For the past month a variety of lem.cochrun.xyz accounts have been spamming religious posts (all linking to christianpicturesblog.blogspot.ca) to a variety of unrelated Lemmy communities. Unless @forgetstoshave@lem.cochrun.xyz has an alternative explanation, the posts are likely all from one or a select few lem.cochrun.xyz users seeking to evangelize their beliefs across the Threadiverse, using sock puppet accounts to evade bans.

While they are welcome to post to relevant communities (just as other users are free to block those communities), spamming such content on unrelated communities is unacceptable. While use of the Threadiverse should be encouraged, spam only serves to push new users away, and thus should be handled via the defederation of lem.cochrun.xyz should it continue.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45437770

I've been thinking a lot about the Fediverse ALT issue.

Some people are annoyed by posts without Alttext, & others get reminded¹ to add it.

The core question is: How can we improve accessibility?

Proposal: ☑️ Add a user filter to hide media posts without AltTag ☑️ Reduced engagement on hidden posts would encourage adding Alt text ☑️ People who need accessibility wouldn't have to encounter unlabeled media

If this gets traction, I'll open a Mastodon GitHub issue (maybe on others too?).

¹ https://mastodon.social/@madeindex/113996311493021102

On AI and place, and how Mastodon gives tools to create communities at the instance level, but people experience 'place' at the federation level.

What it looks like:

Here's an example of such a post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/58082125

They uploaded an image and then included a URL as the body/text.

On Lemmy, it looks like an image post, with a small expando to the right of the title that you can click to show the body:

Why you should stop doing it:

1. It makes high-quality posts look the same as low-quality ones.

I automatically downvote most image/meme submissions and posts with bad/non-descriptive titles for quality control. Linking directly to a source is how you make a high-quality submission. You can include screenshots or quotes in the body of the post.

2. I could start clicking the expando next to the title to check if a source was provided, but there's going to be a user option to block image posts in the next lemmy update (v0.20), so that format is not good since lots of people will start to automatically block them.

3. You can put images in the body of the posts.

Why should anyone care?

Low-quality, easy-to-digest content will dominate and drown out everything else if no one does anything to limit it. It degrades the internet and our brains.

A blog that elaborates:

The Cargo Cult of The Ennui Engine https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb

Publicly Run Social Media – A Solution for Europe?

TikTok, Instagram and YouTube are not neutral public spaces. Designed to maximise attention and engagement, these platforms play a major role in shaping public opinion in Europe. They amplify misinformation, polarisation and hate speech, while also encouraging patterns of use that harm mental health.

The EU has begun to respond through the Digital Services Act. Yet success up to now is limited.

Could Europe build a public-service social media model, inspired by public broadcasting – social media that protect democratic debate, strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty and offer a healthier online environment?

This event will explore that question and introduce a European Citizens’ Initiative calling for a European public-service social media infrastructure.

With Lukáš Mikulecký, Co-Leader of the European Citizens’s Initiative “European Public Social Network”.

New! 1:1 Conversations! After our one-hour open discussion, we invite you to stay for another 30 minutes. You’ll be paired up randomly and answer four questions together in a one-on-one conversation.

The idea behind: meet new people from across Europe and exchange ideas in a more personal setting. The breakout rooms will stay open for as long as you like.

I think it would be better to have these public spaces be outside the control of foreign tech companies, but I'm also unsure whether it would be better to have one centralized EU social media network. I think that the Fediverse (such as Mastodon) could be relevant here. How do other people feel about this?

EU citizens initiative: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2026/000004_en

When's the 2026 one?

https://canvas.fediverse.events

I am currently working on a crossplatform browser for the fediverse, which will allow you to unify identities from mastodon, bluesky, and anywhere else across the open/decentralized social web into a single feed for easy browsing and management. It will also serve as a highly customizable and feature rich fediverse client, allowing profile and client theme customization, as well as groups, rss subscriptions, and several other features I've yet to fully flesh out.

Things to note:

1. This is a pre-alpha project, and just seeking some very initial feedback on the very broad strokes of what is planned and what is done so far. If you are interested in collaboration and furthering the development of the project, please feel free to reach out.
2. Features such as groups (i.e. federating with the threadiverse such as lemmy/piefed) or rss subscriptions are not implemented yet, it's just a basic unified feed for bluesky/mastodon at the moment.
3. This is not a live site that can be visited yet, it's just an app on your client that authorizes access to the various platforms through oAuth flows. However, the plan is to eventually have a dedicated server hosting infrastructure in place, with individual platform identities able to be registered on a unified instance, and local/self-hosting data storage options.

So, please provide any and all feedback you have on what I have shown above, both good and bad, and feel free to ask clarifying questions on how the platform will work overall. Open to hearing what people think of the idea overall.

[IMAGE ALTERNATIVE TEXT: “Unfinished Projects - In solidarity we can build a future that benefits us all."]

