Im not sure its so much learned helplessness as, and I know this will be an unpopular opinion here, I don’t want to understand how it all works behind the scenes.

“Learned helplessness” isn’t meant as an insult, it’s just a way to describe… well, this. The idea that the internet is too complicated and you’ll never understand it so don’t bother trying. This is not the fault of the “normie masses” but rather society not treating digital competence as a necessary skill. Society has many more complicated systems like law, finance, insurance and property that people can still navigate!

It’s difficult to come up with an onboarding solution that doesn’t give overwhelming power to the hands of a few people (who operate the onboarding platform), leading to centralization again.

If everyone was directed to one central onboarding platform, the operators could choose to advertise and censor instances as they saw fit – which is why I don’t recommend potential Mastodon users to the join-mastodon.org server picker, because all of the instances there are hand-picked by mastodon.social admins.

I didn’t expect security and outage threats to be the factor that keeps big instances in check, but I’m kind of glad for it.

The feature is there, but it’s glitchy. Whenever I try to post with a language tag to lemmy.world and other big instances, the post screen stays loading forever and the post is never submitted. It only goes through when I remove the language tag, so I avoid posting non-English content on lemmy.world because I can’t tag it…

Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it’s inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.

And I’m sure it would also be more convenient to have it all under one roof, just like everything about Germany is under feddit.de, and people from elsewhere can still visit if they like.

I’m trying to advertise my country’s instance, feddit.nu (Sweden). feddit.de got a headstart with Germans by having been created before the Reddit migration and providing the first federated community discovery tool.

Instances that were created after the migration started on the other hand? It’s frustrating with Redditor behavior, because they expect the Lemmy community to share the same name as the Reddit community (/r/Sweden) and only subscribe to communities that use the same name.

If you don’t want your lemmy.world feed to be flooded with languages you can’t understand, please make sure to annoy their users about it as much as possible, in English, that they should move to the country-specific instances instead of centralizing on lemmy.world. It’s healthier for the Fediverse in general with everyone on many instances, in the long run.

It’s Estonian (.ee is the country code for Estonia) but it’s also a cool domain hack and the owner opened it to everyone.

1. The sign-up process can be improved. But the reason people think choosing an instance complicated is because they’re so used to having choices taken from them by social media companies, so when they’re given the choice back, learned helplessness causes them to freeze.
2. You do bullet points with a dash or an asterisk, like - This is a bullet point or * This is a bullet point.
3. Click on your profile picture in the top right of the screen and click on “Settings”. There is a section named something like “Default Homepage Sort”. You can change it to view the All feed instead of Local.
4. We don’t think having dumb people in the Fediverse is enshittification. Many of the current users would be considered dumb depending on who you ask. Corporate control of the Fediverse and companies milking users for money while making the user experience worse is enshittification.
5. This text formatting system is called Markdown, which is what Old Reddit used to format text before New Reddit introduced the graphic text editor. This page has a guide on all the formatting tricks you can do with Markdown.

Older than 30 nope, tech enthusiast yes, Linux user sort of, because my self-hosting servers run Linux but my personal daily driver is Windows. Windows native art programs have a lot of responsiveness problems and other random issues when running on Linux, and it’s annoying to have to boot up a separate OS to use specific programs.

Taking the extremely tech-unsavvy fanartist community as a reference, it’s not that federation and choosing a server is that difficult, that’s just a lame excuse. Their usual social media platforms do UI redesigns, A/B testing and introduce weird limitations all the time. They just learn to cope with it.

People who don’t care about tech don’t think about the websites they use at all. In their minds, websites are just omnipresent things that exist naturally, like the sun. They only care about whether the website is able to connect them to their friends and showcase their posts to other people. They will only pay attention to the website if it introduces a change that affects their daily usage of it negatively, just like how people don’t consciously think about the sun unless it inconveniences them.

That’s more of an Instagram thing. The calling card of the teenage zoomer on Reddit is the nerd emoji and the moai head emoji.

That’s why I suggested Revanced with “disable recommendations” patches. It’s still Youtube and there is no new platform to learn.

I think it’s sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.

The algorithm doesn’t actually care that it’s promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people’s eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using “not interested” and “block this channel” buttons doesn’t make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you’re teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!

The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP’s mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). “Youtube with no ads!” is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.

Why do you have to use NGINX? Caddy does the proxying to the Lemmy containers for you. That docker-compose.yml file is my entire deployment, there is no hidden NGINX container or config file that needs to be added. Just remove your broken Lemmy deployment with docker compose down and delete the containers, then docker compose up my docker-compose.yml (after you edit the postgres variables) with config.hjson in the same folder.

Oh shit, I forgot that your Caddy would be running on a bridge network by default because mine is on the host network where all ports are already exposed to it! (It’s generally a bad idea to use the host network, so don’t do this if you’re only using Caddy with containers on the same network) I edited the Gist to expose 80 and 443 for HTTP/S on that container, the updated file uses the same Github link. Really sorry about that!

Ugh, that one is a problem with indentation because pasting the config into a Lemmy comment destroys the formatting. I uploaded it on Github to preserve the correct indentation.

Yeah, the config file on the documentation sucks. I had to poke through several discussions on /c/selfhosting to find a config that wasn’t the extremely minimal one linked in the documentation. Your config.hjson is fine from what I can tell, although I’m not sure why you censored the hostname there as it’s supposed to be lemmy.emphisia.nl and not anything confidential.

