this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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tl;dr:
I’ve been using Lemmy for years, back when there were only 2 or 3 nodes and federation capability did not exist. It’s a shit show. Extremely buggy web clients and no useful proper desktop clients. I must say it’s sensible that the version numbers are still 0.x. It’s also getting worse. 0.19.3 was more usable than 0.19.5 which introduced serious bugs that make it unusable in some variants of Chromium browser.
mBin has been plagued with serious bugs. But it’s also very young. It was not ready for prime-time when it got rolled out, but I think it (or kbin) was pushed out early because many Redditors were jumping ship and those refugees needed a place to go. IMO mbin will out-pace Lemmy and take the lead. Mbin is bad at searching. You can search for mags that are already federated but if a community does not appear in a search I’m not even sure if or how a user can create the federated relationship.
The running goat fuck with Lemmy is in recent years with the shitty javascript web client. There’s only so much blame you can fairly put on those devs though because they need to focus on a working server. The shitty JavaScript web client should just be considered a proof-of-concept experimental test sandbox. JavaScript is unfit for this kind of purpose. It’s really on the FOSS community to produce a decent proper client. And what has happened is there has been focus on a dozen or so different phone apps (wtf?) and no real effort on a desktop app.
Cloudflare filters lacking
Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums. So you get imersed/swamped in LemmyWorld’s walled garden and to get LemmyWorld out of sight there is a big manual effort of blocking hundreds of communities. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole.
Lemmy lets you block whole instances, it was introduced in 0.19.0 (which was released just before Christmas, but many instances didn't update until 0.19.3 was released around the start of the year due to federation issues with 0.19.0).
I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though. If your instance doesn't use cloudflare, then you won't access through cloudflare. I'd actually be really interested in understanding why this is something you're looking for, rather than just the ability to block an instance such as Lemmy.world.
Suppose an instance has these users:
And suppose the instance is a special interest instance focused on travel. The diverse group of the above people have one thing in common: they want to converge on the expat travel node and the admin wants to accommodate all of them. Norm, and many like him, are happy to subscribe to countless exclusive and centralised forums as they are pragmatic people with no thought about tech ethics. These subscriptions flood an otherwise free world node with exclusive content. Norm subscribes to
[!travelpics@exclusivenode.com](/c/travelpics@exclusivenode.com). Then Victor, Terry and sometimes Cindy are all seeing broken pics in their view because they are excluded by Cloudflare Inc. Esther is annoyed from an ethical standpoint that this decentralised free world venue is being polluted by exclusive content from places like like Facebook Threads™ and LemmyWorld. Even though she can interact with it from her clearnet position, she morally objects to feeding content to oppressive services.The blunt choice of the admin to federate or not with LemmyWorld means the admin cannot satisfy everyone. It’s too blunt of an instrument. Per-community blocks per user give precision but it’s a non-stop tedious manual workload to keep up with the flood of LW communities. It would be useful for a user to block all of LemmyWorld in one action. I don’t want to see LW-hosted threads and I don’t want LW forums cluttering search results.
Ah right! OK first off, you can block all of Lemmy.world with one action now.
Secondly, Lemmy now supports image proxying (with a new feature in Pictrs 0.5, which I believe was also introduced in Lemmy 0.19). I'm not sure which instances have it enabled but in theory you can check the source of images for remote users who have posted images.
Lemmy is already a strain on hard drive storage so I don't think many people have enabled it (proxying will store the images on the Lemmy server for a set period of time).
Thanks for the explanation by the way, it makes sense.
I just need to work out exactly what the effect of the user-configured node block is. In principle, if an LW user replies to either my thread or one of my comments in someone else’s thread, I would still want to see their comments and I would still want a notification. But I would want all LW-hosted threads to be hidden in timelines and search results.
On one occasion I commented in an LW-hosted thread without realising it. Then I later blocked the community that thread was in (forgetting about my past comment). Then at one point I discovered someone replied to me and I did not get the notification. That scenario should be quite rare but I wonder how it would pan out with the node-wide blocking option.
I believe blocking an instance hides posts from your feeds but nothing else, but it's worth testing.
I have lemmit.online (reddit copy) blocked, but I can still search for a specific post and view it. I have also seen others complaining that when they bad an instance they still see comments from users on that instance, so at least at the moment it seems it just hides the posts from your feeds.