7 ms·

The front-end is still buggy and needs a designer's touch. And the real-time aspects wear thin at scale with all the notifications in a mismatch of languages sh

The front-end is still buggy and needs a designer's touch. And the real-time aspects wear thin at scale with all the notifications in a mismatch of languages showing up in the main feed. Lemmy is practically unusable without a personal feed filter, it seems that of the new reddit alternatives only retalk_[1] want to get this right. If you do decide to run an instance of lemmy be sure to nuke the absurd word filter - the code is designed to make it as difficult as possible to change out. Thankfully some nice souls [2] are maintaining that anti-feature removal. [1] https://retalk.com https://retalk.com [2] https://github.com/innereq/lenny https://github.com/innereq/lenny

reginold 5y ago
How strange they would include word filters that are hard to edit. Seems counter to their whole mission...what? Edit: actually it would make sense if word filters themselves were hard to add. But having their own filter and making that hard to edit is bonkers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bbarnett 5y ago
  Reading the whole bug, it's literally a political stance with no teeth or real purpose. It's bizarrely all for show, serves no real purpose, is functionally deficient, and the DEVs know this. Further, a 10 line script could easily patch each new version, replacing the hardcoded code with a loadable text file. Done. Updates would take zero time to deploy. It's all about taking a position. Taking a position is fine. But, imagine a self driving car which wouldn't let you drive home to Cuntsington, MA (an example)? The DEVs think this logic is fine? Strange people.
  - reginold 5y ago
    Super strange. One of those artifacts that makes you question the whole project. One of the powers of diving in super deep is you can start to notice internal consistency or dissonance quicker. With this as an example.
    - uabstraction 5y ago
      It's actually a great feature. It sorts out the edgelords very quickly, while taking 10 minutes to disable for any administrator with a modicum of technical prowess. If removing a regex string from the code is too much work for you, you shouldn't be trusted holding account credentials, email addresses, and private messages of an entire community in the first place. While the core Lemmy team has been intransigent about this feature, it is pretty clear why they have taken the position they have. They understand something a lot of people here seem to miss. That creating an alternative to Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc. is much more a social project than it is a technological project. It doesn't matter how slick your software is. Hell, Reddit's user interface is still dogshit. So is Twitter's. People don't use these platforms for their technological aspects. They use them because of the community. A former Reddit admin by the name of Deimos decided to create a Reddit alternative as well, named Tildes. The software itself is nothing special. Just another bare-bones link aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News. What made it unique was the "manifesto" and philosophy behind it, which basically boiled down to "place value on effort-posts instead of low-effort slop" and "If your website is full of assholes, you are an asshole." The failure to recognize this is the reason why a lot of the early Reddit alternatives like Voat instantly turned to dogshit. They were born from a knee-jerk reaction to Reddit getting rid of communities like FatPeopleHate and C**Town, so the only people who migrated were people who were such enormous assholes that they couldn't even fit in on Reddit (a website which is already notoriously full of assholes). Instead of actually trying to build and nurture a community, or even think of their goal in the terms of a social project, they just tried pushing the technology button. Don't even get me started on the folks who tried to fix Reddit's problems by doing Reddit but blockchain.
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    > Reading the whole bug Is there a link where I can also read this bug?
    - ptman 5y ago
      https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
  - kixiQu 5y ago
    In this case it's really about the burden of community moderation. It's a fairly impotent restriction, and yet it serves the social function of discouraging a certain sort from making Lemmy their home. Most Reddit alternatives become really scummy because they attract the people (not "the kind of people", the literal individuals) who get banned from Reddit for pushing anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny past what Reddit allows. There are a lot of people who thus think "the whole point" of a Reddit-like that isn't Reddit is to be able to post the really awful stuff. The filter obviously doesn't work well to reliably block it -- but it does seem to work to drive off the folks who are looking for a cesspool.
    - Open-Sourcery 5y ago
      But we aren't talking about a single centralised community. This is a part of the fediverse (decentralised) and where anyone can create a server to host their own community. If the lemmy team wants to have their slur filter for their "official" instance, they are free to. However, part of being decentralised is to give people the power to run their communities as they see fit and so they shouldn't be beholden to the infallible lemmy devs to maintain a slur list that the community can't manage themselves. Maybe they want to add or remove slurs or remove this filtering entirely, it isn't the place of the lemmy devs to decide that for them.
      - reginold 5y ago
        Yeah exactly. I would expect a tool like Lemmy to acknowledge that slur lists are a thing, make them easy to modify by admins, and make them exposed and easy to reference by users. Join Server / Policies / Word block list. Put it up front and center.
        candreasen 5y ago
        seems to be the direction they're heading https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773
    - reginold 5y ago
- Tmpod 5y ago
  It seems like it is going away soon(tm): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773
  - chromatin 5y ago
