[HN Gopher] LemmyBB, a federated bulletin board
___________________________________________________________________
LemmyBB, a federated bulletin board
Author : ZacnyLos
Score : 192 points
Date : 2022-11-02 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (join-lemmy.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (join-lemmy.org)
| dutchbrit wrote:
| Funny, I'm basically building the same thing at the moment.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Do you have any more details about your project?
| dutchbrit wrote:
| It's very much work in progress but hope to have an alpha out
| sometime next week. You can sign up for updates here:
| https://ciety.com
| batmaniam wrote:
| Would LemmyBB need its own mobile app to stay consistent with its
| phpBB-like UI? The demo apps shown looks more like reddit.
|
| https://join-lemmy.org/apps
| lowwave wrote:
| Really needed!
|
| Just FYI: Hmm, send user a private message
| https://fedibb.ml/ucp.php?i=pm&mode=compose&u=356301 return a
| 404.
| fsiefken wrote:
| A very nice. It would be even nicer if it had a nntp gateway or
| interface, not sure if that's even feasible with activitypub.
| bluedino wrote:
| nntp gateway sounds like a good way to avoid eternal September
| kuramitropolis wrote:
| This is beautiful. For me, the old-school forums are a pinnacle
| of UX that Discourse fails to match. That UI + the real-time
| facilities of Lemmy is a match made in heaven.
|
| Now, if only someone implemented the old IPB theme! Pic:
| https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_app-cover-m,f_auto/p/3753...
| photoGrant wrote:
| IPB, for me, was peak BB software. Back in the WinBeta days
| ValentineC wrote:
| I know they had to earn money, but it's a shame how they
| screwed licence holders over and over trying to encourage
| people to move over to monthly payments.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| I really missed newground's style of BB.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Some of my best memories of the old internet. We were getting
| so much right in this era of web software interfaces.
| kuramitropolis wrote:
| Yes, because nobody was trying to manipulate us through them.
| It was just a communication service enabling diverse people
| to talk to each other.
|
| It was also, well, optional. None of that algoboosted
| dopamine-head datamining freakshow that's leaking into the
| world in a way that the AI alarmists seem to be ignoring
| entirely.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Whole way I got started in webdev was skinning IPB for various
| gaming forums because it had such good UIUX vs vBulletin and
| SMC/phpBB etc. It was awesome. Blew my mind when someone tried
| to pay me. Thank you IPB.
| dutchbrit wrote:
| Haha same here, started skinning on 1.3. The good old
| Invisionize days!
| RainaRelanah wrote:
| PunBB (now: FluxBB) for me. Seems like Connor broke DNS for
| the site. 15 year old me was probably a nightmare for them to
| deal with, but it was my first involvement in OSS, and I'm
| still proud to have hosted two of the largest install bases.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Man, so much time spent in that UI reading and talking with
| people. Good memories.
| kuramitropolis wrote:
| Yes! Those forums really felt like _places_. Social media
| nowadays just feels like, well, TV.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| I post regularly on a vbulletin forum and have for the last
| 15 years. Every so often someone who used to be active will
| drop by and it drags other old lurkers out. One of the
| better analogies is that it feels like neighborhood bar,
| there are regulars, new loud people, new people who get a
| feel for the space, people who come in every now and again.
| And then occasionally it feels like thanksgiving where a
| bunch of people are back in town and show up all together.
| all2 wrote:
| This makes me want to get back into scifi-meshes.org.
| Man, I used to be on there daily for _years_. Blender was
| an absolute God-send in my childhood, and having a place
| to talk with others that were doing the same thing made
| it so much more... I don 't know. Impactful.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Still some holdouts - mainly in niche automotive forums. If
| you work on old cars or are an enthusiast, these are still
| very active places.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| People think that federation like this is great but what ends up
| happening is that either the instance you create your account on
| goes down and you lose your account, or the instances that you
| communicate with go down and you lose the context. Federated
| should mean that instances federate enough data to be usable on
| any instance, whether the others go down or not.
| gpm wrote:
| How does this handle converting the reddit/HN like tree of
| replies into a forum thread?
|
| If you federate one of these with a reply tree based lemmy
| instance, do all the comments from one instance have absolutely
| horrid organization on the other instance? I guess you could just
| always just not do that (federate cross reply style) though.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Every reply should have an inReplyTo property you can use to
| build any tree you like.
