Lemmy.ca's Main Community

Hi all!

I've been thinking lately of following more Lemmy.ca communities where possible in order to help foster growth and community with Canadian fediverse users. I used to have a lemmy.ca account, but have since swapped to PieFed's software and have been finding it to be a much better match for me and my personal usecase.

I was just curious if there was a cooking community hosted on the Lemmy.ca instance. In going to the site myself and doing a quick search on the communities page, I was unable to find such a community. If there is one, I was hoping to be pointed in the right direction, as I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance, and Elbows up!

Sorry everyone I know how much you love the attention she gives you, but I've implemented some quick and dirty filtering for private messaging.

We now have the ability to automatically mark PM's as deleted or read, depending on content inside of them. If we accidentally filter something you legitimately wanted (ie, not Nicole) please let me know.

If any other instances would like to implement this, here's the code. Note that you'll need to set your hostname at the top here for some reason I haven't exactly identified.

SET lemmy.protocol_and_hostname = 'https://lemmy.ca/';

CREATE TABLE private_message_filters (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    phrase TEXT NOT NULL,
    behavior VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL CHECK (behavior IN ('delete', 'mark_read'))
);

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION filter_private_messages()
RETURNS trigger AS $$
DECLARE
    banned_phrase_record private_message_filters%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN
    FOR banned_phrase_record IN 
        SELECT * FROM private_message_filters
    LOOP
        IF LOWER(TRIM(NEW.content)) ILIKE '%' || LOWER(TRIM(banned_phrase_record.phrase)) || '%' THEN
            IF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'delete' THEN
                NEW.deleted := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            ELSIF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'mark_read' THEN
                NEW.read := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            END IF;
        END IF;
    END LOOP;
    RETURN NEW;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages
AFTER INSERT ON private_message
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE FUNCTION filter_private_messages();

To add filter words:

insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('delete', 'spamtestdelete');
insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('mark_read', 'spamtestread');

If you want to quickly disable / enable filtering while testing:

ALTER TABLE private_message DISABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;
ALTER TABLE private_message ENABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;

I'll leave it up to you to figure out what phrases to filter on. MAKE SURE YOU TEST. If there's an error, private messaging could break completely. You should not get an error message from the UI while sending a message with a banned word.

In the past few weeks the [email protected] community has grown quite a bit. The growth has mostly consisted of news and (geo)political posts, which is understandable.

However, this makes it hard to follow any text threads like these or non-news/political posts. This leaves the only option of either blocking the [email protected] community completely, or having to use a mobile app with keyword filtering (I'm not aware of any on desktop, and keyword filters do not sync between devices yet).

I'd suggest changing/updating the rules of [email protected] to note to users to post their political (and geopolitical?) news threads in [email protected] instead. Alternatively, split geopolitical with (world) news into a separate lemmy.ca (world)news community like with [email protected]? This split community would have a rule that all posts would need to link to a news site or equivalent. Text & image posts would remain at [email protected].

This would make it a lot easier to find text posts, general discussion threads, and image posts without them being drowned out by the news and (geo)political news threads.

One can look to [email protected] and note how that community makes it clear in the rules that politics, (world) news, and geopolitics have to be posted into the Australian politics/(world) news communities. This makes the main Australia community much easier to browse and scroll through without going insane.

Sorry for the downtime! Unfortunately our secondary firewall took over for some reason, and haproxy failed to properly come up.

I'll be scheduling a maintenance window in the next few days to do some further digging, so I can make sure this is fully resolved.

I was wondering if there was really a good reason for CloudFlare to be used? I understand Lemmy.ca has dedicated hardware in a datacenter. Seems odd to pipe all our data through a US company as we are in a trade war.

Does Lemmy.ca/fedecan.ca also own pixedlfed.ca?

If so, can someone answer if it's possible to have a private account that does NOT federate your data?

The more people use Fedecan services, the more Fedecan will attract bots.

Which means Fedecan will have to do something for users to prove that they are human. When I joined, you guys had a registration prompt with manual review, but I imagine the prompts you gave could be automatically bypassed by an LLM fairly easily.

The naive solution is to do something like collecting government IDs like Facebook tried at one point. But that'll just drive people away who don't trust Fedecan with that info.

What would be your thoughts (admin thoughts, and community thoughts) to implement some 'proof of unique personhood' process with something like Canada Post Identity+? Basically, Canada Post verifies that users are human and is responsible for taking care of PII, and Fedecan just trusts Canada Post to not let the same user register multiple times. If done well, I think 'Canada Post proves that every user account on this site is a unique human' could be a real selling point for lemmy.ca and pixelfed.ca

Full disclosure, I heard about it in a Reddit thread of people complaining about bugs in it while they try to vote in the Liberal party election. But I bet this is just early adopter bugs, and the Liberal party clearly trusts it with their leadership elections.

Regardless, I think proof of unique personhood is a problem Fedecan will have to solve, and a solution through something as Canadian as the post office just seems more elegant than having the Fedecan admins reinvent the wheel.

