Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Is there a way we can minimize the stickies? It’s a quality of life but would be great to read it once and shrink it so I get to my feed quicker.
I cannot code. 🫤
But it occurs to me that we need a couple of features - although maybe they already exist.
One is the ability to back up a Lemmy account and download the data.
The other is account portability - the ability to move an account from one instance to another.
But I suspect that #2 might be impossible.
I'd be happy to help contribute as best I can. I don't have much Rust experience but I'd like to learn more. One thing I'm noticing: I like that there are a good deal good first issue tags for the backend repo, but only one for the frontend. I'm not sure if there's really that far fewer intro tasks for the frontend or if they're just not tagged as thoroughly.
It’s possible, once they have a good ecosystem of apps plus a lower priced tier (maybe around at macbook air pricing?) However, I can’t imagining it ever shredding the feeling of dystopian-ness of it
Likely need to define some basic rbac controls. They signed up, sure, but don’t receive a “user” role until after approval. Then in the home page, when signed in with no roles assigned, they get a banner saying they’re still pending approval and will not be able to post or comment.
The major concern will be retroactively applying user roles to the existing users.
Off topic but I'm really happy that the developers chose Rust to code Lemmy in. Low maintenance + high performance is the ideal combo for open source server software.
I'd second this. Knowing that the back-end is built on Rust was definitely big part of drove my excitement for this project!
There are hardly any experienced Rust developers. It's going to be a big problem.
It's a very popular language for people to learn (as per the Stack Overflow surveys) which is good for a volunteer project.
Also, being somewhat inexperienced in Rust doesn't stop you from being useful, partially because the compiler will catch a lot of stupid mistakes. I don't think that "years using a language" is a very useful accurate proxy for skill with a language without the context of what else they've done, and your article is just looking at the raw averages.
My dev days are a little while behind me, but I have experience in project management, QA, etc. Happy to help.
Bit of a tangent here, but if you’re ever looking for experience designers to help out here and there, or to just give something a second set of eyes, I might be able to lend a hand or connect y’all with some bright and chill people.
You probably don’t want me making any PRs, but I know my way around Figma and a user test plan.
I'd love to see you redesign some parts of the Lemmy UI!
In my option, a lot of designing work is still to be done so I'd love to see mockups you can make and your thoughts on design work!
If we could end up with a theme that looks a lot more like https://kbin.social, I'd be so happy. My biggest gripe with Lemmy is all of the white space, and none of the current themes improve that at all. All of the theme options offered by kbin look amazing by comparison, and to my understanding Lemmy theming is done via CSS based on Bootstrap v4, so new theme creation should be straightforward enough.
It's to the point where, when visiting Lemmy instances, I use a custom CSS extension to modify a few properties to make it a bit more palatable to me.
If you guys ever need help creating custom themes to offer to users I'd be happy to contribute.
Can you post your user style??
But I would very much support having a more compact theme available without a browser extension. I think some tightening up up would make this place look more welcoming. It feels sort of "empty" due to all the white space.
Hey there, sure, currently I'm using this. The border between comments on a comment thread doesn't look the best, but it makes it easier for me to track comment levels so I like it, though there are certain properties I'd like to change but can't.
Either way, I'm using an extension called Amino to apply my CSS changes on a domain-level.
This fixes a lot of the whitespace and borders to make differentiating between posts and comments a little easier, while minimizing white space. I think it looks nice.
.container-lg {
max-width: 1600px;
}
.col-md-8 {
max-width: 80%;
flex: 0 0 80%;
}
.col-md-4 {
max-width: 20%;
flex: 0 0 20%;
}
.post-listing {
border: 1px solid rgba(34,34,34,.125);
border-color: #c80000;
border-bottom: 0px;
padding-top: 10px;
}
hr {
display: none;
}
.border-top {
border-top: 1px solid rgba(34,34,34,.125)!important;
}
.border-light {
border-color: #e4e4e5!important;
}
thank you I like it! I hate when websites force me to have so much blank space. Like I remember what an improvement it was in 2002 when everyone got into sans serif fonts and padding to their table based layouts and using % widths, but the craft has moved on from those days... For this kind of website I am thinking more of a newspaper and less of a coffee table book.
looks like Amino is only available for chrome and edge. For other ff users I will say I use an addon called Stylus but it might not be the best one; kind of resource hungry on big pages.
