Lemmy Support

https://lemmy.ml/post/52706206

The post is the same, but the discussions are different in each community. I get help and useful information from different communities, and if I didn't post across multiple communities, I wouldn't have been able to put this list together.

Do you want me to remove my post? Do you want me to stop posting similar things? Then I wouldn't be able to update the list. Or should I stop posting in local communities so it won't bother you?

Also, which products on the list are "privacy snake oil"?

I’m not sure there’s a good Community to discuss meta elements of Lemmy? So I’m posting here, this isn’t necessarily a support question (and might be apt in a Lemmy developers community or asked on matrix) but I also think it’d be valuable to get input from a larger pool of Lemmy users.

Last night I stumbled on a dead instance that have links somehow through the fediverse still being able to read the body text but with dead images link and whatnot due to being served from a now defunct instance. And that inspired me to make this post, curious what admins are supposed to do to try and make Lemmy more sustainable to host/incentivize instances to stay up (even if their admin is kind of a jerk or whatever).The admin of this instance said a couple years ago he was shutting down the domain and was really angry to be hosting a Lemmy instance with like 250k visitors or whatever his metric was. He had a donate button but was not making enough to recoup the hosting costs and basically made inflamed comments about the users giving him a pittance of $60/month.

I’ve tried to host my own Lemmy instance and did for about a year but I had specific goals in mind to make a local community to get local businesses off the other US social platforms. I didn’t find much time or effort making this a reality, just me and few friends had accounts on the instance so I pulled the plug.

But it made me curious if Lemmy devs or community have some sense of what would be a good way to help admins fund their hosting costs? I’d be against ads/trackers, promoted content as they erode privacy and the spirit of the fediverse imo. But what would the community’s thoughts on having some sort of payment system baked in where it’s kind of gimmicky but translates to $ for server costs?

I personally don’t pay for “free” things, which is coincidentally how most people operate; But smaller, humanity defining initiatives like the fediverse subverting US tech oligarchy might be a decent cause to toss a few dollars at every month via some sort of subscription with some value add. Like Reddit has awards you can give other users, maybe something like that? I’d love to hear what others think!

I host a lemmy instance for just my account. I don't host any active community or anything, but after 4 years my docker volumes grew to 155GB in total size so I tried to do some cleaning as I don't care that old content is not viewable anymore and I have limited storage (and no object storate for now).

I wanted to retain only the last year of content, but it turned out to be kind of difficult to achieve.

First of all, I didn't find any documentation that explains how this should be done so I did a full database and pictrs backup, stopped lemmy (but started PostgreSQL back up), and did some digging myself, with pretty much no prior knowledge whatsoever of how lemmy works internally, but some postgres experience.

Database

Database size was 35GB.

Reviewing the database schema, I found that purging content should be pretty straightforward. Deleting old posts should be enough because the post table has a trigger that handles deleting associated comments.

Set retention to 1 year :

retention=365

Remove posts older than ${retention} :

docker compose exec -it postgres psql -U lemmy -d lemmy -c "DELETE FROM post WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL '${retention} days';"

This started computing, but failed after a while because a LIMIT statement within some trigger function ends up having an illegal negative value, probably a bug as far as I can tell. So I revised the above command in order to perform the DELETE by one day steps from 1500 days old onward, in an effort to locate where things start to fail.

for ((age=1500; age>=${retention}; age-=1)); do
    echo "Older than ${age} days:"
    docker compose exec -it postgres psql -U lemmy -d lemmy -c "DELETE FROM post WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL '${age} days';"
done

Doing this, I could pinpoint the age of the culprit post because the DELETE statement started failing at "older than 949 days".

For those posts from this particular time interval, I disabled the triggers and performed the cleanup manually on the post and comment tables form psql.