| capableweb wrote:
| Flatten the hierarchy and sort by date? Here is an example of
| my own HN client (that I use) that displays comments in a flat
| manner instead of a tree: https://ditzes.com/item/33438493
| (linking to this very submission)
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| That's pretty cool actually. I've been tossing around the idea of
| a federating forum style UX that uses ActivityPub, and I figured
| it would be easy using something like this https://github.com/go-
| ap/fedbox
|
| I don't know how many generic AP backend servers are out there,
| but it looks like Lemmy is becoming one. I hope they keep with
| the AP spec and allow any functionality in addition to it to be
| modular.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Needs a SSH TUI interface with time-metered connection credits,
| for that true BBS feel.
| photoGrant wrote:
| Wild. This is everything I want. Same data, different
| consumption. I'd LOVE to flip a switch to phpBB mode for so, so
| many threaded conversations!
| ConanRus wrote:
| manv1 wrote:
| phpBB seems to be the last man standing in the forum wars. It's
| interesting reflecting on the multiple forms that online
| communication has taken over the last 40 years.
|
| They all suck in their own special way.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Simple Machines is still getting updates
| rexreed wrote:
| Isn't Flarum an option? https://flarum.org/
| kuramitropolis wrote:
| If you can get over the PHP and the "reinvented" UI... maybe?
| gog wrote:
| What is the problem with PHP?
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Discourse is fairly popular.
| qznc wrote:
| DFeed is underrated: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
| kornhole wrote:
| This is beautiful. When I last used Lemmy, the number of
| instances were few and not diverse, but now I see a bunch on
| https://join-lemmy.org/instances. I also notice that it has been
| packaged for easy install on yunohost. I might just install it on
| my server.
| andirk wrote:
| Diggin all these lefty channels! Where's the closet alt-right
| anti-vax anti-government-except-its-world-conquest-military-
| and-heavy-policing-and-penal-colony-loving channels?
|
| Does "federated" mean decentralized?
| kornhole wrote:
| You can start your own if you want. Federated means that the
| many instances can talk to each other. The emphasis is on the
| word 'can'. They can choose not to federate with yours based
| on your rules and content.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Don't know about the first two, check out wolfballs.com and
| exploding-heads.com, not quite as extreme as you're hoping
| for, as far as your third example you went there already.
| endorphine wrote:
| A bit off-topic but why would someone write a forum (or any web
| app) in such a low-level language? Isn't it more trouble than
| it's worth, considering it's not a performance sensitive,
| critical or constrained environment?
|
| I could understand going as far as Go, but further than that it
| just feels not the right trade-off for the productivity lost.
| jjice wrote:
| The type system is awesome to work with. It is low level, but
| it does a good job at feeling like a high level language. The
| biggest thing to get used to is the borrow checker, but it also
| helps with data races. While it works as a low level language,
| I think it _feels_ like a higher level one to work with.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| By low level, do you mean strongly typed? Rust can be used for
| "low level" programming (systems programming) but I don't know
| if I'd call the whole language inherently "low level". It's
| strongly typed but has a good trait system and generics, very
| good for domain modeling at different "levels", so it seems
| suited just fine to "high level" programming to me, provided
| you are looking for a compiled, typed language rather than a
| dynamic one like e.g. Python.
| random3 wrote:
| +1 - genuinely curious if a high-level slang/DSL is possible in
| Rust or it's just a matter of having tools for the existing
| Rust developers that prefer to code in Rust
| kuramitropolis wrote:
| Once you get over the initial learning curve, Rust is a very
| capable and productive application language, and I'd argue that
| the whole "low-level"/"high-level" divide is just a historical
| artifact.
|
| Sure, there used to be a tradeoff between performance and
| expressivity in a language, such that a "low-level" language
| would just become crufty and kludgy up to the point that
| someone would decide "screw it, we'll implement a safer but
| less performant language in this less safe but more performant
| one".
|
| Today, the hardware is much more powerful, and the theory and
| practice of software development is more advanced. Thanks to
| open source, devs have been exposed to good ideas from all
| corners of the ecosystem, so all that would remain is coming up
| with sane syntax and semantics - and Rust positively excels in
| that regard.
|
| I'm fluent in Python and JS, but I put off learning "low-level"
| languages because of the innumerable footguns. Go looks like it
| has plenty of those, too, and TypeScript is... just a mess.
| Rust is next-gen stuff in my opinion, and categorizing it as
| just a "systems-level" language makes no sense. It's "systems"
| all the way down, and the more kinds of systems a language can
| efficiently cover, the more good things can come out of it.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| Rust is higher-level than Go, in practice.
