I'm giving Lemmy a go, as I was an avid Apollo user. Have people on here noticed a noticeable uptick in engagement in here and across Lemmy in general?
We seem to get bursts, then some really active users we never hear from again. That's expected though, people are trying stuff out. Reddit starts charging unreasable amounts for their API tomorrow which will kill most 3rd party apps, so I'm expecting another uptick (which may have already started).
Lemmy.nz has a group of core active users and others come and go, I've noticed a lot of new users in the past few days, especially new users posting and participating which is great to see!
As others have said, to get the proper experience you need to interact with communities on other instances. Just going to Communities->All and browsing the ones with the highest active user count can give you a good selection. Or even just browsing the main All feed, look for posts you like, and see what community they are posted to. Lemmy.nz has a slow trickle of content but if you look at All there is plenty of content to interact with.
Haha, hopefully I stick around :) Yeah, that's what brought me along to finally give it a go, as I was using Apollo.
I hope you do stick around!
I'm very fussy about apps so I'm still mostly using the website on my phone, but there is a list of android apps here from the !android@lemmy.ml community.
I've been using WefWef today as it's based off of the Apollo app UI, and apart from a couple of bugs/wants, its been great so far 👍
I've seen that but it seems to be struggling with it's popularity! It's self-hostable, I wonder if it's the sort of thing you could run a version of for the instance. E.g. wefwef.lemmy.nz could be a wefwef frontend that prioritises the lemmy.nz page for logged out users, but otherwise works the same.
Edit: I went and did it, you can now access wefwef.lemmy.nz
No warranties express or implied
This is awesome but FYI it’s recently been updated to 0.6.0.
Haha wow, I thought "I only did it an hour ago, how could it not be the most recent!" But then I see 0.6.0 was released 15 mins ago. I'll update it :)
(done BTW)
That's pretty cool! Total noob is this regard so I probably wouldn't have even been able to do it myself haha
The basics of self-hosting stuff is pretty simple once you get used to it. But it is one of those things that you need a high tolerance for frustration because you will spend hours banging your head against the wall wondering why something isn't working, then either you realise you made a silly mistake, or it suddenly starts working and you have no idea what changed to make it work.
In this instance, what are the benefits of having if self hosted like this?
You're talking about wefwef still?
The main reason is that this afternoon I wasn't able to access wefwef.app half the time, it was giving me errors. I presume because the server couldn't handle a sudden surge in popularity.
Other than getting ourselves a version we host ourselves so has a lower server load, I don't think there's any other benefit.
If you like Apollo, https://www.wefwef.app has a similar UI
As that site is struggling at times, we are now also running our own instance of wefwef at wefwef.lemmy.nz
Oh interesting. It's a progressive web app, so you can install it on your phone which removes the need to worry about the performance of whatever site was originally hosting it.
I suspect a lot of people are just browsing it via their web browser?
My understanding is that progressive web apps still rely on the site's server, it's basically a way to show the website as fullscreen like it was a native app, though there are a few things that PWAs are allowed to do that a normal website doesn't.
The nornal Lemmy site is a PWA as well, so that can be installed the same as wefwef.
Only for the initial download depending on their service worker (annoyingly it's super site dependent). I'd need to see dev tools to be sure but I'm pretty confident all the JS assets and stuff are being served locally from my phone.
There's a distinction between being able to install a site to your homescreen, adding a shortcut to the site (which opens in full screen), and installing a site to your homescreen which uses their service worker to effectively be a full local server for the site.
Setting up the service worker for my note taking app was very painful haha
Interesting! I guess it depends on the site as to whether anything needs to be processed on the server.
I'd think typically most JS and images are cached in the browser for any site though, right?
In general yes, although the root HTML document might not be.
Service workers can do more than caching though, it's effectively a full web server just for that web app that runs on your device. If it's installed I'm pretty sure the data they have will never be cleared by the OS unless you uninstall the app too.
Oh thats interesting, I wonder why the wefwef.app server was struggling so much if it doesn't do any processing just serving static content that gets stored on the client. I guess just wasn't prepared for the rush of people checking it out.
Yeap, currently using wefwef.lemmy.nz that is hosted? by Dave here.
Yeah, I've been using it for a few weeks now and it seems to be growing steadily. I joined on lemmy.world at random because I didn't really understand how it all works at the start. But that instance and the NZ one seem pretty good, there's some good discussion and few dickheads.
It's not as big as The Other Place of course, but it's gaining popularity slowly. And tbh, I wouldn't really want it to be massive - I like the slower pace, and it seems more welcoming being a smaller community.
@NoRamyunForYou @sortofblue I have found engagement across the whole fediverse to be better quality.
The number of comments I get is higher than Twitter or reddit, despite the number of likes being lower.
Yeah, really enjoying the community type vibe going on around here. Feels more like you're having a conversation with a group of people. Excited to see how it all goes
I've only been on lemmy for a few weeks so I'm really not sure but I think next week is going to see a decent jump in numbers.
How are you finding it so far?
It's great to finally have an icon for this community! We still have a couple of "naked" communities but the majority now have icons and banner images. It's looking good!
As boring as it sounds, my weekend plans are likely to be Lemmy related. I'd like to run some tests using Ansible to deploy Lemmy (automated rather than manual install) and then test using Ansible to update Lemmy. I've been getting a lot of help from @SamC@lemmy.nz with that but there's not much more that can be done without me having to get my hands dirty myself.
Lemmy 0.18.1 release candidates are being released for testing so I'd guess we will get an official release this weekend based on the last few weeks.
And all this will only happen given time, since weekends mean kids are at home in need of entertainment! And school holidays are starting this weekend (last day of school today).
Lemmy related question: I was looking at a GitHub list of instances, with user counts, blocked by and blocking numbers, etc, and saw that lemmy.nz blocks 1 other instance. What instance and why?
Also, cool to see us so high up on that list when sorted by users!
What instance and why?
Lemmygrad.ml, because we don't want that in our All feed.
There are worse instances, but if we start seeing things against our code of conduct in the All feed then I'll add more. We want our instance to be welcoming and friendly.
Why ansible and not the current docker deployment?
Ansible does use docker, it's almost the same thing but automated.
The main driver originally was because the ansible setup seems to be kept up to date where as following the manual docker install instructions leads to many things not set up right because they haven't been kept up to date (admittedly it's getting better).
The update instructions are pretty brief. It basically says to update the docker tags to point to the new version. This did not work for 0.18.0 because there we other changes. Having an ansible update process would hopefully make things easier in terms of updates. It also means the setup would be exactly like what they expect, currently we have a few differences (e.g. reverse proxy running traefik in docker).
Kia ora! Another Apollo refugee just wanting to say thanks for the mahi getting this up and going, probably going to be mostly lurking though!
Pretty shitty weather in Tamaki Makaurau. Guess it will be gaming, and if I can, a bike ride between storms.
I did quickly read an article this morning that said El Nino should now be coming into full effect. Should bring a bit of a drier spell hopefully?
I really should turn off Steam sale emails... pretty distracting to get one in the morning
Yeah...temptation got the better of me and I bought four games off of my wishlist. Should keep me busy for a while haha
dude. I couldn't help myself and bought a game a couple days ago, completely forgetting about the sale. Now it's 70%. I could have saved $24. fuck.
I'm a Kiwi based in Melbourne so the work day has barely started for me yet, bleurgh! Just got back from a wee jaunt up north in Mangawhai where it rained buckets but it didn't seem to affect the collective mood of my old Otago uni mates.
Weather is going to be crap here. Assuming I can't take the wee fella out on the bike (my son, not a euphemism for anything else), I'm probably going to be spending the weekend on a whole lot of Linux admin chores (some work, some personal) and a wee bit of gaming. Steam sales are depressing when I realise I've already bought everything. I really have a problem!
Thanks. I'm glad it worked out. It was a good idea. But I still want to tweak it slightly because I'm a perfectionist.
I'm so sick 😫. On holiday and I've been vomiting with diarrhea all day and night. Basically clutching a bottle of water and a bottle of pocari sweat for dear life.
Going to try eating food today but I have no appetite and will probably throw it up.
Halfway through the workday, yay. I have no firm plans for the weekend and I'm very happy about that. Except maybe to go to the gym and maybe go out to eat some nice food somewhere.
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