NCL Meta

Hello,

In my previous post, I outlined a detailed plan for the likely shutdown of NCL (NormalCity.life). The hope was that the post might encourage donations, alleviating the ever-growing financial burden of running NCL. The hope was that this and a few other issues would've sorted themselves out by December. Unfortunately, we are not in a better position today than when I wrote that first post. It's not an announcement I take lightly, but NCL is shutting down for good in January.

You can look back on that post for the specific plan we have in place for the shutdown, but I wanted to spend a little more time going into some of the reasons why NCL is ceasing operations. I suppose the best place to start is why NCL exists at all. In June of this year, Reddit had a significant upheaval concerning API pricing. If you recall, a sitewide protest resulted in much of the site being inaccessible for a significant period. People were upset with how the website was being run, and people were searching for alternatives to Reddit that still filled a similar hole in their social media diet. Lemmy was perhaps the best-equipped alternative, although many of the instances that I came across before NCL were home to vile and divisive content, often moderated on extremist political lines, and generally were one-trick ponies in terms of what local communities were allowed under the rules. It was clear to me that I was in a position to create an instance focused on tackling these problem areas, and so NCL was born. NCL became a home for federated alternatives to the subreddits I moderated at the time, as well as several other communities I created based on my own interests. NCL was founded on the idea that the divisive political content typical of other instances should be minimized without resorting to outright censorship. It's a tricky thing to get right, so we ended up essentially banning communities that were created with explicit political intent but left well-meaning users with as much freedom to speak their minds as possible. If you're interested, there are some older posts I made on this topic that clarify our stance on moderation. We also were interested in gaining a general user base and wanted to avoid locking users into too much of a box if they wanted to create their own communities here. In fact, NCL originally intended to be purely general-purpose in this regard but more recently switched its focus to STEM-related topics. In general, we wanted to be a place that offered more freedom, less drama, and something more dependable.

So, did we achieve what we set out to do? In some regards, I think we did. NCL gained a respectable, albeit small, base of local users. We never reached the level of growth needed to become fully supported by donations, but we did receive a modest amount of user donations early on. Aside from the communities that I've created here, we haven't had much activity in terms of community creation. Still, our [email protected] community is probably our biggest success story regarding activity and participation. We offered someplace with lenient moderation; we tried to stay as federated and functional as possible, and I believe we managed to set something of an example in terms of what a Lemmy instance could be. We didn't reach our glorious aspirations to be self-funded, but we ticked the main boxes we wanted to for the short time we've been online.

I encourage you to read the last post on our shutdown, which will be the playbook for the coming weeks. The short version is that we're shutting down on January 15th, 2024. This provides a two-week grace period after the end of 2023, outlined in that initial post. Everything here will be deleted along with the VPS where NCL is hosted, although a few key posts that I value were/will be archived before that time. I can attempt to recover data if you request it at [email protected], but I'm really not making promises regarding what I'll be able to gather before the shutdown. Chances are, you're in a better position than I am to recover your own data, and some tools are available to make moving key bits of information to a new account on another instance easy. I'll try to address that gamut of concerns on January 1st with another post, so look out for that.

Aside from financial concerns, which were the main reason for the shutdown (it's now $32 a month to run this site), legal and technical concerns were also part of the decision. Ensuring continual compliance with the multitude of global and state-level privacy laws is nigh impossible, and more recent issues with our automated update system Ansible meant that hours would need to be spent fiddling with configs to get that working. Combine that with an already busy schedule, waning interest in the concept of Lemmy as a whole (on the part of me and others), and other considerations; it's simply the right time to say goodbye. So, once again, NCL will definitely be shutting down on January 15th, which provides a two-week period after New Year's Eve for people to get their things in order and figure out their next steps. I'll make a post before that period with more information.

I hope everyone has a great December, and I will see you at the start of our grace period to help you all out as much as I can.

Sincerely,

EuphoricPenguin22

I’m really curious where else everyone on NCL hangs out on the internet besides lemmy.

I myself am frequently on discord with my wife and friends playing games. I’ve also found myself in and around smaller blogs spaces like Kev Quirk and related people. Reddit used to be a place for me to hang out but I never found a community that I felt connected to. I don’t know if YouTube would be considered a place to hang out, but I frequently spend way more time there than I should.

So, where are your favorite places?

Hello, regular users and passers-by,

NormalCity.life first came online some three months ago as a response to the Reddit protests that were taking place at that time. I wasn't really sure whether or not NCL would be a success, but I thought it would be worth the risk. We've had our ups and downs, especially with several initial configuration headaches and issues with spam accounts. We're still here, though, and plan to be online at least until the end of this year. That's really what I want to talk about, though, as server costs are still steadily increasing.