|
| Rust says "a String is a valid Unicode sequence, an OsString is
| a valid filename according to your OS, and a &[u8] is a
| sequence of bytes; I'll enforce the validity of these types for
| you". Go says "a string is a sequence of bytes, make sure you
| use them correctly."
|
| Rust says "here's an Iterator interface, with hundreds of
| methods for your convenience". Go says "we didn't have
| polymorphism when the standard library was developed, so there
| aren't any fancy iterators; how about you use a for loop?"
|
| Rust says "error handling is important, so there's syntax built
| into the language for it (the '?' operator)." Go says "just
| write `res, err = func(); if (err) { handleErr }` over and over
| again."
|
| Rust says "please think carefully about the difference between
| shared references, mutable references, and ownership; I'll be
| checking your work." Go says "you don't need to think about
| that, I'll keep track of it with GC for you (unless your
| sharing data between threads in which case you do and you're on
| your own)".
|
| In the last instance, Rust is lower level than Go. But in the
| rest, it's higher level.
| gpm wrote:
| No, I really wouldn't characterize rust as more trouble than
| it's worth.
|
| Rust exposes low level primitives and is efficient, that's nice
| and all, but you mostly don't actually think about them when
| programming non-low-level applications.
|
| What it does force you to think about a _lot_ is it 's
| correctness guarantees. Things like only letting you modify
| data that no one else currently has a reference to, and things
| like forcing you to check error conditions by wrapping them
| behind an "enum" (algebraic data type). Rust is making a
| tradeoff here between friction in writing code, and the the
| amount of time it takes to understand code as well as the
| number of bugs you write.
|
| All in all, for most large programming projects there is no
| language I think I'd be more productive in than rust. For small
| scripts, the tradeoff can be less worth it (in which case I
| tend to use python, or for even smaller ones bash), but those
| scale poorly to giant projects where you want to be able to do
| things like refactor without introducing bugs in a file you
| forgot about.
|
| It happens to be the case that rust maps many of it's primitive
| types directly to low level types that you can reason about in
| a low level fashion (e.g. ADTs are tagged unions, references
| are actually just pointers - maybe with a second vtable pointer
| depending on the type) - but you don't need to do that unless
| you're worrying about optimizing the constants for performance
| or doing terrible hacks with unsafe.
| aloisdg wrote:
| OCaml, haskell, Idris, F#...
| cies wrote:
| > why would someone write a forum (or any web app) in such a
| low-level language? [...] I could understand going as far as Go
|
| Oh so many reasons:
|
| Lemmy is a socialist project. Rust is a project that has it
| roots in FLOSS movement and Mozilla foundation. Go, otoh, is
| Google's thingy; a tech/advertising multi-national.
|
| Technically Go is in some ways less low level than Rust. See
| the null guards everywhere in Go, and the idiomatic
| abstractions that Rust provides for this in the stdlib. Rust
| has sum types that allow for really high-level abstractions,
| was designed with generics in mind.
|
| I personally find it more intellectually rewarding to program
| in Rust, over Go or say Python. The stack overflow favorite
| list shows more people like Rust as a language.
|
| You call it "more trouble than it's worth", but that's up to
| the Lemmy devs to decide. As a FLOSS project, expecting they
| put in the effort of love there...
|
| Sure Go was a viable alternative; but would the devs enjoy
| writing it in Go? Also then they would be skilled in Go, maybe
| that's not what they want.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| > Lemmy is a socialist project.
|
| As in the project itself is socialist? What does this mean?
| another_story wrote:
| If you go and look at the boards you'll find a lot of
| posters lean hard left.
| darthrupert wrote:
| I would claim that most web services are performance sensitive,
| since every single millisecond matters for UX experience.
| Having big JS at client side circumvents this of course, but it
| might be thought that that is just a hack to circumvent slow
| server-side processing.
| dom96 wrote:
| I think the simple answer is that the hype is with Rust so it
| will be used for just about anything, even if it is not well
| suited for it. This happens to every language that is
| sufficiently popular (and probably even some that aren't).
|
| I myself am guilty of this, I wrote a web app recently using
| Rust, mainly because I wanted to learn Rust. I probably
| wouldn't reach for Rust next time as implementing my project in
| it has felt like overkill throughout.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| I've seen a surprising number of Rust web frameworks cropping
| up which may be encouraging use of the language at higher
| levels in the application stack. I could absolutely see
| somebody familiar with Rust reaching for it to do something
| like this.