We have a new community and would love if you came and checked us out ( ദ്ദി ˙ᗜ˙ )

A couple of us have been working on a project that took quite longer than we expected, but we finally have opened registration on our forum, and would love for you to come check it out if you are interested :)

Our intent: We are trying to create a community focused on collaboration and genuine connections to create and make things with others. From software developers to artists, to handicrafts, and etc. We are working on a public wiki that can be used for creators to display and collaborate on each others projects that are openly licensed.

We want to create a community that is different than the much of the fast paced, superficial communications that happen on modern day social media - and instead try to build lasting connections where creative people and projects can grow and contribute to the commons.

From our "About Page":

An unfinished project is a seed that someone else can water when you no longer have the time or the tools.
The community thrives when we treat every piece of unfinished work as a stepping stone for the next person. You don’t need a long-term commitment to make a difference. Whether you finish a single page on our Wiki or solve one small problem in the Forum, you are making a project "slightly less unfinished" than it was yesterday.

We still have a lot of work to do to improve our platform (primarily our wiki - which is invite only until we ensure everything is working and in order), but we figured it was time to open up registration on our forum and see if we can get our few first members to help establish our community and maybe stick with us through a few more hurdles until we get everything more polished.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in being a part of, and are willing to stick around as we polish things up and try to grow, we would love to have you :)

I hope to maybe see one or two of you over at our federated forum!

PS: We will eventually be looking to "partner" with some other federated communities that share our values, so if you have a community that would be a good fit, feel free to reach out - as it would be great to have a network of communities that can support each other and provide value for the members.

I posted about this issue a week ago:

Currently, instance bans and community bans are treated as two separate things. When a user is banned from an instance, you’ll often see in the logs a bunch of community bans alongside it at once (at least from Lemmy communities). These are communities that user has posted on. An instance ban automatically applies hard-bans to communities they have interacted in from that instance. But the problem here is its only communities they’ve interacted in.

The instance ban itself is simply a rejection of federation. It doesn’t block users from posting in communities on that instance - only the community bans do that. It just means their posts won’t federate out. This means that an instance banned user can continue to be a nuisance in most communities (or all, if they are pre-emptively banned) on an instance locally - and the moderators of that community and instance won’t even know because they don’t view their community from there. With larger numbers of users would also mean larger amounts of trolls and incompatible users, which could greatly increase the chance of people simply vandalising communities and no-one even noticing.

Lemmy 1.0 promises to fix this apparently from their end, but I think at least for as Piefed is concerned we could get in on this first. We need a hard block on all Piefed accounts from being to interact on any community that is from an instance they are bannedfrom. We also need a way before that for Piefed based communities to automatically throw out all comments made even locally by instance banned accounts based from Lemmy.

It's now been implemented on the latest piefed. A Piefed user instance banned from anywhere will now be hard-banned from all communities on that instance to prevent them from being a local menace unbeknownst the moderators of those communtiies. But all Piefed instances need to update.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/62817221

After taking a lot longer than I was expecting to, I'm pleased to announce the results of the census we ran earlier this year!

This year, the results are on our website instead of being copied into a post here. I'm hoping that this is better since the website charts are interactive, with additional details if you click/tap on something. They also support dark and light mode. The full results contain discussion on how we processed the results, any assumptions we made, and all of our recommendations for how to improve this process for next time.

fedecan.ca/en/announcements/2026-04-03_censusResults

If you have any issues with the site, let us know and we will take a look.

I can also add screenshots in the comments so that people reading the comments don't have to search through the article for context.

A few sample charts

Section 1.5: Internet Speed

Section 1.8: Most common pets

Yes, the 200 cherry shrimp were all from one response.

Section 2.01: Age Distribution

Section 2.08: Education

Section 2.10: Desktop Operating System

The question on specific distro / version had a pretty low sample size, but you can find that too on the article.

Section 3.1.08: Most popular desktop UIs

Section 3.1.10: Most Popular Mobile Apps

Section 3.1.13: How often people use centralized forums/threaded platforms

Section 3.2.05: What people post on Pixelfed

Section 3.2.06: What people follow on Pixelfed

Section 3.3.04: Donations (of time or money)

Section 4.4: Favourite genre of music

You'll get taken to a random community. Once you arrive there's a link at the top of the page to /r/random so you can just hammer away at that until you get somewhere that's the right combo of random and interesting.

There is also /r/randnsfw that takes you to a random nsfw communty if your instance has them.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26769543

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/30387402

@threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works

Ik that there used to be Diagonlemmy, but, IMHO, we should create an instance that is exclusive to Harry Potter, and the Wizarding World.

---

Perhaps call the instance Wizarding.World, or something.

That way, Fediverse users who wish to interact with Harry Potter material can, and other users/instances/etc, can defederate/don't have to.

---

Harry Potter is only going to become more popular.

The HBO Harry Potter series is coming. Whether we like it or not, the HP fandom is about to have a significant resurgence, and it's going to find a home somewhere on the internet.

---

The question is whether that somewhere is Reddit, Discord, and corporate platforms — or whether the Fediverse gets there first and shapes what that community looks like.

