Fuck you reddit 2.0, took you long enough. Thanks though, we'll stop seeing your crap posters pollute our comment section from now on.

90% of people we ban come from world. Very funny that they said they saw a rise of hate speech from our instance though considering the worlders we ban are fucking genocidal maniacs and fascists. You can check the modlog (it's unfortunately federated), we are one of the tamest instances when it comes to banning people and deleting comments/posts.

For any worlder that was based and liked interacting with lemmygrad (you will notice we did not ban good faith participants), I recommend you make an account on a third-party instance that federates with us, like ml or ee until they also defederate from us because we have principles 🙃

Fuck israel, Palestine will be free a month from now mark my words 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

On top of that, for the worlders finally breathing free again now that the scary tankies are away, you think the USSR wasn't communist or whatever. You base that on whatever you've been taught in school. We've read things. We've actually gone beyond whatever our high school teachers said and looked into the USSR for ourselves. If you're not cowards you will debate us about communism and "totalitarian" regimes, we'll wipe the floor with you. Bet you don't even know where the world totalitarian comes from or who coined it without looking it up.

And we retain our perfect track record of not blocking real instances while you further isolate yourselves from anything that might cause you some amount of discomfort. Really good democracy you got going there where wannabe tech bros instance admins decide for you what you're allowed to see, must be those liberal values I hear so much about.

We get reports, and that's great. But sometimes we also get reports for people who have already been banned, it's just that their comments weren't removed.

You can differentiate someone who was banned by the lack of a profile picture next to their name. All users since a few lemmy versions have a default pfp of the Lemmy mascot. If there's no pfp there, it means they were banned on the instance you're looking at the comment from.

We’re finally federating! 🎉

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2671212

Boosting the dev AMA.

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Following the news that Lemmy world has decided to defederate from hexbear without consulting their community and before hexbear even federated with anyone, I'd like to make this announcement to settle things once and for all about us "scary tankies" who apparently don't tolerate free expression or whatever.

Lemmygrad has been around since the very beginning of Lemmy as a project, we are one of the oldest instance with lemmy.ml.

In that time, we have never defederated from anyone except in three cases:

• troll instances (usually inactive and unmoderated, with free account requests, that trolls used back in the day to bypass their bans). We usually refederate if they start being moderated again.
• outright fascist instances such as exploding heads or powerballs or whatever before the admin deleted it (which you're welcome, it's because there's communists on Lemmy that there's so few fascists)
• and, the fringe case, the couple specifically NSFW instances that we instantly defederated from because we don't want to host porn on our database and our rule 5 prohibits porn anywhere on Lemmygrad.

Otherwise, we have no reason to defederate from anyone. Holier-than-thou liberals can be difficult and irritating, I'm not denying that or implying we're somehow above it all, but to defederate would imply we are scared of what they have to say. We're not, because what they have to say is stuff we've all seen for ourselves and used to believe too.

You can see our blocklist here for yourself: https://lemmygrad.ml/instances, we only block around 40 instances, which might seem like a lot, but then compare to lemmy world which blocks 141 instances, or beehaw which blocks 765 instances.

Nobody is born a communist. Nobody is born a liberal either, but we become one through the self-reproduction of culture. From our earliest age we're exposed to liberalism (the ideology of capitalism) to the point that we integrate it. Did you have a model UN in school and vote for class presidents?

So really we can't be scared of anti-communist arguments because we've heard them all before. It's especially weird when people say we "buy into old propaganda" around Stalin or whatever, when anywhere you look, Soviet historiography in academia amounts to little more than "Stalin was paranoid and acted like the Tsar but called himself a communist". Like we went to public school too lol, we had a unit on the USSR lol.

Anyway, all defederations that happened on Lemmygrad come from other instances themselves, most of them pre-emptively defederating us before they even saw a single post from us. If beehaw, or shitjustworks, or lemmy dot whatever wanted to refederate, they could do it instantly and we'd be federated again.