• Open a psql prompt on the container :

docker compose exec -it postgres psql -U lemmy -d lemmy

• Disable the triggers on tables

ALTER TABLE comment DISABLE TRIGGER USER;
ALTER TABLE post DISABLE TRIGGER USER;

• Delete comments of posts older than 949 days :

DELETE FROM comment 
WHERE post_id IN (
    SELECT id FROM post WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL '949 days';
);

• Delete posts older than 949 days :

DELETE FROM post 
WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL '949 days';

• Re-enable the triggers :

ALTER TABLE comment ENABLE TRIGGER USER;
ALTER TABLE post ENABLE TRIGGER USER;

Running the previous stepped DELETE again, it proceeded to purge the rest of the data without issue, although it took hours to complete on my modest VPS.

This purge deleted lots of rows, but to reclaim the space on filesystem (and rebuild the tables and indices fresh, which doesn't hurt), I ran a VACUUM FULL on the database :

VACUUM FULL;

Database size is now 8GB. That's 27GB reclaimed!

Pict-rs

This volume was taking 120GB. While I do know my way around PostgreSQL, Pict-rs is totally foreign to me. I figured I could try to purge files older than a year old based on find's -mtime, not entirely sure if that would wreck the Pict-rs database or not, but having my volumes safely backed up, I tried it anyways :

• Set retention to 1 year :

retention=365

• Delete images older than the set retention :

find ./volumes/pictrs/files -type f -mtime +${retention} -delete

• Clean up empty directories left behind :

find ./volumes/pictrs/files -type d -empty -delete

This took forever but it cleared up a lot of space, as the pict-rs volume is now 12GB. That's 108 GB reclaimed!

I started lemmy to check things out, and while there are a few missing images here and there, all content from the last year is fine. My profile picture was gone, but I just uploaded another one.

For purging pict-rs, I realize that this method is kind of dumb but I didn't know what better to do. I would have liked to remove only images from posts and comment I had just purged from the database, so that things like profile pictures, community thumbnails, profile banners and such are left untouched, but I don't know how that could be done.

I'm relatively happy with the purge, and I won't restore from backup. But I can't help but feel this whole thing I did was pretty janky. Why is it such a massive pain to do housekeeping on lemmy? Are we expected to store everything until the end of time?

Can someone help me? I've been trying to generate an image of a sperm whale on

https://perchance.org/ai-text-to-image-generator

I can generate killer whales, blue whales, and other whales, but not a sperm whale.

Hi!

I'm on lemmy.ml and wanted to follow !xbox@lemmy.world - it is shown but the posts are >1 year old. If I open !xbox@lemmy.world via lemmy.world I can see very new (<1 day) posts.

How can I see new posts using lemmy.ml?

Can anyone provide a basic rundown of how Lemmy handles input sanitization?

I ask because I want to know if it is necessary for lemmy userscripts to sanitize the content of comments for security purposes or if I can reasonably expect that this has already occurred.

My specific concern is whether the innerHTML attribute of comments can still contain harmful scripts even after Lemmy's sanitization procedure.

I am not very familiar with rust and it's not obvious to me from skimming the source code. Some of the git issues hint at it occurring server side while others in the ui?

Questions:

• Where does input sanitization occur?
• Does the sanitization simply prevent injection or does it further more reject the comment/entirely remove the script from comment/ban user etc?
• Can posts and comments still contain potential threats via a userscript vector?
• How is sanitization handled with regard to federation? ie; are comments received from federation also sanitized despite not being input directly by the user on the receiving server?

I know it would be good practice to just sanitize it in the userscript anyways but I would still like to know what's happening on the Lemmy side.

Hi! I'm new to Lemmy and I've noticed that !xbox@lemmy.ml appears to have been inactive for around three years.

I'm an Xbox user and I'd be interested in bringing the community back to life and actively maintaining and moderating it, with news, games and general Xbox discussion.

Would it be possible for me to take over moderation of the community?

Thanks!

It seems to be for me, but looking for confirmation.

Any app (Interstellar, Thunder, Summit) doesn't.

I haven't tried another network or vpn.

If I try to load in browser, I get this error:

Error!

There was an error on the server. Try refreshing your browser. If that doesn't work, come back at a later time. If the problem persists, you can seek help in the Lemmy support community or Lemmy Matrix room.