I host NCL in the cloud because it's faster and more secure than a honkey-tonk network configuration here at home. Of course, that comes with a cost. Initially, it was palatable for the small user base we had at that point. Now, for whatever combination of reasons, we've maxed out our storage again. If you noticed issues with the site today, that was the reason. I had to upgrade the plan to a higher tier, which means it costs more to run NCL month-to-month. Now, it's not astronomical ($28-30 per month), but it's quickly getting to the point where I cannot support it long-term without some help. This server is run in the interest of those who use it and without the sale of user data or profit-seeking activities. So here's what the future of NCL looks like:

• NCL will pledge to keep its servers online until January 1st, 2024. After that date, if it is unsustainable to operate the server, a two-week notice will be given to users via a post in this community. An additional post will contain as much information as I can reasonably provide to help with account migration and user data management. Users will have the opportunity to request user data; however, certain types of data retrieval may be unfeasible (remember that this is a one-man operation on the backend, after all). After that period, assuming the server is still unsustainable to operate, the server will be taken offline, and all user data will be permanently deleted. NCL promises to never sell or otherwise directly profit from your data. We will only make copies of your data as requested by you via the email associated with your account. We will only offer data retrieval before or during the two-week window; after the sunset period elapses, all data will be unretrievable.

• If you would like to help fund this server, a recurring donation to our tip jar would greatly help in offsetting the costs of operating NormalCity.life. If we can reach a more sustainable month-to-month operating cost by the end of the year, NCL will continue to operate as usual. I hate to set a deadline for something like this, but I have a lot of personal costs that I have to balance with the operating costs of this server. I can reasonably promise three or four more months, but if costs keep increasing due to resource usage like they are, that is all. A recurring donation, even $1-5 per month, would make a big difference, and one or two of those donations would likely put us in a place where we can continue to operate into 2024.

I don't like making posts like this, but I wanted to formalize this in writing so you all know what to expect. I've been thinking about the cost of operating NCL long-term for some time now, and this recent issue reminded me to make this post. I've been pretty happy with Lemmy overall, if only for the constant supply of Star Trek memes at [email protected]. This is my main account, and this server is my main way of accessing Lemmy. When I said a while ago that this was my ideal Lemmy instance, I wasn't mincing words. I've run it to treat others the way I want to be treated on a social media platform, and I hope that's still obvious, especially now. Your support is appreciated, and I sincerely hope that we can move forward together in a more sustainable fashion.

All the best,

EuphoricPenguin

Send all requests, suggestions, and concerns to: [email protected]

EDIT: I'll add this at the bottom here, but we've moved to registration applications until further notice. I'll do my best to let people in, but this is better than letting spammers slip through without a care in the world. I'm periodically trying to get NCL updated to the more recent version of Lemmy, but I've hit a few snags with the Ansible install. In any case, we're proceeding with the above plans unless the funding situation improves for this instance.

Hello,

I just wanted to let you all know that, due to potential legal issues arising from caching content from a few questionable smaller instances, we are defederating them based on our policy against illegal and sexually explicit material. While we generally adopt a policy of letting users on our instance do as they please, several smaller instances are venturing dangerously close to allowing CSAM material on their instances, which we'd like to distance ourselves from for legal and ethical reasons.

We won't mention the instances here by name to avoid sending them traffic, but they are fairly small, with <5k members. We may defederate other instances of this nature in the future, although this is something we will only do if it's deemed absolutely necessary. We only defederate instances based on exceptional cases that run counter to our instance-wide rules. We do not defederate instances for superficial reasons, like qualms with moderation practices or for mere political content. Our goal is and will always be to stay as fully connected to the rest of Lemmy as we can.

- EuphoricPenguin22

Hey,

Just wanted to say that the server was updated to the latest stable release, and everything appears to be working as intended. We're also back to open registration now that CAPTCHAs have been re-added. If you want to create an account and see what we're about, there is no longer a wait to do so.

Have a good one,

EuphoricPenguin22

This isn't a formal addition to any particular chapter in Foundations of Lemmy, but I wanted to point people to a few cool places to find instances and communities:

Lemmy Explorer - A new search tool to find communities and instances all in one place. It's a bit more robust than the Lemmy Community Browser, which I have recommended before. This tool displays far more information and helps you to make informed decisions about where your account should live and which communities are worth subscribing to.

sub.rehab - A site that is especially useful for finding official alternatives to subreddits on alternative platforms. Most live on either kbin or Lemmy and are accessible through both.

Lemmy Observer - A site with a great deal of statistics on Lemmy instances. A great resource if you're trying to find a small instance to lay down roots. For example, NCL has >99% uptime and 100-150ms ping.

That was about it for now. You should check our main chapters for a detailed crash course on using Lemmy.

Hello everyone, It's pretty late here, but I wanted to clear the air and say that all major technical problems have been resolved with this instance. We're ready to upgrade to the latest release when it is available and will move to open registration again when CAPTCHAs are re-added in said next release.

For fun, here are all of the things we've managed to get working/solve so far:

• Bot Spam: Manually deleted 2.5k+ bot accounts, added preventative measures

• Email: Added SMTP relay, fixed config

• Images: Fixed image uploads via NGINX config

If we have any more issues, I'll let you know as soon as possible. For now, it looks like things are working as expected. We welcome you to this instance if you are new here and are (as shown above) working through issues as quickly as possible to provide a compelling experience for new Lemmy users.

