Lemmy.ca's Main Community

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Welcome to the lemmy.ca/c/main community!

All new users on lemmy.ca are automatically subscribed to this community, so this is the place to read announcements, make suggestions, and chat about the goings-on of lemmy.ca.

For support requests specific to lemmy.ca, you can use !lemmy_ca_support@lemmy.ca.


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) by Shadow@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca
 
 

Hello everyone!

It’s time for another long-overdue update on how Fedecan and our various sites are doing. It’s been just over two years since the great Reddit migration, and in that time we’ve made some solid progress:

Finances

Here’s a look at our bank balance since we began accepting donations:

We’re currently sitting at around $2,900, with a monthly burn of about $200, which gives us roughly a year of runway. We have some additional annual costs (like domain renewals and non-profit registration), but overall we run very lean.

Fedecan still owes:

  • TruckBC: $1,980
  • Shadow (me): $525

These were out-of-pocket hosting and non-profit registration costs from 2023/2024. It’d be great to get those covered, but we want to keep at least a year of operating expenses in reserve.

If you're a regular user and value what we're doing, please consider donating! We have multiple ways to donate, you can find the comparison and donation links on our website: https://fedecan.ca/en/donate

Sh.itjust.works

Nothing major to report here - we’ve all been a bit busy lately, but collaboration is continuing slowly behind the scenes.

Fediverse Growth

We're seeing a healthy volume of posts and communities on lemmy.ca, surging with each Reddit drama:

Infrastructure

Our server is a Dell R7515 with an EPYC 7763, 1 TB ram and 4x 7.68tb nvme data disks, which is hosted in a datacenter in Vancouver, BC.

I spun up victoriametrics + victorialogs a few weeks ago and have been ingesting all of our data, giving us the ability to put together some nice grafana dashboards.

Everything is running great on the infrastructure side of things. Our server is barely working up a sweat and we shouldn't have to worry about scaling for a long time.

Lemmy.ca still comprises almost all of our traffic:

Lemmy.ca

Our over provisioned stack is performing well, handling the occasional lemmy / lemmy-ui dropout:

Similarly the DB is mostly running out of ram:

Our object storage is slowly climbing as expected, but we've got several years of capacity to figure out a long term solution:

I’m also doing some limited analytics on our web logs. As expected, lemmy.world makes up the majority of our federation traffic:

One interesting thing to see from the user-agent data is the breakdown of traffic by the different mobile clients:

The “dart” UA is just a common web library, Thunder reports as this and I suspect other clients do too. If you’re a client developer, please set your user-agent!

Out of the alternative web clients we support, tesseract is the most popular although the overall traffic volume is still low:

We only store 7 days of logs but I’m hoping to get these pulled out into metrics soon, since it would be interesting to track which clients / interfaces people use over time.

Pixelfed.ca

Not much to say on this one, due to using local storage it currently runs on a single VM without redundancy.

Piefed.ca

Piefed runs on a pair of VMs with its own database and object storage backends.

Service Health Response data

Cloudflare

If you want to compare against previous data posts, here’s our same cloudflare graphs for lemmy.ca

As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions or ideas. Thanks for being a part of the Fediverse!

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca
 
 

Would you like some pie? Check it out here: https://piefed.ca/

What is PieFed

PieFed follows a similar format as Lemmy and Mbin. Those that are familiar with Lemmy will find it very similar, with some additional features including topic lists, optional private voting, new mod and admin tools, crosspost de-duplication, community wikis, etc. Thanks to how the fediverse works, you can use either lemmy.ca or piefed.ca to interact freely!

We will put together some guides on our non-profit's website at some point. In the meantime, we have created !newtopiefed@piefed.ca for us to learn from each other. There is also the official !piefed_help@piefed.social community which has a similar purpose.

We have done some testing and we are learning as we go, but please bear with us while this new platform gets going 🙂

Other Links & FAQ

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca
 
 

We have gotten a lot of new signups over the past few days, and we're all very excited to have you joining us! You'll find that people are more than happy to help you get started and learn how to use the site.

If you feel up for it, you can introduce yourself or ask questions below!

We have put together some resources to help new users get started:

You can also read:

These guides were published very recently, and we will be updating them over time. If you find that something is confusing or missing, please let us know and we can improve them further.

For an organized list of Canadian communities (provinces/territories, Cities / Local , Sports, Schools, BuyCanadian, CanadaPolitics etc.), see this post on !Canada@lemmy.ca. You can also ask about communities in places like !CommunityPromo@lemmy.ca.

We also encourage you to check out !NewToLemmy@lemmy.ca, so that others can help you / learn from your questions.

