JohnnyEnzyme

joined 2 years ago
[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago

the upsides outweigh the historical data IMO.

Err... may I ask, based on what?

Personally, I put in hundreds of hours in to hundreds of mini-articles in the body of those ~400 posts I created across ~two years. For me, it would have to be an absolutely stellar set of features and security for me to go to some other instance which didn't have the means to migrate anything over. Like, what would be the point, mate..?

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

Oh, right... instead of an absolute URL-style link.
Good point, thank you!

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

Thanks, Abby Normal!
Btw, if you happen to know of any communities which might be interested in us, please give a holler...

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 1 points 4 weeks ago

Yup, good point.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 1 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, fair point!

Still, as has been commented in this thread, Lemm.ee indeed called for admins at some point in order to help out, but evidently got an underwhelming response. Perhaps part of that due to the fact that Sunaurus & Ella stating right up front that it was a thankless type of job.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 6 points 1 month ago

¡Hola, compa!
Yes I'm bummed, but we'll see what happens. Blaze has offered some help, and linked some kind of 'PieFed migration project,' above.

At this moment I'd say that even if a migration *is* possible, there's a very strong chance that EGN+ will need a new mod(s) to run the place. Aside from that, and if my health picks up, I'd be happy to keep contributing content, and maybe help out here and there.

I'll probably be posting that message to the community soon, but am mentioning it to you first, and for anyone else reading. =)

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month ago

Well, yeah. In .ee's case, one might surmise that Sunaurus was a whiz at backend-stuff, but maybe didn't have enough experience as lead admin in the specific capacity of dealing with multitudes of 'people fires.' (not that he wasn't absolutely wonderful and professional in everything he handled IMO) But, a lead admin would ideally be a manager dealing with direct-reports, not the guy who had to do it mostly alone for a long time, as I think he did.

What the community contributed (in the positive sense) to Lemm.ee was more than enough AFAIK. What was critically needed, rather, was a robust admin crew, be it fully volunteer and/or partly paid by donation. Maybe various tasks could have been rotated too, such as: "I'll handle the reports this week, Ilona will handle requests, Tomaso will handle documents, and Rafo will handle mod interactions, then we'll switch roles next week." Or something like that... Anything that worked, really.

Indeed, it would be really interesting to see how other big instances are handling all this, specifically the bad actors that all sites must deal with, and which ultimately seemed to bring down Lemm.ee.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago

“Build it, and they will come” isn’t really true nowadays. We’re competing with Reddit, but also TikTok and Discord, where people seem to spend most of their time.

And that's fine. At a certain point I understood that what I was running was essentially a 'blog+,' and didn't have a problem with that, evidenced by my willingness to keep posting and composing content on a regular basis, seemingly much like yourself.

FWIW, and not unlike as with Legos-- European Comics are indeed a major industry and consumed around the world, altho not so much in the States and Japan. So, "niche" in the FV-sense, but by no means the real-world sense. This gave me a certain amount of motivation & hope to keep on truckin,' no matter what...

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 6 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Unfortunately, that's not what I'm talking about, either.

What I'm talking about is something like a sufficient, critical mass needed to help .ee (and any other place) survive in the long run. Two years ago I thought there was a real opportunity and possibility based on what the Reddit execs were publicly doing... how many users it both pissed off and motivated. That in turn brought about a burst of user energy, directly reflected by the significant migration to FV, which of course included participation, and at best, valuable content-creation, curation, useful posts & comments, and responsible moderation. That was a significant, known movement, and IMO a positive one, even if it wasn't going to last indefinitely.

As a personal example of a 'motivated user,' I saw the need for a certain community which was nowhere-else present across the FV, and decided to create it. Over the past two years I've populated it with 400+ posts, most of them in the form of mini-articles. Other people also chipped in here and there, and there have been healthy comments and subscribers to sort of flesh the whole thing out over time.

For the most part it's been a fun (if sometimes extremely frustrating) little hobby, but it's still basically a one-man show, despite almost 2yrs and 1,210 subscribed accts. Point is-- at the end of the day it's been a small project that I thought worth maintaining as both a thank you to .ee and a tribute to the FV as a whole. Lemm.ee didn't necessarily need that kind of contribution from more than a handful of users, but as said above, it needed a certain critical mass to make it work across the server as a whole, and a minimum of posters contributing vile content or simply being disruptive assholes.

At one time I thought community spirit (for what that's worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction. But it seems I was mistaken, and thus we have the announcement today. IMO I'm not pointing fingers; I'm observing.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago

Thanks for the offer and kind words! I've tagged you in the comment above...

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 18 points 1 month ago (5 children)

@https://lemm.ee/u/mjhelto

Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.

Yes, I understand it's already and naturally backed up across the FV as a whole, but I would think that having direct backups would help for any number of reasons, especially when it came to running a new sub somewhere, being able to edit previous content as needed.

As part of that, backing up the community's many images specifically hosted at .ee would be another priority I should think.