- EuphoricPenguin22

Hey everyone,

I haven't gotten too many useful suggestions on my issue threads, although a few issues somewhat directly related to the issues I was having are being incorporated into the 0.18.1 update. I'm hopeful that whatever issues we were having were just some sort of buffer issue from me messing about that finally worked its way out. ~~We're still stuck with fairly small image upload sizes (1MB and below), but hopefully, it will become clear as things move forward how that can be increased.~~ Image upload limits have finally been increased to 20 megabytes; this was an "issue" (it's a default) with the NGINX configuration files.

As far as I can tell, things are relatively stable as things stand. I'm hesitant to try and make any more unnecessary config changes, as things seem to be working fine. I don't think there's much more that I can do at this point; it seems like my messing about with things on the fly is probably part of what caused our problems.

Anyway, I thought I would leave you with this:

- EuphoricPenguin22

Hi,

I'll be honest: I'm unsure what is happening around here. Since the 0.18 update, we seem to be having issues with several of our important functions, resulting in 502 errors, image upload issues, and more. Apparently, this update can potentially lead to DB issues, which might be the root cause. If things get so bad that it's unrecoverable, I have a single backup that we can fall back on, but I'd rather not use that option if we can. You can still create an account here but don't be surprised if we have more technical issues in the coming days. I've exhausted most of the options I immediately have available and am relying on either the accidental discovery of a solution in an old help thread or replies in a few I've started myself. NormalCity won't go down without a fight, but the backup is better than nothing if it comes to that.

I figured issues would crop up in running something like this, but I'm starting to realize how much a site like this can feel like a temperamental beast with a mind of its own. I'm trying as much as I can fit into my schedule, but I don't have time to go full-time to support this instance. I appreciate your support, and I sincerely hope this is the last major issue we have in a while. I'm hoping this is just a bad configuration or something, but it's seeming more and more like an issue with Lemmy itself. I'm not sure what to make of it. Anyway, wish me luck. I'll probably think twice before updating in the future, especially if it risks bringing us to this point again. This is totally nuts.

- EuphoricPenguin22

EDIT: Image uploading is now working again (not sure how or why), but the site does seem to be acting a bit weird with load times. I'm thinking it's some buffer issue or something weird with the DB, but I honestly have no idea. I hope it's just something weird with Lemmy that gets fixed soon.

Hello all,

Once again, more news. Running a Lemmy instance is a game of whack-a-mole; this is absolutely nuts. We recently updated to 0.18.0, which does not have support for CAPTCHAs. Unfortunately, that means we will have to temporarily enable registration applications until the next update arrives. This does not stop anyone from creating new accounts, but it gives us admins a better chance to ensure that real people are behind the account creation.

We're also currently experiencing issues with our image submission, which is leaving us in a bit of an awkward position for some of our art-heavy communities. ~~Image uploading seems to work with images under a megabyte or so, but large image uploads are currently returning an error.~~ We're having significantly worse issues with image uploads now. I'm working on a fix, but you probably won't be able to add a profile picture or banner until this is resolved. I've contacted someone who has dealt with this problem on another instance, and I've also created a new issue thread on GitHub to hopefully get this sorted out. If you're interested in uploading art here, you will probably have to reduce the resolution or use another image host like ImgBB or Imgur and paste a direct link into the URL field. Hopefully, we will get this sorted out by the end of the week or sooner if possible.

That's all for now. On the bright side, I recently fixed major issues with our DB resource allocation, and our SMTP relay for email-based password resets has been operational for some time. We're definitely trying to stay on top of things, but there's always something to worry about.

Take care,

EuphoricPenguin22

Hey,

It seems like we're going through a major announcement every few hours, but I wanted to update you all on a few more things. First, I'm sorry that I keep rushing into these updates that, even though they disrupt service only for a few seconds, still are something I should be more committed to announcing. Regardless, we're currently on the latest version of Lemmy, 0.18. Captchas won't return until 0.18.1, so we're stuck with email verification until that is added again. The real problem is that a wave of spam again could potentially eat up our daily allowance of email send-outs, which would make sign-in page password resets and legitimate sign-ups impossible. Still, I'd rather deal with that than leave the instance exposed to thousands of bogus accounts like last time.

Speaking of our SMTP relay, I recently added more DNS records to buff our verification, which should help to keep emails from landing in your spam folder.

That's about it for now. I still want to manually review and eliminate the few remaining bot accounts, which should only be 100-150 left at most (out of nearly 3k). I'll let you all know before any future service disruptions, but it should be smooth sailing for the foreseeable future.

- u/EuphoricPenguin22

EDIT: We're also now on closed registration for the foreseeable future. Bot spam is something we're still dealing with.

Hey,

The server kept going down every four hours due to high memory usage. As it turns out, I misunderstood how the RAM allocation worked for the database; I needed to set the allocation low enough that it didn't take down the entire server each time it came close to the maximum. I've set it low enough now that this should no longer be an issue, but I'll be keeping an eye on our usage graphs to make sure things are stable. This was a frustrating issue that I've been trying to solve since this instance first went online last week, and it also probably means I didn't need to upgrade the server as soon as I did. It's fine, though, since we would have needed to upgrade our data storage soon anyway (and it gives us some overhead if we get slammed with traffic).