And on that topic, let's talk about bans. We don't ban people who ask questions in good faith. But we will instantly ban anyone who comes to Lemmygrad solely to troll, as all online forums have done since time immemorial.

Likewise on blocklist issues, we poll our community very often for their input and allow them to propose changes. You can look at our !lemmygrad_court@lemmygrad.ml to see some things we've included the community on. We try to practice democratic centralism where applicable.

It goes even further; we allow communities and posts that some both on Lemmygrad or outside might disagree with, on the principle that we see ourselves as a more generalistic ML instance. We allow users to have their own community and moderate it however they want (respecting sitewide rules), and generally the removal of a community goes through an admin chat and might even go to a community feedback session. We have meme communities, we have religious communities, we have shitposting communities, and we also have serious discussion communities. And a plethora of personal communities for users who want to post in their own space like a blog.

We also have exactly 6 rules and no lengthy code of conduct or other documents one needs to read to participate here. This is helped by the fact that as we're all communists and more specifically mainly marxist-leninists, most of us already behave the expected way around comrades and don't need to be told how to conduct themselves.

So let me ask this; who is really censoring who here?

For those that don't know, Hexbear has been back on lemmy for a few months now and can therefore federate with all of Lemmy again.

For those who don't know Hexbear, they're an instance based around left unity and more shitposty than us but you know, I still like to browse there because they're very, very active and funny.

Hexbear will federate by the end of the month with Lemmygrad, which means you'll be able to visit and interact with them from the "All" tab, and they can do likewise.

We expect that federation will be going smoothly and our two cultures won't clash too much, but we also expect some friction at least in the beginning.

As a reminder, we apply Lemmygrad rules on Lemmygrad, and Hexbear will, I imagine, apply their rules on their instance. Likewise we won't be moderating stuff that happens on Hexbear if it only concerns Hexbear. If it involves a Lemmygradian we might moderate (see PS below for more info on how that works).

For Hexbearians that visit Lemmygrad (I assume they'll make the same post on their end so I won't explain how Hexbear works), we're principally Marxist-Leninist but allow non-marxists piecemeal as long as liberalism doesn't come out of their mouths. It's all by the principle of good faith; we do talk to people if they come here in good faith, which I have no doubt will be the case from Hexbear.

With that said we'll also be more lenient towards Hexbear since with them, we form essentially the only left presence on Lemmy and we like them very much. We also urge everyone to be lenient with Hexbearians even if they're not marxists.

Anyway, while Hexbear is more left unity, in all my time browsing there I've never really had to ask "is this person a marxist?" so their system seems to work well. However, I also expect that since their registrations are open, we might see wreckers and infiltrators make hexbear accounts to troll Lemmygrad. Likewise on their end, it's possible someone requests an account on Lemmygrad to try and troll them. In which case we'll deal with the offender on an individual basis.

If you have any questions about federation with Hexbear ask them below.

PS: the way comment/post reports work is that if you report a comment on Hexbear with your Lemmygrad account, we'll see it. So please only report stuff you see on Hexbear if it's something we should actually take a look at, or it's something that breaks Hexbear's rules cause your reports help them too.

Image upload (and also download) were not working for the last few hours. This has been a recurring problem but I think I have finally found the real cause so it should not happen again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We are doing some maintenance related to the image upload/serving service.

This will take some time. I am guessing maybe 6 hours.

During this period image uploads won't work and old images won't be displayed properly.

Really sorry about this. But thankfully, as far as I can see, this is the last infrastructure related maintenance we have to do.

Thanks for understanding.

Edit: Gonna have to postpone this because of personal reasons. For now images should be working fine.

I am sure many of us have noticed that the site had problems over the last four or five days.

The downtimes were caused because of unrecoverable hardware issues with our server. The result was that he had to rebuild the setup from scratch on a machine and restore from a backup. We have also switched to a new provider since the previous one was consistently causing issues.

