug, discussing about how to setup an application for a certain use case or anything like that? Answering questions on Stack overflow is an example but is that the best way?

Generally the best way to help out is to do a thing that’s needed and that you can figure out how to do. Your list includes a bunch of good options, and I’ve been thanked for doing all those things at one point or another. Some common growth paths include:

1. Using the software
2. Encountering bugs, problems, or small opportunities for improvement.
3. Discussing those informally in forums and helping people find workarounds.
4. Identifying some of those issues as common things other things experience as well, so filing bugs for them with clear explanations and links to related forum discussions.
5. Reading source code to better understand bugs.
6. Discussing potential fixes in developer bug threads (or in GitHub or whatever).
7. Submitting small fixes for simple bugs as pull requests.

Another path might be:

1. Using the software and reading forums/docs for help.
2. Answering basic questions on forums, looking to old threads and relevant docs.
3. Learning about common questions.
4. Writing blogs or forum posts about common questions.
5. Submitting improvements to official docs to clarify common areas of confusion.

There are other paths as well, the main thing is to use a thing so you learn about it and then use that knowledge to make it a little easier for the next person. Good luck!

For the latest version of lemmy, hot sort works in the new fashion. There is a pull request with further implementation details linked in the GitHub issue.

Ah, fair enough. My response doesn’t apply then.

You misunderstand what the Hot rank is doing. It’s not balancing newness vs hotness, it’s scaling hotness according to community size. This might feel like newness if you’re focused on vote counts as a proxy for post age, but it’s a different approach. See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622 for details.

There’s a couple ways to think about this:

1. There are a handful of Lemmy communities that are just WAY more active than everything else. The main feeds are kind of lame if you have to scroll 300 posts it to find anything other than a shit post from the same 3 communities. Scaled Hot rank shows a greater variety of communities by making it easier small communities to get ranked hotly.
2. Or you can consider Hotness to be a rough measure of what percentage of people who have seen the post interacted with it. A post with 500 upvotes in a community with 10,000 active users is kind of popular, but only 5% of the people likely to have scrolled passed it cared about it. A post with 50 upvotes in a community with 200 active members is much MORE popular relatively even though the absolute numbers are smaller.

At any rate, this preference toward smaller communities in hot is a recent change and deliberate. While they might further tweak the scaling factors, I wouldn’t expect it to be drastically different. It sounds to me like what you want is Top, Active, or Most Comments. All these are unscaled according to community size and will get you top posts by their absolute metric rather than posts that are doing well relative to their community size.

I don’t think titles directly transfer between companies, and yet the industry allows it. It’s a very useful tool for advancement.

This may be true on some corners of the industry, but at the more competitive end (both in terms of competitive pay, and a competitive pool of candidates)… I believe it’s common to relevel on hire. I’ve seen folks go from director to senior and from senior to junior at my org. The candidates being offered those seemingly big “demotions” often seem to be somewhere between unphased and enthusiastic about the change, presumably because the compensation package we offer at the lower level beats what they were getting with an inflated title and because they know their inflated title is nonsense and they’re frustrated with the other aspects of organizational dysfunction that accompany title inflation at their current company.

What you say is real, and sometimes a promotion in one org can help bridge you into an org that would have been hard to get hired into as a junior, or harder to get promoted in. It’s not without risk though. All things being equal, I’d much rather spend my time working on a strong team and learning a lot and being challenged than to be in a weaker org that’s handing out inflated titles. Getting gud isn’t a guarantee of advancement, but it’s at least as reliable over the long haul as title inflation.

I dunno how to hotlink, but if you scroll to the active users graph at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy you can see there’s been like a 25% dropoff in active users since the peak in July. Lemmy has still grown 50x since May, and it’s much MUCH more active than it was then. But we’ve definitely crested a peak and not everyone who gave Lemmy a shot then is sticking around in a monthly basis.

