I heard that they gave out a bunch of free .ml domains and those are the ones they aren’t allowing for free any more…

Only way to solve this (imho) is to reinstall Lemmy BUT use another subdomain.

I wold agree that this is worth considering as an approach to not clash identity and get into custom SQL or Rust programming. But there isn’t even really a procedure in place to decommission the old lemmy entity… so another damned if you do, damned if you don’t in 0.18.4 era.

I’m a little surprised that the federation private key/public key signing doesn’t get upset about all new keys appearing on the same domain name. I’ve tried to get details of exactly how a server joins the Lemmy network and gets discovered over on !lemmyfederation@lemmy.ml but haven’t gotten any actually discussion on the details.

What do you think? Will this work?

I’ve seen people nuke and start-over their database from empty several times while having problems setting up NGinx and Docker… or whatever part.

I’m glancing at the list of SEQUENCE in Lemmy…

CREATE SEQUENCE public.admin_purge_comment_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.admin_purge_community_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.admin_purge_person_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.admin_purge_post_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.captcha_answer_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.comment_aggregates_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.comment_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.comment_like_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.comment_reply_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.comment_report_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.comment_saved_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.community_aggregates_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.community_block_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.community_follower_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.community_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.community_language_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.community_moderator_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.community_person_ban_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.custom_emoji_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.custom_emoji_keyword_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.email_verification_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.federation_allowlist_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.federation_blocklist_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.instance_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.language_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.local_site_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.local_site_rate_limit_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.local_user_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.local_user_language_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_add_community_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_add_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_ban_from_community_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_ban_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_hide_community_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_lock_post_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_remove_comment_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_remove_community_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_remove_post_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_sticky_post_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.mod_transfer_community_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.password_reset_request_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.person_aggregates_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.person_ban_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.person_block_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.person_follower_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.person_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.person_mention_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.person_post_aggregates_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.post_aggregates_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.post_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.post_like_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.post_read_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.post_report_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.post_saved_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.private_message_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.private_message_report_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.received_activity_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.registration_application_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.secret_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.sent_activity_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.site_aggregates_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.site_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.site_language_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE public.tagline_id_seq
CREATE SEQUENCE utils.deps_saved_ddl_id_seq

It is complicated. It’s surely a damned-if-do damned-if-don’t situation. It doesn’t sound like you had all that much in terms of local users, communities, posts, comments - so at least that’s in your favor.

I haven’t looked around at alternatives.

Lemmy has a lot of front-end app development going on and I think that’s one of the big strengths. The API can be bloated with a lot of duplicate data in JSON responses but it is usable.

Lemmy is pretty immature as code to actually run in production. It may be well over 4 years old, but the whole thing seems to have very little in the way of information that a server operator can look at to check the health and problems under the covers. It also doesn’t deal with unrecognized data very well and hides a lot of errors in a log where the messages are often not very much of a hint what is going on.

Lemmy surely is unique, as I almost never see people using it actually criticize the code for quality assurance and testing. More often than not, I see people cheering and defending it. I’ve had to look through this experience and code as it is more run like an art project or a music band than any serious focus on data integrity or performance concern.

if it were me right now with Lemmy 0.18.4, I’d take the server offline, do a PostgreSQL dump file - keep a copy, then hand-edit the sequence numbers in the dump file - and do a restore.

you probably only had a few users, so I would set user to 100, person id can be higher because of federation - but jump ahead to 10000 maybe. Post and comment set ahead to 10000 … and community set ahead to 10000 because that gets federated

the PostgreSQL sequence numbers should only get used on newly created objects here-forward.

GitHub issue about this topic: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3782

Some of it might be avoided by tweaking the PostgreSQL database with higher key values after the new install, but the whole situation isn’t really planned for or recognized in the code

You really have blind faith that federation even works, when I’ve been validating data and highlighting that delivery is not reliable when it has so much overhead it crashes servers.

This basically shuts my idea down

it’s not very difficult to modify the code for something like this… and closing off registration wont’ let anyone else login and create new content form your istance.

Personally the load on the major servers by having one more instance that subscribes to everything is why I think people should back off from creating more than the 1500 instances Lemmy network already has. Delivery of every single vote, comment, post 24 hours a day just so one person can read content for an hour or two a day.

That makes sense for email systems where all that content doesn’t have to be sent, but for Lemmy it’s a huge amount of overhead.

Most common cause is people changing their language settings in their profile. It’s a daily occurrence. The app really needs to tell people “25 messages not displayed because you are only viewing in Spanish”.

I personally would need to dig into testing and code again to give answers with confidence. What I’m trying to say more than anything is… don’t assume. The level of mistakes in Lemmy’s more technical back-end code are pretty high from my experience, especially when it comes to multiple servers involved (comment deletes not being sent to all servers was a situation I tracked down). What I do know is that there is very little written out there about people actually tearing it apart and showing what works… a lot of stuff gets logged in server logs as errors that almost nobody can explain. Either it’s mistakes in apub JSON or other non-lemmy servers, or older versions of Lemmy, etc.

When you say packages get forwarded to whatever instance wanted (if I understand correctly) you don’t “unpack” (e.g check if it’s a valid request)

the pack metaphor isn’t that great. But it is signed, and the receiving server checks a signature. But I really have not seen anyone discuss how those signatures are exchanged in the first place, and I’ve seen people say they re-installed their entire instance - which I assume generates a new set of signing keys for the same domain name… and I know Lemmy starts with 1 in index for post, comment, person - and would end up generating the same numbers for different content.

I haven’t seen much eye towards auditing any of this works, and if it even is a good design. Even 2 months ago there were some aggressive timeouts that were causing delivery to fail. And when something fails, the person who comments or posts doesn’t get notified…

There is some deep stuff in lemmy., every community has a private key/public key pair, as does each person - but I’m not even sure that is used at all and was an ambition. I rarely see the topic actually come up and I’ve been listening for this kind of deeper technical topics… and created !lemmyfederation@lemmy.ml to try and better organize it.

Thanks again, and sorry for the ramblings.

I’m pretty much rambling myself… my repeat point is: don’t assume. I would not describe Lemmy as battle-hardened against attacks or spoofing that someone can find to bypass the current logic.

Like normal people! :D Go to another instance, if you find something interesting

So “normal people” would go read another instance just to bring a single comment or post over. They may as just well join the other instance. Which is what I see actually happening… Many of these lemmy accounts are the same person duplicated to route around crashes.

But it’s a little bit sad, that you’ve never done this and only look at all.

If you had any clue what I have been personally doing with lemmy for the past 90 days, you would laugh at yourself. I’ve been logging in to several different Lemmy servers every single day for months and posting about my observations… such as when a big instance put new user interfaces online, upgrade their backend, crash on their home page, etc.

Having worked with lemmy_server code for months, I wouldn’t trust it in practice. Unless someone produces a pretty through test to validate that it actually works as intended when out-of-band data delivery attempts are made. And for discussion sake, I am assuming comment and posting “messages”, and not private messages… which is a whole different set of behaviors.

when a user homed on lemm.ee comments on a post where the community is hosted on lemmy.world, it would get delivered to lemmy.ml by lemmy.world, not the origin lemm.ee instance.

Messages are sent with a digital signature that only the original instance could craft.

I don’t think the actual message carries a signature from the origin instance, in this case lemm.ee - I could be wrong, because it may not unpack and repackage it before forwarding to subscribed instance servers. But there are some very short timeouts on these signatures and HTTP connections, and I think it does unpackage it and repackage a public comment message.

I think lemmy.ml would need to go fetch the profile for the then unknown user to be able to get the display name and other details of the lemm.ee comment creator to display on the comment. The signature for the comment I think would actually only validate lemmy.world to lemmy.ml - and if lemmy.ml already has the profile of the lemm.ee user stored locally it may not verify it (and could be an entirely different install with the same username). But I don’t think many have ventured into study the code in these areas. The whole process hasn’t been examined that much and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there are issues with post and comment getting dropped because servers aren’t all reachable at the right times for these steps.

How exactly do I deactivate the “All Feed” to not pollute my server and avoid distractions to the users, but let them comment on external posts

How would they ever find the external posts to comment on in the first place?

A couple weeks ago there was a pull request to make it default, https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3743

But i don’t think it’s in now.

cool. I’m in the camp that the feature causes more problems than is useful. Entirely hiding posts of another language would not be my choice, it should at least say “there are 5 comments you do not see because of your language preferences”.

it does show the comments on incognito

That means it is tied to your login, something is set in your preferences so that you aren’t seeing content.

Picking “undetermined” isn’t the same as having never touched it. There is a steady stream of people who accidentally touch the language settings and say they don’t see anything.

People have called out how confusing the whole thing is: https://lemmy.world/post/523012

Sorry I can’t be specific on how to click and what works, I just know you aren’t the first to get their account where it stops showing routine content.

Without more details, it’s hard to know what you are describing. Do you mean comments from other people on posts you make? or your own comments?

I assume you are talking about the main webapp, lemmy-ui, and not a smartphone app or other front-end? The first thing to try is anonymous reading of the same post - are the comments there for incognito mode?

I’ts not uncommon for people on Lemmy to set their languages to something odd and and Lemmy will hide a lot of content.

FYI: !lemmydev@lemm.ee

lemmy-ui is still pretty bad about presenting spinning graphics when encountering an error. As for why the title isn’t rejected, maybe it’s too short, I don’t know the length minimum.