The Lounge is a great IRC webclient with built-in bouncer functionality.

Seconding The Lounge. It’s a great self-hosted option.

I actually do not understand the widespread hostility that people have toward this kind of thing. I watch a lot of content on YouTube, and I don’t want to see ads, so I pay for premium. I watch a lot of content on Twitch, and I don’t want to see ads, so I pay for turbo. Hosting a major video streaming website isn’t cheap. It’s not like these things are unreasonably priced. If you hate the ads so much, then why not pay for the service that the platform is offering you, and for the content that creators are providing on it? And if you don’t watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?

I currently have Kubuntu on my most-used Linux machine but, since a friend recommended it to me, I’ve been considering hopping to KDE Neon when I have some time to learn a new distro. (I’ve tried GNOME and I don’t really care for it, but KDE Plasma fits like a glove.) I’m not extremely experienced with desktop Linux, so I’d love to hear about others’ experiences with either distro and how they might compare.

Does the gmail SMTP server have a limit on how many emails can be sent per day?

I think it does, yes. The kinsta.com link says the limit is 500 per day. If you’re expecting a higher volume than that, or if the unpredictability of relying on a free Google service for anything is not acceptable, then you would probably want to pay for an inbox service.

But if you’re running a small instance and just need the occasional email to go through without a lot of effort or fees, then it ought to be fine.

It’s all good, thank you for the reply. I hope you’re right. But new registrations do not actually appear to be closed for lemmy.ml at the moment, it’s just that newly registered accounts require admin approval.

If email isn’t working, then you’ll have to turn off email verification in your instance’s settings before anyone is able to log in without encountering that spinner.

To get email to work, you’ll need to provide SMTP credentials in lemmy.hjson on the server you’re using to host lemmy. An example SMTP configuration is shown in the docs here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/configuration.html

When I set up lemmy on my server with lemmy-ansible, the config file was initially set up with a valid-looking SMTP config. But when emails weren’t working I looked more closely, and it turned out that there is something broken with the SMTP service that lemmy is integrated with by default. It seems that you will need to provide your own credentials.

I’m using an SMTP service provided by a web hosting service I pay for, but you can also use gmail in a pinch: https://kinsta.com/blog/gmail-smtp-server/

Why can’t a messaging app just send messages? Why does it have to include a social network?!

Silicon Valley corporations don’t know the meaning of a stable business model. Infinite growth or bust, only they always seem to find their way around to bust.

Op is obviously trying to create drama which is being shared on Reddit to discourage people from joining Lemmy ( not lemmy.ml the instance). Any new user who would spend a bit of time would figure out that there are many instances to all tastes, if not they could create their own instance.

Honestly, it was my hope to avoid greater drama in the future. I am concerned that there will be a much larger problem down the line if people join lemmy.ml in large numbers due to events on reddit, and only come to understand afterwards what rules they have agreed to by registering their account there. If the rules are not communicated clearly ahead of time, then I think this is likely to make a lot of people very upset, and this could seriously damage the reputation and adoption of lemmy as a whole.

This is why I have attempted to clarify by commenting where others shared a link to my post in /r/lemmy, that this is only about lemmy.ml specifically as opposed to the entire network and, at least where I stand, only about a need to communicate its rules more clearly.

There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.

What about “Remarks that moderators find inappropriate” is not clear? :p

Do you honestly have to ask? Most people will not interpret this as including orientalism.

What is the purpose of having rules if you do not communicate to people the rules that they are expected to follow?

If you try to clearly state all rules, you will just end up with a huge wall of text that no-one reads other than some trolls that try to intentionally walk up right to the border of that is “legal” and test your patience as a moderator.

There was a clearly stated reason for these removals, but it is a reason that does not appear either in lemmy.ml’s rules list nor on the page that you listed.

There were additional moderator actions citing the same “orientalism” reason that occurred while I was writing the post:

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

It is my opinion that this is a significant rule to leave unstated.