Also, just want to point out that the community is indeed archived at Archive.Org, but last I checked, that tends to only preserve the post / comment text.

Anyway, that's for starters. Me, I have absolutely no idea at the moment if I'm going to be able to help run the place after migration, but at the very least I can hopefully find someone willing to do that. Anyway, I guess that's good for starters!

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 8 points 1 month ago (10 children)

Blaming the community for that is not fair.

I'm not blaming the community. Things are what they are, including human behavior.

What I did was to state what I think is and was necessary for the FV to survive robustly in the long term, and in my opinion it just wasn't happening adequately, at least for .ee, and maybe it's a problem for the FV as a whole, too. You'd have to see what other major instance admins had to say, I guess...

 

Here's an example, seemingly hosted at discuss.online: https://lemm.ee/post/65046490/20725069

A bit peculiar to me, as when I hover over the expanded or unexpanded version of the thumbnail and follow that it via link or image, I'll get the good ol' broken graphic.

And yet, if I follow the link via the title or instance source, then I'll properly see the image in question, like so: https://cdn-discuss-online.s3.us-east-005.backblazeb2.com/01/97/0d/0a/3b/0c/70/4f/8c/6f/8f5036ae36d6.webp

So yeah, not a burning issue or anything, but it does make it harder to easily browse and enjoy the FV as intended. Thanks in advance for any help or insights!

Source: WinX, FF browser , and uMatrix extention with all JS permissions enabled for these sites.

 

NOTE: the late "Lemmy" is a beloved Brit* musician from an enjoyable rock band, perhaps with some Led Zep-type analogues? (sorry, I just didn't know him very well; kinda before my time)


Okay, what I'm trying to explain here is how we search for things and how we find them, particularly when we include the magical word: "Lemmy" in our searches.

For example-- I can just half-awake, lazily type something like "reddit" + search term, and BOOM! Robert's your avuncular figure.**

Now, by comparison, hopping on an instance, so far I've found that searches within the Lemmysphere are remarkably strong. (well, at least for lemm.ee; I love my instance)

Unfortunately, that's not how most people search and find us, which more typically involves Google, etc.

Hence my question, laddies & lassies-- i.e. is there anything we can do to influence how this search-stuff works...?


* see, I always find a way to relate things back to Europe, haha

** like "there you go," ie. "Bob's your uncle," a classic Brit pub-phrase

 

(image is credit to my co-mod's active series "Concept Art for James Cameron’s The Abyss, by Mœbius")

Okay, let's see if I can explain this another way:

To be clear-- any post with a lead image previously sourced to Imgur content seemed to change around half a year ago, no longer showing up as an expandable thumbnail as usual, but instead just showing a generic 'offsite' link icon, which needed to be clicked an extra time in order to see the actual content. Example:

https://lemm.ee/post/40626407

...In which the popup image content still works in the body of the post, but not via the *lead* thumbnail, which... is fairly important for users browsing their streams, no?

Anyway, it just hit me that this issue now appears to be dealt with, at least on Lemm.ee! :D

CAVEAT 1: older, Imgur lead-sourced posts still appear to be broken in this way across the "LV," not unlike how image content was broken a ~year ago via the auto-added 'image proxy tags' by the Lemmy software. Point is-- it seems sublemmy-runners (community mods) will still need to fix such older posts by hand.

CAVEAT 2: having had some years of experience using Imgur as a pic-hosting service, I simply *cannot* recommend it if your intention is to create moderately long-lived posts. I could say more about why I'm completely baffled as to why some posts seem to last 10yrs+, while some are deleted within less than 6mos, despite featuring identical content, but what would be the point? (I would guess something along 'server-mgmt lines,' but who knows?)

CAVEAT 3: Image-hosting is obviously a whole big issue upon itself, and there are obviously MANY ways to do it, with perhaps the chief issue relating to image-permanence, so to speak. That said, if your instance is indeed Lemm.ee itself, you do have a nice, healthy 500k limit upon uploads here. And think about it-- if 'LE' or the LE's hosting site ever goes down one day, then isn't it the same, in the end?. I.e., there won't be one aspect of the site uselessly upholding the other, if that makes sense.

But I would think that's also a nice, motivating reason to get on board the train of supporting our specific instance. I mean, (as I understand it) our admin spends like US$200/mo supporting us via a colossal ~10 servers, and what do you know-- bad actors here forced him to semi-retire via too much relentlessly vile content.

I really feel like shit when I read about that stuff.

TBH, my personal lack of more useful action towards supporting our instance is rather embarrassing, frankly, and I hope to do better, but... ugh, I'm frankly pretty nervous these days, living on a rather fine economic line here, dealing with upcoming USA policy-making which could... incline me to... oof. Well, it won't be good. Anyway, thank you Sunauras, EllaS, et al for carrying on in so many ways. <3

 

Lol...it hit me square in the teeth the other day, so I just HAD to try my hand. 😂

 

Okay, there's a frustrating backstory that I won't bore y'all with, but in this case, my Lemmy-mates have suggested that I should share image-content more slowly, rather than do roundups like this.

