I haven't looked around at alternatives.

Lemmy has a lot of front-end app development going on and I think that's one of the big strengths. The API can be bloated with a lot of duplicate data in JSON responses but it is usable.

Lemmy is pretty immature as code to actually run in production. It may be well over 4 years old, but the whole thing seems to have very little in the way of information that a server operator can look at to check the health and problems under the covers. It also doesn't deal with unrecognized data very well and hides a lot of errors in a log where the messages are often not very much of a hint what is going on.

Lemmy surely is unique, as I almost never see people using it actually criticize the code for quality assurance and testing. More often than not, I see people cheering and defending it. I've had to look through this experience and code as it is more run like an art project or a music band than any serious focus on data integrity or performance concern.

if it were me right now with Lemmy 0.18.4, I'd take the server offline, do a PostgreSQL dump file - keep a copy, then hand-edit the sequence numbers in the dump file - and do a restore.

you probably only had a few users, so I would set user to 100, person id can be higher because of federation - but jump ahead to 10000 maybe. Post and comment set ahead to 10000 ... and community set ahead to 10000 because that gets federated

the PostgreSQL sequence numbers should only get used on newly created objects here-forward.

ok, I'm going to delete this post. People actually aren't discussing privacy and are just debating if they think Lemmy needs Multi-Reddit. And I just want to get the code finished. I am probably moving ahead on the code with ZERO sharing of any existing data.

I’m suggesting that multireddits are a “local” function. Theu are so local that they’re possible without server-side support at all,

Again, how? If I want a blend of 50 different communities, how can Reddit or Lemmy do that without 50 API calls if you do not add server-side MultiReddit code?

50 API calls is the overhead and nonsense that is being avoided here....

But it should definitely be off by default and have a clear warning when you try to enable it.

I was afraid people would say that. The easier way is to just not touch it at all, as adding new code to opt in/opt out is more Rust code programming that is in rare supply with developers.

The easiest solution is to avoid it and not introduce sharing of personal communities at all. Which was what I was afraid this discussion would yield. So we start fresh with empty MultiPass lists and build them up from scratch.]

the amount of low-effort drive by comments and off-topic posts communities gets just because they are similarly named is bad enough as it is.

which is why I actually want it.

I think a well-cultivated list of quality communities that people share is a means to escape the heavy amount of noise that grew out of the explosion in the number of low-effort barely-any-moderation instances.

Another way to look at this feature is really simple: multiple subscribe lists, the ability to organize what you subscribe to into your cultivated groups. I don't see why anyone thinks a limitation of having only one community list per login is beneficial in organizing the duplicate choices all over the place.

why does a multi-reddit need multiple instances to collaborate to create the feed?

by "create the feed", I assume you mean "provide posts" when API call post/list is called?

content is replicated in all federated instances. You only need to use the local copy and merge all the communities of the multi-reddit.

Yes, that is what MultiPass would do, query the local PostgreSQL database. Right now Lemmy only allows this for a single Subscribe/Follow list per user... you have to create 3 different logins if you want 3 different lists of communities. For example, a "games" list, "music" list, "news" list.... Plus, the current design does not accommodate logged-out users, they have no way to list multiple communities (other than "All", local or merged remote+local).

Multi-reddits as they exist on Reddit itself could be implemented entirely client-side, the server side stuff just syncs the behavior of multiple client apps.

Can you explain how? As the only way I can see this is if you did 50 different API requests for all 50 subreddits, merged the results, and then sorted them again by the desired order.

I personally would need to dig into testing and code again to give answers with confidence. What I'm trying to say more than anything is... don't assume. The level of mistakes in Lemmy's more technical back-end code are pretty high from my experience, especially when it comes to multiple servers involved (comment deletes not being sent to all servers was a situation I tracked down). What I do know is that there is very little written out there about people actually tearing it apart and showing what works... a lot of stuff gets logged in server logs as errors that almost nobody can explain. Either it's mistakes in apub JSON or other non-lemmy servers, or older versions of Lemmy, etc.

When you say packages get forwarded to whatever instance wanted (if I understand correctly) you don’t “unpack” (e.g check if it’s a valid request)

the pack metaphor isn't that great. But it is signed, and the receiving server checks a signature. But I really have not seen anyone discuss how those signatures are exchanged in the first place, and I've seen people say they re-installed their entire instance - which I assume generates a new set of signing keys for the same domain name.... and I know Lemmy starts with 1 in index for post, comment, person - and would end up generating the same numbers for different content.

I haven't seen much eye towards auditing any of this works, and if it even is a good design. Even 2 months ago there were some aggressive timeouts that were causing delivery to fail. And when something fails, the person who comments or posts doesn't get notified....

There is some deep stuff in lemmy., every community has a private key/public key pair, as does each person - but I'm not even sure that is used at all and was an ambition. I rarely see the topic actually come up and I've been listening for this kind of deeper technical topics... and created !lemmyfederation@lemmy.ml to try and better organize it.

Thanks again, and sorry for the ramblings.

I'm pretty much rambling myself... my repeat point is: don't assume. I would not describe Lemmy as battle-hardened against attacks or spoofing that someone can find to bypass the current logic.

it does show the comments on incognito

That means it is tied to your login, something is set in your preferences so that you aren't seeing content.

Picking "undetermined" isn't the same as having never touched it. There is a steady stream of people who accidentally touch the language settings and say they don't see anything.

People have called out how confusing the whole thing is: https://lemmy.world/post/523012

Sorry I can't be specific on how to click and what works, I just know you aren't the first to get their account where it stops showing routine content.

@Prefix@lemm.ee - maybe pin this for a while?