I'll try and announce smaller outages in the future, as fixing this probably took the server offline for a few seconds (and was separate from the other announced outage). Still, we should be out of the woods for some of the more annoying downtime issues we've been having. The next server maintenance will likely be to update the codebase to the next major version, 0.18, which should be coming out soon. Anyway, I thought I would let everyone know about this. Have a good one.

- u/EuphoricPenguin22

Hello, Since I'm committing to the higher server plan, I can easily double our available storage for free. I'm planning on doing this no earlier than 11:45 PM EST. I know this is fairly short notice, but I wanted to do this before bed.

- u/EuphoricPenguin22

This might not be the right place for this, but it seemed appropriate to me.

I'm not sure about the fediverse in general. I've been interacting with it here and there for a while, and of course, since the strangeness on Reddit, I've been interacting with it more. But something seems... strange. What do I mean? Well, I'm not sure exactly, but let's see if I can put it into words.

I think the idea of the fediverse is excellent and truly better than a centralized approach. But, to me, much of the content on the fediverse seems different than the content on other centralized networks. Maybe Reddit content is more relevant and engaging to me because there is just more to choose from. Maybe that's just what you get when you have some algorithmic influence. I can hop on Reddit and find something interesting and enjoyable to engage with very quickly. But to me, it's just not the same on the fediverse. My guess is that my experience would be better with a far larger user base--maybe some critical mass of users needs to be achieved or something.

I suppose the lack of users could be an appeal rather than a drawback--a community could form that's tighter and more engaged. But what's the point, then? Is it simply meaningful human connection? For some, might it be to have intellectual stimulation that we can't get with the people around us? But this just shows what I mean: the experience in the fediverse, to me, is an altogether different one than on the centralized platforms we are running away from.

My purpose for going to Reddit wasn't a sense of community or anything like that. Maybe it was for some of you! I just wanted to find and engage with interesting stuff, and that's definitely more challenging for me in the fediverse. For now.

What are your thoughts? It could just be me!

At the end of Chapter 3 of Foundations of Lemmy, we discussed how defederation could affect how accessible other communities and instances are to your main account. If one instance decides to "defederate" (or block) another, large portions of Lemmy are no longer accessible to you. If you'd like to learn more about this and other things to consider when aiming for a workable single Lemmy account experience, I highly recommend checking out Chapter 3.

Both moderators and administrators have a fair bit of power over users, even if certain admins and moderators complain that they do not have enough. For example, administrators can ban you or delete your account, but they can also control the federated content you see in more ways than one. Moderators also have numerous actions available to them, as they can remove comments, ban users from communities, and lock posts, to name a few. If you're familiar with Reddit, this probably isn't a huge surprise. In Chapter 1, we mentioned how moderators are roughly equivalent to subreddit moderators on Reddit. Likewise, administrators on each Lemmy instance are akin to the admins Reddit hires to do their dirty work. Much like on Reddit, admins have total and complete control over their own instance, and can do quite a lot to influence their user's experience in browsing federated content, how local communities are operated, and who gets to create accounts and communities. They can also assign other people to moderator and administrator permission levels and can also take away those roles at any time.

The Nitty-gritty of Moderation Actions

As stated above, moderators and administrators wield a great deal of power over users. While the figure below isn't a complete list of all possible actions server staff can take, it will give you a general overview of who can do what.

Chart based on this piece of official documentation.

Administrators also have several additional settings that can influence how users experience Lemmy as a whole. As we've stated before, administrators can "defederate" (block) certain instances if they choose, effectively walling off sections of the Lemmy federation from users on both sides. If they wanted, they could also disable federation entirely, although this is something I imagine most choosing to avoid (for obvious reasons).

Here are the administration settings for federation.

Administrators can also do things like enable or disable downvotes, change protections for new accounts, and create regex (regular expressions) to filter for certain keywords. I don't imagine much of this is a surprise, but it's probably worth sharing regardless.

Here are another large chunk of the options available to administrators.

There isn't much more interesting to share in the admin panel besides some fairly dry settings related to technical constraints and a few settings that allow you to customize things like taglines, server branding, and the sidebar. All in all, it's pretty clear administrators have a fair bit of power over users. As an end-user, it would be in your best interest to join an instance with a track record of respecting users and setting clear boundaries.

Overall, that was a quick look at some of the settings moderators and administrators have access to. I feel like this covers basically everything of importance to an end-user and also highlights why it's important to find a decent instance for your Lemmy account.

When I'm finished with the next chapter, I'll add a link here.

(C) EuphoricPenguin22 2023; Licensed under CC0

Hey everyone,

Two nights ago, we got hit with a wave of spam bot sign-ups. I couldn't figure out quite what it was at first, which led to something like 2500+ spam accounts making it through before I enabled CAPTCHAs. This wasn't an isolated incident, as it looks like just about any instance that was susceptible was targeted. That seemed to thwart their efforts, but we were left with a large number of accounts that were not trivial to remove. In the end, I used a few commands similar to the one listed below to remove the extraneous accounts. It's still likely there are a few spam accounts left over, but the vast majority are now banned. I will see what I can do about the remaining ones, but I thought I would let you know what was going on. Unless your email address happens to contain long strings of numbers or a bogus domain, your account should be safe. If your account was banned and you aren't a robot, feel free to email me at [email protected], and I'll unban you manually.