Welcome to Lemmy :)

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Hello, world! Recent lemm.ee migrant here moving into the neighborhood. My reference point is: https://fedecan.ca/en/donate

I'd like to request Liberapay support for donations - generally speaking it's a zero-fees frontend for Stripe/Paypal/Credit cards and SEPA if in EU (not applicable here). Most questions are answered via their FAQ page: https://liberapay.com/about/faq

As a user, Liberapay allows me to organize (and get reminders!) of all my donations regardless of individual payment source, turn them on off add more money, etc. Their preferred method to keep the lowest fees is, for example a monthly donation, to charge an entire year's worth of donations at once, then dole it out post-fees monthly themselves. In a sense, solves the "no Stripe recurring payments" problem and it's optional for the user to choose (but recommended). The Liberapay platform survives by people donating (meaning, they "eat their own dogfood" and use the platform they built to survive)

Liberapay has worked out great for me as a user for years supporting various open source projects and collectives of all types. Thank you for considering.

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A few months ago, we posted a discussion thread about lemmit.online, which resulted in the decision to defederate from it:

https://lemmy.ca/post/38374922

The reasons were given as follows:

It feels actively harmful to lemmy, since so many of the posts it brings over are questions that the original poster will never see. It encourages a conversation that will never happen, so if someone does reply they’re going to feel disengaged.

The bot rarely gets any upvotes or engagement, and I suspect a majority of people (like myself) have just blocked it.

These reasons also apply to lululemmy.com, and so we just defederated from it as well. Same as before, if you were using it and miss it, let us know and we can reconsider.

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To preface none of my fellow admins know about this post due to the language that I am using.
Although I do believe that they would be supportive of this as they care about our users just as much as I do.


I just had a run in with a user asking for help who then deleted their post and comments soon after.

If you see any users asking for help I would personally recommend a couple of things to look out for:

  • Check their profile;
    • how old's the account?
    • what kinds of posts and comments are they making?
      • Are they the kind of user you'd be cool with being friends with?
    • Do they have history of deleting posts/comments? If so why? and how often?
  • Check the modlog;
    • have they done or said anything that warrented themselves getting banned or their posts/comments removed?

I'm making this post as I'm personally frustrated seeing posts and comments being removed as it actively harms instances, communities, and most importantly users.

I absolutely despise when I go a saved post or comment thread that I wanted to reread later only to find that I can't cause the post/thread's been deleted by a single user.

There's so much useful or interesting and creative things that people care about and also want to share in terms of life experiences or just having a cool thing to collaborate and work on.

  • having this be ruined by individuals that want to 'dine and dash' basically ruins this.

Honestly Fuck you.
If you 'help farm' especially I will find you and I will ban you because you are actively harming users who spend their precious time, effort, and humanly love to do cool stuff here on the Fediverse.

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Hey everyone, with the upcoming closure of lemm.ee I just wanted to say thank you to all the admins and mods of all the comms on .ca, and users! You all are what helps to make this the best instance of Lemmy! Doing those jobs for free can't be easy (admins/mods), what with all the douchebags that tend to populate the internet and make life harder for normal people that just want to chill. I know I certainly wouldn't have the patience to mod even a small comm, let alone help to be an admin of an entire instance.

I tend not to post or comment to much, always been that way, but I've been here since July of 2023 and I browse daily. The stability of this instance is awesome and I have nothing but respect for the admins that make this possible. The mods of all the .ca comms, and awesome users in general really help to make this the greatest instance on Lemmy.

Thank you to everyone, regardless of whether you're an admin, a mod, or just an average user posting their hot takes, shit posts, memes, and great discussion material etc.

Long live lemmy.ca!

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Hello! Thank you to all involved in running this service :)

I think it is wonderful that this instance, and other services are run by

a registered non-profit organization based in Canada

Before spending a lot of time boosting the instance or donating, I wanted to verify the registration, but I wasn't able to find it where I searched. Could you provide a link or a pointer?

Thank you, again, for all that you're doing! <3

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Good morning everyone. Just a quick heads up that I've banned a good chunk of IP space in China due to abusive traffic.

I've tried to restrict this where possible to datacenter blocks from Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba, but China Telecom / Mobile were also heavy sources of suspicious traffic. I doubt we have many (if any) users in China, but if you are affected please let me know.

This has been ongoing for a while and I ignored it initially since the traffic levels were low, but it wasn't anymore.

The ban has very visibly cut our traffic levels:

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The maximum statistics shown on the Lemmy statistics page on Fedecan only goes out 2 years at most.

However, since the initial Reddit API exodus is now approaching the 2 year anniversery, this means that after this month, the Fedecan statistics pages would no longer be able to show the activity trends on Lemmy prior to the surge of users in June 2023. This is because after June 2025, the 2 year graphs would cut off before it would show the API exodus, as it becomes greater than 2 years old; and so it would not be displayed in the graphs after that time.

Would it be possible to add an additional set of graphs to all 4 statistics pages on Fedecan to show the all time statistics on Lemmy (i.e. with a fixed start date so it shows all statistics)?

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Rentlar@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca
 
 

Since the server went off of OVH, lemmy.ca has felt super snappy overall. Tonight I'm noticing lagspikes, and the status graph shows it too...

I'll check back in the morning, site's still usable so not an urgent matter. It'd be interesting for me to know what might be happening.

Morning edit: seems like a one off.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by mp3@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca
 
 

cross-posted from: https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.ml/post/29579005

Since we depend on them to have this platform, it seems fair to spread their request for donations. To be clear, this is to finance the developers who build this software, and has nothing to do with our specific instance operational costs.

From the Lemmy developers

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

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I am new to Lemmy so I may be missing some setting, apologies if so.

Using the mobile app on Android. When someone replies to a comment and I tap the bell icon to see messages, I can only see the reply itself, not what it was replying to. When I click on the message it takes me to the thread leaving me to scroll through the entire thread to find the comment and its reply. This is frustrating and time consuming and I often abandon the discussion because I'm not interested in looking for a needle in a haystack. This stifles discussion. It's confusing because the context of the reply is often lost without it's parent.

As an example of how it can be done better, in Reddit when you click on a comment it takes you to the thread and filters for only the reply and its parent, with the option to "view all".

Is there any viable solution to this? I can't be the only one with this concern.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Shadow@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca
 
 

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/35952239

Hey all,

Today, I’m writing to share our intention to join Fedecan, a Canadian not-for-profit organization committed to supporting the Fediverse. We believe this partnership will foster collaboration among like-minded individuals who share a common goal: to create a safe, welcoming space where people can connect freely.

Together we will help deliver a fast, reliable, and consistent experience for all and continue to be free from corporate influence and guided by the values of openness, community, and trust.

Who is Fedecan

Fedecan is a registered non-profit organization based in Canada, with the goal to provide a safe and welcoming space for people to connect with each other on the Fediverse. More information can be found here.

You may also know them by their Canadian lemmy instance lemmy.ca.

What does this mean for sh.itjust.works?

From the outside everything will stay much the same, especially with the admin team. Internally, we will collaborate on tasks related to non-profit compliance, policies, banking and common infrastructure elements such as backup/disaster recovery infrastructure. We will continue to operate separate equipment and instances in geographically isolated locations under different names. We will work towards aligning on safety and security practices in order to ensure that data is secure.

From an organizational structure, sh.itjust.works will fall under the Fedecan umbrella and will share common bylaws, policies, methodologies on best practices, security and legal considerations.

Where do donations go?

Donations to sh.itjust.works will continue to support our mission and objectives exclusively. However, users will also have the option to donate directly to Fedecan, which will allocate funds amongst its projects including sh.itjust.works. Operational costs related to running the non-profit will be shared among projects and these expenses will be transparently disclosed in annual reports published on the Fedecan website.

Option to withdrawal

sh.itjust.works will have the right to withdraw from the Fedecan umbrella should our mutual goals no longer be aligned. In such a case, a predefined provision and action plan will be in place to ensure a smooth transition back to independence.

Why Now?

As the Fediverse continues to grow, we believe it's important to collaborate more closely with others who share our values. Joining Fedecan allows us to do just that, strengthening our operation through a non-profit while staying true to our mission.

Timeline / Next Steps

Over the coming weeks, we'll begin the process of integrating with Fedecan on the organization side. You won't notice many changes but we'll keep you informed throughout the process.

Looking Ahead

We’re excited about this next chapter and the opportunities it brings. By joining forces, we’re reinforcing our commitment to the Fediverse and to the principles that brought us all together in the first place—openness, community, transparency, and trust.

Our core mission remains unchanged. We're still independent in spirit and practice and we remain committed to being a space that's not driven by profit, but by people.

I invite your questions or concerns on this thread or on our https://matrix.to/#/#sh.itjust.works:matrix.org)

Stay connected,

--The sh.itjust.works and Fedecan Team

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We're now running 0.19.11, changelog here - https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-04-08_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.11

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I got a 7 day ban from Reddit for 'violence' on a shit-posting sub. I suggested our beloved Bonhomme go stomp on the Whitehouse. Apparently, the US is so butthurt from the reaming Drumpf and Elmo are giving them, that they're scared of a snowman from Québec. Makes me proud.

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Hey everyone. I am new to the "Fediverse" and I am confused about how Lemmy connects with PixelFed.

As I understand it, you should be able to interact with all the Fediverse platforms from just one platform, but I can't seem to figure out how to see stuff from Mastodon or Pixelfed here on Lemmy.

Similarly, I don't quite understand how to see stuff from Lemmy on Pixelfed. I created a Pixelfed account and tried searching for my Lemmy account over there and managed to find it, but I don't know how to log in to it or make changes to it.

Could someone explain this to me? I am very confused!

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by KanadrAllegria@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca
 
 

If not, are there any plans to set one up in the near future?

I'm new to the Fediverse, but I'm loving it so far, and i'm ready to ditch Facebook/meta... Have been toying with the idea of setting up a Friendica account. I'd love to continue with Fedican if possible, but I am also open to suggestions for other instances if Fedican is not an option.

Cheers!

*Of>If

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Shadow@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca
 
 

For anyone that noticed the 30 seconds of downtime a few minutes ago, that was to upgrade us to lemmy 0.19.10.

Changes are listed here - https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-03-19_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.10_and_Developer_AMA

This is not the version with breaking API changes, there should be no impact to any clients.

Enjoy!

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In the spirit of !fedigrow@lemm.ee, has anybody printed off stickers for lemmy.ca to grow it in our communities?

23
 
 

Hi all!

I've been thinking lately of following more Lemmy.ca communities where possible in order to help foster growth and community with Canadian fediverse users. I used to have a lemmy.ca account, but have since swapped to PieFed's software and have been finding it to be a much better match for me and my personal usecase.

I was just curious if there was a cooking community hosted on the Lemmy.ca instance. In going to the site myself and doing a quick search on the communities page, I was unable to find such a community. If there is one, I was hoping to be pointed in the right direction, as I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance, and Elbows up!

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In the past few weeks the !canada@lemmy.ca community has grown quite a bit. The growth has mostly consisted of news and (geo)political posts, which is understandable.

However, this makes it hard to follow any text threads like these or non-news/political posts. This leaves the only option of either blocking the !canada@lemmy.ca community completely, or having to use a mobile app with keyword filtering (I'm not aware of any on desktop, and keyword filters do not sync between devices yet).

I'd suggest changing/updating the rules of !canada@lemmy.ca to note to users to post their political (and geopolitical?) news threads in !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca instead. Alternatively, split geopolitical with (world) news into a separate lemmy.ca (world)news community like with !worldnews@aussie.zone? This split community would have a rule that all posts would need to link to a news site or equivalent. Text & image posts would remain at !canada@lemmy.ca.

This would make it a lot easier to find text posts, general discussion threads, and image posts without them being drowned out by the news and (geo)political news threads.

One can look to !australia@aussie.zone and note how that community makes it clear in the rules that politics, (world) news, and geopolitics have to be posted into the Australian politics/(world) news communities. This makes the main Australia community much easier to browse and scroll through without going insane.

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Sorry everyone I know how much you love the attention she gives you, but I've implemented some quick and dirty filtering for private messaging.

We now have the ability to automatically mark PM's as deleted or read, depending on content inside of them. If we accidentally filter something you legitimately wanted (ie, not Nicole) please let me know.

If any other instances would like to implement this, here's the code. Note that you'll need to set your hostname at the top here for some reason I haven't exactly identified.

SET lemmy.protocol_and_hostname = 'https://lemmy.ca/';

CREATE TABLE private_message_filters (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    phrase TEXT NOT NULL,
    behavior VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL CHECK (behavior IN ('delete', 'mark_read'))
);

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION filter_private_messages()
RETURNS trigger AS $$
DECLARE
    banned_phrase_record private_message_filters%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN
    FOR banned_phrase_record IN 
        SELECT * FROM private_message_filters
    LOOP
        IF LOWER(TRIM(NEW.content)) ILIKE '%' || LOWER(TRIM(banned_phrase_record.phrase)) || '%' THEN
            IF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'delete' THEN
                NEW.deleted := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            ELSIF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'mark_read' THEN
                NEW.read := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            END IF;
        END IF;
    END LOOP;
    RETURN NEW;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages
AFTER INSERT ON private_message
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE FUNCTION filter_private_messages();

To add filter words:

insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('delete', 'spamtestdelete');
insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('mark_read', 'spamtestread');

If you want to quickly disable / enable filtering while testing:

ALTER TABLE private_message DISABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;
ALTER TABLE private_message ENABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;

I'll leave it up to you to figure out what phrases to filter on. MAKE SURE YOU TEST. If there's an error, private messaging could break completely. You should not get an error message from the UI while sending a message with a banned word.

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