NCL Meta

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

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 1 of Fundaments 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 defederate content if users petition us to (subject to future rule changes). We're open to registration, 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.

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 so long as it is genuinely separate from and does not directly reference the illegal content.

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 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 rule in its 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.