I don’t see any downside at all if it’s layered on top of some other (very capable) keyboard-driven UI that can do all the same things.

The downside is that no existing tech company has enough self-control to actually keep these kinds of recordings private.

Rust is a really cool language, but all this drama has been very off-putting. I sincerely hope the team gets their shit together and learns from this.

Agreed. Rust the language seems like a good tool, but I am very discouraged from getting invested in it when at least half of anything I end up hearing about Rust is some kind of new drama or in-fighting among the people who oversee the language and its community.

Shit happens, I know, but with Rust it feels like the frequency and magnitude is way out of proportion to other dev-centered communities. I am not involved, and I do not want to be, but from the outside it often appears like many of the people who are in positions of leadership are more concerned with posturing and politics and exercising whatever power is afforded to them than they are with the actual programming language and the well-being of its community.

So there was a mix-up with a speaker. So then the organization responsible should make it right, and announce that there was miscommunication and that it will be handled differently in the future. If it happened because someone was acting unprofessionally, then handle that internally and separately. It is ridiculous that one mishandled invitation is spiraling into a public mess of personal attacks and 4,000-word blog posts.

I promise I understand what I’m talking about, building for scale on a global level is what I do for a living. I also know something about open source projects, having co-founded Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and serving as its Director of Operations.

I’m not calling into question your qualifications. I do think you have misunderstood how lemmy works.

The lemmy.ml website could go dark tomorrow, completely offline, and lemmy would continue to exist and the software would continue to need maintenance and optimization. Those GitHub issues are for improvements that will help everyone, not only people using lemmy.ml specifically.

If you persuade lemmy.ml’s admins to deploy a load balancer and whatever else, that doesn’t help me. It doesn’t help anyone who’s hosting an instance that isn’t lemmy.ml, which is most of them. It’s arguable whether it even helps the admins and users of lemmy.ml itself, since half the point of federation is to not funnel users into one massive canonical instance that everyone is using. But if you write documentation or share automation tools that guide anyone on making their other federated instances more scalable, or if you contribute to lemmy’s source code to make improvements there, then that helps everyone. It improves lemmy the federated network as opposed to improving only the single inconsequential instance that is lemmy.ml.

Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can’t log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.

You’re not wrong, but I don’t think anyone is actually trying to enforce this for small-scale things like personal websites or lemmy instances.

any good imgur alternatives? I know they’re doing similar shenanigans to reddit to prep for IPO

My understanding of the imgur situation is that you should actually be fine for now, provided that you’re signed into an account when you upload, and not using it for explicit content.

…Though I hope you have an account that you already registered some time ago, before they started requiring a phone number, if you didn’t want to share your phone with them.

That’s not how this works. Lemmy itself may be open source, but the instance it runs on is not. All the work in work in the world on the Lemmy codebase won’t mean anything if its actual deployment is not built for scale, and that’s not anything anyone but the admins can do anything about.

That’s not how this works.

Lemmy doesn’t run on an instance. It runs on everyone’s instances. If lemmy should be deployed differently, then the first thing that would be needed is documentation and automated tools that make it easier for everyone to deploy their instances that way. You might be using lemmy.ml, but I’m not!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, I sure never heard that one before

For what it’s worth, I have offered my expertise to the admins around networking, security, scale, and automation.

It’s open source. That’s what’s great about it, the pro that beats out all those cons. You don’t have to offer anything to anyone, you can just start contributing.

It seems like if a user gets banned on their own instance, they show up on this list for everyone (I also see them on my ban list here), so unbanning them on your end probably does nothing.

Seems like just a bug, I think this list should only show local users who are banned, and instead it shows every ban it knows about across the fediverse.

I mean, the users have remained unbanned, at least as far as my own instance’s settings go. The list is empty since I unbanned each user after a look at their seemingly benign history. But I guess that if they are banned on the instance they registered on, then they probably aren’t able to interact with any federated instances in any case?