Hi, we've noticed some server instabilities around 9:20AM (Eastern Time) this morning and it seems our hosting provider had some issues, which lasted for about 40 minutes.

We also took the time to reboot the server after the event just to make sure we're not running into other issues down the road, sorry for the downtime everyone.

Recently I was asked if we'd be willing to reconsider federation with Hexbear, followed by CARCOSA reaching out to me to see if it was something we'd be open to.

They made a post asking if their community was interested in refederating with us, similarly I'd like the opinion of our local users.

Why refederate?

Hexbear has a decent number of sizable active communities:

• https://hexbear.net/c/games
• https://hexbear.net/c/technology
• https://hexbear.net/c/movies
• https://hexbear.net/c/food
• https://hexbear.net/c/vegan

These all seem fairly well moderated, giving us access to more diverse posts and viewpoints. A lot of our feed right now is dominated by US centric communities, and it'd be nice to get some more variety.

Why not?

They love trolling and I don't expect them to follow our rules when commenting (primarily "be civil").

Just looking at their thread about us, there's a significant number of immature replies slandering us / Canada. I'm not confident their users will engage in actual discussion in our threads, rather than just showing up to throw out insults and memes.

We can try to handle this by banning users / blocking specific communities, but that's going to increase moderation workload for both admins and mods. Hexbear is self admittedly quick to ban users on their side, but they also don't mind ban evasion - not ideal for us.

So what's next?

This is where we solicit your opinions, how does our community feel?

Edit: Well, it looks like the community is overwhelmingly against refederation. Decision made, thanks everyone for your feedback!

Currently the instance is the source of unmoderated trolls, and the instance admin seems unwilling to take action despite multiple reports sent.

We're therefore taking the action of defederating. We'd rather work with the instance admin to keep those trolls in check and minimize the disruption before taking a drastic action like this.

For transparency purpose, you can see which instances we are defederating from by accessing the https://lemmy.ca/instances page and going to the Blocked instances section.

We recently crossed the first anniversary for many of us on Lemmy and the Fediverse, and we are thrilled to announce an important milestone: we have started a new registered not-for-profit organization! The organization is registered as ‘Federated Open Communications Canada’, and we will go by 'Fedecan' in our day-to-day operations.

Over the past few months, we have been working behind the scenes on the necessary paperwork, bylaws, and other administrative tasks to get the organization rolling. Thanks to the invaluable feedback from our previous check-in, we decided to take the leap and register federally, which will allow us to operate across Canada more easily. For more details, you can check out the FAQs on our new website.

Resuming Donations

With this important step completed, we are now ready to resume accepting donations. We have set up several donation options to accommodate different preferences on convenience and fees. Our first priority is to reimburse those who have been covering server and other costs, and to set up regular financial updates. We are open to adding more donation options, so please let us know if there is an option you prefer.

• Donation Page: (fedecan.ca/donate)

• Alternate Donation page without embedded elements: (fedecan.ca/donate-private)

Our current costs

• Server hosting - $150/month
• Domains registrations - $50/year
• Non profit requirements - $500 one time

Our Next Steps:

• Reimburse individuals who have covered server and operational costs and to set up more regular financial updates
• Collaboratively creating guides and learning resources about Lemmy and the Fediverse (ex. how things work, data/privacy details, and best practices for moderating or running instances, etc.) + translations
• Exploring other platforms to run. Some that are on our radar include Sublinks, Pixelfed, and Matrix
• Developing logos, colours, and other branding details based on ideas from the community

What we want to know:

• Do you have any questions, comments, or concerns? This will also help us expand our FAQs
• Which other platforms would you like us to explore?
• Do you prefer any other donation method?

We want to help build a better online experience for everyone, and that requires an organization with a strong foundation. This should be the first step in that process.

Thank you for everything so far, and we look forward to seeing you around! 🥳

The Fedecan Team

Thank you to everyone that participated, it was fun :)

Link to the location:

https://canvas.fediverse.events/#x=-54&y=-185&zoom=11

LINK: https://canvas.fediverse.events/

Feel free to use this thread to discuss ideas and otherwise coordinate.

---

What is it?

You can sign in with almost any Fediverse account (ex. your lemmy account, mastodon account, etc.). Afterwards, you will be able to place a pixel every 30 seconds or so. By working together, people make (and break) different designs.