| Klonoar wrote:
| For pretty much everything required to build a forum, Rust can
| easily hide away 99% of the low-level things you don't need to
| deal with.
|
| You're moving around strings and talking to a database, and
| possibly doing some templating. It's not rocket science, and
| provides the same story as Go with regards to build + deploy.
| fho wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but does anyone know a "forum" software that
| is based on a graph instead of list of lists?
|
| Something that has some intelligence on top and shows only the
| most relevant path through a thread (based on replies and
| mentions) and somehow puts less emphasis on all of the off topic
| discussion that tend to happen in forums.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| phpbb... that's some nostalgia
| ufmace wrote:
| I know they've removed it since the time of the comments I will
| refer, but I still feel like I would not choose Lemmy to host a
| forum due to the conduct of the maintainers on the threads
| regarding the hard-coded slur_filter. See
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622. When the
| conversation with the project maintainers goes like:
|
| > Hey I don't think a hardcoded slur filter is a good idea due to
| good reasons a, b, and c that don't relate to actually being a
| troll or calling people slurs in a hostile way
|
| > Screw you racist, we're never going to remove it
|
| I feel like their priority is no longer to provide a flexible
| tool other people can use as a communication platform in the way
| that best suits their community, but instead to impose a narrow-
| minded agenda on everybody. After that, even if they change their
| mind later, who's to say they won't change it again at some
| point?
| darthrupert wrote:
| >but instead to impose a narrow-minded agenda on everybody
|
| Having a slur filter is not "narrow-minded agenda", it's
| mainstream. And, well, it's open source, so anyone can maintain
| a fork that removes it with not much work.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm LGBT and slurs are used socially within the in-group.
|
| Nevermind the fact that art such as film frequently relies on
| the use of slurs when dealing with this subject matter.
|
| We aren't protected in real life from being called words.
| I've certainly had my fair share hurled at me. By having to
| deal with it both at a young age and in adulthood, I've grown
| a thick skin and strong defense system.
|
| I worry that this attitude is more dangerous that what is
| trying to be accomplished.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm a black American and I'm honestly sick of white people
| telling me when I can use the "n-word." I guess if they
| can't have it, no one can.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > I guess if they can't have it, no one can.
|
| I'm a white american and I think I agree with this.
| Making sure that only one race of people can say bad
| words on the internet doesn't seem practical to me. If we
| don't want some races saying a word, I don't see a way of
| preventing that which doesn't sacrifice either anonymity
| or black people being able to say that.
|
| There's only one implementation that I can imagine, and
| it's pretty impractical and ethically dubious. The idea
| is to have some kind of verification process to prove
| that you're a certain race, and somehow publicly store
| the public keys of people in each category. Then, when
| someone want to post a word that only some races can say,
| they submit a zero-knowledge proof that the message was
| written by someone who controls the private key of one of
| the public keys in the appropriate category. But I'm
| pretty sure that a registry of people organized by race
| is neither practical or desirable.
| echelon wrote:
| The only thing this does is make people invent new slurs.
| cy_hauser wrote:
| Says the thromrod!
| darthrupert wrote:
| Good points from you and echelon. This (by which I mean
| hardcoded slur filtering in Lemmy/LemmyBB) is not a good
| thing. On the other hand, it's obviously within their
| rights to code such a thing into their own thing.
| ufmace wrote:
| Having a slur filter on a particular forum instance designed
| and chosen by the admins of that site is a perfectly good
| idea. They know the character of their forum, they can choose
| what is and is not appropriate to say.
|
| I think it does display a narrow-minded agenda for the
| authors of hosting software intended to potentially host a
| wide variety of forums to declare unilaterally that all sites
| hosted using their software must use a particular slur filter
| declared by them, or else create and maintain a fork.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| If you read the GitHub issue, the debate was not over its
| existence, just that instance operators should be able to
| configure it, which it sounds like they now can anyway (last
| comment on issue, he said it was added).
|
| There was no need, and is quite malicious, to imply and talk
| down to their own users/supporters of their software as
| anything"-ist" in their motivations, which in many cases is
| considered a more corrosive/ruinous label (court of public
| opinion) than "convicted criminal" (court of law) in the
| West.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| onetimeusename wrote:
| In case anyone was wondering, this was (is) the slur filter in
| question:
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/b18ea3e0cc620c3f97f98...