People flock to spaces where they feel familiar and welcomed.

---

Rowling will profit from HP whether a Lemmy instance exists or not.

The Fediverse needs more projects that make immediate sense to people, and it needs to stop ceding entire fandoms to corporate platforms by default.

---

The move isn't to reject the fandom.

The move is to build the instance with explicit values — pro-trans, pro-queer, progressive moderation, zero tolerance for bigotry.

Pull HP fans into federated, open spaces and surround them with those values.

That's far more powerful than gatekeeping.

I shared this, because I wanted to know what the general consensus was.

Also if there were any users who might have any experience with potentially creating/running their own instance.

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/35452508

Hely everyone!

Hope it's okay to post here, let me know if elsewhere is better. I'm glad to announce the third edition of Lemmyvision (the Lemmy song contest) is now live. I'm once again promoting the event and inviting communities of Lemmy to participate!

Don't hesitate to check the main post announcement for all the details here : https://lemmy.world/post/45063698

TL;DR

• From right now and until May 3rd, discuss with your Lemmy instance or community about which song to send to the contest.
• Submit the song in the Lemmyvision community by making a new thread.
• On May 4th, voting will begin. You will rank your favourite songs in a form. Any song not submitted by this date will not be featured.
• On May 11th, results of everyone’s favourite songs will be published.
• You can use !lemmyvision@jlai.lu for any question, this will be the community for updates and results, make sure to subscribe if you’d like to stay in the loop.

Here is my notes from using Lemmy:

• There is core limitations on Lemmy which cannot be fixed even on the long term( for example finding communities via search. Results from .world is very different from the result that your instance fetch, no ability to upload media with the same ease and speed of Reddit,...etc);
• Herd mentality is very deep on Lemmy, compared to other social media websites;
• People seem to take disagreements in opinions personally, which is weird on it's own;
• Lemmy users would like to have a working cancel culture so much that they would have no problem deepthroating a dick to get it;
• Lemmy users and with them Digg 2.0 users, hate with passion anyone who criticize their platform and is ready to go against logic to defend it;
• Lemmy Admins and moderators seem to have a control fetish: on Reddit, it was very normal and easy to me to reach out to a mod to restore my posts or to explain himself and even discuss and change rules or reverse discussions. Yes there was some of them who also had control fetish, but in the communities which I used to use that was kind of rare. Meanwhile here there is no modbox functionality which complicates talking with mods;
• Some Lemmy users seem to be easy to obsessive over things.

I feel there needs to be disclaimer on Lemmy servers/introduction page to warn people about negativity on the platform, but I don't think it will ever happen.

About moderation, I feel the only outcome that will happen is bad moderation (IMO) will keep happening on the platform till either the servers hosting communities go down or till the mod become inactive.

On a side note it feels like a lot of Lemmy servers are suffering financially and might close soon, while Lemmy developers did not even try to help them by implementing third party upload functionality(Imgbb, catbox, imgur,...etc) in the app and the web front end to lighten the load on the server admins. Right now most Lemmy servers I know of are protected by Cloudflare and pictures uploaded on some servers don't open natively(you need to click it as a normal link and pass cloudflare verification to see image).

It's what it's here. but I just wanted to lay out what I think about Lemmy culture, moderation and software.

Edit:

More proof for my point:

Catodon is a new Sharkey/Misskey fork (Edit: sadly with AI code contributions).

Just deleted reddit and working on getting off of facebook. I'm actually glad to be here. It's a bit of an adjustment but I think it's for the better. Cheers everyone.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/49700074

On Mastodon, if you have an account on instance X, you can follow someone who is on instance Y. It creates a connection: X -> Y. If there are a lot of such follows, weight of this edge will increase, attractive force between points will be higher.

Original explanation on the page of Kaggle dataset:

"active users" graphs: For each instance, we consider the set of the 10K most recently active users. Then, for each user of an instance X, we consider the list of the users they follow, and add 1 to the edge from X to Y where Y is the instance the followed users. The weight of the edge from X to Y thus encodes how much the content seen on instance X is generated in instance Y. Note that this graph thus contains self loops.

I've tried to layout this dataset in Gephi, but it was a classic hairy ball - everyone is connected to everyone, amount of edges is too high comparing to number of nodes. Then, I've filtered out all EN instances and suddenly got a meaningful picture:

What can we see? If English-speaking instances are ignored, German, French and Japanese languages are most common across Mastodon. Japan and Korea don't hang around much with other folks, while French, German and Spanish instances are quite interconnected between each other.

Size of nodes depends on centrality, post about centrality of Peertube instances is here.

Same, but Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm instead of ForceAtlas 2:

Mastodon active users dataset can be downloaded here: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/marcdamie/fediverse-graph-dataset-reduced

I’ll be totally honest and say that I don’t trust Evan (for reasons I’m not getting into), and I’m not sure why we need “hashtags with extra steps,” but I’d like to get opinions from people who are smarter than I am about this stuff.