rglullis

Out of principle I refuse to put any type of analytics on my sites. I don't want to send user data to third parties and I don't want to rely on data that comes from JavaScript on the browser unless strictly necessary.

But the thought recently occurred to me that I could use my server logs to create some basic data visualisation on Grafana.

I'd like very basic stuff:

• hits
• common referrers
• geo location by IP address
• bounce rates per page

What would be the recommended way to get this, assuming that I have traefik logs aggregates via Loki and Grafana installed?

Ok, I get it: the majority of users on Lemmy are browsing by "all", which puts a lot of content on their feeds that they are not interested in. I've already got in many arguments to try to explain this is kind of absurd and everyone would be better off if they went to curate the communities they are interested in. But I also understand that this feels a bit like saying "you are holding it wrong".

But can we at least agree to a guideline to not downvote things in communities you are not an active participant, or at least a subscriber? Using downvotes to express "I don't like this", "I don't care about this", or "I disagree with this" is harmful to the overall system. It's not just because you don't like a particular topic that you should vote it down, because it makes it harder for the people that do care about it to find the post.

Downvotes should be used as a way for us to collective filter out "bad" content, but what constitutes "bad" content is dependent on the context and values of the community. If you are not part of the community in question, then you are just using up/down votes as a way to amplify/silence the voice of majority/minority. By downvoting in communities you don't participate, you end up harming the potential of smaller communities to grow, and everyone's feed gets dominated only by the popular/lowest-common-denominator type of content.

Instead of downvoting, a better set of guidelines would be:

• If you don't care about the post, leave it alone.
• If you don't want to see content from a specific community, just block it.
• If the content is actual spam and/or not according to the rules of the community, report it.

Another thing: don't forget that votes are public. Lemmy UI has a very handy feature for moderators that shows everyone who upvotes/downvotes any post or comment. I'm tired of posting content to different communities and be met of a pour of non-subscribers on the downvote side. Yeah, I think we should make some improvements in the software side to have a more flexible rule system for scoring downvotes, but until such a thing does not exist, I'm seriously considering creating a "Clueless Downvoters Wall of Shame" community to mention every user that I see downvoting without a strong reason for it.

Yesterday, as part of the discussions related to Lemmy current inability to delete all user content I wrote a proposal: if enough people stepped up to help with funding, I'd take my work on my Fediverser project (which already has an admin web tool that "knows" how to interface with Lemmy) to solve all the GDPR-specific issues that we were raised by @maltfield@monero.town

The amount asked is, quite frankly, symbolic. I offered to work 10h/week on it if at least 20 people showed up to contribute via Github (which would be $4/month) or to signup to my instance (which access is given via a $29/year subscription). In other words, I'm saying "Give me $80/month and I will work 40 hours per month on this thing which so many of you are saying is critical to the project."

So now that we have passed 24 hours, 58 upvotes and a handful of "that's great!" responses, let me tell you how that translated into actual supporters:

• Zero sponsors on Github
• Zero signups on Communick.

Don't take this as me demanding anything. I'm writing this just to illustrate the following:

• The Tragedy of the commons is real. I can bet that at least 30% of the 60+ thousand users on Lemmy are proud owners of a pricey iPhone, and most of these are okay with paying for an app to use on their pricey iPhones, but almost none of them will even consider throwing a few bucks per year on the way of an open source developer.

• The Outrage Mill is not a "capitalist" or even "corporate" phenomenon. People were piling on the devs yesterday for completely ignoring "such a crucial piece of functionality", but no one actually stepped up to offer (or gather) the resources needed to have this problem solved. It's almost as if people were getting more out of the discussion about the problem than working through a solution.

• "Skin In The Game" is a powerful filter. No matter how much people will tell you that something is important to them, the true test is seeing how many are willing to pay the asking price. If not people are not willing to pay $2 per hour of work, then I can assume that this is not really important.

Yesterday my old Fairphone 3 decided to go for a dive on the kitchen sink and I apparently didn't give it enough time to dry it out. The display now won't turn on. I went to their website to look for a replacement but they seem to be "out of stock". So much for repairability...

I'm a bit disappointed with the Fairphone overall (that would be for a separate discussion), and I'm looking for other alternatives.

I don't really need a powerful device, but I'd really like to have a headphone jack, a SD slot and above all the ability to install alternative ROMs. I was using /e/OS (aka MurenaOS) but I'd be fine with anything that lets me use F-Droid and micro-g instead of Google Play Services.

I know that there are "comparison websites" out there that can filter devices by features and/or price, and I know that Murena and LineageOS sites provide a list of the devices they support, but I haven't found any suite that can include both. Does such a site exist?

So, with news of Reddit making deals to sell user data for AI training, I think we should really start organizing ourselves for an effective migration campaign.

I believe one of the (many) reasons that the summer protests failed was its lack of focus. There was an overall idea of "going dark" as an attempt to get Reddit to backtrack on some of its decisions, but once they double down on their decision there was no followup and creation of a credible threat, so only the more strong-willed really stuck by their principles and left reddit, the majority just shrugged it off and went back to their niche communities.

