Y'all are nuts! It hasn't even been a week since I raised the call for fundraising and we already have it done!

It was sitting at 99% all morning, so I kept refreshing every 10 minutes to post this!

Great success!

As promised, I plan to send the overflow to lemmy development once I open the next goal. I'll let you all know!

Thanks to the work of @RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com we now have a new personalized theme for this instance.

The theme is open sourced and lives in this repo. We're planning to add more themes soon and hopefully a few other cool features like user flairs. If you want to assist improving them, feel free to send PRs or ideas.

The theme is based on the work of @pkrasicki@lemmy.world

If you don't like the default theme, you can always switch to the standard ones in your user settings

I started this lemmy instance to ensure that pirates, anarchists and neurodivergents would find a friendly port in the storm of enshittification engulfing the internet right now.

Reddit (and Digg before it) has always been my favorite way to interact on the web, secondary only to Google Reader (RIP). Likewise, I moved away from Digg when it started shooting its foot with gusto and now it's time to do the same for Reddit. This instance ensures I won't have to move again!

I however didn't expect the amount of people who would follow me, so in the past 2 weeks since I've opened this instance, I've had to upgrade twice to keep up with the demand, and hopefully this latest one should last us a while.

This means that my cost planning is way off. I had to buy into a professional SMTP service, get a dedicated box, etc. All this is starting to become a significant personal cost I need to cover. I said before that I'm not in this to make money, I just have a particular set of skills and ideologies which allow me to both run a lemmy instance and also make it friendly to the particular people who need it as their base jump into the fediverse.

So I plan to follow the same playbook as I mentioned before. I just want to cover the infrastructure costs of running and maintaining this instance and the rest is going to go to Lemmy development itself, to help make the software even better and prevent any accusations of profiteering.

The link of this post goes to the Ko-fi goal I've set up. Once this goal is bypassed, any overflow will be sent to the lemmy development once a new goal is opened for the next period. Or if you prefer, just send to them directly when you see the goal being full.

I am very happy for everyone who decided to follow me on this journey and very excited at the quality of people joining and interacting with this community. Your application answers are a delight, so keep on amusing us admins with your creativity and keep posting the awesome stuff you do!

One last thing, Lemmy is not my main project (but significantly eating into it). If you're into Generative AI and want to share your idle GPU compute, do check out the AI Horde; the only crowdsourced cluster for Generative AI!

Always remember: Sharing is Caring!

I've been reading up on this FediPact stuff, and I'm curious: will the Divisions by zero instance be defederating Meta when they launch their new app that's supposed to be Fediverse compatible? I checked the Anti-Meta FediPact list, but couldn't find @db0 listed on there. I did read on a different post that the creator of the FediPact list has been blocking some people from signing it for whatever reason, so I'm not sure if that's what happened here.

For instance say I post a guide on how to do something related to piracy...should I be concerned that my IP is being logged? I understand if it is logged it is most likely saved on the instance server I'm posting on. What I'm asking is if I should be constantly using a VPN while browsing or posting on instances?

Hey everyone, you may have noticed that some of us have been raising alarms about the amount of spam accounts being created on insufficiently protected instances.

As I wanted to get ahead of this before we're shoulders deep in spam, I developed a small service which can be used to parse the Lemmy Fediverse Observer and retrieve instances which are suspicious enough to block.

The Overseer provides fully documented REST API which you can use to retrieve the instances in 3 different formats. One with all the info, one with just the names, and one as a csv you can copy-paste into your defederation setting. You can even adjust the level of suspicion you want to have.

Not only that, I also developed a python script which you can edit and run and it will automatically update your defederation list. You can set that baby to run on a daily schedule and it will take care that any new suspicious instances are also caught and any servers that cleared up their spam accounts will be recovered.

I plan to improve this service further. Feel free to send me ideas and PRs.

When you post or comment in some of the bigger communities like Piracy or ADHD Memes it might appear as if your post is hanging.

This is misleading! The comment or post still goes through after a second or two, but the UI is buggy at the moment. You can leave it "spinning" for a while and hope it returns, or just reload the page.

Literally the only community missing from reddit. I and many other unix users need to share screenshots or else we'll die from ligma.

Hey y'all I wanted to make something clear. While the lemmy.dbzer0.com allows anyone to create community because I feel there's a lot of creativity to be found by giving people this freedom, I also don't want a sea of flotsam in our communities list.

So while I'm not going to shut down community creation, I am planning to start curating the available communities a bit more from now on.

What it means for you is that if you plan to create a community, I expect you to actually have a plan to grow it. Not just register the name so that you squat on it and hope other join so that you end up the top mod other users built-up.