You shouldn't need to give away your login information to authenticate. For me, the system asked for my instance and username, then sent me a message with the verification code.

---

Timeline: 72 hours

• Opens on July 12th, 2024 @ 4am UTC
• Closes on July 15th 2024 @ 4am UTC

---

What should we do?

I don't think we have any templates yet, so you're open to suggest a Canada wide design, or smaller specific ones. In the meantime, just have fun :)

You can see what other people are up to here: https://programming.dev/post/16720673

You can see last year's design here: https://toast.ooo/post/288913

You can use this post as well, but it might be helpful to have everything in one place:

https://lemmy.ca/post/24637498

Hi everyone,

We'll be undergoing maintenance on Saturday morning from about 11am - noon PST.

We've been having some stability issues over the past few days that I've tracked down to database performance, so I'll be doing some tuning and also applying all our needed system updates at the same time.

Cheers!

Update: This is all done now!

Happy Canada Day everyone.

Related to the outage that happened last night, we rebooted the Lemmy services but we're still trying to figure out the root cause, which seems to point to an out of memory issue in the logs. However it's not what we see in our monitoring console.

In the meantime, we will monitor the service more closely until we are confident the issue is resolved, and we will improve our tools to detect such a problem faster.

EDIT: Also happened at night on July 2nd, still trying to find the root cause..

Apologies for the extended downtime.

It may be a few hours till things are up, please bear with us in the meantime.

See status here: https://status.lemmy.ca/

It looks like the alternative frontends are (partially) working:

• https://old.lemmy.ca/
• https://photon.lemmy.ca/
• https://alex.lemmy.ca

---

Also happy Canada Day!

Back when I joined lemmy.ca, the front page was full of bicycles, city/province-specific community posts, and others like woodworking This morning, four or five of the front page posts were making fun of some crazy bikini lady(?). I read their “read this first” post and understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, but is there a way to get our default front page to be a bit more…friendly and community-oriented?

Sorry for the brief bits of downtime here and there, I snuck in a quick upgrade of us to the latest lemmy 0.19.4 now that a few bugs have been patched out.

More details here! https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-07_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.4_-_Image_Proxying_and_Federation_improvements

The sole moderator doesn't even follow their own rules: https://lemmy.ca/post/22741340?scrollToComments=true

I'll just say it - it's a Russian propaganda community. Is there any reason this community needs to exist on Lemmy.ca? Is there a rule against blatant astroturfing / propaganda / misinformation? I don't think the 5 rules in the sidebar are going to be enough to stop an army of trolls:

No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, > or xenophobia. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here. No porn. Use the NSFW tag when needed. No Ads / Spamming. Bot accounts need to be flagged as such in their settings.

Maybe time to get ahead of it?

I'm in the process of upgrading us to the latest 0.19.4 release.

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-07_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.4_-_Image_Proxying_and_Federation_improvements

You might see some brief downtime during the next hour or so, pictrs is currently upgrading its database.

Edit: Holding off on lemmy as Blaze was nice enough to flag some new bugs - https://lemmy.ca/comment/9660430

Edit: Pictrs upgrading taking longer than expected after the migration crashed, hopefully wrapped up soon!

Finally Done! We're all ready for the new lemmy version now, maybe once a patch release comes out.

I have just noticed a new community that is dedicated to harrassing an influencer they don't like. They are migrating here after being banned from Reddit.

I don't see anything in the rules that this might run afoul of, but I wanted to make a post and ask if this is content we really want on lemmy.ca? The same influencer who got them kicked from reddit could come after lemmy.ca.

The community is !thebirdspapaya_snark@lemmy.ca

Hello,

I noticed that I cannot see some posts or comments from this account on this instance. Some of which are my own posts/comments. These are not posts/comments that have been removed nor does it have to do with bans or blocks.

My own posts/comments for which I receive replies, I will see them in the "messages" section and will be able to access them from there. The posts in communities will be displayed, but comments will show as unable to view

If I log in using an account form another instance, like sh.itjust.works for example. I can see all the missing posts and comments normally.

Here's an example of a post that I made in the Montreal community. I doesn't appear when using my lemmy.ca account, but will appear when using my sh.itjust.works account.