SQL command in question:

UPDATE person SET banned=true WHERE id IN (SELECT p.id FROM person AS p LEFT JOIN local_user AS l ON p.id=l.person_id WHERE p.local=true AND p.banned=false AND (l.email NOT LIKE '%@%.%' AND NOT l.email='' OR l.email LIKE '%@gmail.com' AND l.email ~'[0-9]{4,}') AND l.email_verified='f');

In pseudocode, this is: ban any unbanned local accounts based on their id where they have an invalid email address that isn't blank or where their email is an unverified Gmail address with four or more numbers.

If you're interested in using this command to combat spam on your own Lemmy instance, it would be in your best interest to run a select command before running this one, just to make sure it's working correctly.

Oh, and here's how you get into your PostgreSQL database on a standard Ansible/Docker install:

docker container ls

Run this first to check what to replace <instance_name> with in the below command. It's typically a modified form of your instance address.

docker exec -ti <instance_name>_postgres_1 psql -U lemmy

This is how you can access your PostgreSQL terminal. This is where you would run the above SQL command. Please run the nested SELECT command before the full command to make sure it's selecting the correct accounts.

I'll tack this on the bottom here, but our SMTP Relay is now operational. If you get locked out of your account and need to request a password reset link, it should work.

EDIT: Here are some additional commands to fully delete accounts that are already banned.

DELETE FROM local_user WHERE person_id IN (SELECT p.id FROM person AS p LEFT JOIN local_user AS l ON p.id=l.person_id WHERE p.local=true AND p.banned=true);

Deletes accounts that are already banned.

UPDATE site_aggregates SET users = (SELECT count(*) FROM local_user) WHERE site_id = 1;

Helps to ensure user count remains accurate.

Here's the donation link if you wish to help support us with server costs. A recurring monthly donation in the amount you choose would be greatly appreciated.

Current server specifications and associated costs:

$18/mo - VPS: 2 Intel vCPUs, 2 GB RAM, 25 GB Regular SSD

$3.60/mo - Weekly Backups

$0/mo - Sendgrid SMTP Relay

$2.48 ($0.21/mo) - First Year of Domain Registration

-----

$21.81/mo

Thank you to everyone who has already supported us. If you would like your username added to this post, please let me know.

Since we're growing a bit, I thought it would be a good time to clarify our stance on political discussion, how we will moderate political speech, and what we mean by an "apolitical" instance.

Political bias tends to be magnified within smaller communities online, tinting the user experience and may make the experience for some feel welcoming and push away others. As instance admins, so long as user content does not break our instance-wide rules, we will not take action against user speech in posts or comments, federated content from outside this instance, and moderator positions in specific communities. It is our view that, aside from a basic set of rules that ensure some continuity between communities on this server, it is the job and responsibility of individual moderators to set more restrictive rules for their individual communities. To be clear: instance-wide rules do not take a stance on what types of political speech are allowed on a user level. However, moderators are welcome and encouraged to set community-specific rules that restrict what types of speech are allowed.

Our "apolitical" descriptor comes from Rule 2, which allows administrators to ban communities with an overt political focus. This means that certain communities, such as those heavily centered around political candidates, political movements, parties, or ideologies, are not allowed on this instance. As administrators, we will not play favorites on where this applies: if a community here is created with an undeniable political focus, we will remove that community. As an example, a group of middle-aged men talking about cool things on the Internet is fine, but a group of middle-aged men promoting conservatism is not. "Political" here does not refer to marginalized groups on their own, but rather communities that make an explicit effort to promote policy that caters to a specific political slant. For example, an LGBTQ+ community that focuses on artwork would be a great fit for this instance, but an LGBTQ+ community that focuses on promoting anarcho-syndicalism would not. There are plenty of examples I could use to illustrate this point, but I hope this makes it clear.

The point of NormalCity's existence is to promote a neutral platform where people can gather to discuss topics relating to creativity and technology; we do not have an interest in telling users how they should think. However, this does not mean we wish to encourage strong political messages on a community level, as those are simply outside the scope of this instance. We welcome moderators to set rules restricting what types of speech are allowed in their communities, as we understand different communities here will naturally have differing opinions on what should and shouldn't be allowed.

In short, NCL's administrators will not police political speech on the part of users with instance-wide rules, but we welcome moderators to do so in their own communities. We do not allow communities to form here that have an overtly political focus, but "political" does not mean banning marginalized groups who gather here for a topical (creative or technology-related) reason. We hope this clarifies how we view the political speech here on NCL and hope these policies help to ensure our instance and the communities that live here stay true to their purpose.

TL;DR We’re not banning political discussions that spring up in topical communities here, and we’re also not banning moderators from using their best judgment to moderate.

