Hi there, I’m currently looking into renting a domain from cloudflare for convenient access to my hosted services from outside my home. It seems some of the cheapest options for the domain name I want to use are country TLDs (.uk, .us). Does this bind me to their laws in any way? can anyone come at me for hosting (e.g....
Thanks for the quick reply! Assuming I host a Jellyfin instance for instance (pun intended), can they actually accuse me of breaking rules without a valid login? afaik for non-users the login page is as far as they (should be able to) go. As for the domain name, I’m not actually set on one specific name, but it seemed from the few I tried that .uk and .us are consistently much cheaper (~$5/yr as opposed to ~$10/yr).
Obviously it wouldn’t be allowed in this community, but how feasible would it be to make a community on a friendly instance and start shipping data through it somehow? If it works for NNTP it ought to work for ActivityPub, right?...
Now that a lot of the commotion has subsided I’m just curious to know how y’all are finding the Lemmy experience in general and whether you use it regularly like you did reddit?
Hexbear: the 3rd or so biggest instance on lemmy and by far the most active. It’s where all the people with pronouns next to their names come from. We’re a left unity trans positive community that’s been around for 3 years, mostly made up of Marxists and Anarchists. We were just recently federated with the rest of lemmy about a week ago.
slop: Food for the hogs. Content. Posts. Discussion. Drama. Romance. Danger! Hoggers
cth: a podcast no one really cares about. A community of leftists outgrew a forum that used to be about them. It got banned from reddit and the refugees turned into Hexbear.
libs: Liberals. From our perspective this includes about 65-75% of the American political landscape. This includes all democrats and about half republicans. These are people who support capitalism. Bernie Sanders is a lib. They are annoying and will betray you in the end but they’re usually the people who can be reasoned with so it’s extra frustrating.
chuds: Fascists. The other 25-35%. Confederate flag waving people who eat burgers as a protest against global warming. Kyle Rittenhouse stans. Coal rollers. The people who will kill you first if you have good politics. They believe above all else in natural hierarchies so the capitalists will turn to them when the left challenges theirs. That’s how Hitler happened.
In general, it’s been pretty good. Stuff is a bit unstable every now and then, but most of that changed when I switched away from lemmy.world.
There’s a couple of things to contend with though. There’s less content than there was on Reddit. This ultimately doesn’t matter that much for general browsing, as there is still plenty. But for more niche communities it now means barely any content. Even with larger topics like Formula 1 it’s quite noticeable that there’s a lot less people in there. It’s great during big discussions, but any smaller links or discussions often only have like 1 or 2 responses. For other communities it’s even worse. Some of the genres I listen to have basically nothing going on, while on Reddit the community was at least large enough to have a few nice discussions every moe and then. The same with many games that I really liked.
Another problem is federation with more (politically) extreme instances like lemmygrad, hexbear, and some right wing crap that was luckily defederated before I could remember their names. On the one hand, I don’t want defederation based on political opinion alone to be the norm. But neither do I particularly like getting constantly called a “lib” (even though I’m quite left wing compared to the national average) or get to read constant discussions on these topics wherever I go. I come here to read about fun stuff, unwind a bit, not to constantly read about people defending dictatorships. Hexbear is especially interesting, since their users also add a lot of fun memes and good content. But then equally they brigade comment sections and overwhelm anyone who disagrees with them.
Ending on a positive note: the software (apps, backend, frontend, etc) have really gotten a lot better over the past months. I’m using Connect at the moment and I really enjoy it. Bugs keep disappearing, to the point where I now have very few complaints. Apps is why I left Reddit, so seeing that we’re now (imo) in a better place than Reddit is a good thing.
If people would share the idea of the fediverse instead of saying “yeah reddit suck, go to this website instead”, this would put a dent in it.
But since the concept is so alien and hard to describe, people find it easier to just share the site, and since that game keeps being recommended, and since even if they know about multiple sites working together, even those people are going to go to one that has a friendly name, so this is what happens.
I’m only not on it because I like picking less popular things in general, so I actively avoided picking what seemed to be the default at the time.