This isn’t necessarily bad. Lemmy is still young and has many rough edges, it wasn’t realistic to win all the users that tried it on ease-of-use in a head to head with reddit. And Mastodon has had multiple growth waves interspersed with periods of declining usage, but with the spikes has grown ie remained stable overall. Early-stage commercial social media have big ups and downs in engagement and growth as well, and just like lemmy those ups and downs are often externally driven… when competitors mess up, when a big global news story hits, when a major sporting event happens… these can all be catalysts for one-time growth. It’s not a straight line.

Time will tell what user level we stabilize at in the short-term and what events spur new growth, but it’s normal to have a big expansion be followed by some degree of contraction.

Have you emailed admin@lemmy.world to try to get reinstated? This all seems like a pretty reasonable explanation if it isn’t repeated behavior.

Is there an issue for this in the GitHub project? It sounds like you’ve done the hard work of diagnosing the issue and an upstream fix seems likely a modest effort given this info.

No, Beehaw defederated your instance. The open-source community on lemmy.ml someone else already mentioned is your best bet.

I feel like you’re combatively advocating for a specific vision and not collecting and processing feedback as your OP suggests, at any rate… you don’t seem to be understanding what I was trying to say at all… but it’s not something I’m going to fight about with someone who is questioning if I know what a multi-reddit is and dismissing client-side techniques as nonsense without seeming to understand why they were being discussed in the first place.

I’ll leave with these thoughts, do with them what you will:

1. I’m not interested in any multireddit feature that reduces sub privacy. I’d consider it a net loss for lemmy.
2. On Reddit, multi-reddits personal in nature. Such a personal multireddit for lemmy doesn’t require interaction with federation or privacy changes.
3. I realize that a shared super-community feature is frequently requested on Lemmy aimed at addressing duplication of communities across instances. I don’t think that’s more than superficially similar to actual multireddits, and I don’t think it’s a good idea because it creates moderation problems that are far worse than the community duplication problems it purports to address.

What you’ve described is one way. It could also be a filtered view based on the subscribed/all feed which provides a single API call that can return material from multiple communities. I’m not suggesting that a client-side only solution is a GOOD solution. But from an information-flow perspective, I’m suggesting that multireddits are a “local” function. Theu are so local that they’re possible without server-side support at all, and especially local enough not to require representation in the federated feed… which is a more significant change with potential impacts to other federated projects like kbin and mastodon… and shouldn’t require relaxing privacy constraints in any case.

Anyway, what’s the feedback on privacy issue with allowing any user to have read-only access to your community subscribe list…

I wouldn’t want this in exchange for multi-reddits. You can a little bit infer the communities someone subscribes to from their comment activity, but as it stands one can choose to privately lurk and this would eliminate that… silently for existing users in the absence of some big series of announcements to make it well known.

Why are multi-reddits a thing that involves federation at all? Multi-reddits as they exist on Reddit itself could be implemented entirely client-side, the server side stuff just syncs the behavior of multiple client apps. Why does the concept of a multi-reddit need to extend outside of the user’s instance?

I’m mostly in the pro-written word camp myself, but I have sought out video tutorials in cases where written docs seem to assume something I don’t know. When I’m learning something new, a written doc might have a 3-word throwaway clause like “… add a user and then…”. But I’ve never added a user and don’t know how. If it’s niche open-source software with a small dev team, this may not be covered in the docs either. I’ll go fishing for videos and just seeing that they go to a web-ui or config-file or whatever sets me on the path to figure out the rest myself.

That is to say, video content that shows someone doing a thing successfully often includes unspoken visual information that the author doesn’t necessarily value or even realize is being communicated. But the need to do the thing successfully on-screen involves documenting many small/easy factoids that can easily trip someone inexperienced up for hours.

I’m as annoyed as anyone when I want reference material and find only videos, and I generally prefer written tutorials as well. But sometimes a video tutorial is the thing that gets me oriented enough to understand the written worthy I wasn’t ready to process previously.

Edit: The ubiquity of video material probably has little to do with it’s usefulness though, and everything to do with how easy it is to monetize on YouTube.