This long tail of niche communities is Reddit's biggest strength. There are plenty of places where people can find general news or share memes, but there is only one place that can connect people with its many different interests. This is why so many of you surely went to Reddit, despite our best efforts to bring enough people around here.

So, how about we change the strategy? If the general "spray and pray" approach only managed to bring 0.008% of Reddit's userbase to Lemmy, how about we put our focus on bring as many people as possible from a single one?

We should look into a subreddit with the following characteristcs:

• Not too big in size, around 100k - 300k subscribers.
• Still fairly active.
• Very specific in focus. Ideally, it would be a local community, but we could also think of a not-so popular subreddit dedicated to a niche hobby.
• The moderators of the subreddit need to be willing to participate, and follow through with the migration. That means, they need to keep promoting the Lemmy alternative until our corresponding community is at least as big as the Reddit one.

I'm thinking one potential candidate would be /r/adelaide (158k subscribers, multiple posts per day) but I haven't talked with any of the moderators so I don't know how that would go. (Any admins from aussie.zone that could chime in?) Of course, this is just an idea and if any would you think of another sub that could also work better we can talk about it. The important thing is not to spend too much time worrying on what subreddit we are going to push, just that we need to choose one and only one.

Once we find a subreddit that fits the bill, then our efforts go to supporting the subscribers to help them find a client, setup their account, subscribe to the new community and unsubscribe from the subreddit.

We don't even need to encourage them to leave Reddit altogether, we just need to get them to go through the motions of setting up Lemmy for one community. I think if we do that, it will be a lot easier to keep us all focused on the goal, the overall network effects won't be such a problem and the coming users will be more likely to stick.

This is already a wall of text, and I'm sure there will be plenty of people who will shoot this idea down for numerous reasons, but overall I really haven't given up hope on the Fediverse as the future of the Internet. We just need to work a bit for it.

For context: I recently set up a Funkwhale instance for Communick subscribers, where people can upload their music collection, stream on mobile/web and share with their friends. That's useful already and can be thought of as a replacement to the original Google Play Music, but I guess that those with large music collections will either just play from their dedicated devices or self-host a service like Navidrome.

So I'd like to make my instance a bit more interesting by building tools for (a) musicians wishing to connect with their audience and use the space to showcase their own work and (b) people who want to support independent musicians but don't want to commit paying a few dollars every month to lots of different people - the main complaint about Patreon after all is that those little contributions end up amounting to a lot of money.

In terms of funding, what I'd like to do is let users set up a fixed monthly budget (say $10-$25 per month) to be split between all the artists that are enrolled in the platform, however they want. One user might decide to get 100% of my budget and give to one artist, another might choose to give 10% to one and 1% to 90 other musicians. In the end of the month, the system would tally up everyone's contributions and make the payout accordingly.

I wouldn't even have to take a cut of these donations, because my business model already has revenue by simply providing the service.

Is this something that you'd see yourself using? I know that Bandcamp is king in this space, but with the recent changes maybe there is an opportunity to get more artists and supporters to the Fediverse.

cross-posted from: https://communick.news/post/419975

When building out the database of recommended Lemmy communities, I think it makes the most sense to prioritize the communities that belong to instances focused on a specific topic over communities that are based in a "general" instance, even if currently the community is smaller in the topic-specific instance.

For example, for an user coming from reddit and signing up via a "fediversed" instance (like alien.top) it would make more sense if they see that the anime subreddits are on ani.social, the rpg/board games are on ttrpg.network, the programming communities are on programming.dev, the basketball ones are on nba.space, the NSFW communities are on lemmynsfw, etc, etc...

This will also avoid the issue that I am currently seeing where some communities have multiple entries in the recommended database due to the initial migration where each user was just trying to replicate their favorite subreddits in their own server they signed up for.

Let me start by thanking everyone that has joined https://fediverser.network and the ones who are already helping to categorize and create a map between subreddits and the recommended Lemmy alternatives. Y'all are amazing and I hope we can keep it up.

To keep in mind that the main goal of this whole project is to help people on reddit to migrate quickly and effortlessly to Lemmy, I was thinking on what could be done once we have the majority of the niche subreddits mapped out. I thought about the idea of creating "Community Ambassadors", which would be basically people interested in "turning" other redditors from their specific communities to Lemmy.

Basically that would require you to signup to Fediverser to indicate what community you are focusing on and how many people you are willing to reach out per day. The system could then collect the top posts of that subreddit every day and let you trigger a (custom, personalized) DM to the people telling them about the alternative Lemmy community that exists with a link to alien.top's portal to make one-click migration.

The original projects meant to help finding out the Lemmy communities sub.rehab and redditmigration were not really kept up-to-date after the first wave of protests. To avoid bitrot and to make sure that the community can help keep this up to date, I'm launching today fediverser.network.

At the moment, it is a simple browser of subreddits and lists of recommended alternatives. It can also let users sign-in with their reddit credentials so that they can get a list of the mapped communities specific to their subscriptions.

There is a lot more to be done, as I want to use this tool to help me map out all the niche communities that are missing on Lemmy and eventually have a 1:1 map for those that want to leave reddit entirely.