| cout wrote:
| Wow, many of those words have legitimate non-slur uses. I
| can't imagine an automotive forum where users cannot discuss
| how to retard the timing on a distributor.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| drewzero1 wrote:
| > For example, there was someone who tried to talk about
| Stardew Valley and only managed to talk about Sremovedew
| Valley.
|
| Even beyond whole legitimate words, it filtered inside
| legitimate words-- you'd think people would consider the S
| _removed_ horpe problem by now.
| gpm wrote:
| > this was (is) the slur filter
|
| Was (not is) is correct: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/bl
| ob/71aed94a000c951ddfdb4...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| So it only took them two years to decide that it should be
| a configurable option and not hardcoded? Doesn't really
| solve the terrible implementation, but it's a step.
| drstewart wrote:
| Yeah, their responses to legitimate discourse make this project
| a non-starter for anyone serious about relying on open source
| software.
| iruoy wrote:
| It looks like this has been merged 6 days ago.
|
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/2492
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The slur filter is optional. You don't have to use it.
| huimang wrote:
| It is now.
|
| But I see no point in using software that has such disdain
| for downstream users. I'd rather use software that treats me
| like an adult.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| I agree with you, the dev team for Lemmy are hard line
| ideologues and it has hurt their original stated mission to
| take online communities out of the hands of corporations. As
| you noted, all that slur filter stuff was removed from the
| codebase some time ago, they've walked it back a bit, though
| they're still the same people of course. The software works.
|
| If you're interested in a different federating link aggregator
| there's also lotide https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/ which looks
| promising as well, and littr.me/littr.go/brutalinks
| https://sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks/ which is single community
| oriented like HN.
| acdw wrote:
| Just hopping in to say : it's laughable to claim that open
| source projects have "hard-coded" anything. It's literally
| impossible to hard code things when anyone can download the
| source, edit it, compile it and run it on any machine they own
| cocoricamo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_coding
|
| > Hard coding (also hard-coding or hardcoding) is the
| software development practice of embedding data directly into
| the source code of a program or other executable object, as
| opposed to obtaining the data from external sources or
| generating it at runtime.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I've seen a few recent projects hard coding things like this. I
| am not a fan. Not because I want to use the words but rather I
| want to be in control of the instance I am running. UnrealIRCD
| for example has an optional module for word filtering that is
| quite powerful and can be left entirely blank, or use regex to
| replace words, block words or kick someone off. I just prefer
| having flexibility and multiple options. One of the goals of
| open source was to give people freedom of choice.
|
| It's too bad as I really like the idea. I suspect and hope more
| things like this will pop up with recent events. Ultimately it
| is their project and their choice. I think I will stick with
| phpBB [1] as a forum, UnrealIRCD _for the deep dark places_
| [2], uMurmur _for real time text and voice_ and the Mumla app
| _to access uMurmur from my phone_ but that is just my personal
| preference.
|
| [1] - https://www.phpbb.com/
|
| [2] - https://www.unrealircd.org/
|
| [3] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur
| nortonham wrote:
| I just read the link. I don't think your characterization of
| the conversation is fair. Either way, it seems like the people
| behind the project have a CoC about what language is allowed.
| Further, the first response seems pretty reasonable to me from
| both a technical and ethical standpoint.
|
| I would add, lemmy doesn't seem to be about pure free speech,
| or free speech above all else. They've made it clear that slurs
| are not acceptable, and anyone who doesn't agree is free to go
| somewhere else.
| cocoricamo wrote:
| Nah, they definitely overreacted to a reasonable request.
| Different languages, different cultures and different groups
| will have different words they consider as slurs or not
| acceptable.
|
| Then there are edge cases like history forums where they have
| a valid use case for posting transcriptions with words that
| are currently deemed not appropriate.
|
| Their response can drive possible adopters away because they
| could only think in US centric politics.
| nortonham wrote:
| What is US centric about not wanting to allow words that
| are commonly understood in English to be slurs, on a site
| that is predominately English speaking?
|
| Also, why is it wrong to expect non native speakers to
| eventually work out what is and isn't acceptable in day to
| day conversations with native speakers?
| cocoricamo wrote:
| Isn't the idea of Lemmy to run your own instance that
| could be used to host communities that don't speak
| English? In their instances list they have servers that
| speak German, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Euskera,
| French...
|
| Why would some non English speaking person be forced to
| change their language because someone in the USA decided
| that an innocuous word in their language is now a slur?