After this was done, image uploads were still broken for some time. There was no good fix for this because one of the database files used by pictrs had become corrupted due to the aforementioned hardware issues. To resolve this, we had to use an non-corrupted database file from a very old backup. Now image uploads should work fine. The downside is that images uploaded recently will not show up properly. There is not fix for this other than to reupload these images. Sorry about this.

Most of the technical problems with the site should be fixed now.

There is one maintenance task remaining related to moving the image storage to a new S3 provider which will require some downtime. We will inform about this beforehand.

Thanks for your patience.

Follow-up for https://lemmygrad.ml/post/939916.

Some of you thought we got hacked so we have removed taglines for now. People also complained about some taglines being too long which also makes sense.

We might add them later in the future but for now we have removed them.

Thanks for the feedback.

Let's do this again!

We can make add taglines now, I added 3 so far but we can have as many as want, so send them here!

Please format properly in markdown so I only have to copy and paste.

Our VPS shat the bed yet again, and due to a ton of disk-related errors, I had to restore from the last daily backup, so a few hours of data are missing.

This is not the first time this has happened, so we're officially done with this VPS, and will migrate to something else in a few days.

Again, I apologize, and special thanks to @ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml for getting us back up so quickly.

Forming the Stalin Battalion!

Some instances we federate with have free account creation and some people use that to instantly post on Lemmygrad (like 2 days old accounts with comments only on Lemmygrad type of stuff)

I give you my blessing to dunk on those people when you see them, go as hard as you need (within reason).

But remember: people that are reasonable should receive the same too. I'm talking about pure trolls who know what they're doing.

Then don't forget to report them and we'll ban them.

If we mobilise a front to counter trolls, I assure you they will stop soon enough because we take the fun out of it.

We can add anything as an emoji and we virtually have an infinite amount of slots available.

Post the emojis you want here, most upvoted will be added.

Please upload them on Lemmygrad ready to be used, due to the way uploading emojis work. That means you need to get rid of the background etc. This is what the interface requires:

and every field must be filled, so please provide a name for it (as well as : : shortcode) and some keywords I guess. Not sure what these are used for. About categories I'm not sure we're really gonna use them, at least not yet.

edit: they get really small when you upload them too, see here:

So keep that in mind when you suggest an emoji.

Image uploading and downloading will be down for a while. Gonna try my best to do it without bringing the site down. Sorry for the inconvenience it will inevitably cause.

EDIT: 2023-06-23T04:07:57+00:00: Going to take down pictrs now. There is a chance it might break the site.

EDIT: 2023-06-25T04:21:57+00:00: Site did not break. Migration has begun. Should take one to three hours in my estimate.

EDIT: 2023-06-25T05:54:00+00:00: Migrations still ongoing.

EDIT: 2023-06-25T06:36:17+00:00: Final stretch. Image upload will work now. Old images will be back Soon(TM).

EDIT: 2023-06-25T07:42:07+00:00: Old images are coming back online. Migration should be done in 10-20 minutes.

EDIT: 2023-06-25T07:49:35+00:00: It is done.

Should be less than 30 minutes.

Yesterday, muad'dibber had to quickly restore lemmygrad from a backup due to disk space issues on Lemmygrad's host.

We didn't have the info earlier because he's super busy juggling between and fixing stuff on Lemmy, lemmy.ml and lemmygrad due to the Reddit migration. So please don't take it too hard on him 🙏 he did what was necessary, there was no other option than to restore a backup, we just didn't have the info.

That's why I suggest that if you can code, you should help Lemmy! On our end we are starting to need better moderation tools (like being able to message the whole admin team would be great) to name just one. They have lots of issues open and probably even more now that lemmy has had a surge of activity, so any contribution to the code would help greatly!

Here's the repo: https://github.com/LemmyNet

If you're approved please read this too and come say hi! https://lemmygrad.ml/post/734891

We go through account requests in around 3 hours at most. The problem is the email that you're supposed to get when your account gets approved or denied doesn't get sent.