Also I believe it would help if the sites/instances had a way of distinguishing themselves more and communicating their differences. Even most of the instances’ intro or about pages are mostly saying something like “hey I’m a general use instance, with mostly this language, pick me!”
Which in and of itself is fine, but it seems most of them are general use, so people have no basis for picking one. They may figure out different reasons to like one or the other along the way, but once they pick one initially, I don’t think most people make another account.
I haven’t done much of that either, except for making one my dedicated NSFW account and this one, but I plan on making at least one or two more just in case of downtime, or even to separate genres of content.
A few questions as you’re self hosting an instance and I haven’t read much about it yet.
Are you hosting it on personal hardware?
Can you just choose any free name for the domain if it’s on your own hardware or do you need to rent one regardless?
Do you keep it active all the time or turn it off for the night/other periods of time where you know you won’t use it?
I have NSFW unchecked on my instance, so no porn is ingested/federated. Also because its just me, i have to seek out communities to federate with via search.
I did this via lemmyverse.net/communities and changed the linked names to my domain and just ran searchs to start the federation for the specific communities i found interesting.
It does mean things like “Local” is useless and subscribed and all are the same filters since its only stuff i subscribed to.
Occasionally I will browse one of alts on a different instance and check all, or local there and see if theres anything interesting. I have also re-run through the link above here and there to find new communities to join. Those are probably the biggest “pain points” in that it takes more effort to find new communities. But once you start the feed its fine.
I also use different default filters on my alt’s in different instances (ie: ALL:HOT on lemmy.world) or whatnot if im feeling like finding new stuff. But honestly the lemmyverse stuff gets like 99% of the content here, and theres been a dip in participation, so some communities are idling (which just means I dont see anything)
[…] it sounds like you’re arguing that the downtime is because of massive user registrations and not from an attack like they said themselves […]
I have no idea where their downtime is from. If it is DOS-related, though, they would protect against it using a DDOS protection service like CloudFlare, which costs $$$
Lemmy.world hasn’t done anything to suggest they would be a significant privacy and security risk to users, at least not yet
[…], pushing ads to federated servers or collecting and selling user data would absolutely change that I guarantee it.
We’ll see, but the larger they grow, the more permanent they get, and ads only affects that so much.
I didn’t and won’t go as far to accuse the instance owners themselves of being behind the attack but I won’t say it isn’t a user from Hexbear because nether you or I can prove that it isn’t.
Hexbear is not more suspect than other instances, and there is no reason to name-drop Hexbear, alone, in particular. If they’re being DOSed, then whoever is responsible is most likely involved in a community that has a culture of DOSing in general, like a Chan, maybe the same one that has actively been responsible for vandalizing Lemmy instances.
I have no idea where their downtime is from. If it is DOS-related, though, they would protect against it using a DDOS protection service like CloudFlare, which costs $$$
They currently do use Cloudflare actually, doesn’t magically stop all forms of DDoS though (ever heard of SQL queries, some of them can take seconds to execute). Anyway I only said that because a big misconception by people is that Lemmy.world’s uptime problem is caused by “the Reddit hug of death” as in user traffic and that it’s a scaling issue, when it isn’t.
That’s pretty bad, though honestly it still pales in comparison to Facebook’s awful history with collection and selling user data, though I guess how each instance views it. Maybe lemmy.ml (one of the biggest instances to ban threads) would use this to justify defederating from world (maybe I’ll let them know about it and see what they say, I know they’re certainly not going to go hunting for it on their own).
We’ll see, but the larger they grow, the more permanent they get, and ads only affects that so much.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it pans out
Hexbear is not more suspect than other instances, and there is no reason to name-drop Hexbear, alone, in particular. If they’re being DOSed, then whoever is responsible is most likely involved in a community that has a culture of DOSing in general, like a Chan, maybe the same one that has actively been responsible for vandalizing Lemmy instances.
I have indeed seen many things that do elevate Hexbear on the list as of the possible origins of an attack, but there isn’t any reason it couldn’t also be from one of the chans or any instance that was defederated from them.
It does seem a bit weird to me though that you are strangely adamant about defending Hexbear, which does also make me slightly more suspicious, though that isn’t definitive, many people will defend their instances for totally innocuous reasons. Anyway we’re done with this, there was drama and concern (from several instances, not just world) and there’s no point in arguing about it when we can’t prove anything for certain here. Also this isn’t exactly the place for a debate, this is c/piracy not a debate forum.
BUT neither really believe in good faith discussion, it’s mostly trolling and “dunking”.
I do not like tankies but I have absolutely never experienced this, all tankies typically want to do is discuss theory and history to the point that it’s exhausting. Have you talked to any Trotskyists??
It’s way more present since Hexbear federated in, every first impression is that it’s an alt-right troll farm.
I literally never got this impression, it’s like extraordinarily clear that Hexbear is a leftist instance. From the pronouns in names to the leftist jokes lol.
This is in regard to Lemmy.world blocking piracy communities from other instances. This post is not about whether you agree with the decision. It’s about how the admins informed their users....
Ah my bad. I don’t really feel comfortable saying their name completely openly because they are very aggressive to any and all people who point that out, but they allow loli/shotacon and attract a lot of open pedophiles. Wont say the name outright, but if you go to lemmy.world/instances and scroll down to “blocked” and look at the first one, that’s it. Do not go to that instance. I’m serious, the content they host is illegal in many jurisdictions.
On the old site, there were a number of funny video communities with regular posts, for example /r/Unexpected, /r/PublicFreakout, or /r/WhatCouldGoWrong. While there are plenty of memes on Lemmy, we have relatively little video content. Those of you who used to frequent video subs, what have you replaced them with since coming...
Unfortunately that’s not the best way to link to communities on Lemmy, when people click those links they see it through Lemmy.world your home instance.
You want to format the links like below, with an exclamation point before the community name @ the instance that the community is hosted on
I was thinking, what really stops a defederated lemmy instance from changing their domain name and/or IP address to evade defederation or re-federate against another admins’ decision to defederate. If someone was doing that, say buying garbage domains and changing their lemmy Instance domain to force federate with people who...
AFAIK /r/trueoffmychest on Reddit was a reaction to people feeling that the mods/rules of /r/offmychest were too restrictive (I have no horse in this race, I don’t know if that was actually warranted or not.) A quick search shows me that !goodoffmychest exists, and seems to be the most active offmychest community on Lemmy currently.
I have no real experience with that community and its mods, or if any of them are the same people who ran either reddit sub, but at a glance their rules seem reasonable enough to me, so perhaps start there.
Lemmy is new enough that I doubt there are enough users dissatisfied with the moderation on that community to warrant forming a breakaway community already, and if there were there’s a decent chance that they’d just start a second offmychest on a different instance instead of calling it trueoffmychest, if not go with a completely different name entirely.
If you do find their rules too restrictive, you could always take the initiative to start your own community, otherwise you’d have to wait for enough people to splinter off and do it themselves so you can join, or learn to play by the rules of the existing community, or just do without entirely.
I’ve noticed a lot of people complain that niche communities aren’t really all that present here or are difficult to find. Having some consolidated in specific instances is very helpful for discovery as well as spreading the federation around....
This is how Lemmy should be, with the majority of the content being hosted on themed instances. Easy to browse if you want to focus on something, otherwise use Lemm.ee or other “catch all” instances if you want a more /all experience. Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml shouldn’t host well over half the content I see. Easy targets for DDOS and then their users are screwed AND their hosted content stops federating.
Spread out is the way to go, it’s the whole point of the fediverse.
lemmyloves.art seems like a name that could catch on. I’m sure if it became a prominent art community on Lemmy people would donate to support the upkeep.