Practically this means that we expect to see some activity on those communities, a sidebar that explains what it's about, reasonable names and titles etc. Please also do the effort of adding a banner and an Icon. I've developed a free Generative AI art tool you can use even!

Communities which we perceive to be abandoned or squatting will be summarily purged. My plan for now is to purge empty communities within 1 week after giving a warning. I haven't decided how to deal with communities which have posts and subscribers yet, but if it's inactive long enough and the amount of posts is trivially small, I'll probably start purging those within a month. I do not think I'll purge communities with significant amount of posts and subscribers however.

I also plan to post a report about purged communities when we do so, so that people are aware.

Thanks for reading. Let's try to keep the quality of the divisions by zero sufficiently high.

EDIT/UPDATE: Recent versions of lemmy make this even easier by allowing turning the !instance format into a relative link to your instance. For example !div0@lemmy.dbzer0.com. However when you do this, don't use the auto-fill option which turns it into a markdown link, as that will break this functionality.

When you link to another community on lemmy with a absolute link like so Div/0 this links to that community directly from that instance's domain. This means users who follow that link from other instances, will not be able to comment or subscribe. They will have to go back and edit their URL manually to workaround this.

If you instead link to a community using a relative link like so Div/0 it will lead them to the community using their own instance as a mediator, allowing them to interact with it naturally.

The source for the above relative link is like this [Div/0](/c/div0@lemmy.dbzer0.com). So basically just add only the /c/... part and ensure your instance's domain is at the end

Quick post to answer some basic usage questions that can throw off new users.

Where should I register?

The age old question of fediverse. The answer is pick an instance that is not right-wing and you should be fine.

https://join-lemmy.org/instances makes this very easy. Once you find an instance, just go to its /signup endpoint. For the instance you're reading right now, it would be: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/signup. Another great option is to use the lemmyverse which provides a lot more info about potential instances and communities, including a trust score.

Do I need to create a profile for each instance?

No! Each instance can access each other instance, unless it's been defederated because its admins are toxic (this is why I told you not to join right-wing instances earlier).

I joined an instance, but the community I am interested in is in a different instance

No problem. Simply add the instance domain at the end of the url endpoint.

For example, say you're in lemmy.ml and you realized that stable_diffusion is in lemmy.dbzer0.com. To access it, simply add @lemmy.dbzer0.com at the end of the url after the community name. So:

https://lemmy.ml/c/stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Or to put it differently, you can access any community, in any instance by adding /c/ (The requivalet of reddit /r/) and then community_name@instance.domain

If this doesn't work, then it's likely this instance is not yet federated with yours. To solve this, you need to search for it. See the next section.

But how do I even find the community I want to if it exists in any of hundreds of instances?

One option is to use the lemmyverse, as it's very user friendly, if you specify which instance if your home, it will automatically convert all links to your own instance.

Alternatively use the use the built-in search.

Note that if you search for an community in an lemmy instance your own instance doesn't yet know about, it won't find it. You need to give it more precice instructions to find it, which require the whole "address". To follow our example above, you would put [!stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com](/c/stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com) in your search field.

When searching for a community in a new instance, it might take a few minutes to take effect. The first search will not return anything, but if you search again after a couple of minutes, it should appear.

How do I find my community from reddit?

https://sub.rehab allows you to search for any subreddit and see if its official community exists in the threadiverse. You can then search for it specifically to subscribe. If you've already registered an account somewhere, make sure you visit the settings in sub.rehab and set your home instance there, so that all links go through it.

Community? Instance?

An instance is a lemmy server hosted by someone. it has its own set of users and communities. lemmy.dbzer0.com is an instance. You can access (almost) every instance from any other instance.

a community is like a subreddit in reddit, or a channel in discord. It's a topic in inside an instance. stable_diffusion is a community inside the instance lemmy.dbzer0.com.

In more plain terms, consider a lemmy instance like a street, and a community like a number on that street. When you write [!stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com](/c/stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com) you are giving the exact address and number to search for.

I keep seeing the same posts

In you're in a smaller instance and you've subscribed to communities in other places, you might have set up your default visibility to not show them.

Switch your view to Subscribed/Hot to get a similar view like the reddit frontpage.

Switch to All/Hot to get a similar view to reddit /r/all

You can store this setting permanently as default in your user settings

Tips and PSA

• Protip: Use instance or relative links
• Upload images on your text posts
• Use Firefox' bookmark keywords to navigate quickly to a community
• Protip: Use the instance switcher script

Also see

• Lemmy.world starting guide

This is a lemmy instance. It is meant to be focused on the projects I created, the communities I run and the interests I have.

Something outside of corporate control, run on FOSS and indexable.

Say hello