What you have to do after you request an account is try to login to your account and see if you can get in. If you've been approved, you'll log in normally. If you're still in waiting, it should say something like "registration pending". If you've been denied, it should say "your account was denied".

Welcome to even more new users! There's real hype behind Lemmygrad due to the Reddit API thing, which drives further hype for people to recommend Lemmygrad to their friends.

This post should contain everything to get you started using Lemmygrad, so please read it entirely. Then, at the end, why not make your first comment in this thread and tell us about yourself?

What is Federation

Lemmygrad works similarly to Reddit for users. You can make posts, subscribe to communities, comment on posts, etc.

The major part where we differ from Reddit (aside from the fact we're not corporate-owned and don't run ads) is that Lemmy allows federation to other instances. If you click on the "All" button at the top of your home page, you'll see posts from Lemmygrad as well as other instances (two big ones we federate with is lemmy.ml and lemmy.world). You can act on those instances the same way you would act on Lemmygrad, except they have their own rules and moderation team. They're completely independent from us, you can just interact with them. And they can interact with us too.

You can also subscribe to federated communities by the way, and they will show up on your "Subscribed" view (on the same group of buttons as All).

We also federate with Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects by the way. You access all federation from lemmygrad.ml, by using the All button or typing the URL you want to reach in the search bar.

Speaking of, please read our rules

Lemmygrad-wide rules are on the homepage. I'll copy them here too:

Rules

1. No capitalist apologia / anti-communism.
2. No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
3. Be respectful. This is a safe space where all comrades >should feel welcome, this includes a warning against >uncritical sectarianism.
4. No porn or sexually explicit content (even if marked >NSFW).
5. No right-deviationists (patsocs, nazbols, strasserists, >duginists, etc).

Since January 2023, the creation of new "Shit X Say" type communities is not allowed. Please post anything of that nature to Shit Reactionaries Say or Shit Ultras Say.

We take these rules seriously and you will be warned or even banned (temporarily or permanently) for breaking them. We've cultivated a very laid-back and welcoming atmosphere here over the years though, so don't be scared to participate haha

If you participate on Lemmygrad from another instance, we also expect you will respect our rules.

Creating communities

Unlike other Lemmy instances, we allow users to create communities here. You're free to create a community (subreddits on the aforementioned inferior competitor), but please look around to make sure it doesn't already exist. Community bloat is a real problem on such a small site, which is why we merged the Shit X Say communities into just 2 earlier this year.

You're free to run a community you create however you want for the most part, but you have to respect and enforce the instance rules. For our part we try not to step on your toes as a mod unless we have to make a sitewide ban. Essentially it helps spread the load of moderation from our small team of 5 people.

As a moderator, you can't ban people from the lemmygrad as a whole, just from your community. Generally, we find that someone who gets banned from a community should be banned from the whole instance, so in that case feel free to contact us or make a report and we'll look at it.

How to make reports

We're a small team managing a growing forum, and as such we rely on reports to see what we can't see ourselves. Please see this post: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/727768

What else?

We try to submit big decisions to the community for input as much as possible, for example the merger of SXS communities was first put to a vote, and then further discussed to see how we should go about it.

We hope you enjoy Lemmygrad, now it's your turn ;) tell us a bit about yourself!

Hi comrades,

Lemmy (as a whole) has been blowing up due to a HUGE influx of new users. On Lemmy.ml they take care of 400 new account requests every day; that's also why their moderation is slow today, the devs need to focus on code more than moderation.

I just want to go over how reports work because yes, you can report both comments and posts across the fediverse!

To make a report, you just have to be logged into your instance and then click on the three vertical dots under a comment or post. Then, a few more icons will show up; click on the flag like here:

Reports go to the following persons:

1. Your instance administrators. If you are on Lemmygrad, we see your reports.

2. The community's moderators. Currently, reports go to community moderators as well as admins of the instance the community is on.

3. Admins of the target's instance. Reports also show up for the admins of the instance the person you report is registered on.