To explain: I personally hate withholding content when I have a load of some resource to share. I feel like a fraud, an a-hole, a userer, and all that stuff...

Yet I've been told repeatedly that it's better to just (in my words, 'act like a drone') drip the content, and yes, it's not hard to see the logistical point, but... bah.

I guess, end of the day, I always like to include something interesting about my posts, and it would be harder to do that via the "drip" posting method, which... pretty much circles back to why I post the way I do, which is to aim for roundups.

Bah... Baa-Ram-Ewe!

 

Now, no doubt this is my own dumbarse fault, but I'm coming to find that relying on Imgur to preserve my pic-content across the mini-articles I write and share on the Lemmysphere is just... well, I mean it's just so utterly hit-or-miss that it's become completely unreliable, daggit.

For example, I happened to check on the Satania review I first posted ~10mos ago, and discovered that the Imgur page source had been deleted without notice, altho oddly, the lead full thumbnail / image still remains. Like, what...?!

Point is-- there seems to be utterly no rhyme nor reason for the image deletions, whether the content is uploaded via official acct or not, or is kid-safe vs NSFW stuff, or is new vs old stuff, or even via file-size issue (I think, not totally sure).

Anyway, yeah... it's clearly past time to get the hell out.

So what would you recommend, mateys, and how reliable do you think that host is? (I'm completely cool with paying a monthly fee via PayPal in order for our content to last)

Note: the lead pic is just an anti-Imgur thing I randomly discovered, lol.

 

Woot! ^^
https://jramseyillustration.net/

EDIT:
TBC, I've no personal association with "J. Ramsey," myself. They're moreso one of the many online artists I discovered and enjoy, bless their creative souls & talent. <3

 

Now, from what I understand, a recent Lemmy software update broke the ability for Imgur posts to serve as lead-examples. Since then, I've been forcing the lead image on to local servers. Fine, whatever.

Just tell me what to do, and I'll do it.

But now, checking some of my earlier posts, I also see this problem in the body of my posts, in which Imgur content isn't appearing either:
https://lemm.ee/post/38133693

EDIT: Okay, I totally forgot that for a few months there, Lemmy was auto-formatting image links in to 'proxy' versions. So when I go back and manually remove that formatting (didn't used to be able to do so when it was active), the posts are no longer broken.

Really wish this could have been handled more smoothly by the devs, tho. 😞

EDIT2: removed some non-essential rubbish.

 

You can see this from the root page of our community:
https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels

In which the posts that link to Imgur as their thumbnails now display the 'offsite' arrow pointing to the upper-right. Note that all Imgur-based behavior seems otherwise fine, for example you can click on the thumbnail and the full image will properly display, and the contents of the posts themselves seem unaffected.

Browsing around other lemm.ee communities, it seems that all other thumbnail post imagery is functioning normally as long as it doesn't link to Imgur.

Hope I explained that clearly!

 

After being helped several times with my various community issues by our kind site-runner, I would like to make a useful donation at this time. Oy, but there seems to be a problem:

Now, I use an add-on in Chrome called "uMatrix," which is a script-blocker. This add-on forces me to hand-enable whatever necessary java-scripts there might be on sites, but it's not perfect. Okay, fine, so in Ko-fi's case, I wound up having to turn the tool completely OFF in order to get to the final payment-step, for anyone reading who had issues with such.

Now, to the final step:
My donation / pay options are evidently these: iDEAL, Bancontact, Przelewy24 and EPS.

New problem: I have utterly no idea what those are.
Is there a way then to donate via PayPal, perhaps?

EDIT: Sorry, I guess this should have gone in "Support." Please do move as necessary.

 

Yes, I'm the very same ~~moron~~ person who accidentally deleted his community, then had it restored by our excellent admin / site-runner a month or two ago. Yup!

Now for today's stupid-idiot complaint:

Around June 9th I found that I could no longer display images in comments & posts. The specific problem seemed to stem from some broken code that was being auto-added, namely:

"https://lemm.ee/api/v3/image_proxy?url"

IIRC my co-mod opened a thread on this stuff around a week ago." And... in the words of the kids? "Shizzle's still broke." I.e., the code still doesn't work, and still breaks every attempt to share images.

But sadly, there's more. Namely, it seems that lemm.ee communities are no longer showing up in one of the significant FV search engines, i.e. "lemmyverse.net."

For example, one of our biggest communities here on lemm.ee, i.e. "movies" is now totally missing from the results. So, (currently) every time people look for stuff on search engines like that, lemm.ee communities will be invisible to them.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=movies

 

My community is:
https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels

The post I was working on was:
https://lemm.ee/post/2890991

To be clear-- I, in no, way, shape or form intend to delete my community. I wish the community to remain undeleted, thanks.

In case it matters:

57 users / day
150 users / week
444 users / month
1.53K users / 6 months
635 subscribers
317 Posts
902 Comments

EDIT: Google retains the specific URL's of a bunch of our posts, such as the "Moebius" ones.

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