|
| Also USA is not the only country speaking English and
| some words considered slurs or offensive in the US are
| not in other countries that also speak English.
|
| They did in the end made it configurable and that's good,
| but their initial response is a major turnoff for anyone
| thinking on seriously running the software without
| planning to maintain a fork in the future.
| ufmace wrote:
| > I don't think your characterization of the conversation is
| fair.
|
| You're free to think so. I for one don't care to censor those
| who disagree with me. Note that there's a number of deleted
| comments, and neither of us know what those say.
|
| > anyone who doesn't agree is free to go somewhere else
|
| Fair enough, and I just said above that that's exactly what I
| intend to do.
|
| I think it needs to be remembered here that their project is
| attempting to build a forum hosting tool, not a particular
| forum. If a particular forum intends to censor any slur list
| they choose, I have no issue with that, that's entirely their
| right, and I'll post on it or not. But I feel it's highly
| inappropriate for a team building a hosting tool to impose a
| particular chosen slur list on anyone using their tool to
| host a forum, with no regard to what the purpose or character
| of that forum is intended to be. I shall indeed choose not to
| use such a tool.
| lovich wrote:
| >Note that there's a number of deleted comments, and
| neither of us know what those say
|
| Does that mean you get to just create a narrative?
| Dessalines is the closest in that thread with telling
| people they can use voat or gab if they want to use slurs,
| which at least implies some racism but that other dev
| Nutomic has a pretty inoffensive stance when he says
|
| >If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it,
| we will never fully remove the slur filter.
| Minor49er wrote:
| >Does that mean you get to just create a narrative?
|
| Eh? GP was pretty clear in showing that the developers of
| the project are pro-censorship, not only in hard-coding
| in naive badword filters, but also in how they handle
| responses to requests on their own project
|
| >Dessalines is the closest in that thread with telling
| people they can use voat or gab if they want to use
| slurs, which at least implies some racism
|
| There is no "some" in their statement. They are saying
| that if you have a problem with blanket-filtering
| language, then that means that you _want_ to use words
| that are designated as bad, and that only bad people use
| those words. It 's purely black-and-white. Nobody could
| ever want to use those words in any other context,
| according to them
|
| >that other dev Nutomic has a pretty inoffensive stance
| when he says "If you dont like it, fork it. Stop
| bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the
| slur filter."
|
| On the contrary, saying that anyone who disagrees with
| you is a "bother" is offensive, especially if you flip-
| flop on your position and plug the change in anyways,
| which is what they did
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| cocs are supposed to police the contributors, no?
|
| who will you complain to when _a user_ violates Corey Ehmke
| 's Ten Commandments? the cyber police?
| serf wrote:
| > cocs are supposed to police the contributors, no?
|
| its a generic phrase. I definetly would have thought that
| if I was reading a github page; but not necessarily when I
| have to read a COC for joining a Discord.
|
| Apparently it's getting tough to operate outside of
| everyone's random (usually poorly written) CoC on the net.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| Discord and the other services have ToS/EULA. a legal
| agreement that has actual power, unlike github cocs
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I read the whole thread, and the developers don't come off as
| principled, it feels more like they're just wedded to a
| particular implementation and are grasping at all straws to
| defend it. A singular regular expression as a slur filter is
| pretty terrible by any modern coding standard. I'd avoid the
| project on the grounds that the rest of their code is
| probably just as amateurish.
| serf wrote:
| >I just read the link. I don't think your characterization of
| the conversation is fair.
|
| "If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we
| will never fully remove the slur filter."
|
| "stop bothering us about it" is , in my experience, a huge
| red-flag to run into while perusing issues and commits.
|
| a 'code of conduct' that dictates all use cases for software
| for the forever-future is a cute concept -- but 1) it has
| never worked, and 2) it's basically untenable in the open-
| source environment.
|
| If the software IS workable, it WILL be forked, and your
| power-from-on-high to force behaviour on people crumbles. If
| the goal really is to force your political/ethical position
| on people who use your software it's probably better to do so
| more transparently so as to not scare the herd into another
| avenue of control from another actor.
|
| As with any software _tool_ in my preferred catalog of tools
| I prefer one that doesn 't foist it's own methods and
| standards onto me; furthermore I prefer my tools don't foist
| their politics and societal standards onto me. I don't think
| that's the purpose of a tool.
|
| >I would add, lemmy doesn't seem to be about pure free
| speech, or free speech above all else.