Hello everyone, I've been noticing an increase in gateway timeout errors, which coincides with large CPU and RAM usage spikes. In the hopes of preserving the quality user experience we've built so far here, I have little option but to upgrade the server. If the statistics are accurate, it would appear we have close to 30 users here now. This is an incredible amount of growth in a short period and something I was not expecting (this server has been running for only three days). At 9:30 PM EST, I will be temporarily taking the server offline and upgrading it to a higher plan.

If you would like to help support me with increasing server costs, a recurring monthly donation would mean a lot. All of the money (100%) donated to my Ko-fi (aside from PayPal fees) will be used exclusively for server costs, server backups, and SMTP relay (email).

Thank you for joining, and I hope to make this instance a place where you feel welcome!

EDIT: Looks like we're back up. Next time, I'll try to shut things down more safely, but I think we're ok. The server is now running on two CPU cores instead of one, 2 GB of RAM instead of 1 GB, and a fair bit more transfer. I will upgrade the SSD if needed, but keeping it at 25 GB will allow me to shrink the volume to a smaller amount of resources if usage drops off. Of course, my end-goal is to grow the server with the hopes that it is self-funded by donations.

In Chapter 2 of Foundations of Lemmy, we discussed how to use one account on your home instance to subscribe to communities on other servers. This post builds on this concept to address a few points of confusion I see within the community. If you're unsure how to use one account to access and subscribe to communities on federated servers outside of your own, Chapter 2 is worth a read.

Ultimately, the goal behind a federated platform like Lemmy is that it acts like one large social media site yet is decentralized and therefore hosted and controlled by many small individual servers. In general, you only need one account to access the entirety of what Lemmy has to offer. What seems to be causing most of the confusion is that, in some situations, you may end up accessing content from a different instance than your own. For example, a direct link to this post probably took you to NormalCity.life, even though you could have accessed this post directly from your home instance. You're in the right place if you're unsure how to do this. This is the main focus of this chapter. We will also explore how, in some cases, moving to a different instance may be advantageous if your home instance is defederated.

Dealing With Direct Links

Before we dive too deep into this topic, it's important to remind you that your account is only accessible from the instance in which you signed up for it. In other words, an account here on NormalCity cannot be used to log in directly to other instances. You can access and interact with content from other instances here, but the username and password you used for your account only authenticate with and are stored on this server (or your home instance).

With this in mind, it's clear that our goal is to navigate to the content we want to see, but we need to do so from our home instance in order to interact with it. There are a lot of ways you might come across a direct link somewhere on Lemmy, but let's explore the basic scenario of being sent a link via a message or a comment. Perhaps you're happily browsing all of Lemmy from your home instance, and you've even mastered subscribing to communities. In one of the comment threads you're participating in, another user on Lemmy.world sends you a link to a post about cats. If you click that link directly, you'll be taken to Lemmy.world, but your account is on (for the sake of this example) NormalCity.life. So, as far as Lemmy.world is concerned, you have no account, so it asks you to sign in to interact with the post.

By directly clicking the link, we end up on Lemmy.world, where we have no account registered. You might see a warning like this, which asks you to sign in or create an account. Of course, both of these things are pointless if you already have an account on your home instance.

Stand strong, Lemmy user. You need not listen to such lies; the power to access the post from the account you already have doth exist. The easiest way to access the content is, in fact, to navigate to the main community where the post is located. If you can copy the URL, you'll be able to search for the entire community on your home instance.

The aforementioned cat picture is located in this remote community. Remember, this is the remote server, Lemmy.world. We'll still need to go to our home search page to look for this community.

We covered this part in Chapter 2, but here's the relevant excerpt:

Once you have the link copied, proceed to the search page for your instance. If your account is located on this instance, NormalCity, our search page is located here. If not, it's simply <domain.com>/search, replacing with the domain name of your home instance. You can also access it using the magnifying glass icon at the top of the web UI. Once you're there, paste the URL you've copied and click the "Search" button. Wait, what? No results? It may appear so at first, but Lemmy is capable of reaching the community in question. The issue is that it can take a few seconds for the results to appear, so pressing the "Next" button several times will likely eventually lead to the result appearing. It may also appear if you give it some time, although spamming "Next" tends to work best for me.

Here's what the result should look like if you follow the above instructions. Obviously, you need to click on the search result to navigate to the community. This will take you to the community in question, but you will be browsing it from your home instance. In this case, I'm browsing on NormalCity, but the community is located on Lemmy.world's server.

Once you're browsing the community on your home instance, you have a few options. You can find the post you were linked to manually, as it's probably at the top of the sort. You can also try using the search feature again, but paste in the post link. Since your home instance has now cached the remote community, the search feature will work well for finding individual posts. That's the real hurdle with manually finding content on Lemmy, as searching for content from uncached communities is next to impossible. To continue with our scenario, I'll go ahead and search for the original post link. Remember, the previous steps were necessary for our home instance to cache the community.

After we helped our home instance cache the community by directly searching for and visiting it, searching for individual posts is a breeze. In this image, I simply copied the original direct link and searched for it.