J'ai mi le mauvais mail du coup j'ai recréer le compte avec le bon mail mais l'autre compte semble toujours en attente de validation du mail donc mon pseudo est "bloqué" (pseudo : softyoda)

je l'ai précisé quand j'ai créer mon compte, mais il ne semble pas avoir été lu

Edit: A user found the issue and clarified its an issue with the website using placeholder pointing to localhost, probably when developing. This old post title has been changed from "An accounts profile causes a localhost Port Scan on Firefox" to "A website causes a localhost Port Scan on Firefox" to reflect the new found information. Solution here (a reply in this post): https://lemmy.ml/post/51842257/27445377

Post in question: https://lemmy.ml/post/51833596 which links to the actual "problematic" webpage: https://radicle.dev/guides/user

A ~~users account / profile~~ post causes a localhost Port Scan (attempt) on my Firefox, when I either open the page or even when posts of the account are listed in my Subscribed feed view. I just noticed this because I have an addon installed that blocks and notifies me about this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/port-authority/ The addon lists port 3000.

Is this something to be concerned about?

Edit: Removed the link from this Post URL, so it does not cause the Port Scan to others I was reporting here.

Apparently upset someone enough saying democrat hakim Jeffries is just the same as Republicans for negotiating with kushner to get that user or user to direct others at me to unleash downvoting bots or alt accounts to downvote everything I comment now.

Example is 3 accounts with no activity lately or just created within the last week on multiple instances.

There a way to deal with this or just an annoyance that is part of the fediverse?

Accounts in question

https://lemy.lol/u/AnarchyBacon

https://futurology.today/u/project654189

https://lemmy.today/u/rune

any idea what's causing this error?

From a lemmy user perspective I find the Linked Instances and Blocked Instances lists to be annoying to view when there are large numbers of instances. Could these be sorted in alphabetical order?

Also for the Blocked Instances can a short comment field be added so that when a lemmy admin blocks an instance from their site they can enter a reason why it is being blocked which can be shown to users?

I am very new to Lemmy. Created my account today after a long long time of using Reddit. I notice that there is an option to pick a language for your account. I selected English and I can see more posts with that language set. However I do not know how to select multiple languages. Am I missing something obvious here? Is it possible?

Thank you :-)

Explanation: I got bored of the mechanical steps involved with posting. Two of the people in my Discord/XMPP bridged chatroom remained posting here with access to all of the accounts we have been using, shared via a password manager account made for group socials. I stopped monitoring most of the internet except for my Google Reader equivalent, as I have been making more videos, writing, and have no desire to be unemployed. So it seems there was a large argument, or a large series of arguments, continued ad nauseam mainly by one member, resulting in mass banning of all accounts involved in tomfoolery, which were supposed to be left idle. The explanation I have received is very long and confusing, so I am going to skip making sense of it and reiterate I take full responsibility for this. I could have noticed something was going on and made a few quick threats to shut it down. I don't want to minimize the wider political issues involved or any of the responses, or their tone. This just does not seem that important, though. This is incredibly self referential social media speak and I am having difficulty making sense of many, many parts of it.

My only intention with the news and history communities is, you guessed it: curate news and history. I cannot guarantee I will be an active moderator, it would be silly to claim that after something like this, but I will be a moderator, which these don't currently have. If you refuse my request, please delete these communities. I have everything archived anyways.

Sorry about the fuss,

VengeCorp® CEO

As of either yesterday or maybe the day before, I've had issues connecting to lemmy.ml from VPN servers (Proton VPN) that are hosted in Finland. I was able to reach the website from some other countries' servers.

I've been too tired to do some testing before, so I did some today. I tested a few countries that are somewhat close to me:

Work: Sweden, Estonia, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany

Don't work: Finland, Norway, Russia

Didn't test other countries yet, but maybe this will be enough to investigate the issue.

Perhaps I'm overreacting a bit, but his posts and opinions are so much all over the place and so incoherent that I don't think it's coming from a troll or extremist, but someone with either cancer or severe mental issues that this person way not be aware of and that this person might be in need of help and not getting it.

Does Lemmy support agree and if so, has Lemmy support tried to seek contact friends / family / medical authorities?

Has anyone tried running Lemmy with one of the release candidates for pict-rs 0.60?

