If I think I’m sick, regardless of what I’m sick with, I try to isolate and mask as much as possible. Nobody wants to get sick from me. For the flu and Covid, I go and get tests to allow me to take the antiviral medications. If I have Covid, I mask for a couple of weeks just to prevent spreading it.
At worst, it's gauche. It's much more likely that the moderator was personally offended by the use of that word than anything else. I have my own pet peeves. I can't stand the sound of someone saying "an historic event" ... but I'm not going to go around banning people over it. All that's going to do is make everyone more and more angry.
This is why we put specific, actionable rules on communities, people!
Regardless of whether or not any of the titles do or do not contain said content, ChatGPT’s varying responses highlight troubling deficiencies of accuracy, analysis, and consistency. A repeat inquiry regarding The Kite Runner, for example, gives contradictory answers. In one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseini’s novel to contain “little to no explicit sexual content.” Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book “does contain a description of a sexual assault.”
On the one hand, the possibility that ChatGPT will hallucinate that an appropriate book is inappropriate is a big problem. But on the other hand, making high-profile mistakes like this keeps the practice in the news and keeps showing how bad it is to ban books, so maybe it has a silver lining.
As a site admin, I really wish it was easier to modify the content on the front page. We've had some interesting ideas over here, like linking to some simple online games and posting high scores for the site, or maybe just adding some analytics boxes to the site. But for us that's difficult.
A lot of our ideas come from a shared experience in BBSes from the 90s, where they had game doors, ascii art, and other fun site-specific elements. Technology has changed, but there are modern equivalents to all of those things that we wish we could implement.
There are several ways to link to a community. If your instance has had someone previously search for the community, then they will all work. If this hasn’t happened (usually because your instance is small or new) then there can be problems with the “shorthand” method that begins with an !. I’ve written a full explanation in this article at the Community Search Tips community. It lists the drawbacks and advantages of each approach that I’m aware of.
This is a great idea! I just added it, but it's tricky. For anyone coming across this who wonders how it's done, here are the steps:
Now there will be a generic accessibility icon on the control center that will toggle the background sounds on and off.
Almost the same thing happened on Reddit when everyone migrated from Digg. It's so similar, in fact, that I wonder if maybe this isn't a normal thing.
It took me a while to figure out that an over-the-counter sleep aid and the Benadryl I would buy for allergy symptoms were, in fact, exactly the same drug, Diphenhydramine, packaged under different names.
If you did this, you would prevent your fellow instance users from subscribing to content they are interested in. That wouldn't be very neighborly.
Going forward, the moderators of Community Search Tips will strongly encourage posts to use the URL of a community when linking to that community. We won't get upset at you for using the other methods; we just feel that the full URL provides the best user experience, especially for users of small instances.
This is a bit of a meta post, but please feel free to comment on it if you like.
There are several ways to link to a community in Lemmy. The two most common you will see are these:
We had previously thought that both methods were interchangeable, but we have since learned of some issues with each.
You have probably already encountered the main drawback with the URL method. When you follow a URL to a Lemmy community, you visit that community at the remote instance. You can still see the content there, but you can't comment, upvote, downvote, or subscribe to the community from this page. To subscribe, you'd have to go back to your home instance and follow the instructions we've laid out here.
You can see an example of that below. Here I've folled the URL to https://math@lemmy.sdf.org, and I cannot subscribe to the community because there is no subscribe button present.
At most you can view the community and its content. You can still return to your instance, search for the community using the same URL, and subscribe to it there.
As inconvenient as the URL Method is, the shorthand method can introduce even worse problems. In Lemmy, a community isn't linked to your instance until at least one user has searched for that community on the search page. This necessary step causes a serious problem when using the shorthand method on a site where that search hasn't happened yet. If you try to follow a link that uses the shorthand method to a community that hasn't been searched for, you will receive an error response.
This is much less of a problem on sites like lemmy.world, where tens of thousands of users have searched for communities already. As you can imagine, however, smaller instances and newer instances haven't necessarily searched for the vast majority of communities out there, making this problem much more pervasive on those instances. To make matters worse, the error page is cryptic and doesn't explain what the problem is or how to solve it.
This site is primarily focused on Lemmy, but other projects in the Fediverse, such as Mastadon, can -- and do -- interact with Lemmy communities. We can't test the shorthand method in all of these products, but we have received reports that it won't work for Mastodon users, and I suspect there are other projects out there that would run into the same problem. (Note that I did test this for kbin, and kbin can follow the shorthand method.)
We feel that the drawbacks of the shorthand notation have more severe consequences for user experience than the inconvenience of using the URL method. Neither approach is perfect, but a community link that leads to an error message completely defeats the purpose of the content in this community. We hope you agree.
We have confidence that the error will eventually get fixed. Until that time, please use the full URL when linking to communities when making posts to Community Search Tips. Thank you!
I'm an admin on lemmy.ninja, a month-old Lemmy instance. Users are required to validate their emails, but the email sent to them to do this always ends up in the spam folder. There's nothing we can do about that. We've found, however, that if the users are told to go get it, they can find the mail and validate just fine.
What's the best way to get this message to users while they're creating their new account? Is there a file we can edit to add instructions about checking their spam folder while they're creating the "create" button?
I'm hoping someone has a creative solution. I know it won't be a 100% fix, but any little bit helps.
It's Friday, so today's Community Spotlight post is brought to you by Cats! No, it's not a community about the awful 2019 movie based on the Broadway Play -- yeah, that one -- with the infamous butthole cut. No, this is a community focused on the core purpose of the internet.
No, not porn.
Cats! Posting cat pictures and cat videos and cat-related content! Glorious glorious cats!
Now, granted: this community is pretty small right now. But if there's one thing I've learned in my years on the internet, it's that cat communities grow exponentially. So get in there and secure your spot as one of the founding members of Cats!
Part of making communities discoverable is making the posts in those communities stand out. If you're an admin, moderator, or even if you're a contributor who wants to draw in subscribers and increase engagement, you should always try to attach an image to any text-only posts you make.
Important note: This post applies to Lemmy 0.18.0. In Lemmy 0.18.1, you will see separate text boxes for the URL and the image of a post.
When you create a post that has a URL, Lemmy will try to grab a picture from the URL's destination to insert into the post thumbnail. But when you create a text-only post, you need to supply that image yourself. Luckily, it's very easy to do.
In the image below, we have a post I'm writing for Lemmy.ninja's Boomer Shooter community. It's about a patch for Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, a first-person boomer shooter game. As is often the case with announcements like this, there isn't a good web page for me to link to. Just an announcement on Twitter (ewww!) and a quick note in Steam. This is the perfect candidate for a text post with a picture!
Start by finding a good image to use for your post. You will need to download this image to your computer so that you can upload it to your post in a later step. For this example, I've selected an image from the news article about the patch. Another good source is an image generated by Stable Diffusion or another AI image generation system. AI-generated images are always different. Using them will give the posts in your community variety when viewed side-by-side.
Try to keep the image somewhat small. Let's say somewhere around 500 x 500 pixels or less. Larger images take longer to load, which can be especially noticeable on overloaded servers. They also take up a relatively large amount of space on the server.
Once you have your image downloaded, it's time to write your post (if you haven't already) and to attach your image to the post. Attaching it is easy:
Note: There's another, identical icon on the Body section. Don't use this one; it's used to upload an image in the body of your text.
When you click upload, the image will be uploaded to the server that the community is hosted on, and you will see the URL field is populated with a path to the image.
Note: You can also supply a URL to a remotely-hosted image in the URL field and get the same result. The bonus is that the image won't be taking up space on your community's Lemmy instance. This will make your administrators very happy.
And that's it! You can now submit your post and the post will contain a nice thumbnail. Users can click on the thumbnail and expand it if they want to see the image at full size.
Let's take a look at the final result!
This looks great! All of the posts in the community have a good variety of eye-catching images. On the All feed, this post will stand out among all the other posts from different communities, hopefully encouraging people to subscribe and participate. It's also a signal to others that the contributors care about the comment of their community!
That looks really good. Which dashboard software is it?
I don't know how much future frustration you just saved me, but I'm betting it was a lot. Thank you!
This is absolutely brilliant! I’ve tried to get results like this With starter images, but I have gotten nothing as nuanced and subtle as this! Great work!