Community: !montreal@lemmy.ca

Post: REV Saint-Denis | Une entrave dans une portion névralgique indigne les cyclistes

Is there a problem with this instance?

I hope Galen is getting the message.

Is it possible to place permanent info on newly created and existing communities?

Specifically just two small items:

• date stamp of when a community was created
• stamp of who created the community

I think it is helpful to permanently place a date stamp on when a community was created. It's also helpful to note who initially created or established a newly created community.

Just these two pieces of information let's everyone know immediately if a community is a long time well established base ... or if it is just a newly created alternate community that people are jumping on because of new developments. Sometimes communities are organically created because of real interest and they grow over time. Other communities appear suddenly when events are happening, like the Gaza war, middle eastern conflicts, or popular topics where there are many opposing sides.

I like being able to verify and check on instances and communities wherever I go now. Every time I see something new, especially when it comes to politics and news, I do a bit of extra work to verify the information and check who created it, when, where and why.

As of now, every new community just appears with very little information other than what is written by the community creator, or creators. There are some metrics on users but its a guesstimate as to when the community was started (there is no start date). And there is a listing for the current Mod (but no indication of who created the community).

The Mod log gives some information but again it is all info that is posted and generated by the creators and existing mods.

Creating and establishing a 'date created' and 'created by' permanent stamp on communities would give them more legitimacy and accountability to everyone that reads content on them. This info is also very important when events are unfolding and people are actively debating with one another in different communities.

Hi everyone, we're currently working on the non-profit applications. This post is to check in, get feedback, and get some future planning done.

---

Give feedback on potential names

Before the main application goes out, we need to apply for and reserve a name. After going through the responses of the previous post, we have picked out a few potential names. If there are some names on this list that you particularly prefer or oppose, please share your thoughts below.

• Federated Comms Canada (FCC)
• Federated Open Comms Canada (FOCC)
• Canadian Federated Platforms (CFP)
• Open Comms Canada (OCC)
• Canadian Federated Comms (CFC)
• Canadian Communities Online (CCO)
• Online Federation Canada (OFC)
• Canadian Open Federation (COF)
• Canadian Federated Agora (CFA)
• Northern Federated Open Forum (NFOF)

.

If you have any other ideas, (such as variants of the names above) you can share those too. The specific requirements are as follows:

Societies must have their name approved and confirm that it doesn't conflict with a name already being used by a corporation. This makes sure that the public is not confused or misled by a society's name. Find out how to choose the right name.

This page is a great resource for thinking of names: Request approval for a business name | Gov BC

---

Join the non-profit team

We are currently looking at what roles need to be filled. Everyone is welcome (and encouraged) to apply if interested, even if you don't have experience in the areas listed:

• Administrative: Organization development, project management, legal experience, financial experience, etc.

.

While the non-profit application is being prepared, we will only onboard a few people. Afterwards we will do call-outs for more people, including those with backgrounds in other areas (ex. technical background, community engagement, visuals, grants, etc.) depending on what we will be working on.

To apply, please fill out this form. You can also message admin@lemmy.ca by filling out the following template:

1. What skills, experiences, or areas of expertise do you want to highlight?

2. Is there a specific area that you want to help with?

3. How much time are you able to commit to the non-profit on a weekly / monthly basis?

4. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for the non-profit that you would like to share?

5. Is there anything else about yourself that you think we should know?

Cheers 🍁

Hey friends from the other side of the pond! I hope I'm not spamming your community, please redirect me if it's inappropriate.

I'd like to invite you to participate in Lemmyvision, a Eurovision-like Song Contest for Lemmy communities around the world ! I'd love for people across Lemmy to participate, and I hope it will bring people together through our diverse taste of music, so join us if you'd like to discover new music and culture from around the world!

TLDR

• From right now and until April 1st, discuss with your country's community on Lemmy about a song that released in your country, to send and share to the Fediverse.
• On April 1st, voting will begin, where you will rank your favourite songs. Any song not submitted by this date will not be featured.
• On April 8th, results of everyone's favourite songs will be published.

There's a lot of info I posted on this post and the dedicated community on !lemmyvision@jlai.lu, stop by if you have any question, this will be the community for updates and results, make sure to subscribe if you'd like to stay in the loop.

