Added :) I also disabled the “Create Post” button if the community is on a defederated instance even though, technically, you can still post to your instance’s local copy (it just won’t federate).

You mean like if there’s a community called !cats@example.com and your home instance no longer federates with the instance example.com?

If so, I’ll add that to Tesseract as it sounds useful.

I disabled local thumbnail generation almost a year ago, and things mostly work the same.

Instead of a local thumbnail image URL for things like news articles that get posted, it will be the direct URL value from the og:image metadata from the source. Usually those load fine, but sometimes they don’t due to CORS settings on their side. Probably only 1-2% of posts have issues, though.

For image posts that come in via federation, (memes, pics, etc), the thumbnail image URL is the same as the post URL. In other words, you’re loading the full res version in the feed. Since I use a web client that has “card view”, this actually works out better, visually. YMMV whether that’s a drawback for you.

The only pitfall is that you will lose thumbnails for image posts if an instance goes offline or shuts down.

I’m sure that does increase load slightly on other instances, but no more than if the remote instance had image proxying turned on. And the full-res version always has to load from the remote instance (even if you have local thumbnail generation enabled). All in all, I’d say the additional load is acceptable given the benefits of disabling local thumbnail generation.

To mitigate that, in my case anyway, I have my own image proxy/cache in place. My default UI is Tesseract and it’s configured with the image proxy/cache on by default… (I think I saw that Photon is also working on something similar). In this configuration, the first person to scroll past a remote image fetches it directly (via the proxy/cache) and it’s now available locally in the cache for everyone else (unless they’re connecting with a different client that doesn’t use Tesseract’s proxy). Granted, I shutdown my instance last year and it’s just now a private testbed for development, but when I did have daily active users (plural), the proxy cache helped.

Now the only images my instance stores are ones that are uploaded locally.

Why did I disable local thumbnails?

• I closed up my instance and didn’t want potentially problematic thumbnails being generated while I wasn’t actively modding it
• Generated thumbnails go in, but they don’t go out. There’s no way to clean them up later other than the ephemerally generated ones (if someone requests a version in a custom size, for example)
• Increasing storage costs. Like, I’d be scrolling the feed and see some of the dumbest shitposts while constantly thinking “Ugh, this is costing me money to store a copy”.

Ran into a hiccup while trying to reproduce (there seems to be considerable lag between adding a domain to the filter list and the federation processes handling it), but now that I was able to reproduce it successfully, I made a bug report: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6320

Granted, I don’t think the instance level URL filters were meant to be used for the domains of other instances like I was doing here. They’re more for blocking spam domains, etc.

e.g. I also have those spam sites you see in c/News every so often in that block list (e.g. dvdfab [dot] cn, digital-escape-tools [dot] phi [dot] vercel [dot] app, etc) , so I never see/report them because they’re rejected immediately.

During one of the many, many spam storms here, it was desired by admins for those filters to stop anything that matched them from federating-in instead of just changing the text to removed on the frontend. So it is a good feature to have. Just maybe applied too widely.

Though I think if a user edited their own description to include a widely-blocked URL (no URLs are blocked by default), they’d just be soft-banning themselves from everywhere that has that domain blocked.

If a malicious community mod edited their communities’ descriptions to a include a widely-blocked URL, then yeah, that could cut off new posts coming in to any instance that has that domain blocked (old posts and the community itself would still be available).

All of those would require instances to have certain URLs blocked. The list of blocked URLs for an instance is publicly available from the info in getSite API call, so it wouldn’t be hard to game if someone really wanted to. Fortunately, most people are too busy gaming the “delete account” feature right now 🙄.

The person who cross-posted it was probably definitely from your local instance.

You only ever interact with your local instance’s copy of any community, even remote ones. If the community is to a remote instance that is either offline or since de-federated, there’s nothing that prohibits you from interacting with it*. Because lemm.ee is no longer there to federate out the post/comments to any of the community’s subscribers, only people local to your instance will see it.

*Admins can remove the community and, prior to it going offline, mods can lock it. But if an instance just disappears, you can still locally interact with any of its communities on your instance; the content just won’t federate outside your instance.

I haven’t looked. Just noticed it earlier today and haven’t had time.

Lol. I guess now I gotta decide which is more annoying: Not having content from c/Books or having to deal with unwanted spillover from .ml. I don’t have the chutzpah to ask the mods to change the community description lol

Just figured this might catch other people off guard like it did me. I never would have expected the community description to be evaluated for the URL filter (only posts/comments).

I haven’t been to Odysee for a good while, but is it still Rumble-lite?

