Some non-Lemmy Groups that are interesting or might get interesting:

PieFed: !antisocialmedia@piefed.social
MBIN: !FloatingIsFun@fedia.io
PeerTube: !veronicaexplains@tinkerbetter.tube
WordPress: !dbzer0.com@dbzer0.com
NodeBB: !fediverse@forum.wedistribute.org
a.gup.pe: !photography@a.gup.pe

How well they backfill and inter-op is very platform-dependent, obvs (your platform and the remote platform)

If you fetch a community that your instance hasn’t previously heard of, you can typically query the community’s ‘outbox’ collection to get recent posts. So in Lemmy, you get 50 old posts, and then - once someone has subscribed - new posts start coming in.

Different platforms have different formats for their outboxes - Lemmy uses Announce/Create/Page, a.gup.pe and PeerTube use Announce, with a URL that leads to a Note or Video, wordpress uses Create/Article. Because Lemmy already understands its own outbox format, it’s able to get old posts from other Lemmy instances. It doesn’t get old stuff for a.gup.pe, PeerTube, or wordpress though.

So you might be wondering what outbox format nodebb uses - to which the answer is none. The outbox leads nowhere useful (they’re in good company with MBIN on this). Anyway - this is why fetching a nodebb community won’t come with any of its existing posts (but - as mentioned - new stuff will come in for subscribers)

Nothing really, just a bit of maintenance at their hosting provider: https://lemm.ee/post/48190514

(I got a 503 earlier too)

The use of the word ‘radical’ by these Republicans is grimly interesting and perverse, since I associate this mammalian definition of gender with a subset of radical feminism (the RF in TERF). They presented the idea as liberating (in the sense that since your gender has already been singly defined by your reproductive role, everything else - e.g. your name / job / hobbies / how you present yourself - was irrelevant, and no-one should be able to use any of those to question your gender). I very much doubt that these measures by US politicians will ultimately be liberating for anyone though, since trans people are just the first on a list. (It’s not like no-one warned the ‘gender critical’ gang about who they were cosying up to)

Yeah the lack of test suites really kicks our arse sometimes. I changed it from hard-deleting to soft-deleting stuff recently, and I forgot to check whether a post actually links to an external URL when restoring a post. The first time someone restored a post without one, it decided that it now had 189 cross-posts (i.e. all the other text posts that week). Whoops!

Oh man, it’s only from reading this that I’ve realised that ‘pypy’ isn’t the same as ‘pypi’

There used to be one - https://lemmings.world/u/communitylinkfixer

It looks like it was de-activated 3 months ago.

If you make a new one, please consider limiting it to just this community (and maybe communitypromo), and to not translating a link if the OP has also already provided a ! one, and to not translating links inside code blocks.

Drive-by bots can seem easy to make, but the problem is that they can be a bit too easy, and then end up as yet another annoying one.

The vote count for comments is something I’ll work on next. The idea is that if you have a high reputation (your stuff if upvoted more than downvoted), then you get an extra one (your comments start at 2, because it’s one from you, and one bonus one). But you’re not the first person to question it, and find it counter-intuitive. So I’ll probably change it so that a high reputation effects the internal score (which is used for ranking) but not the visible upvotes.

p.s. Lemmy’s changes re: batching are to fix its own problems with queues over long geographical distances. It’s unrelated to backfilling content from other instances: that’ll stay the same - every instance on every software platform will have some stuff missing compared to where it’s originally hosted (if it’s not because the content pre-dates the federation, it’ll be because of de-federation, or bans, or timeouts, or some activitypub mystery (someone was asking the other day about why a post from feddit.org hadn’t made it to lemmy.world and there was no real satisfactory answer to my mind)).

What’s happening with 0.19.6 ?

You can see the upvotes vs downvotes if you hover your cursor over the score. The old layout displayed both, but there’s pros and cons to combined vs. separate vote info. Videos pretty much always attract a disproportionate amount of downvotes, btw - it’s just one of those Lemmy things.

I don’t know how technically viable a temporary-only retrieval of a post would be. If you look at any given post across multiple instances, every one has its “own truth” for one reason or another, and it’s just something that I’ve started to accept comes with the territory.

Re: votes and comments for old content - you’ve noticed the same problems on PieFed as on smaller Lemmy instances, because they have the same root cause: we can only get what Lemmy will give us.

The ‘retrieve remote post’ function was originally written for PeerTube integration. If you fetch a post from there, you can then query the ‘favorites’ outbox to get voting info, and the ‘replies’ outbox to get comments. You can’t do that with Lemmy - it considers voting data to be private, and it doesn’t provide a ‘replies’ outbox. The only outbox that Lemmy provides is for posts, that provides the text for the most recent 50 posts, but nothing else (FWIW, the posts outbox for PieFed communities includes the replies along with each post, but - again - not the votes).

When a PieFed or other Lemmy instance first becomes aware a community that’s hosted on a remote Lemmy instance, it processes the posts outbox. The ‘retrieve remote post’ function is there for if you want a post that’s older than the ones provided in the outbox, or if someone before you discovered that community but didn’t subscribe (the remote community won’t send anything to piefed.social if no-one there is subscribed to it, so we can end up with a situation where we have the old posts but not the newer ones).

For votes: the hypothetical scenario of a post having +1000 on its home instance, but -4 on a remote one, is a real possibility, but that’s a bigger problem than just PieFed. Using ActivityPub, Lemmy doesn’t provide a post score, and even if it did (or you grabbed it using their API), it doesn’t say where the votes have come from. You need to know this, because otherwise you’ve no idea what a future vote will mean (is a ‘downvote’ reversing a previous downvote, or is it a new downvote?). There’s an inconsistency in PieFed, whereby a post retrieved from an outbox starts at +0, but a manually retrieved one starts at +1, but it doesn’t really matter that much, because they’re both as wrong as the other (we’ve no idea whether the OP kept the automatically assigned upvote that they got with a new post).