I'm not sure if the Québécois would like to send their own song, I can make an exception to that, but otherwise it's up to y'all to self organize, eh?

Thanks for your time, hope to see you there! ❤ 🇨🇦

I am seeing subscribed communities on my feed here that I have been subscribed to ever since I first joined Lemmy. The only thing is I have not seen them on any other instance. Any idea why that is?

Hello everyone!

I'm going to be taking the server down on Sunday to apply system updates, as well as migrate us to running across multiple lemmy containers.

Currently we do a nightly restart of lemmy / lemmy-ui at 2am resulting in a 2-3 minute outage (visible on our status page). This change will make those restarts transparent so I stop getting alerts on my phone.

I'm current planning on starting this at 11am PST on Sunday Feb 18th and will probably take about 30 mins.

Edit: All done! We've upgraded to postgres 16 as well.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out the census! This was an exciting year, and for a lot of users it was their first year on lemmy.ca (and the fediverse in general).

For this census, the questions were more open ended, and it ended up being much harder to do data cleaning and analysis. However, it worked well as the first census because it gave us insight into what we might want to do differently in the future.

Some images may be hard to read, so please open them in a new tab to see them in full size.

---

The turnout was good, with 531 total responses in the 1 week that the census was open. That made up around 8% of the ~6500 total users on lemmy.ca, which feels like a nice sample size for some fun analysis.

To start off, here is a chart of the responses over time:

This one is pretty self explanatory, so moving on to the actual results!

---

---

Section 1: Where is everyone?

Question 1.1: Where are you from?

This question was broken down into a few parts.

Most users (~87%) are from Canada:

Next we can see which province and territories are represented (sorted by the number of responses):

If we compare to the population of Canada, this instance is somewhat consistent with the population distribution with some exceptions (if someone does a proper comparison, please share it! ). We have users from every province and territory, with the exception of Northwest Territories. The NWT community does have subscribers, so hopefully by next year we should have a response from there as well.

Next we can see where the users from the rest of the world are from (sorted by the number of responses):

Thanks for spending time on lemmy.ca everyone!

---

Question 1.2: How big is your community?

A handful of users (13) entered "suburban" as a custom response, so that could be something to add in the future:

However, what's interesting is that our results are very similar to the proportions reported by Statistics Canada for the 2021 Canadian census. We had 82.8% urban, 14.7% rural, and 2.4% other, while the 2021 Canadian census reported ~82.15% urban and ~17.8% rural (source).

---

Question 1.3: In your opinion, what is the quality of your internet connection?

To help those that don't have excellent internet, you can do small things like reducing the size of images before uploading them.

---

---

Section 2: Who are you?

Question 2.1: What age range do you fall into?

There was a lot of interest in seeing the results for this question:

We can see a nice curve, with a peak around 30-39. So the average age on Lemmy is likely a bit older than other social media platforms, but there's a good spread nonetheless.

---

Question 2.2: Ethnicity?

This was one of the questions that I couldn't analyze the way I was originally planning to. While allowing for multiple responses and user submissions allowed for more accurate self-identified responses, it made it difficult to visualize the data in a meaningful way. This data deserves a more in depth analysis, but for now I opted to create a word cloud so we could get a sense of what the responses were like.

NOTE: For this question and others that used a word cloud, I used this project to generate the results locally.

See the note at the bottom on potential bias and misleading results.

The command I used for this graphic:

wordcloud_cli --text text.txt --imagefile wordcloud.png --prefer_horizontal 1 --width 720 --margin 10 --height 400 --colormask colormask.jpeg --random_state 5 --relative_scaling 0.4

---

Question 2.3: What is your gender identity?

With this question, we can see that a large proportion of users identify as 'Man' (441), followed by 'Woman' (32), 'Non-Binary' (25), 'Genderfluid' (3), and the remaining responses were custom responses (1).

This is something that could use more analysis and comparison as the instance continues to grow.

---

Question 2.4: Are you someone with trans experience (meaning your gender identity does not align with your sex assigned at birth)?

In case it is hard to see from the graph, the breakdown was 'No' (472 | 93.8%), 'Yes' (28 | 5.3%), and the rest of the responses were custom responses (4 | 0.9%).