    That is a nice to see after reading several past issues and a closed unmerged PR where innumerable users and (presumably) instance hosts made good faith arguments as to why a hard coded Regex was not only untenable , but antithetical to the ideals of the fediverse — which fell on deaf ears of the developers.
    - HexbearShill 5y ago
      The maintainers can be pretty ruthless about closing issues. I think it’s either about their workflow or about maintaining focus for the main branch’s feature set. Last I knew the core team was two people and maintaining a repo with an increasingly large number of contributors can be super time consuming.
hu3 5y ago
For reference, some context about word filtering: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 And here's the related code: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/3b37ea6c8beeaa57754df698223e76c59e15b4f7/crates/utils/src/utils.rs#L12 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/3b37ea6c8beeaa57754df... edit: I don't get the instant -2 downvotes for just providing context.
- seszett 5y ago
  > I don't get the instant -2 downvotes for just providing context. Well I don't remember the exact phrasing but I think your original comment did have a part asking people not to discuss this further. I can see how this would not be well received.
  - hu3 5y ago
    Makes sense. Thank you for pointing it out!
- hanselot 5y ago
  >https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 Wow, this was a fantastic thread. It very clearly and logically lays out how to kill software by injecting your ideology into it. RIP dessalines
  - HexbearShill 5y ago
    All software is political. The act of releasing your work for free into the public domain is political. Disagree with his ideology, but anyone who thinks they are above ideology is just unaware of the assumptions they’re operating under.
    - uabstraction 5y ago
      Ideology is when you disagree with the status quo, and the more you disagree with the status quo, the more ideological you are. And when you disagree with the status quo a whole lot, that's dogma.
seszett 5y ago
Weird, so you can't talk about Main Coons on Lemmy? Or even say that your train was delayed in French. That list seems very Americanocentric.
- Igelau 5y ago
  > That list seems very Americanocentric. Indeed it is. There are comments here and there in the GitHub issues where the devs defend the filter as being targeted at making it harder for "the [American] right wing" to use the platform. It's naïve, and they don't want to talk about it.
- hjek 5y ago
  It's the Scunthorpe problem all over again. It's like Youtube flagging that chess channel for hate speech[0] (perhaps because words like "black", "white" and "attack" were used a lot). It will annoy people who're accidentally caught by the filter, and people who want to get past it will figure out a way anyway (by look-alike character substitution or whatever). I think it's the wrong approach to that problem. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27914261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27914261
esjeon 5y ago
> all the notifications in a mismatch of languages showing up in the main feed I'm not quite expert here, but, IIRC, this language problem is partially inherent to ActivityPub. The sender can attach translations, and the receiver can pick one from the set, but no one knows what's gonna happen if the expectations from both sides don't match. One might, instead, re-fetch the messages from the sender using HTTP + content negotiation, which will definitely cause different types of headache.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
Odd how Lenny (the fork without a word filter) hasn't received commits in 5 months, yet has 3386 commits compared to upstream's 3330.
strenholme 5y ago
The problem with Retalk is this: It’s closed sourced. If we want to talk about Reddit alternatives, I would rather we look at ones which are open source, including Reddit itself until 2017 [1], the Mastodon Twitter-like web app [2], Discourse [3], Lemmy [4] (use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter), and the old school PHP discussions boards like PhpBB [6] and MyBB [7]. [1] https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon [3] https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse [4] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy [5] https://github.com/innereq/lenny https://github.com/innereq/lenny [6] https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb [7] https://github.com/mybb/mybb https://github.com/mybb/mybb
- account42 5y ago
  > use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter I'd rather not support the ecosystem at all if they pull stunts like this.
  - lewiscollard 5y ago
    If it was possible to write an effective slur filter, I would not find it completely objectionable. Not because that would be useful to stop people saying completely shit-headed things if they really wanted to (I strongly suspect you could get the entirety of Mein Kampf past that filter), but as a "people who use these words are not welcome" signal, which definitely has some value. As it is, it's bashing the problem with regular expressions, and doing so badly. I mean, some of those words actually have completely different, non-offensive meanings in certain communities & contexts. (One of a few I spotted: Last time I used "retard" was in the context of ignition timing...)
    - reginold 5y ago
      Writing an effective slur filter is undesirable. No one can stop people saying completely shit headed things. For one, people just work around it. And more importantly for every shit headed thing you restrict you also cut out someone else, even if it's just because of their perception of constraints. The mind has a funny way of editing thought before it even arrives. We can't afford this anymore in our online spaces.
StellarTabi 5y ago
> retalk > Civil discussion for the center and center right > Karl Marx: Atheist or Satanist? > Candace Owens > transphobic comic > no links to github/gitlab is this what passes for "civil discussion" and "center/center right" these days?
- HexbearShill 5y ago
  Weird that a Reddit clone wouldn’t be open source. So much for the free speech crowd. thedonald and the .win-iverse did the same thing, but I think it was originally based on postmill.

reginold 5y ago

How strange they would include word filters that are hard to edit. Seems counter to their whole mission...what? Edit: actually it would make sense if word filters themselves were hard to add. But having their own filter and making that hard to edit is bonkers.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bbarnett 5y ago
Reading the whole bug, it's literally a political stance with no teeth or real purpose. It's bizarrely all for show, serves no real purpose, is functionally deficient, and the DEVs know this. Further, a 10 line script could easily patch each new version, replacing the hardcoded code with a loadable text file. Done. Updates would take zero time to deploy. It's all about taking a position. Taking a position is fine. But, imagine a self driving car which wouldn't let you drive home to Cuntsington, MA (an example)? The DEVs think this logic is fine? Strange people.
- reginold 5y ago
  Super strange. One of those artifacts that makes you question the whole project. One of the powers of diving in super deep is you can start to notice internal consistency or dissonance quicker. With this as an example.
  - uabstraction 5y ago
    It's actually a great feature. It sorts out the edgelords very quickly, while taking 10 minutes to disable for any administrator with a modicum of technical prowess. If removing a regex string from the code is too much work for you, you shouldn't be trusted holding account credentials, email addresses, and private messages of an entire community in the first place. While the core Lemmy team has been intransigent about this feature, it is pretty clear why they have taken the position they have. They understand something a lot of people here seem to miss. That creating an alternative to Reddit / Twitter / Facebook / etc. is much more a social project than it is a technological project. It doesn't matter how slick your software is. Hell, Reddit's user interface is still dogshit. So is Twitter's. People don't use these platforms for their technological aspects. They use them because of the community. A former Reddit admin by the name of Deimos decided to create a Reddit alternative as well, named Tildes. The software itself is nothing special. Just another bare-bones link aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News. What made it unique was the "manifesto" and philosophy behind it, which basically boiled down to "place value on effort-posts instead of low-effort slop" and "If your website is full of assholes, you are an asshole." The failure to recognize this is the reason why a lot of the early Reddit alternatives like Voat instantly turned to dogshit. They were born from a knee-jerk reaction to Reddit getting rid of communities like FatPeopleHate and C**Town, so the only people who migrated were people who were such enormous assholes that they couldn't even fit in on Reddit (a website which is already notoriously full of assholes). Instead of actually trying to build and nurture a community, or even think of their goal in the terms of a social project, they just tried pushing the technology button. Don't even get me started on the folks who tried to fix Reddit's problems by doing Reddit but blockchain.
- newswasboring 5y ago
  > Reading the whole bug Is there a link where I can also read this bug?
  - ptman 5y ago
    https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
- kixiQu 5y ago
  In this case it's really about the burden of community moderation. It's a fairly impotent restriction, and yet it serves the social function of discouraging a certain sort from making Lemmy their home. Most Reddit alternatives become really scummy because they attract the people (not "the kind of people", the literal individuals) who get banned from Reddit for pushing anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny past what Reddit allows. There are a lot of people who thus think "the whole point" of a Reddit-like that isn't Reddit is to be able to post the really awful stuff. The filter obviously doesn't work well to reliably block it -- but it does seem to work to drive off the folks who are looking for a cesspool.
  - Open-Sourcery 5y ago
    But we aren't talking about a single centralised community. This is a part of the fediverse (decentralised) and where anyone can create a server to host their own community. If the lemmy team wants to have their slur filter for their "official" instance, they are free to. However, part of being decentralised is to give people the power to run their communities as they see fit and so they shouldn't be beholden to the infallible lemmy devs to maintain a slur list that the community can't manage themselves. Maybe they want to add or remove slurs or remove this filtering entirely, it isn't the place of the lemmy devs to decide that for them.
    - reginold 5y ago
      Yeah exactly. I would expect a tool like Lemmy to acknowledge that slur lists are a thing, make them easy to modify by admins, and make them exposed and easy to reference by users. Join Server / Policies / Word block list. Put it up front and center.
      - candreasen 5y ago
        seems to be the direction they're heading https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773
  - reginold 5y ago
Tmpod 5y ago
It seems like it is going away soon(tm): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773
- chromatin 5y ago
  That is a nice to see after reading several past issues and a closed unmerged PR where innumerable users and (presumably) instance hosts made good faith arguments as to why a hard coded Regex was not only untenable , but antithetical to the ideals of the fediverse — which fell on deaf ears of the developers.
  - HexbearShill 5y ago
    The maintainers can be pretty ruthless about closing issues. I think it’s either about their workflow or about maintaining focus for the main branch’s feature set. Last I knew the core team was two people and maintaining a repo with an increasingly large number of contributors can be super time consuming.