I only learned of Odysee because I saw a video linked to it here and went directly to the video. When I saw it had embed code, I added support in Tesseract UI so the videos would play from the post. Then I went to the main site and saw the front page full of rightwing nutjob rants and vaccine skepticism and was like “nope”. Had I saw that beforehand, I wouldn’t have added embed support, but the work was already done so I left it in. That’s basically why I refuse to add embed support for Rumble.

Wondering if ownership/leadership/policies have changed since about 2 years ago when I wrote the embed components for it and last interacted with it.

So what if Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, and NodeBB made it so that only the first matching community gets the post?

Not sure about the others, but doesn’t Lemmy do that already (only applies the first matching community)? I’ve been out of the loop for several months, so maybe it changed, but I thought it already did that?

Just defederated from usagi [dot] reisen just in case federation starts working on that end.

Web app, specifically, or any apps?

I’m also familiar with these three (web) apps:

• Alexandrite: https://alexandrite.app/
• Mlmym (Old Reddit Lookalike): Not sure if there’s an “open” instance of it, but several instances offer it. See https://old.lemmy.world/ for an example (not sure if SJW offers Mlmym or not).
• Voyager: https://vger.app/

Might also also check out https://lemmyapps.com/ which has a good list that you can filter by platform/feature.

It does, but I’m talking more about scheduled posts. Many instances require those to be tagged as bots.

Maybe dubvee? That’s kind of the exact vibe we’re fostering.

Site info: https://dubvee.org/site

I’m looking for a instance with…

• the fewest trolls (they’re site-banned upon discovery)
• [the fewest] bots (see rule 2: “No fscking bots”). Some bots are allowed, but only ones that are just a human queuing up things to post on a schedule.
• and anyone that likes to take things to the extremes (See Rule 8)

Cons are that a lot of accounts are banned (rule 8) and we don’t federate with some instances: .ml, grad, hexbear, lemdroid (too much spam originates there). We’re kind-of the opposite of lemm.ee in a lot of ways, so it might be a bit jarring if that’s where you’re coming from.

Yep, known issue: https://feddit.org/post/13613230

I’m still putting that together, but it’s basically something like:

UPDATE post set url = thumbnail_url where thumbnail_url like 'https://dubvee.org/pictrs/image/%' and url like 'https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/%'

For the Kbin users to clear out their avatar/banners, I just did:

UPDATE person set avatar=NULL, banner=NULL where instance_id=(select id from instance where domain='kbin.run')

UPDATE community set icon=NULL, banner=NULL where instance_id=(select id from instance where domain='kbin.run')

…and will update that for lemm.ee

I’m working on a Bun/NodeJS script to download the avatars, icons, and banners for all the lemm.ee users/communities, upload them to my pictrs, and then update the DB with the new values referencing the local images.

Prob gonna have to break that up into two steps so I can download and file the images before lemm.ee goes down and upload/assign them after (so they’re not overwritten by federation).

Not sure if I’m gonna do that for comment / post body images. Basically, I just want the archived communities to look nice.

Depending on how the admin has pict-rs (the “subsystem” it uses for media) configured, post images can create local copies /thumbnails for image posts. Some instances opt to do that, some don’t.

Other images like ones posted a comments, user/community avatars/banners aren’t stored anywhere except their home instance.

But yeah, even the limited caching has proven problematic if questionable/illegal content gets posted.

I’m gonna run some scripts on my instance’s database to look for posts that have lemm.ee pict-rs URLs and local thumbnails. Then update the url value to that of the local thumbnail_url. That’ll at least fix them on my instance where I have a copy.

I won’t be doing that until after lemm.ee shuts down, otherwise the original values will federate back in if there’s any activity on the posts.

For comment images or ones where my instance didn’t create a thumbnail, they’ll just have to be broken I guess - same goes for the community icons, though I suppose I could go ahead and get local versions of those and update the communities afterward. Prob also set those to “Mods only” in the database to keep local users from trying to post there.

For user avatars, I’ll probably just clear those in the database so when looking back at old content from .ee, it won’t try to fetch them and timeout/404.

There were less posts to worry about then, but for community icons and user avatars, that’s the same thing I did when kbin shut down.

That’s pretty much it.

Every instance that was subscribed to those communities will retain their local copy of the posts/comments and remain visible. You can even still comment on them, but only users on your instance will see them (i.e. without the home instance for the community being online, they won’t federate beyond your local instance).

The only hiccup is image posts. Different instances have different configs for creating local thumbnails of images, and community icons/banners aren’t cached, so it’ll mostly be text-only copies of the content.

And any comments or posts to other communities by .ee users that have images hosted on.ee will be broken.

Sorry, I had to meme this thread: