Feddit UK

I've posted the same thing twice to !raining@sh.itjust.works and it doesn't federate back.

I posted it again from my lemmings.world account and itjust.works 😉.

I can't see the instances on either block list, is there a problem here or is automod striking again? (btw, I still have problems with large posts not coming through from !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com)

As can be seen from our Open Collective page, we built up a war chest in our first round of fundraising that almost covers a year's worth of hosting and we still have solid monthly donations:

However, this doesn't provide a full breakdown of our costs, so here are the details:

Hosting (total after VAT €40.68 - £34.09):

• Server - €29.00
• IP4 - €1.70
• Backup box - €3.20

So, as we received £39.31 this month our monthly donations are covering the hosting costs. As we went for a server with ample specifications these costs should remain the same for the time being.

In addition, before our fund-raiskng, I paid for hosting as we were preparing for a move to a new instance and then, after a quick change of plans, the current server. So there were four payments and I am submitting one repayment each month. This month was £11.78.

Following an earlier request, I have broken down the outgoings in a spreadsheet, which can be found here. That should help explain what the various costs have been and the payments that have been made to me as well as the ones due.

If anyone has any other questions then fire away. I've tried to keep everything concise but informative, however, I may have missed something.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to ask if there is any reason why UK_Politics on Feddit has substantially less content compared to UK_Politics on Reddit?

I'd love to only use Feddit but I find myself starting with Feddit and reading the stories/articles quickly and then checking Reddit to see other content. This annoys me (and maybe many others) as I would love to get completely away from Reddit.

Is it purely down to less people on Feddit vs Reddit? or some other reason?

Is there any way we could 'sync' with Reddit to get the same content? I'm not bothered with the discussion parts of it I'd just like to get the stories and articles (which would hopefully add more discussion on Feddit if we got them)

I'm still getting some federation weirdness, but this issue seems to be to do with general federation rather than particular actions.

This community: https://feddit.uk/c/lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Refuses to update! Some posts have been edited but the edits don't come through. New posts are added but the only way I can get them to come through to feddit.uk is to search for the full original URL.

Is there an issue here? Or is it just being very slow?

I felt this might be worth the community discussing.
Happy for people both on and off-instance to weigh in, though it is about this instance's interaction.

It's made doubly fun by the fact that the main owners of the lemmy project are admins on there. (If I understand correctly)

Title was brought over during the cross post.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.

I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

When GreatAlbatross and I agreed to become Admins our guiding principle was that this couldn't be a project run and funded by an individual and subjects to their waxing and waning interest. Instead, this had to be a social network run by and for the users. That meant that we needed as much as possible to be open and transparent with no single point of failure. This should ensure that feddit.uk would be around as long as people needed it, possibly even outlasting the both of us.

To this end, now the server move has been competed, we move on to the next step in securing the instance's future - ensuring there are enough funds coming in to cover the cost of running the site.

Fortunately, the outgoings are pretty modest (£40/month) and so it will only take a few dozen people contributing a small amount each month to pay for everything.

With the ideas of openness and transparency in mind, and after listening to suggests from you, we have signed up with Open Collective. As we are using a fiscal host it doesn't require any donated money to be held in a personal bank account, all banking and accounts are done by them (in return for a set-up fee and 5%) and the state of the finances can be viewed on the Open Collective website.

As well as a custom option (where you can pay what you like when you like), we have set a few contribution tiers:

• Regular subscription of £1 or £5 a month
• One-off donations of £5 or £10

This should meet the regular costs and, hopefully, build up enough of a surplus to increase storage as needed or upgrade the hosting if there is a sudden influx of Reddit refugees again. GA and I have also been funding things from our own pocket up to this point and, when there is enough of a war chest built up, we will repay those costs.

There will be regular updates (probably around this time every month as the invoice for the server goes out on the 4th and regular contributions are collected on the 1st) where we'll explain the costs and summarise the fundraising efforts so far.

If anyone has any questions feel free to ask below.

Was feddit.uk down for a while yesterday

I think I know the answer to this but just wanted to check incase it was something else. I'm trying to subscribe to some new communities and can't.

For example: https://feddit.uk/c/eurovision@feddit.de returns the error message:

The server returned this error: couldnt_find_community.

I think it is to do with the 0.19 Lemmy instance upgrade (and the fact that we haven't upgraded yet) but can't confirm that.

Is that correct or is it something else? 🍻

Edit: Ok this is quite embarrassing. The moment I made this post I was able to access the community and subscribe. I swear this wasn't working a few hours ago and right before I made the post.... honest 😄. I'll leave this post up incase there's a better explanation in the comments.

First off, I understand that this isn't our top priority right now, but I am scared that this can will be kicked far too down the road. I also don't want to cause a storm of drama here, nor a split. No hard feelings here to Emperor, Tom or Albatross.