|
| that moral absolutism doesn't need to exist within software.
| We know that hard-coded lists of restrictions hidden deep
| within software are a _Bad Thing_ for a long variety of
| actual technical reasons -- there is nothing stopping the
| developers of Lemmy from shipping a filter-list that reflects
| their values right along side their software; the choice
| towards inflexibility and zero-tolerance just makes the
| software less reliable, less maintainable, more opinionated,
| and less popular.
| nortonham wrote:
| well if people maintain/own a project, and say no to a
| request multiple times, eventually they will just say,
| please stop bothering us.
|
| In regards to the technical side, the original linked
| github issue was resolved. See:
|
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://join-
| lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/configuration....
| rjknight wrote:
| Their principles are fine. It's just that hard-coding a list
| of English-language bad words, then matching on them in an
| extremely naive way, is not an excellent way of manifesting
| those principles in code.
|
| The Scunthorpe Problem[1] has been known for over 25 years.
| Plenty of people have names that incorporate a word that, on
| its own, would be a slur. Many English-language slurs are
| also words with entirely different meanings in other
| languages. Naively regex-matching all incoming text to see if
| it contains any of a hard-coded list of words means that
| you're going to get a lot of false positives, which the
| instance administrators can do nothing to prevent. Meanwhile,
| you are requiring only the level of creativity of an
| unremarkable eight-year-old on behalf of those who wish to
| evade the filter by creatively mis-spelling something. This
| is all very very obvious to anyone who has ever worked on
| content filtering, and not much less obvious to someone who
| hasn't and just sits thinking for five minutes or so.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
| Mezzie wrote:
| Also there are genuine reasons to want to be able to type
| out slurs that aren't racist.
|
| I have an interest in linguistics (complete with degree -
| so I'm not just saying that to be racist), and discussing
| something like 'how the use of ethnic slurs has changed
| over time in English speaking countries' or how the
| euphemism treadmill functions with regard to insults would
| be impossible with this filter in place. Similar as to how
| a hard coded 'no swears' would make it hard to discuss
| English infixes since the most obvious infix is 'fuck'.
|
| Which is the exact kind of niche, pedantic, really nerdy
| small group discussion that is a good match for this.
| nortonham wrote:
| >Many English-language slurs are also words with entirely
| different meanings in other languages.
|
| Possibly. But looking at lemmy, it seems like most
| interaction is in English. As such, it seems reasonable to
| expect people to make a good faith effort to learn what
| isn't acceptable on a mostly english language website.
|
| >It's just that hard-coding a list of English-language bad
| words, then matching on them in an extremely naive way, is
| not an excellent way of manifesting those principles in
| code.
|
| I imagine there are better ways to do it, but this goes
| back to who owns the instance, and what type of community
| do they want to foster.
|
| More to the point, the github issue originally linked was
| resolved (to the extent it can be) by having user created
| filters.
|
| https://join-
| lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/configuration....
|
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1481
| [deleted]
| pbreit wrote:
| Sounds a bit like NetNews/NNTP/Usenet? I've been wanting to try
| to get a Usenet server set up but it's difficult to find
| solutions. Are there ANY modern implementations?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The dlang forum which has a web interface is also an nntp
| server. You can download every single thread and post. Its on
| github too.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Basically a new front-end to Lemmy, a federated Reddit clone
| started last year. More interesting than being a fork or entirely
| new project because, as article explains towards the end, it
| showcases how Lemmy can be used as platform to develop federated
| apps.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| I just wanted to correct you, development didn't start last
| year, it has been ongoing for several years.
|
| Source: I was marginally involved in the project early on,
| before political ideology got in the way.
| hnaccy wrote:
| what political ideology got in the way
| alexb_ wrote:
| Read the About page.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| The developers are avowed hard line Marxists, and they did
| not want contributors who did not toe the line on that.
| workethics wrote:
| It should be noted that this isn't an exaggeration. For a
| long time they actually had in the sidebar on lemmy.ml
| that it was the main Marxist instance. I'd link an
| archive but the site's design makes every one I can find
| pull the new info.
| alexb_ wrote:
| I mean is this really a reason to not use something? Just
| because you don't agree with the views of the people
| running it?
| workethics wrote:
| I never said you shouldn't? I was only backing up the
| other commentor's claim since many people might think
| he's being hyperbolic rather than them overtly spelling
| it out on their site.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Well it depends, right. If their views are just their
| views then no, not really. But if they outright tell
| people they want nothing to do with them unless they
| think exactly alike, yeah, why would you want to
| contribute to that? When I say they're Marxists, I mean
| they're not shy in saying what they think of you if
| you're not one. These are not weekend "what Mao did was
| wrong" socialists man, they don't want to hang around you
| either.
| cocoricamo wrote:
| Not at all but is a very strong reason not to
| collaborate.
|
| Can't work with someone who is radicalized, they tend to
| take criticism as attacks and will attack back, sometimes
| preemptively if they get paranoid and start seeing
| ghosts.
|
| In those cases only use it if you can maintain it and
| fork it. Because you can't trust that someone with so
| extreme political views will not remove the software
| because they don't agree with whatever downstream group
| using it.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| True. First commit was Feb 10, 2019.
| geek_at wrote:
| > before political ideology got in the way
|
| you mean the guy who uses che guevara as profile picture on
| github has some strong political views?
| cocoricamo wrote:
| Not only one but two. The first dude has Che Guevara and
| the other one Fidel Castro.
|
| I bet they'd be all riled up if someone used Mussolini or
| Franco as their profile picture.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Fidel Castro, but yeah. And that's him watering it down for
| the public.
| neoneye2 wrote:
| github link: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
|
| Looks great.
| samstave wrote:
| >>* uses about 70 MB of RAM *
|
| Hilarious that like every fucking google chrome tab uses like 1
| gig of ram PER TAB!
| [deleted]
| sliken wrote:
| Heh, that's far from my experience.
|
| I've got 80 tabs open, many terminals, thunderbird (with
| several large inboxes) and my system has 32GB ram, only 9.4G is
| used.
|
| Maybe you mean 1GB of virtual memory (mostly shared libraries)
| and which are shared across all tab.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I wonder if most of that is due to the zillion plugins people
| install for their browser.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| It's unclear to be from a quick glance - can I host this with
| SQLite instead of Postgres? Forums are by definition read heavy
| workflows, and I imagine you would have to get insane traffic
| before SQLite became limiting.
| geek_at wrote:
| the content itself is heavily relying on reads but every view
| event and many other things like logins, clicks and link
| follows need writes
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| It's not Facebook. No need to track every pixel that a mouse
| covered.
| synxsynxsynx wrote:
| striking wrote:
| > Edit: This comment was written at a time when Lemmy the
| software was practically identical with the lemmy.ml instance.
| At that time we barely had any moderation tools, so it was an
| easy way to keep some groups of users off the instance. Now its
| different, there are good mod tools, and many different
| instances. So we removed the slur filter in Lemmy 0.14.0
| (instance admins can optionally configure one, which lemmy.ml
| does).
|
| The comment was edited Nov 2021 to include this new context.
| MadcapJake wrote:
| Uh, right in the link you gave, they indicate the filter has
| been removed and is now just set up on their own instance.
| [deleted]
| nabakin wrote:
| You should read your own link
|
| > we removed the slur filter in Lemmy 0.14.0
| slivanes wrote:
| Obviously there isn't a filter here...
| stoplying1 wrote:
| I love that the CSS is basically identical. I'm very curious to
| see if this takes off. It feels like this has been missing for a
| while.
|
| I really wanted to see something like this for Matrix but despite
| seeing some functional prototypes, it doesn't seem like anyone
| stuck with it...
| tln wrote:
| Why does it say phpBB on the upper left?
|
| Looks like a cool concept. The last topic on the federated link
| on the Flagship instance for lemmyBB,
|
| https://fedibb.ml/viewforum?f=3#:~:text=LemmyBB%20on%20Lemmy...
|
| ...is just a dead link. I'd like to see how the federated aspect
| works as a user.
| dmix wrote:
| Link works fine for me
| tln wrote:
| Sorry, wording unclear. The last link on the page seems to be
| an example of "federation". But the link breaks
|
| In context:
|
| https://fedibb.ml/viewforum?f=3#:~:text=LemmyBB%20on%20Lemmy.
| ..
|
| Link that breaks:
|
| https://fedibb.ml/viewtopic?t=6
| input_sh wrote:
| I'm able to open it and I believe I found an answer to your
| question:
|
| > This instance runs Lemmy as backend, so it can federate with
| Lemmy, and all other compatible software. But for now, nothing
| is actually federating. You can enter a community or post url
| in the search field to fetch some remote objects and interact
| with them.
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(page generated 2022-11-02 23:00 UTC)