Hey so just a heads up, I made a few more changes that I quite like (again, for the red theme, tweak appropriately for the default green theme), so thought I'd just update you.
This changes the main feed quite a bit, adding a bit more of a card-like design to posts, though I have done my best to make sure there isn't too much white-space from this change, I just feel it looks a bit more modern, but again, feel free not to use it :)
It also, and this is my favorite change, changes the title color of any post you've visited, something that I feel is basic but for some reason Lemmy didn't have before. So now any posts you've visited before will be a light-gray color instead. Hope you find some value here.
.container-lg {
max-width: 1600px;
}
.col-md-8 {
max-width: 80%;
flex: 0 0 80%;
}
.col-md-4 {
max-width: 20%;
flex: 0 0 20%;
}
.col-sm-2 {
max-width: 10%;
flex: 0 0 10%;
}
.col-sm-9 {
margin-left: 5px;
max-width: 80%;
flex: 0 0 80%;
}
.post-listing {
border: 1px solid rgba(34,34,34,.125);
/*border-bottom: 0px;*/
border-color: #c80000;
border-radius: 5px;
margin-bottom: 8px;
padding-top: 10px;
background-color: #fff;
transition: all .2s;
box-shadow: 2px 2px 1px #c80000;
}
hr {
display: none;
}
.border-top {
border-top: 1px solid rgba(34,34,34,.125)!important;
}
.border-light {
border-color: #e4e4e5!important;
}
body {
background-color: #ecf0f1;
}
.navbar {
background-color: #fff;
}
.card {
background-color: #fff;
box-shadow: 2px 2px 1px #c80000;
}
.col-12 .card {
box-shadow: none;
}
.comments {
padding-left: 10px;
background-color: #fff;
}
a:visited .d-inline-block {
color:#d6d7d9!important;
}
.my-2 {
margin-bottom: 0px!important;
}
Thank you for sharing! I will try it when i am on desktop.
I actually used your code as base to start to fix some things that bug me the most.. all spacing/positioning the colors are a total mess. So i am interested to see what yours is like. I can tell from looking that yours is more efficient because i do not know what im doing so it is trial and error.
Do you think there is a better place than wherever we are to post? A repo or other code sharing? I think the stylus extension connects to some sort of website but i never investigated it.
Hey so I setup a repo; swap to the default green litely theme, and then test a few of these out, I think they turned out quite well!
https://github.com/HrBingR/Lemmy_CSS/
Please feel free to submit pull requests if you have other colors or ideas you think would look nice. The more the merrier!
I have had hardly any time at the desktop this week! I tried your code and I like it because it generally looks good. I like mine because it uses the full use of space and has strong delineations. I'd like to combine them when I can. Dial down the hideous by about 50%.
Here is my code https://gist.github.com/btyaa/36a1743e7a0ae95b5aa8178722650b9e
I hope I am not disparaging you by giving you credit. I can remove it if you want. I do not feel this deserves to be in a repo at the moment. It is hideous at the front and the back.
The Stylus extension exported it with this @-moz-document and tbh I do not exactly know what that is; it isn't how it shows up when I edit it. I didnt look into it.
Also I apologize for my various bad css habits such as preceding lines with x or other letters to comment them out instead of using comments.
And I use border, outlines, backgrounds to help me locate things. Forgive me I learned CSS before web developer tools, before firebug, and only had intermittent practice since that time. I always fallback to my old ways. Only roughly grok CSS3. Usually I hide these but sometimes i miss. If I would properly share, I'd run a script to remove all the junk.
But if it works easily in your userstyle extension you should try it out. It might hurt your eyes. I make effort to describe what I am doing in comments, because otherwise I get even more lost, but the way it exported isn't great.
Oh also it hides some stuff I am not interested in. So, uh, careful.