You can see Canadian census data for 'Sex at birth and gender' here: https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/census/census-engagement/community-supporter/sex-birth-gender

---

Question 2.5: How do you identify?

Similar to the other question above, this question allowed for multiple responses and user submissions, so it was difficult to visualize the data in a meaningful way.

See the note at the bottom on potential bias and misleading results.

The command I used for this graphic:

wordcloud_cli --text text.txt --imagefile wordcloud.png --prefer_horizontal 1 --width 720 --margin 10 --height 400 --colormask colormask.jpeg --random_state 6 --relative_scaling 0.55

---

Question 2.6: Disability Status (optional)

As this was an optional question with free responses and a small number of responses overall, I opted to manually clean the results and list out details from the responses. Hopefully this is still useful while also respecting the privacy of the respondents.

• "ADHD"
• "anxiety"
• "ASD/autism"
• "AuDHD"
• "bipolar disorder"
• "BPD"
• "colorblind (protanomaly)"
• "depression"
• "difficulty processing information"
• "fibromyalgia"
• "health decline due to age/life experiences"
• "learning disability"
• "neurodivergence"
• "partial deafness"
• "PTSD"
• "sensory issues"
• "struggles with mental health"
• "vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome"

---

Question 2.7: Educational Background

For this question, multiselect really didn't make sense. Some users included everything, and others picked their highest level of education. Instead, I manually cleaned all the results to answer "What is your highest level of education?". Other details that aren't captured in the graph include entries that highlighted that the program was in progress, or that they dropped out. With that in mind, I had to make some choices about how to clean the data, and my choices may not reflect the original intent of the respondents.

Next time should be better, as we can split this into a few questions:

• Highest level of education achieved
• School is in progress?

We could keep the multiselect option since 'highest level of education' doesn't get the full picture. We could also add "CÉGEP diploma", "College diploma", and "Other degree/diploma" as options.

Here are the raw counts for each of the original options:

• No formal education 8
• Secondary School 93
• Trade/Vocational Training 52
• Some College/University (no degree) 120
• Associate Degree 42
• Bachelor's Degree 223
• Master's Degree 55
• Professional Degree (MD, JD, MBA) 10
• Doctorate (PhD) 19

---

Question 2.8: Employment Status

We got a few custom responses, including 'active duty military', 'disability', etc. Those were included in the 'other' category, and we could add those options in the future.

The percentages are as follows:

• Employed Full-time: ~70.8%
• Employed Part-time: ~4.8%
• Self-Employed: ~7.1%
• Unemployed: ~6.7%
• Student: ~6.7%
• Homemaker: ~0.4%
• Retired: ~2.5%
• Other: ~1.0%

---

Question 2.9: Field of Work

This question was... a mess to try and clean and display. I tried to collapse as many similar responses as I could, but it felt like I was making more mistakes than I was fixing:

The command I used for this graphic:

wordcloud_cli --text text.txt --imagefile wordcloud.png --prefer_horizontal 1 --width 720 --margin 10 --height 400 --colormask colormask.jpeg --random_state 150 --relative_scaling 0.35

See the note at the bottom on potential bias and misleading results.

---

---

Section 3: Instance Usage

Question 3.1: Approximately how many lemmy.ca communities do you participate in?

---

Question 3.2: If you moderate any communities on lemmy.ca, how many do you moderate?

This one should be a number entry in the future.

---

Question 3.4: What community do you want to see on lemmy.ca? (optional)

Personal information was cut out and responses were split into multiple lines as appropriate. If I accidentally cut your response or you want to add something now, please comment below!