Honestly, I don’t have enough understanding of NGINX to debug its config, so I’ll just share my docker-compose.yml for leddit.danmark.party which worked correctly and federated out of the box, with a few adjustments to match your deployment. Note that you’ll have to tear down your existing deployment if you want to use this docker-compose.yml because they use the same ports.

version: "3.9"
x-logging:
  &default-logging
  options:
    max-size: '10m'
  driver: json-file

services:
  caddy:
    image: caddy:2
    volumes:
      - ./volumes/caddy:/data
      - ./volumes/caddy:/config
    # See Caddy's documentation for customizing this line
    # https://caddyserver.com/docs/quick-starts/reverse-proxy
    command:
      - /bin/sh
      - -c
      - |
        cat <<EOF > /etc/caddy/Caddyfile && caddy run --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
        
        {
          debug
        }
        
        (common) {
        	encode gzip
        	header {
        		-Server
        		Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; include-subdomains;"
        		X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block"
        		X-Frame-Options "DENY"
        		X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
        		Referrer-Policy no-referrer-when-downgrade
        		X-Robots-Tag "none"
        	}
        }       
        
        # Lemmy instance
        lemmy.emphisia.nl {
          log
          import common
          reverse_proxy http://lemmy-ui:1234 # lemmy-ui
          
          @lemmy {
        		path /api/*
        		path /pictrs/*
        		path /feeds/*
        		path /nodeinfo/*
        		path /.well-known/*
        	}
         
         	@lemmy-hdr {
        		header Accept application/*
        	}
          
          handle @lemmy {
            reverse_proxy http://lemmy:8085 # lemmy
          }
          
          handle @lemmy-hdr {
            reverse_proxy http://lemmy:8085
          }
          
          @lemmy-post {
        		method POST
        	}
        
        	handle @lemmy-post {
        		reverse_proxy http://lemmy:8085
        	}
        }
        EOF
    lemmy:
      image: dessalines/lemmy:0.18.1-rc.9
      ports:
        - 8085:8536
      volumes:
        - ./lemmy.hjson:/config/config.hjson
      depends_on:
        - postgres
        - pictrs
      restart: always
      logging: *default-logging
      
    lemmy-ui:
      image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.18.1-rc.9
      ports:
       - 1234:1234
      environment:
        - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=lemmy:8085
        - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=localhost:1236
      depends_on:
        - lemmy
      volumes:
        - ./volumes/lemmy-ui/extra_themes:/app/extra_themes
      restart: always
      logging: *default-logging
   
    postgres:
      image: postgres:15-alpine
      ports:
        - 5432:5432
      environment:
        - POSTGRES_USER=MyPostgresUser
        - POSTGRES_DB=MyPostgresDb
        - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=MyPostgresPassword
      volumes:
        - ./volumes/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data
      restart: always
      logging: *default-logging
      
    pictrs:
      image: asonix/pictrs:0.4.0-rc.7
      user: 991:991
      hostname: pictrs
      environment:
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__VIDEO_CODEC=vp9
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_WIDTH=256
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_HEIGHT=256
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_AREA=65536
        - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_FRAME_COUNT=400
      volumes:
        - ./volumes/pictrs:/mnt
      restart: always
      logging: *default-logging
	  
    postfix:
      image: mwader/postfix-relay
      environment:
       - POSTFIX_myhostname=lemmy.emphisia.nl
      restart: "always"
      logging: *default-logging

I don’t use NGINX as my proxy server, but it’s a bit strange that you would need two configs for this while mine runs perfectly with one config and two open ports (:8536 for Lemmy-BE and :1234 for Lemmy-UI). And why are you using different versions of Lemmy-BE (18.1-rc9) and Lemmy-UI (18.1-rc4)?

If you are using the default docker-compose.yml on the Lemmy repo, that part of the NGINX config uses https:// + the name of the Docker containers. And you always give NGINX the external port (the number on the right side of the colon defined in ports:, like 1234 in 1234:5678). The port on the left is only known to the container the port is defined for.

If it’s still broken after you correct the NGINX config, what are your docker-compose.yml and config.hjson like? There’s several versions of them floating around and you might have combined incompatible versions with each other.

On 0.18.0, there is only the “Only moderators can post” checkbox which stops regular users from creating new posts, but it doesn’t stop them from commenting on posts. I’m looking for a way to prevent both (instead of deleting comments after they have been posted).

It will continue to work if you’re the only user on your Teddit instance. Teddit (and Libreddit, and any of the Reddit alternative frontends) use the Reddit API un-authenticated and after July 1st, they will be rate-limited to 10 requests per minute. The limit is enough for the activity of one logged-out user but it will break the proxy instances that allow many users to combine their traffic under one IP.

Given the number of bots on the internet trying to crack captchas, this is already happening. I don’t think captchas are being used for AI training that much, since hCaptcha uses AI-generated images with prompts like “Select the images with a hamster eating a watermelon” for its tests. All of the reCaptcha road captchas I receive also have answer validation and won’t let me pass if I answer incorrectly because of a misclick.

Yeah no, this “America Bad and backwards 3rd world country while us Europeans are so enlightened” circlejerk isn’t constructive either. The American political system is terrible but a lot of European countries, mine included, are copying their “celebrity drama show” attitude towards politics because of extreme American cultural influence. We shouldn’t deny our own problems.