That means if you're from lemmygrad and report something on, say, news@lemmy. ml that was posted by someone from lemmy. world, all three admin teams will receive your report + the moderation team for news@lemmy.

If we, lemmygrad.ml, delete something that's on lemmy.ml, it will only be deleted for our instance. People from other instances will still see that content.

Therefore we tend not to delete stuff that's on other instances as it would only prevent us from further engaging with it and there's no point in that.

Also be aware that when making a report, your username is passed on too. Reports are not anonymous.

It's important to keep reporting stuff however, especially if they break other instance rules! On Lemmygrad, we take care of our reports and do delete and ban people appropriately based on reports: we (the admins) can't see everything ourselves. So remember, if you see something, say something!

My post was too long so I had to post here: https://pastes.io/07p5nd9dxc

Edit: first correction to the paste, our trans community is represented far above the general population. Around 11% of our community is trans, while in the world only 1% of people are. I also only gave absolute numbers for some reason in the paste so here's the percentage points: 10% trans women, 1% trans men, 7.7% nonbinary.

Edit: we might end up redoing the survey, please read this comment!!

First things first, thanks to everyone that took the survey!

So, one thing we were not aware of is that questionpro (the software we used to make the survey) only lets you have 300 responses to a survey before they close it. Obviously they would not tell you that before they sell you their 1200$ a year subscription. We reached that limit and can't access the data. Now they want us to email them to download this data, which I'm reluctant to do (but still might do) because of, you know, the whole communism thing. Also if we download the data we still need a way to visualise it.

So yeah, sorry about that. I'd used questionpro before for a ProleWiki survey and picked it exactly because they didn't seem to have a respondent limit.

I did save a screenshot of the analytics at the 301 mark, so we can still publish the results of the survey. However, I'm not sure there's any point in setting it up again for the few people that haven't taken it yet, considering they represent around 50 users or so.

This survey was mainly made for fun and out of curiosity, so I'm not sure it's worth trying to download the data, import it to another provider if we can (I was recommended framaforms), and hold the survey for the few people that didn't take it yet.

At the same time, I totally get it would suck for the people who haven't had a chance to take the survey yet to be locked out from it.

Regardless of any solution we find, we'll find a better provider for next year if we run this survey again.

Edit 3: See new post (soon)

Edit 2: it seems the survey was locked, but maybe you can still take it. Just in case I got a screenshot of the results at 301 answers.

Edit: the survey will forcibly lock when it receives 300 responses 😱 (we're at 287 right now)

Unfortunately, survey software is a cartel on the Internet and they have huge restrictions on free users. I was not aware that questionpro locked surveys beyond a certain point for free users, and we just received an email that they would lock our survey once it reaches that response rate. And of course the only solution is to buy their expensive plan ($1.2k a year).

300 is a very confident amount still, seeing that our monthly user rate is ~350. It just sucks for the people that will not be able to take the survey.

Next time I'm using Google Forms. Google sucks but at least they don't cap you in the knees like this.

Or if anyone knows open source survey software we can use, that would be amazing 😀 (we also run surveys on ProleWiki sometimes)

You asked for it, now we're doing it.

This survey will run for around a week, so please take it ASAP!

At the end of it we'll analyse the results and will finally be able to answer the question that's on everyone's mind: is half of Lemmygrad trans?

Disclaimer: all questions are optional, meaning you can skip them if you don't want to answer. The survey should take around 5 minutes to complete. It asks personal questions, but all answers are anonymous. We do get your country code when you submit your answers, so use a VPN BEFORE you open the survey (but don't retake the test). Otherwise we really can't identify you.

If we missed any question or anything is unclear, please post it ASAP so that we can fix it before too many people take the survey.

We've approved I don't know how many new comrades here since the announcement that Reddit will kill its API access.

If you don't know where to start posting on lemmygrad, this is a good thread to start in! You can also ask questions you have about federation or our instance.

Welcome!

The current lore is:

We are all feds on lemmygrad, but you get to choose your agency.