Preface

When we came up with the idea for our next Instance to replace feddit.uk, we settled on a name and bought a domain for it. That domain was quackhouse.uk . We decided it was a fun-loving name and carried numerous benefits: • .UK TLD. Which was very important. • Not tied to Reddit. • Easy to say and memorable • Not tied to Lemmy. • Not tied to the Fediverse.

We were quite excited for Quackhouse, and to have such a last minute development for Quackhouse was disappointing.

Why Quackhouse?

Why did we decide the last two weren't a good idea? Well, to start, people who are interested in Lemmy and the Federation aspect would go for a lemmy instance anyway regardless of the name. I believe we aren't that stupid as to say "oh, it has lemmy/federated in it, it must be good!". HOWEVER just say you are trying to persuade your mate down the pub to join. He likes the idea of a forum for British-type subjects with no advertisements, tracking, and is voluntary donation-funded. However he isn't tech savvy. It would still be perfectly reasonable to tell him "Hey! There's a really nice community for discussing UK Related subjects! It's called Quackhouse.uk! (Mention some forums etc), Want to join?" Therefore for all he knows is that he's joined up to a site, there is content and discussion, he's happy. He doesn't know yet that there are users from other websites interacting with him, but he knows how to use it and he's happy. He'll probably figure out about it eventually but it won't be off-putting.

This approach wouldn't harm the "power-user" tech enthusiast, but it would be inviting to both and benefit growth.

Lemmy's growth problem

People were saying during Reddit's downfall to "join Lemmy" but I must be honest, even I resisted at first. The whole step of choosing an instance was REALLY off-putting. So I think an alternative approach would be to tell people about the instance instead of the fediverse in some cases.

The Feddit.UK problem

Has anyone here tried telling anyone who wasn't in the know about Feddit.uk? If you don't believe me, tell someone. Your response will most likely be: "Is that a Reddit knockoff?" Everytime I have told someone about this place, I have gotten a weird look and something to the tune of this response. Reddit isn't really the most heavily regarded site in the eyes of some, so who would want to make a Knock-off Reddit

I am not Tom and I mean no harm at all to him, but I reckon he kind of just set this up in haste as a pet project (which is perfectly fine, I have had similar experiences)

The fact of the matter is, this is a Reddit knockoff. You cannot deny it. And the main reason you cannot deny it is because it's literally in the name. However we can claim that the upvote/downvote layout is just a bog-standard forum layout (quite a few sites like Stack Overflow use it now anyway)

And I think this community is better than being named after a Reddit knockoff.

Feddit.UK's doomed future.

Feddit.UK has two inevitable futures.

1. • The Fediverse loses hype along with lemmy and everyone who wants to join has joined. We fade into obscurity.
2. • We keep growing, and then Reddit will eventually notice and will shut us down because we literally are infringing their copyright. We have no basis or ground to defend that.

My proposal to you:

We change domains, preferably to Quackhouse.uk. We even had a logo and a mascot designed 🦆. We were on the verge of launching it as well, domain bought, server bought.

My proposed method.

I don't think we should see this as making a new community per say, but making an extension of an already existing house and moving our good stuff over to the new part of the building. Or even better yet; just a name change

We do this in phases:

1: The hatching: Once we have everything soon enough settled, we make Quackhouse.UK as it was planned. Enable sign ups.

2: The Flock Migration: We migrate all of our main staple-UK communities over to Quackhouse. Eventually culminating in them being closed here through turning off posting.

3. Shut down Feddit.UK sign-ups. Keep the instance itself running forever unless Reddit get angry. People can keep their feddit accounts, just keep it updated for legacy's sake. Put no pressure on Feddit users to migrate their accounts, but maybe offer the option.

Why not make Quackhouse a separate Instance and keep Feddit.UK unlocked? Right now, Feddit.UK is the Go-To place for British Discourse on Lemmy. We need the whole community behind this and unity. If we keep Feddit.UK up, then it will likely choke out Quackhouse's communities as there would be no reason to switch. Quackhouse was always planned to be a new home for Feddit.UK users. However, now Tom has kind of come in last minute and... Well.. our plans are a bit screwed.

Feddit.de is fine, though?

For now it is, I feel it will face a similar fate if it grows. Reddit is not going to like this violation one way or another.

All country specific instances uses feddit

While that holds a bit of water, there's no reason why we have to conform to that.

Opinion

I think it's more worthwhile inconveniencing people to resub to specific communties rather than letting them die in the inevitable downfall.

Summary

Feddit.uk is a problemed name and it needs to be changed. I propose we push on with changing it promptly, but when the time is right. It should be done in a way so that people don't lose their existing feddit.uk accounts.