Oooh heck yeah! That solves that issue. I’d love to help out over there! I like the name, it sounds super cute :)
If you need any help on the technical side of things/admin stuff I can help if you want. Lemmy is annoying as fuck to set up and manage sometimes 🫠 I’d def say if you’re hosting files locally consider enabling conversion of images to webp for using less storage space and consider the potential of object storage in the long term as well as limiting upload sizes alongside using a blocklist to block some of the worst of the worst fediverse instances (there is some nasty mastodon instances out there, like genuinely.) I have my matrix link in my bio (I think?)
I’ve seen the controversy where lemmy.world defederated from 2 piracy instances. So since there is no one big owner what is stopping someone creating a instance that host CP or other illegal stuff?...
Because someone can just host a CP instance and now that instance even if defederated from other instances still provides a safe space for pedophiles to share content and other illegal stuff.
That is no different than someone just hosting their own webserver for the same purpose. They would find themselves in jail pretty quickly. If they do federate; they would be announcing their own existence. That would not be in their interest if they wanna fly under the radar.
Regarding names, I don’t really know. Maybe instances can have blacklists of allowed names, if they care about it. Perhaps they leave the responsibility of blocking users you don’t like, to you.
I’ve seen the controversy where myisp.com blocked mail from 2 email hosts. So since there is no one big owner what is stopping someone creating an email host that propagates CP or other illegal stuff?
From what it seems like is ISPs can try to block from those hosts but the only justice that can happen seems only from government/police but that only works in certain countries because more can just pop up bypassing the blocks.
I’m kinda concerned if this issue has no solution because it’s a pretty sharp edge of the double edge sword of having instances anyone can create and host.
Because someone can just host a CP mailing list and now that list, even if blocked from other ISPs, still provides a safe space for pedophiles to share content and other illegal stuff.
Also what is stopping someone from creating an email host that has a slur for its name and then go sending email around to other ISPs. Like you don’t want someone named “[email protected]”
Adjust as appropriate for literally any other technology used on the Internet up to and including frickin’ DNS.
ANY technology, without exception, has utility for evil as well as good. (Some are more evil-leaning, like corporate social media silos, while others are more good-leaning, like automated puppy scritchers, to be fair.) To pearl-clutch over one technology because it’s the new one is just …
… well, human I guess. Humans are always doing this shit.
Wasn’t it the blahaj admin who defederated from some popular instance because it had an “adorable porn” community, claiming that contained child abuse content. Nevermind that a subreddit with the same name has existed for like a decade. And when proven wrong they doubled down and never admitted falsely accusing people of serious crimes.
Yeh good convo. No beef obviously. Marxism is a part of science and so has to include continuous critique.
My point is simply that the confusion of these questions as if they are the same, when they are trivially not, actually gets in the way of precisely the important objective you’ve cited, namely understanding and taking the correct position on China. If our position does not make sense when explained to people then that it our fault and issue, not their’s. People not being Marxist is just as much, if not more, the fault of us as Marxist to clearly explain and convince that it is their’s.
However I’m still not fully understanding your first point. Breaking down concepts, making clear definition, and thus theoretical conditions, is for the sake of clarity and so that we can actually analyze properly, and is obligatory at the onset of any scientific analysis or inquiry, once we’ve gotten beyond the more intuition stage of concept formation. I’m not disagreeing with you that the answers to those questions, the properties and facts they are making reference to, all have to be taken into account in a holistic way if we are going to give a proper analysis or have a decent understanding of how democratic the Chinese political and socio-economic system is and whether it is moving in that direction. It’s also essential so that we know what conditions would produce these conditions, so that we know whether the socio-economic basis for a deepening of proletarian democracy is developing. But clear analysis of concepts at the very onset is still essential. Even tho this points have ofc, as you say, been analyzed to deathly minutiae ad infinitum by millions of Chinese comrades, I’m not seeing how this makes is irrelevant for those of us outside of China. It is still important for us, in our own position, to have a correct understanding of China as Marxists. Marx wrote much of his work before the conditions of as pure capitalism as he describes in works such as Das Capital were even really there. Marx reflected with scientific ruthlessness and lack of qualms about people’s political correctness ceaselessly. This is why we still read him today and not other analysts of capitalism from the time. Hell, even the Communist Manifesto describes a capitalism which is too purified for the time. But this was not an irrelevant mistake on Marx’s part. It was scientific foresight as to where European societies undergoing the transition to capitalism were headed. We need similar analysis today of China, if we think or hope that China will be a future global revolutionary center.
On the plan for socialist transition being laid out, the CPC most certainly have stated and presented such a plan, although I haven’t seen very detailed data demonstrating that such a plan is seriously being laid out and applied. It seems to be based on a kind of faith in the CPC. The argument that they have continued to massively improve the standard of living since the Reform and Opening up, bringing 800 million people out of poverty is of course correct and a historic achievement. However the same argument is often used by liberals to justify, say, the capitalism of the 50s-70s in which living standards in the West did considerably go up. The difference which might be brought up is the fact that China has done so without using imperialism. However, given that the core issue of imperialism is that it is exploitation (of some of the most extreme kind), and given that China has charged its development in recent decades (and did so in the 50s when Liu Shaoqi was saying things like ‘exploitation can be good!’) with exploitation of its working class and peasantry, citing improvements in living standards is not proof that the intentions of the part-leadership are necessarily geared towards a truly socialist transition. So I don’t think it’s just a philosophical point, but something to be always born in mind so that we suspend judgement until hard evidence is there that the CPC will, so to speak ‘push the big red button’. I’m not going to believe something unless I have actual incontrovertible evidence for it. That doesn’t mean that I know that they won’t. But something it’s just not possible to be confident either way. Another issue is that the current mode of production in China does not function like capitalism as we know it at the macro-level, nor does it operate fully like socialism. Maybe it is a type of transitionary stage (but then we hear the Leninist critique of the reforming, Menshevik notion of non-revolutionary transition to socialism in our heads). In either case, it makes clear to me again that one reason for so much of the theoretical impasse of people outside of China trying to understand it is that we don’t have a fully adequate understanding of the key mechanisms at the macro-level of their mode of production.
Of course I’m happy to be proven wrong on this point. The main issue is that I’ve only just recently started leaning Mandarin, so I cannot read Chinese sources. But if anyone has excellent economic data and analysis to give me on this point i’d be happy to see it.
This is, again, why intentions are important. Political groups with different interest take on different objectives and intentions in the same set of external material conditions, so the fact that the Dengist are in power and not the Maoists, and that the economic base of support for the party and the state is therefore different now in the aftermath of the reforms, is very significant for trying to understand what the intentions of the current CPC leadership actually is.
I personally don’t really understand how saying the truth about China, as far as we can discern it through scientific, Marxist analysis (which in no way contradicts, but rather radically extends, the methods of scientific enquiry of the past, whichever culture they were taken from), amongst ourselves is an issue. We have an political and therefore intellectual duty for our understanding of China to be as clear as possible, and that’s not going to be achieved by saying that certain questions which are relevant to understanding China’s contemporary political system are divisive. I’m not seeing how you and I having this convo is divisive. Furthermore, rigorous critique and debate is of the essence of Marxist methodology. Look at the records of the Bolshevik party until the Stalinist period. Before they were in power they were rigorously critiquing each other (perhaps too viviously) left, right and centre. Lenin was theoretically beefing with everyone all the time. In the 20s, once the Stalinist position was dominant, you can look for instance at economic debates or at the party debates on China. They were theoretically sophisticated and based on the premise that a clear theoretical understanding is essential for policy. Obviously we are not in anything like such a position of power of influence, but we do need to start, as part of a truly Marxist culture, to act and prepare for this, not only because liberal hegemony will not last forever, but because it’s important that in order to convince people of the correctness of our view, that we can do so rigorously and clearly.
I’m not using mediation in a Trotskyist position (not a Trotskyist). I was just checking whether you meant directness in a more philosophical, meta-theoretic sense appropriate to materialist dialectics or whether you were using it in a more colloquial sense. Obviously the latter as you’ve clarified that it has to do the time-aspect and thus the pragmatic importance. I’m also not disagreeing in the slightest that the Trotskyist position of that type, especially today, would be ultraleftism in the pejorative sense.
If you have not studied communism, and your main contact with communism is tankies on Lemmy and “communist” dictatorships in history, then I understand why you would think that.
But communists by and large are not tankies, and do not wish for states like the USSR, China, or North Korea. Those people typically identify as Marxist-Leninists (promoted mainly by Stalin after Lenin died), and yep they’re authoritarian, and they’re loud. And, despite the name, Marx himself would disapprove of this ideology for a number of reasons.
Read even just the first paragraph of the Wikipedia articles on ”Communism” and “Communist society.”
A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state (or nation state).
Communists want no state; it is effectively a type of anarchist or radically democratic ideology, where the citizens all equally share power through common ownership of industry… the very opposite of authoritarianism.
A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, stateless, and moneyless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour.
The term communist society should be distinguished from the Western concept of the communist state, the latter referring to a state ruled by a party which professes a variation of Marxism–Leninism.
Communism is not an authoritarian philosophy. If you go talk to people in real life who identify as communists, you will tend to find communists as described in these articles. If you look on lemmy.ml, however, you’ll find lots of Marxist-Leninists (tankies) because that’s who the instance was made by… but that’s not really representative of communism as a whole, and many communists find that philosophy repulsive.
TLD and the law
Hi there, I’m currently looking into renting a domain from cloudflare for convenient access to my hosted services from outside my home. It seems some of the cheapest options for the domain name I want to use are country TLDs (.uk, .us). Does this bind me to their laws in any way? can anyone come at me for hosting (e.g....
Can Lemmy be used to actually share files?
Obviously it wouldn’t be allowed in this community, but how feasible would it be to make a community on a friendly instance and start shipping data through it somehow? If it works for NNTP it ought to work for ActivityPub, right?...
how is Lemmy going for you?
Now that a lot of the commotion has subsided I’m just curious to know how y’all are finding the Lemmy experience in general and whether you use it regularly like you did reddit?
ISPs complain that listing every fee is too hard, urge FCC to scrap new rule (arstechnica.com)
Archived version: archive.ph/JsTV6...
If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful. (media.kbin.cafe)
Official Statement from Lemmy.world admin about community removal (lemmy.world)
Lemmy since the reddit collapse (lemmy.ml)
Critical support for the Lemmy world peeps in their fight against pro-intellectual property nerds (hexbear.net)
Lemmy.world announces blocking communities via Discord [update]
This is in regard to Lemmy.world blocking piracy communities from other instances. This post is not about whether you agree with the decision. It’s about how the admins informed their users....
Where do you get your video content nowadays?
On the old site, there were a number of funny video communities with regular posts, for example /r/Unexpected, /r/PublicFreakout, or /r/WhatCouldGoWrong. While there are plenty of memes on Lemmy, we have relatively little video content. Those of you who used to frequent video subs, what have you replaced them with since coming...
Out of Curiosity how would a Lemmy instance handle another Instance Circumventing Defederation
I was thinking, what really stops a defederated lemmy instance from changing their domain name and/or IP address to evade defederation or re-federate against another admins’ decision to defederate. If someone was doing that, say buying garbage domains and changing their lemmy Instance domain to force federate with people who...
Such a small world (reddthat.com)
Is there a "True off my chest" Lemmy community here?
I’m looking for one, but the search on mobile is difficult.
Would there be interest and support in potentially building an art focused lemmy instance?
I’ve noticed a lot of people complain that niche communities aren’t really all that present here or are difficult to find. Having some consolidated in specific instances is very helpful for discovery as well as spreading the federation around....
Whats stopping someone from creating a instance that host illegal content?
I’ve seen the controversy where lemmy.world defederated from 2 piracy instances. So since there is no one big owner what is stopping someone creating a instance that host CP or other illegal stuff?...
It would appear lemmy.world has blocked this community (sh.itjust.works)
!piracy has also been blocked from lemmy.world....
China courts Germany's far-right populist AfD (www.dw.com)
Know your genocide apologists