List of Requests

• amigurumi
• Analog photography
• anything urbanism, climate change, waste reduction/RE use etc related would be nice to have more activity
• Apple
• Birds, lots of birds
• Ottawa
• Author and book promotion help
• Batman
• DC comics
• bicycles
• binge eating disorder
• buildapcsales
• Canadian and local news
• Canadian Deals (software and other)
• Celeste community
• Chess
• Coffee
• Communities focued on discusison of specific video games, especially Paradox games and From The Depths
• fiction-writing and sharing communities
• dota2
• edmonton
• EMS
• Fibromyalgia or chronic illness communities
• Fine arts related
• First Nations-based communities
• French Canadian content
• FrugalCanada
• Furry
• gameboy verification. Those guyz were awesome and hard workers
• gaming sites
• more healthcare communities
• Hockey
• Hockey is a bit dead IMO
• HumansBeingBros
• I think you should leave
• Kamloops local
• knitting and similar things (crafts, etc.)
• Less with more. The main issue with federation is that there are several communities that cover the same topic. So you end up with fractured groups, or you participate in several communities that all have the same posts.
• Literary
• Loseit
• Maple Leafs
• Montreal
• More craft/art based communities
• more diverse communities
• movies
• nicevancouver
• Non-sided political discussion
• nursing
• personal finance canada
• personal finance canada
• plant and mineral identification communities
• poodles
• printsf
• privacy@lemmy.ca
• Quake Champions
• reading and/or viewing clubs, esp. for lesser known gems
• Reptiles!
• rupaulsdragrace (and variations)
• sasswitches
• Sleep apnea
• Snowboarding
• snowboarding
• Something link with cybersecurity and retro gaming
• Stocks
• superstonk
• Survivor
• Thoughtful conversation, although not very balanced currently.
• Unsolved mysteries
• Vancouver
• Vancouver
• Various fantasy literature ones
• villedequebec@lemmy.ca
• Wallpapers or art curation
• Wearable/smart_rings
• What is this thing
• witchesvspatriarchy
• worldnews

While we will also look into these communities, you are free to (and encouraged) to look through this list and get them going 🚀

---

Question 3.5: On average, how much time do you spend on Lemmy each day?

For the 28 people that said ">21 hours", here is a video of a baby sea otter taking a snooze (Joey from Vancouver Aquarium). While we love to have you here, feel free to use this video as you take a break and get some rest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBVT8HWEahM

---

Question 3.6: How do you access Lemmy most often?

In case it is hard to see from the graph, the breakdown was 'Desktop' (68 | 13.0%) and 'Mobile' (457 | 87.0%).

Not listed here were the custom responses:

• 3 submissions for "Tablet"
• 3 submissions for "Both about equally" (worded in different ways)

Both of these could be added as options in the future.

---

Question 3.7: On desktop, which interfaces do you use?

The default interface was the most popular, but each interface was preferred by some number of users.

---

Question 3.8: On mobile, which OS do you use?

Not listed here were:

• 1 submission for "GrapheneOS"
• 1 submission for "Debian"
• 1 submission for "None"

We could clarify these options in the future.

---

Question 3.9: On mobile, which app(s) do you use?

These options were submitted by users, and I included them in the graph: Avelon, Artic, Lemmios, Lemmur, Bean.

Not listed in the graph were:

• 22 submissions for "Web Browser" (worded in different ways)
• 4 submissions for "None"

All of these could be added as options in the future.

There were also comments about the lack of tablet apps, so if you're an app developer, this could be something to take a peek at 👀

---

Question 3.10: If you primarily access lemmy.ca through different Lemmy/Kbin instance, please list it below (optional)

Thanks for stopping by 😊, here is the list:

• beehaw.org (4)
• bookwormstory.social (1)
• lemmy.dbzer0.com (1)
• lemm.ee (2)
• lemmy.ca (1?)
• Lemmy.ml (1)
• lemmy.dnet.social (1)
• lemmy.world (9)
• kbin.social (1)
• sh.itjust.works (3)
• sopuli.xyz (1)
• startrek.website (1)

---

Question 3.11: What other Fediverse services do you use?

This one was sneakily edited to add a "none" option after a few responses came in.

These were custom responses which I added to the graph: Matrix, Owncast, Hubzilla, Diaspora, GNU Social, Funkwhale, GoToSocial, Soapbox, Wordpress, pump.io.

---

Section 4

Question 4.1: First, what's your favourite dessert?

Wow this one took a while to go through.