Now we're in business. Once you're on the post and you've made sure you are still on your home instance (no warning asking for you to log in), feel free to interact with the post as you wish. Phew, that was a lot. A lot of these steps largely wouldn't be necessary if servers could anticipate and pre-cache searches for popular content, but that isn't really how Lemmy works, unfortunately. Instances hosted on overloaded servers can also cause sync problems, which is its own whole can of worms. If you remember, in Chapter 2, some communities may show "Subscribe Pending," even if you're actually subscribed. That problem, along with things like comments and metadata not fully loading, are also problems that can originate from overloaded remote instances.

Defederation

In short, defederation is when a Lemmy instance is blocked by another Lemmy instance. Just recently, Beehaw blocked Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. As you might expect, this was a controversial decision. When a Lemmy instance is defederated by another instance, all of the communities there become inaccessible to the instance that blocked it. The same is true for any instances that were blocked: in this case, Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users have lost access to any of the communities located on Beehaw. This might prompt some users to make accounts on other instances, especially if they rely on communities that have been blocked.

While we just finished explaining how to access content without creating additional accounts, additional accounts on other instances is the only real way to dodge defederation. There isn't much to explain about this, except that you'll obviously lose access to the history you built up with your old account if you do decide to permanently switch to a new instance and account. Smaller instances, much like NormalCity, are pretty decent candidates for jumping ship. Smaller instances tend to have more lax rules for content, they often don't make enough noise to be blocked, and they often don't police their users as much. Of course, choosing your instance is important as well. If you like starting communities on a wide variety of topics, an instance with a more general focus is a good fit. If you don't really care about creating communities, or you only really care about creating a community about a specific topic, finding an instance that has a specific area of focus may be a better fit for you.

To quickly summarize, accessing content from your main account is required to interact with something you've received a direct link to. It's a bit of a process to get there, but it's easier the more you get used to dealing with Lemmy's quirks. Defederation is when one instance blocks another and can lead to large disruptions for users of Lemmy. In those cases, finding a smaller server to jump ship to might be something worth considering.

Next Chapter: Moderation and Administration for End-users

(C) EuphoricPenguin22 2023; Licensed under CC0

In Chapter 1 of Foundations of Lemmy, we introduced the idea behind federation, which is how individual Lemmy instances communicate to form the whole of Lemmy. We also discussed how rules are enforced and how one instance can be home to many communities. If you haven't read Chapter 1 already and are confused by the concepts mentioned above, it might not hurt to read it before delving into this chapter.

Subscribing to communities is, on the face of things, a fairly simple ordeal. If you can navigate to the community you're interested in subscribing to, it's really a matter of pressing the "Subscribe" button at the top of the sidebar. Of course, getting to where you want to go can be a bit more involved than you might imagine.

Oh, and a quick side note in case you encounter this issue. On some instances/communities, the "Subscribe" button may turn yellow and change to "Subscription Pending." If you can see content from that community in your feed, it's likely safe to assume that you are subscribed. I'm not sure what exactly causes this, but Lemmy.ml seems more troublesome in this area than other instances.

Subscribing to External Communities

The real hurdle in subscribing to other communities is getting there in the first place. There isn't a great way to do this inside of Lemmy itself, as the search function is only really useful to find communities you already know the address of (or content from communities that people on your home instance have visited). Lemmy is essentially blind to the existence of communities until you deliberately enter their address into the search field, so using an external tool to search is how most people find new communities to join. The Lemmy Community Browser is the tool most people are currently using, and it works quite well.

The Lemmy Community Browser allows you to search for new communities to join and explore.

Let's say you wanted to join a community about cats. If we search using the keyword "cats," we can see several communities that might be of interest. If we wanted to explore them with the hopes of subscribing, we'd need to do so from our home instance. To ensure this works right, you'll want to choose the option to copy the address of the community. Once you do this, you'll be able to paste it into your Lemmy instance's search field later.

This is where the aforementioned copy button is located.

Once you have the link copied, proceed to the search page for your instance. If your account is located on this instance, NormalCity, our search page is located here. If not, it's simply <domain.com>/search, replacing with the domain name of your home instance. You can also access it using the magnifying glass icon at the top of the web UI. Once you're there, paste the URL you've copied and click the "Search" button. Wait, what? No results? It may appear so at first, but Lemmy is capable of reaching the community in question. The issue is that it can take a few seconds for the results to appear, so pressing the "Next" button several times will likely eventually lead to the result appearing. It may also appear if you give it some time, although spamming "Next" tends to work best for me.

Here is the search page in question. Paste in the URL you copied and spam "Next" to ensure the result you're looking for appears.

Once you see the result you're looking for, click the search result, and you should navigate to the community from your home instance. Now you're federating with power! As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, simply click the "Subscribe" button, and you're off to the races. It might take a few seconds to update, but you should see the button change to "Joined" with a green check. If you don't, you may want to revisit the beginning of this article, where we mention the "Subscribe Pending" message. You can also unsubscribe by navigating to a community and clicking the "Joined" button, which should return to its original "Subscribe" form.

This is what a successful subscription looks like.

Subscribing to Local Communities

Subscribing to local communities is much easier. Navigate to the "Communities" link at the top of the Web UI, which will bring you to a page that displays a list of communities located on your home instance. Click the one you want to join and follow the aforementioned steps to either subscribe or unsubscribe.