I was thinking of creating a Github repo for it, maybe make a few different theme variants as well for people that'd want different than the standard two colors etc. Might take a crack at it, will let you know.
omg did you add drop shadows??? wowwowow i love it
Glad you like it! :)
How do we deploy custom CSS?
So I use the Amino Chrome/Edge extension, which you can use to deploy CSS per-domain, but there should be alternatives available both for Chromium-based browsers and for Firefox.
Nice! I’m pretty new, so let me get a little bit more familiar with the platform, and I’ll craft up some stuff!
Is there a way to follow you here? I'd like to see that. I'm working on being a designer and I'd like to see what others are coming up with.
It doesn’t look like that quite exists yet
That's a shame. But I'm sure it must be pretty close on the roadmap. It's a pretty essential feature.
How does this work with a federation model. Is it possible that there can be lots of different clients with different UX’es?
Fediverse platforms in general are just different UIs for the same content since they all interop to varying degrees. You can subscribe to and interact with Lemmy content from Mastodon, as an example.
Lemmy backend and lemmy ui are separate components. Look up LemmyBB, that for example is an alternative to lemmy-ui.
That's pretty much how mobile apps work, so very likely.
I don't really know Rust at all but it might be a good opportunity to learn. I come from a C# and Python background so I might see if there's anything I can tackle.
as they didn’t write enough in their registration for us to really evaluate if they were a good fit for this instance.
I'm just curious, what do you consider to be "writing enough"? How strict are you with your applications? I'm trying to learn from beehaw for my own instance.
We want them to fit in with our philosophy, so we're looking that they paid attention to our rule, our ethos, and our ambiance. To be clear, we're not making judgements, but if you leave it blank or only talk about federation, we can't be certain that you will vibe with how we moderate and what we're trying to do here.
Hey, sorry to bother you again but I have a follow-up question. Maybe feel free to ping someone else that might be able to answer.
How do you deal with users just signing up somewhere else and then interacting on beehaw anyway? I mean isn't that effectively just circumventing the application process?
Probably most people interacting in our space are doing so through this method. It's something we have always paid attention to. In the long, long run we will likely have to do something about it.
Practically speaking we will likely have less tolerance for users like this who misbehave and we may have less discussions with them and simply ban and remove their content quicker.
In the long, long run we will likely have to do something about it.
Do you have any solutions in mind? I've been trying to think of something but nothing quite feels right.
Maybe having a setting like "Allow federated users to post" that you could disable, and then users from outside the instance can only comment, not post. That would at least cater the discussion somewhat to what the instance wants to talk about. It still feels very restricting though.
We don't have any tools to treat different instances differently except defederating at this time
Cool. Roughly how many % of applications do you deny? I'm starting to wonder if I should be stricter with my applications for the sake of "user quality".
I've found many applications simply fail to answer the questions. I guess this should at least be a minimum requirement.
I think we're approving around half, but I'm not sure if that's kept up today. To share my thoughts on the matter I'm extremely concerned about the possibility of this place moving the direction of echo chambers for a variety of reasons. I'll probably make another philosophy post in the next week or so, but I've been very overextended between this, work, current healthcare issues (I've had 2 surgeries in the last two weeks 😩), stuff for pride month (I'm a leader at my work's pride ERG, moderated a speaker today, speaking for a group next week, gotta help with SF pride, etc), and in general being busy in my social life as well so I haven't really had a ton of time to contribute all my thoughts or put them on paper as I'd like to.
Oh my goodness! Please, please, please look after yourself and your health and wellbeing first and foremost!
It sounds like we're a lot alike, and I burned myself out overextending myself, like you're doing, trying to help others so much for so long...my health issues got worse and now I can't help anyone because I can barely even take care of myself! and it's an awful feeling when previously helping others was my whole thing and reason for living.
This may be unsolicited and TMI, but just wanted to caution you about what could happen. Look after yourself, please! You deserve it! Remember that you can't help and look after others if you don't help and look after yourself. Thank you for everything you've done and are doing already. Hang in there. <3
I greatly appreciate the feedback and I have taken a few steps back this week to ensure I'm not overextending myself. Thank you for looking out for me 🥰💜
Please take care of yourself first!