OP is claiming that they agree with lemmy world’s defederation choices driven by CSAM, which is unquestionably nonsense. Lemmy world admins have made several in depth posts explaining defederation decisions and none of them had anything to do with CSAM. In some jurisdictions, it would likely be illegal to give such an explanation as it would amount to creating a pointer to a source of CSAM that hasn’t yet been taken down. By and large, these things are reported directly to law enforcement and cleaned up quietly, without showing up in modlogs… and in many jurisdictions the law REQUIRES handling CSAM in precisely that fashion in order to prevent it from being archived before it’s taken down.

Is there a non-zero amount of CSAM in the Fediverse? Sadly yes. Once you achieve a certain scale, people do all the things… even the bad ones. This research paper (from Stanford, it’s reputable and doesn’t include or link to CSAM) discusses finding, in a sample of 320k Mastodon posts, over 100 verified samples of CSAM and something like 1k-3k likely adjacent posts (for example that use associated keywords). It’s pretty likely that somewhere on Lemmy there are a non-zero number of such posts, unfortunately. But moderators of all major instances are committed to taking appropriate steps to respond and prevent reoccurrence.

Additionally, blahaj.zone defederated from lemmynsfw over the adorableporn community. The lemmynsfw admins take reports of CSAM very seriously, and the blahaj admins stopped short of accusing them of hosting actual CSAM. But they claimed that models of verified age “looked too young” and that the community was courting pederasts. These claims were largely baseless, but there was a scuffle and some of the secondary and tertiary discussion threw around terms like CSAM loosely and incorrectly.

I think OP is probably hearing echoes of these kinds of discussions 3rd hand and just not paying attention to details. There’s certainly no well-known and widely federated CSAM communities, and all responsible admins would take immediate action if anything like that was found. CSAM doesn’t factor into public federation decisions, because sources of CSAM can’t be discussed publicly. Responding to it is part of moderation at scale though, and somewhere some lemmy admin has probably had to do so.

If this is true, what is the admin of the reporting user even supposed to do

Decide what instances to defederate. They can check up on:

• Mods of other instances to see if they take appropriate action on reports.
• Admins of other instances to see if they take action against bad-faith mods.
• Admins of other instances who generate a disproportionate number of reports per capita, to address structural, cultural, or policy issues that lead the offending instance to be a bigger source of pain/reports than others.

And finally they can defederate if they don’t like what they find.

New communities don’t automatically federate. Someone who is logged into the instance has to interact with them to cause their instance to discover the new community.

1. Someone needs to search for the community in a specific way for the community itself to be discovered.
2. Someone needs to subscribe for posts/comments to get federated.

See https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827 for more details.

But your community will show up on lemmyverse.net, and will show up for people on your instance. Beyond that you have to advertise it in new-community communities and in juggling adjacent communities where interested folks might hang out.

I wouldn’t expect this to be a likely approach used by Lemmy anytime soon. Applications that run at massive scale (like Facebook and reddit) use a wide variety of storage engines, whereas Lemmy uses Postgres for almost everything. When running at massive scale, read-only storage engines are cheaper and easier to deal with than read/write storage engines… so it makes sense for reddit to to move old-data (which naturally changes infrequently) to read-only storage (making any writes at all impossible) to save a little money on storage even if the machinery for doing that makes reddit more complicated to run for the engineers that work there.

For Lemmy, it’s probably more important to optimize for being easy to run (so more admins run Lemmy instances), even if it makes the storage a little more expensive. Postgres tables can definitely scale to hundreds of millions of rows, and there’s little overhead in allowing the old ones to be written to as long as they’re in Postgres.

Now, someday… it’s possible that the number of posts in a single larger Lemmy instance become untenable for even a single very large PG instance to run, and I’m that far future maybe it makes sense to work on tiered storage for Lemmy. But there are other strategies for scaling PG to big datasets that are at least as likely in that scenario. So I’m not predicting Lemmy will employ cold storage anytime soon.

I read the design notes and found them pretty interesting even though I haven’t really been pining for a faster linker: https://github.com/rui314/mold/blob/main/docs/design.md