Hello guys! New here. I’m coming in peace from a friendly polish instance - fedit.pl. Actually I was contacted by Alice (I believe?) on one of subreddits, had a very nice chat and figured that this instance has to be quite cool. A question for starters - you are not federated - why? If you don’t want to federate with all that crap out there, you can just put a few friendly instances on your whitelist in admin options (assuming they also have only friendly whitelisted instances).
Hey, welcome!
We’re not federated because it’s just too much drama and not enough reward. There are too many instances, many of them inactive, lots of people uploading sketchy shit which federates across, it’s impossible to keep tabs on everything and lots of resources go into hosting that bloat which nobody here would care about. Fediverse politics are also cancer and every shitty admin thinks they’re important somehow.
We just wanted a chill place to talk about shit and have fun.
I’m not opposed to federating selectively, with your instance for example. I mostly care about knowing that you actively admin it and I don’t have to worry about dodgy content making its way across here - if that’s the case and you’re keen, let me know.
Absolutely, I agree. Rn I’m federated (with a long blacklist of instances from fediseer), but honestly I don’t have enough people on board that it makes any difference. I’m in the process of figuring out how to attract users. I managed to plug in fedi-safety which has the ability to run through all images in db to search for adult content and as well it can do i in real time during posting, but in this case it demands that your PC with GPU is constantly running which is not very convenient. But it’s there in case I suddenly needed to use it.
My instance is 4 weeks old and I’ve been spending quite some time on it on a daily basis. I think it could actually be better to have a whitelist of trusted instances than having to constantly be on alert because some new instance is not on your blacklist. For sure, we could do that. We just whitelist each other. You probably won’t download content from my site, cause it’s all in polish and for the most part I want it to stay that way, but polish people know english pretty well and like to participate in discussion in english from what I see on reddit.
Have you checked other niche instances that could possible also be a part of such an “alliance”? I was only a few times on those big instances and there is too much bs there for me tbh.
From what I can observe Fediseer can have false positives. exploding-heads.com is blocked on there and we here are the “descendants” of this instance.
How does it work? What do you mean by descendants?
Well, the admin of EH closed down the instance because of all the blocking he got from the other instances. We moved first to another platform called nostr, but since the community there is Bitcoin ciclejerk we decided to get back on lemmy. HC is basically the community of EH
Attracting new users is really hard, @Alice has been doing most of that here and she’s put in so much effort into it, it’s crazy. It’s catch 22, you don’t have enough users for new people to feel like the place is fun, so they don’t join, which means you don’t get enough users for the place to be fun in the first place.
I’m not running fedi-safety, mostly because it spits out a lot of false positives and we’re pretty small and tight-knit, without federation I don’t feel like I need to. I have turned off fetching images from 3rd party sites too, so there is no local caching of federated shit for example, not that we’re federated to begin with.
I’ve added fedit.pl to our whitelist, so you’ll be able to interact with our stuff now. We technically had federation turned on so you could probably already see our content, but not interact with it without being on the whitelist.
The thought has crossed my mind to selectively federate with interesting instances, I think it’s a good idea, when I get a bit of time I might look into that, maybe we can compare notes.
Just realized I hadn’t hit save, it’s added now.
Is this definitely retrieving content? I see Fediwersum@fedit.pl in the list of new communities and it says there are 4 posts but when I click on the community there’s nothing there.
Yeah, I see them:
https://hilariouschaos.com/c/fediwersum@fedit.pl
What does it look like for you?
For both posts and comments nothing.
That is bizzare, I’ve tried it through a VPN etc, I see no problem with it.
Try clearing your browser cache?
Yeah this is weird, it works in a private window. It might be because I have so much locked down. Not your problem anyway.
Hmmm Let me see too
I see posts I posted on it as well but I’m using jerboah
" I have turned off fetching images from 3rd party sites too" - You mean that external links don’t come with images? Only text? Where is that option available?
Great, thanks. I also added yours to mine, but cannot search any community. Can you check if your instance finds any of mine? For example https://fedit.pl/c/fediwersum@fedit.pl
Yeah, attracting users is painful. I actually did that with reddit api and private messages but reddit found out and i’m on their blacklist. I’m pretty sure they put a filter on messages with name of my instance. I can see my message sent, but I don’t see it in receiver. Basically shadowremoving messages. I’m taking every possible privacy measure (vpn, tor, new account) but it’s not working. It’s wild. I would now have to use some enigma shit to safely write them. Name of my instance is totally burnt on reddit. Had I knew reddit is so crazy about this I would have acted more carefully from the beginning. These messages can work, but you have to be careful.
Other than that, posting here and there on other social media, and creating original content. Don’t really see any other options.
Man. So I freaking copied and pasted an invite message and blasted it to a bunch of people on Reddit on my OTHER account, and they Banned that account for spamming for 3 days.
Can’t do that anymore.
So I invite ppl from my main account. People who are a perfect fit. But I screen shot the post or comment I found them on on reddit to give him reference, and I personalize each message.
Nothing complicated. I just word it differently or add some information. To differentiate all my invite messages. Closing with, “if you’re not interested just ignore the message and have a good day”
And I haven’t had an issue. So that’s crazy you’re having to deal with that.
You can also direct message invite polish people from other lemmy instances I’m sure ppl would be interested. I just personally would use that account only for inviting privately, don’t upvote, down vote, or comment on any posts.
Admins Are children. You might not have my experience, but they delete every comment where I suggest joining our Instance. Like immediately too lol
You can also post about your instance on reddit in the lemmy sub. But don’t post your url. State in the post to private message you for the url address.
Also lurk the reddit alternative sub for good matches
Great advices thanks! So you need to be organic, not look like a bot. Obviously, but on the other hand it takes time unfortunately.
Yea I know I understand. They don’t have to be long.
Just pretend like you’re inviting them somewhere cool because you think you their cool for X reason. Like you’re hitting up a friend to join you at a concert.
It’s now a config setting in lemmy.hjson , under the pictrs block:
cache_external_link_previews: falseIt does work, but this is the correct URL for it to fetch it: https://fedit.pl/c/fediwersum
That’s fucked up, yeah Reddit goes hard on snuffing that out, not sure how Alice pulled it off but I think she got in some trouble too. Finding content people is really hard, we’re very lucky to have a few here, Alice herself being quite prolific.
Thank you I try ! I want a big family here lol
🙌 you and me both!
Yay ! 🙌
Are you sure you have federation turned on?
ok it works now.
This guy is right
We should probably form alliances and do some minimal federation
Or we may die.
I’m open to it, do you have any instance suggestions?
donky.social 😉
Woohooo ! Yes ! Definitely a must
Sadly, I don’t.
I post a lot here (at least for me it is a lot) and I just do not spend time in tracking down new stuff.
All good! We’ve got a decent starter list, you can try using the search to find external communities that you’d like to see content from.
I hope the main result of this will also be that you will get more engagement on the things you do post.