That's about it! If you choose your "Subscribed" sort on your main feed, you should see it populate with posts from communities that you've subscribed to.

Next Chapter: Using One Account for Everything, Defederation, and Navigation

(C) EuphoricPenguin22 2023; Licensed under CC0

Lemmy is one of those things you must use for a while to fully get. It all sounds a bit complicated at first, but the federation works well when it does work, and you really can have one account here (or anywhere in the Lemmy federation) and access the rest of Lemmy.

From the ground up, Lemmy is built on the idea of instances. If you're reading this, you're currently visiting NormalCity, the instance of Lemmy I personally host. Lemmy would be pretty difficult to use if you had to sign up for a different account on each instance you wanted to join, as a lot of great communities are spread across dozens of instances. That's where federation comes into play; it's essentially the magic word for "linking together," and it's how Lemmy can act like one site, even though there's no central server controlling things. In reality, Lemmy uses the ActivityPub protocol, which allows servers to "talk" with one another and exchange user interactions and information in real-time. So, what does that mean for you? It means that you can sign up for an account on, say, NormalCity, and still talk with, subscribe to, and be a part of communities on Beehaw. You can access and subscribe to every community, talk with every user, and have a front page like you might be used to on Reddit. As long as you find a place you feel comfortable signing up for an account and the server you're connected to is well-federated (like NormalCity), you're just as much a part of Lemmy as anyone else.

Now, I might add that choosing where to sign up for an account is more important than you think. For example, as an admin on this server, I can act like one of the Reddit fat cats; I can delete your account, I can control local communities, and I can even block you from seeing certain content out in the fediverse. Heck, if I wanted to, I could even block (defederate) a ton of instances willy-nilly. Obviously, this is a ton of power to have, so it's important to find a place that actually cares about the user experience. Oh, and problematic Lemmy instances are often defederated from most of the larger instances, and politically divisive instances are often the target.

This instance, NormalCity, is focused on providing an excellent experience disproportionate to our small size. We're open to federation and will only remove federated content in limited circumstances. We're open to registration (and are currently accepting applications), which means you can sign up for an account at your leisure. We also have a basic set of instance-wide rules akin to Reddit's Code of Conduct. You are free to create communities here, so long as they are topical to NormalCity's focus on creativity and technology (and follow the aforementioned instance-wide rules). NormalCity wants to deliver a true vanilla user-first Lemmy experience while providing local communities that are apolitical and focused on topics that relate to creativity and technology.

Now, you might be catching on to the idea that communities and instances (servers) aren't the same thing. You're absolutely right! An instance (server) can have a bunch of different local communities, and each other instance on the fediverse can as well. It's analogous to having a network of little Reddits, each with its own site-level admin staff and moderators who oversee the individual communities. Just like how admins on Reddit can take actions that overrule moderators, so can admins on each Lemmy instance overrule moderators of local communities. So, in short, a community is likely subject not only to its own rules but the rules of the Lemmy instance where it is hosted. This can become a bit of a headache if you're just starting out, as instances we're federating with will have their own rules, and so will the communities that reside on them. What is that, three layers of rules to keep in mind? It sounds like a lot, and it is, but I assure you that you get used to reading the rules as you go along. My best advice is to behave in a friendly (not hateful, mean, or abrasive) yet casual manner, and you are not likely to run into major problems.

So, I think that's a fairly comprehensive overview of how Lemmy works, at least from the perspective of a user. There are a lot of other smaller topics that are worth exploring, but I wanted to have a good Introductory chapter that got the heavy stuff out of the way first. You will probably have questions after this and may even run into issues. Feel free to message me, ask questions, or provide suggestions for further chapters like this.

Next Chapter: How to Subscribe to Communities

(C) EuphoricPenguin22 2023; Licensed under CC0

Hello,

This is the full text of NormalCity's instance-wide server rules. Moderators of individual communities are encouraged to set more restrictive rules where necessary. These are simply to unify the disparate communities that live here under one set of sidewide rules. Regardless, all communities and members operating here are subject to these rules, and NormalCity administrators will take action where it is deemed necessary.

NCL Rules

1. No NSFW Content

Not Safe for Work (NSFW), adult content, and other forms of obscene material are strictly prohibited. This applies to federated content based on moderator discretion.

2. No Political Communities

While some topics will naturally lead to a more divisive discussion, communities overtly focused on politics are not allowed. This does not apply to federated content or the content of instance users as individuals.

3. No Illegal Content

Illegal content and links to illegal content are not allowed. Discussion of illegal content is generally allowable as long as it is genuinely separate from and does not directly reference it.

4. No Spam

Spam is disallowed. While NormalCity will allow local communities to set their own rules on what constitutes spam, purposeful misuse of this instance in such a way that leads to excess server strain or harm to users may result in administrative action.

5. Mod Discretion

Both moderators and administrators at NormalCity have complete discretion in dealing with offending users. In essence, differing opinions between mods/admins on rules are allowed, so long as an attempt is made to interpret said rules in their plain meaning. Furthermore, community moderators have the ability and responsibility to make their own rules, so long as they do not conflict with these instance rules.