hu3 5y ago

For reference, some context about word filtering: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 And here's the related code: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/3b37ea6c8beeaa57754df698223e76c59e15b4f7/crates/utils/src/utils.rs#L12 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/3b37ea6c8beeaa57754df... edit: I don't get the instant -2 downvotes for just providing context.

seszett 5y ago
> I don't get the instant -2 downvotes for just providing context. Well I don't remember the exact phrasing but I think your original comment did have a part asking people not to discuss this further. I can see how this would not be well received.
- hu3 5y ago
  Makes sense. Thank you for pointing it out!
hanselot 5y ago
>https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 Wow, this was a fantastic thread. It very clearly and logically lays out how to kill software by injecting your ideology into it. RIP dessalines
- HexbearShill 5y ago
  All software is political. The act of releasing your work for free into the public domain is political. Disagree with his ideology, but anyone who thinks they are above ideology is just unaware of the assumptions they’re operating under.
  - uabstraction 5y ago
    Ideology is when you disagree with the status quo, and the more you disagree with the status quo, the more ideological you are. And when you disagree with the status quo a whole lot, that's dogma.

seszett 5y ago

Weird, so you can't talk about Main Coons on Lemmy? Or even say that your train was delayed in French. That list seems very Americanocentric.

Igelau 5y ago
> That list seems very Americanocentric. Indeed it is. There are comments here and there in the GitHub issues where the devs defend the filter as being targeted at making it harder for "the [American] right wing" to use the platform. It's naïve, and they don't want to talk about it.
hjek 5y ago
It's the Scunthorpe problem all over again. It's like Youtube flagging that chess channel for hate speech[0] (perhaps because words like "black", "white" and "attack" were used a lot). It will annoy people who're accidentally caught by the filter, and people who want to get past it will figure out a way anyway (by look-alike character substitution or whatever). I think it's the wrong approach to that problem. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27914261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27914261

esjeon 5y ago

> all the notifications in a mismatch of languages showing up in the main feed I'm not quite expert here, but, IIRC, this language problem is partially inherent to ActivityPub. The sender can attach translations, and the receiver can pick one from the set, but no one knows what's gonna happen if the expectations from both sides don't match. One might, instead, re-fetch the messages from the sender using HTTP + content negotiation, which will definitely cause different types of headache.

nyanpasu64 5y ago

Odd how Lenny (the fork without a word filter) hasn't received commits in 5 months, yet has 3386 commits compared to upstream's 3330.

strenholme 5y ago

The problem with Retalk is this: It’s closed sourced. If we want to talk about Reddit alternatives, I would rather we look at ones which are open source, including Reddit itself until 2017 [1], the Mastodon Twitter-like web app [2], Discourse [3], Lemmy [4] (use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter), and the old school PHP discussions boards like PhpBB [6] and MyBB [7]. [1] https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon [3] https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse [4] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy [5] https://github.com/innereq/lenny https://github.com/innereq/lenny [6] https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb [7] https://github.com/mybb/mybb https://github.com/mybb/mybb

account42 5y ago
> use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter I'd rather not support the ecosystem at all if they pull stunts like this.
- lewiscollard 5y ago
  If it was possible to write an effective slur filter, I would not find it completely objectionable. Not because that would be useful to stop people saying completely shit-headed things if they really wanted to (I strongly suspect you could get the entirety of Mein Kampf past that filter), but as a "people who use these words are not welcome" signal, which definitely has some value. As it is, it's bashing the problem with regular expressions, and doing so badly. I mean, some of those words actually have completely different, non-offensive meanings in certain communities & contexts. (One of a few I spotted: Last time I used "retard" was in the context of ignition timing...)
  - reginold 5y ago
    Writing an effective slur filter is undesirable. No one can stop people saying completely shit headed things. For one, people just work around it. And more importantly for every shit headed thing you restrict you also cut out someone else, even if it's just because of their perception of constraints. The mind has a funny way of editing thought before it even arrives. We can't afford this anymore in our online spaces.

StellarTabi 5y ago

> retalk > Civil discussion for the center and center right > Karl Marx: Atheist or Satanist? > Candace Owens > transphobic comic > no links to github/gitlab is this what passes for "civil discussion" and "center/center right" these days?

HexbearShill 5y ago
Weird that a Reddit clone wouldn’t be open source. So much for the free speech crowd. thedonald and the .win-iverse did the same thing, but I think it was originally based on postmill.