I realize you guys (admins) are probably quite busy with IRL work and the Pixelfed launch, so if there was interest in this but no admin capacity to investigate further, I could volunteer to reach out to Canada Post and see what they could offer for non-profit use, including what it would cost Fedecan.

Thoughts?

EDIT: for people concerned about "but then CSIS knows which account is mine", an anonymous credential system like U-Prove could be used to prove "1 lemmy.ca user = 1 unique real person", while cryptographically guaranteeing it is impossible to link any particular lemmy.ca user to any particular human identity.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/39752087, from the [email protected] community

TOTAL USERS is the number of users that registered on pixelfed.ca

TOTAL POSTS is the number of posts from all instances that are now accessible on pixelfed.ca

I was just taking a peek at the various frontends supported by lemmy.ca, and I was wondering if the admins here have any insight into their respective use?

I'm going to bet the default (lemmy-ui) is most popular, but do any of the other frontends get far-and-away more use than the other alternatives? Has there been any trends up or down? Just thought I'd ask.

As an aside, if any of the frontend developers happen across this post, well done to all of you! I can immediately see the appeal of each, so each niche is being filled darn well!

Edit: to be clear, I'm talking about the frontends listed on the lemmy.ca main sidebar.

After moving in to our new server last month, our next large project is to set up some new Fediverse platforms. One of the most requested of those was Pixelfed, which is an image sharing platform.

You should be able to sign up here: pixelfed.ca

As with any new instance, some issues are to be expected and while we've done some testing already, please bear with us as things get going. For any support related issues with pixelfed.ca, please post in the new [email protected] community

I've been posting the link to lemmy.ca wherever I can, like over at YouTube for instance... and I wanted to make sure that's ok before finding out it's not for some reason.

So, is that ok?

Do you provide donation receipts so that the donor may use it for tax credits in Canada?

Couldnt find any mention of tax receipts on fedecan.ca

Sorry about the brief downtime there!

Wasn't related to the new users or high load, but was a combination of two problems:

1. Our fw02 took over for some reason TBD
2. Opnsense isn't keeping haproxy configs in sync and fw02 had a broken config

Still digging into the root cause, but shouldn't be any more issues =)

Hexbear lost their domain (It's currently up for auction), and have moved to chapo.chat

Pretty sure we're defederated from hexbear, thought id pass on the new name to be re-defederated if it hasn't been already.

Just a heads up that we're now running on lemmy 0.19.9.

Change log here - https://lemmy.ca/post/38913840

Sorry about the ~20 minutes of downtime there!

I was working on migrating the lemmy.ca domain out of a personal cloudflare account, into a shared one for Fedecan. Missed one little setting that took me far too long to track down!

I can't be the only reddit migrant who often instinctually goes to a given community by typing /r/community, only to be 404d. If the /r/ path isn't being used for anything else, is it possible to have it dynamically redirect to /c/ instead?

I was going to post this in /c/Canada, but figured I'd post it here first since we'd need someone to officially represent Lemmy.ca/Fedecan to make it happen and organize a sort of group-pledge from the lemmy.ca community.

They have tiers for a $500 Gold Sponsor, $1000 Diamond Sponsor, and $2500 Platinum Sponsor to get a logo on their website sponsor page. I figured aiming for $500 is reasonable.

Unfortunately the pictrs database migration yesterday seems to have skipped migrating a ton of data.

Since cloudflare is caching our images, almost nobody noticed. We've now been running on the new instance for over a day, collecting new images into a new incomplete db. Fun.

I now have two copies of pictrs running, one with the postgres db and one with the legacy sled-db. Requests that fail against our updated one, will be retried against the legacy one. This should result in all images working properly again for now, while I figure out a better long term solution.

Please let me know if you still see any issues with images loading!

I'm curious if anyone here actually finds value in the reddit posts brought over by lemmit.online, since I'd like to defederate from it otherwise.

It feels actively harmful to lemmy, since so many of the posts it brings over are questions that the original poster will never see. It encourages a conversation that will never happen, so if someone does reply they're going to feel disengaged.

The bot rarely gets any upvotes or engagement, and I suspect a majority of people (like myself) have just blocked it. TBH I forgot it existed until Tesseract showed me its posts again.

Hi everyone!

Tesseract is now available as an alternative front end at https://tess.lemmy.ca/

Hello everyone!

I'll be taking the site down for two maintenance windows this week to complete our server migration.

• Weds Jan 29th - 09:00 - 11:00 PT (12:00 - 14:00 ET)
• Thurs Jan 30th - 09:00 - 11:00 PT (12:00 - 14:00 ET)

During the first window I'll be migrating us from OVH to our new dedicated hardware. After this migration there will likely be some temporarily broken images, as it takes approximately 8 hours to resync our object storage from OVH.

This is a major change and despite my testing, may have some unintended side effects. If you run into any problems that aren't just a broken image, please let us know.

The second maintenance window is to migrate our pict-rs database from it's local sled-db into our primary postgres DB. This is a much smaller change but since pict-rs checks every image as it goes through them, it takes about 1.5 hours.

As usual, you can check https://status.lemmy.ca/ for updates.