Here are some responses I collected while cleaning (sorry if I lost yours before thinking to do this):

• Anything that has Reese peanut butter cups/pieces in it. Reese is love. Reese is life.
• brownies although I just had some gingerbread men that were pretty bussin
• hard to say. just made some very tasty eggnog cinnamon rolls though
• Either jello formed from the tears of my enemies, or tiramisu. (No I don't have enemies really, I just thought it just sounded cool.)
• Pie. All of the pies. Except Meringue which is the devil's dessert topping.
• Lemmings
• The Sahara (I always mix these up)
• chocolate-stuffed chocolate topped with chocolate with a side of chocolate paired with hot chocolate

After cleaning the data, and consolidating similar responses into a format that could easily be searched, I can confidently say that the most popular dessert out of 527 entries was...

ICE CREAM 🍦

kind of...

There were 94 entries for different flavours of ice cream, and 97 total entries for other desserts that included ice cream. This doesn't even include the entries for things like gelato, frozen yogurt, etc.

• The most popular type was just ice cream with 54 entries, second to which was mint chocolate chip with 5 entries (with many other flavours having 3-4)

The closest other category was cake, which had 42 entries not including cheesecake, and 96 entries that included the word cake (including cheesecake).

• The most popular type of cake was chocolate cake, with 11 entries.

Another close category was pie, with 85 entries for different kinds of pie (not including similar foods such as tarts, crumbles, etc.)

• The most popular pie entries were pie with 17 entries, apple pie with 15 entries, pumpkin pie with 12 entries (with one specific to the Costco kind), key lime pie with 10 entries, pecan pie with 8 entries, and a few others.

Some other popular desserts/categories included:

• apple category: 25 entries
• brownies: 10 entries
• chocolate category: 55 entries
• cookies: 15 entries
• crème brûlée: 13 entries
• fresh fruit category: 9 entries
• nanaimo bars: 11 entries
• tiramisu: 23 entries

Some unique desserts included: affogato, baklava, beaver tails, blondies, gobi, gajar halwa, mochi, jalebi, knafeh, malassada, mango sticky rice, natas do ceu, pavlova, saskatoon berry pie, pouding chômeur, sachertorte, stroopwafel, vacherin, vermicelles, and vinarterta. (If you think your entry should be here, send me a message 😄)

Even a lot of the joke entries had repeats, with 4 entries along the lines of just desserts, 2 entries for your mom, 2 entries for revenge etc.

Additionally, 19 entries did not select anything, with 8 specifying that they couldn't pick, and 3 specifying that they did not like desserts.

Here is the word cloud (the generator ran into a bug that I couldn't fix where a lot of entries are duplicated, this will be swapped out when I can fix it):

The command I used for this graphic:

wordcloud_cli --text text.txt --imagefile wordcloud.png --prefer_horizontal 1 --width 720 --margin 10 --height 400 --colormask colormask.jpeg --random_state 5 --relative_scaling 0.5

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Question 4.2: Do you have any other feedback for us? (optional)

We recieved so many kind words, thank you so much for taking the time to share them! ❤️❤️❤️

In addition to that, here are some other areas with questions, comments and feedback.

Organization Related

• when we will start accepting donations, and many comments about wanting to donate
• the status of the non-profit registration
• possiblity of setting up as a co-op

Technical

• upgrade to 0.19 was a bit bumpy (but otherwise good)
  • a few comments about not being able to log in since 0.19 (please try logging out and back in, it should fix it)
• The subscribed feed is preferred, as users may not want the experience to be Canada-focused
• (census specific): "None" should be an option as it is different from "skip"
• a few users didn't know about the other frontends, so we could do a better job of promoting them

Communities and Content

• More French content / usage
• looking for more guidance on how to grow the communities and build engagement, and other non-monetary ways to help
• local communities could have more informal discussion, as they are currently mostly news articles

Thank you everyone and stay tuned for the next census! 🎉

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Appendix / Other Notes

POTENTIAL BIAS / MISLEADING RESULTS: Word Clouds

I had trouble with the word size variability, and I used the relative scaling option to try and make the word cloud more useful and representative while still being readable. This is based on my perception of the raw data, and while I did my best to minimize bias, I may have introduced some. If you have any suggestions for how to improve this in future years, please comment below!

People filled out the census with so much care and detail and these sections deserve nice visualizations. Word clouds are not good mediums for conveying information, so please keep all that in mind when looking at these results.

Hey Admins!

Just because it's been a little while since the links were taken down/de-emphasized, I was just wondering if there's been any movement regarding donations or supporting the Lemmy.ca server and staff?