The new TLS feature for using a custom CA store will help me redirect the image proxy for Imgur through my rimgo instance.

While trying to update my display name, I've realized that any display name longer than 20 characters gets rejected (specifically: https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/user/save_user_settings returns 400 with {"error":"invalid_display_name"}). Some digging through the code seems to explain why: Lemmy 0.19.20 (the version running on lemmy.ml) uses the same config option for limiting display name length as it does for usernames, which defaults to 20 (and .ml hasn't changed it from the default value)¹.

I would be satisfied with that explanation, except there are clearly other users on my instance whose display names exceed 20 characters (example: https://lemmy.ml/u/Trying2KnowMyself). So, my question is: how the heck are people able to set these longer display names?

¹ In the 1.0 betas the config option seems to have been replaced with hardcoded limits which are separate for user- and display names, but I don't think that'd be relevant since that's not the code which .ml is actually running

EDIT: I figured it out! Importing user settings from a json backup bypasses display name validation. Most likely the user I referenced as an example had imported their profile from their Hexbear alt, so it ended up just copying their display name over as well.

I had noticed that some cross-posted posts showed a different style of link for those cross-posts: some show it as a link under the title and header of the post but above the body, and some show the link (usually) in the body of the post. In addition, the cross-post links above the body are relative links (open in my home instance), but the ones inside the body are hard links (open in the source community's home instance). Lastly, the links inside the body show only on one of the cross-posts, but the ones outside the body show on both cross-posts.

At first I thought that the second style, the one in the body that's hard-linked and only on one of the posts, was due to the poster manually adding that link. However, over time I realized that that was not the case because it looked too consistent across different users.

I searched for a mention of this in this community and found this post about it: https://lemmy.zip/post/8016049 - unfortunately, there's either something I'm still missing or that the explanation is missing.

Here's an example post I happened to find that is linking to an external article's URL, but has both styles of cross-post link. It's a post linking to an article URL too: https://sh.itjust.works/post/64304718

Does anyone know how or why the two different styles of cross-post link get created?

Edit: I'm going to consider this solved. Here's what I think is the likely solution based on all the comments and examples so far.

It appears that the dynamic, outer cross-post links (outside the body, under the title and post controls) get generated by the Lemmy server and that it seems to require that the OP have a URL that it links to in the title. Lemmy seems to use that URL to identify cross-posts. The hard-coded cross-post link inside the body seems to be generated by some client(s) or front-end(s). I asked someone who had a post containing one what they used and they said Alexandrite, so that may be one of the possible sources of this.

Thanks everyone.

I’m trying to make a new account on lemmy.ml because lemmy.zip is now blocked in the uk and i want a new username. Whenever i try to make a new account i get ‘user_already_exists’ even when i use an email address that i haven’t tried before. I also tried the hello@lemmy.zip email but no reply. Who can i contact to get my account?

I accidentally deleted the registration email for lemmy when signing up, is there some way I can get the accounts deleted so I can re register it? I just signed up for lemmy, so it's actually two accounts that i need it for.

It would be nice if we could permanently save an override for the Sort Type for every Community we want to. In example for Memes I would go with "Top Day" and for News oriented Communities without too many posts, I would have "New".

Also having a different setting for Global and a default for Communities would be nice too. Let's say the Global could stay at "Active" or "Scaled" in example, and when we open a Community, the default could be "New" (unless we override it with the previous suggestion).

How can I disable this profanity filter? It's getting a bit ridiculous.

When I first joined here, I thought it just censored slurs so I was fine with it.

Now I've come to realize it censors way too much shit and it's getting really annoying seeing "removed" all the time.

I don't know what happened, but since yesterday, the Boost for Lemmy App stopped working so I visited the instance website (dbzer0) in my browser and I was getting these... texts with choices (which lead to even more pointless texts)

I don't think I am banned because if I use VPN, I can reload the webpage on my WiFi and see the real dbzer0 lemmy again, and I can login and create posts, but the moment I turn off my VPN, it all goes back to the same white page with those texts.

My Mobile Data also works loads the website, but my WiFi doesn't without a VPN for some reason.

Please help!