For comments: old ones are a lost cause (even for admins). Lemmy is a bit better at backfilling these - if it receives a vote for a missing comment, it’ll fetch it. I’d imagine though there’s a complexity limit to this (it’ll get a comment if it’s in reply to comment or a post it already has, but it’s not going to recursively climb up the parent tree to resolve everything if it doesn’t already have it). Also, it depends on votes coming through - lemmy.ml probably has about 3 years of comments that lemmy.world will never get, because nobody is going to vote on them. Again, it’s a bigger problem than just PieFed.

For UI stuff: I’m not the best person to talk to - I’ve only just found out that you can swipe about on a Mac desktop, and that’s because you’ve told me. The main websites of PieFed instances are deliberately old-skool (mostly just HTML and CSS) - this is what a chuck of the Fediverse says they want, but also what a chunk trips up on, because they’ve been spoiled by the conveniences provided by more modern web interfaces. That’s not to say that the problems you’ve mentioned are insurmountable, it’s just that they are best posted as an Issue on codeberg or in a community like !piefed_meta@piefed.social, where folks who’ve much more web development experience than me will see them.

Re: that post of on “ye power trippin’ bastards”, those comments will never come through. I’d guess that you pulled that post after the comments had been made, so they won’t federate out again, because they only do that when they’re originally created (or updated). Leaving and Joining won’t make any difference. There’s an argument that we should fetch a comment if we receive an upvote for it, but Rimu wasn’t too keen on it last time it was raised.

Re: swiping with Mac. I had no idea that was possible tbh, but I just tried it on my old MacBook Air, and it turns out that the two-finger swiping works in Safari, on PieFed as well as any other sites. This suggests that it’s a problem with Chrome, but I wouldn’t know where to look for a fix (it’s not the kind of functionality that websites have much involvement in - they don’t need to do anything to enable it, and would struggle to disable it, beyond the usual ‘back-button’ capture that some dodgy sites do, but PieFed doesn’t).

Hello. Hopefully we’re in deep enough in the comments for meta-chat not to be too annoying for others. Re: hotlinking from fandom sites - a search around the web suggests that other sites struggle with it too, because it looks like the ‘fandom’ people try to prevent it, and send a blank image whenever they detect it.

I don’t know how Lemmy gets away with it. I tried re-arranging elements the same way that Lemmy does, and it didn’t work. However, I have found that if you replace the word ‘static’ in the URL, with the word ‘vignette’, then that does work. This is the kind of thing that can be automated, so it can be fixed in a future commit.

Demo below (in spoiler tags to try to reduce the clutter for others):

Edit: I’ve also been adding an API to PieFed and testing it out with a fork of Lemmy’s Thunder app - using this seems to solve both problems: it can render the image without shenanigans, and it provides a preview too (I doubt preview functionality will be added to the main raw website if it requires significant amounts of JavaScript, 'cos we’re trying to avoid that).

There’s a lot of drama in that Issue, and then, at the very end:

Thanks for sharing your concerns here. We have been progressing use of our SDK in more use cases for our clients. However, our goal is to make sure that the SDK is used in a way that maintains GPL compatibility.

the SDK and the client are two separate programs
code for each program is in separate repositories
the fact that the two programs communicate using standard protocols does not mean they are one program for purposes of GPLv3

Being able to build the app as you are trying to do here is an issue we plan to resolve and is merely a bug.

To my mind, the ideal would be that if you, as the person who wants to share some ‘open-source’ news, chose one community that you think is ‘best’ (based on what instance it’s on, if the mods are real people and are active, participation levels, whatever you think really). And we, as subscribers, would do the same. This way, the ‘good’ communities would thrive, and the ‘bad’ ones would wither away. What happens at the minute, is that there’s 8 communities for open source, and there’ll always will be, because they aren’t in competition with one another.

(this is mostly just a general point about cross-posting behaviour, it’s not meant as a dig at you personally).

If you type a ! link using lemmy-ui, it auto-completes it so that MBIN sees it as an absolute link to the community on midwest.social (Blaze’s link is without the auto-complete). Lemmy, like Mastodon, can be a bit “fuck you if you aren’t us” at times.

I dread to think how many books GRRM’s former assistants have smashed out in the time it’s taken him not to write one.

Anyway:

James S.A. Corey’s hit sci-fi series The Expanse was set in our own solar system, and leaned heavily into the politics of various human factions vying for dominance while an alien threat looms at the edges of awareness. Yes, the protomolecule was dangerous and mysterious and shook up the status quo, but at the end of the day it was always the humans and their decisions which drove the story forward. By contrast, The Captive’s War feels more like Mass Effect, the sort of space opera which features a wide array of aliens where you never know what you’ll see on the next page.

As a big fan of Mass Effect, this book sounds something I’d like to read.

Don’t know if you know, but there’s another community - albeit on .world - for this game: !satisfactory@lemmy.world

I think it’s asking a lot - it’s not unreasonable for libraries to convert the markdown format for embedded images into IMG SRC, but then the clients can’t play them because they’re not images. Ideally, I think, there should be different markdown for embedded videos and audio (but it doesn’t look like there’s anything official).

These clips play for me on PieFed, but only because after the markdown translation, they get regexed into the correct AUDIO tags.

I know all the cool kids hate on AI, but as someone out of the loop, that ‘podcast’ is really impressive. I guess it speaks to how a influential certain style of podcasting is (from the likes of NPR) that a machine can copy it the same as other humans do.

As for the embedded link, this works for me (and others on the same site as me), but it might not for others: