otl

Lemmy uses the packages olowe.co/lemmy (source), which provides a io/fs filesystem interface to a Lemmy instance, and 9fans.net/go/acme to interact with acme. What you get is an Acme Mail inspired program for Lemmy. As you can see, it's a work in progress!

But it's been fun so far. Sorry that this isn't running on Plan 9 (running on OpenBSD). I'm on the road at the moment and don't have a way to connect to a server right now!

I recently wrote a command-line utility lemmyverse to find communities indexed by Lemmy Explorer. A quick count shows almost 14%(!) of all communities indexed by lemmyverse are junk communities created by a single user @LMAO (reported here):

% lemmyverse . | wc -l
  30376
% lemmyverse enoweiooe | wc -l
   4206

Here's a python script, using no external dependencies, which uses Lemmy's HTTP API to delete all communities that @LMAO moderates:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import json
import urllib.parse
import urllib.request

baseurl = "https://lemmy.world"
username = "admin"
password = "password"

def login(user, passwd):
	url = baseurl+"/api/v3/user/login"
	body = urllib.parse.urlencode({
		"username_or_email": user,
		"password": passwd,
	})
	resp = urllib.request.urlopen(url, body.encode())
	j = json.load(resp)
	return j["jwt"]

def get_user(name):
	query = urllib.parse.urlencode({"username": name})
	resp = urllib.request.urlopen(baseurl+"/api/v3/user?"+query)
	return json.load(resp)

def delete_community(token, id):
	url = baseurl+"/api/v3/community/delete"
	params = {
		"auth": token,
		"community_id": id,
	}
	body = urllib.parse.urlencode(params)
	urllib.request.urlopen(url, body.encode())

token = login(username, password)
user = get_user("LMAO")
for community in user["moderates"]:
	id = community["community"]["id"]
	try:
		delete_community(token, id)
	except Exception as err:
		print("delete community id %d: %s" % (id, err))

Change username and password on lines 8 and 9 to suit.

Hope that helps! :) Thanks for the work you all put in to running this popular instance.

lemmyverse: search lemmy communities from the command-line. Thanks to the data HTTP API from lemmyverse.net! This is not really as polished as I like but, hey, in the interest of having a lively Lemmy I thought I'd share anyway :)

Usage

lemmyverse searches community names and descriptions using a regular expression:

lemmyverse pattern

Find communities about motorcycles:

$ lemmyverse motorcycle
120024@lemmy.world      All Things motorcycles
20hirnzelle@feddit.ch   All Things motorcycles
7810322@lemmy.world     All Things motorcycles
bmwmotorrad@lemmy.world Community for BMW motorcycles. A place to share
bootstrappable@slrpnk.net       A community to discuss all things BMW cars & motorcycles.\nFeel free to show off your new vehicle/parts
buell@lemmy.world       A discussion area for Buell motorcycles.
motorcycle_logistics@lemmy.world        A community for pictures and videos of people using motorcycles to transport things in a creative manner.\n\nThis includes
motorcycles@feddit.de   This community is for all things motorcycle related. At a later point and with enough traction gained
...

Find communities for the Plan 9 operating system:

$ lemmyverse '(plan9)|(Plan 9)'
plan9@lemmy.sdf.org     Discussions on the Plan9 operating system.

Why?

I run relatively slow hardware and I'm travelling in Bali, Indonesia at the moment. Loading lemmyverse.net in a web browser takes ages and gets the laptop fans spinning (it's hot here!). So I had some fun creating a tiny command-line program to find Lemmy communities using classic UNIX tools awk(1), tr(1), grep(1) etc.

More info

See the man page:

LEMMYVERSE(1)               General Commands Manual              LEMMYVERSE(1)

NAME
     lemmyverse - find lemmy communities

SYNOPSIS
     lemmyverse pattern

DESCRIPTION
     lemmyverse finds Lemmy communities indexed by lemmyverse.net using the
     given regular expression as interpreted by grep(1).  Both the names and
     descriptions of the communities are searched.

     On first run, a local community database must be generated.  The full
     community index is downloaded from https://lemmyverse.net using curl(1),
     transformed, then stored in the user cache directory.  To regenerate the
     database, remove the file and run lemmyverse again.

FILES
     communities
             Community database from lemmyverse.net.

ENVIRONMENT
     lemmyverse uses the following environment variables:

     XDG_CACHE_DIR
             The directory to store the community database.  If unset,
             $HOME/.cache/lemmyverse is used.

EXAMPLES
     Find communities for the Plan 9 operating system:
           lemmyverse '(plan9)|(Plan 9)'

     List all communities from the instance lemmy.sdf.org:
           lemmyverse '@lemmy.sdf.org'

EXIT STATUS
     The lemmyverse utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO
     grep(1), curl(1), https://lemmyverse.net

Go tech lead Russ Cox:

This post is about why we need a coroutine package for Go, and what it would look like.

With a post like this it usually means there will almost certainly be a new standard library package. But even more interestingly:

If we are to add coroutines to Go, we should aim to do it without language changes. That means the definition of coroutines should be possible to implement and understand in terms of ordinary Go code. Later, I will argue for an optimized implementation provided directly by the runtime, but that implementation should be indistinguishable from the pure Go definition.

Go project tech lead Russ Cox talks about a technique to make programs clearer using concurrency.

An OpenBSD developer and the one-man-band behind Pushover gives some advice after 10 years of running a public HTTP API. It's interesting as big companies are happy to publish articles about all the fancy stuff they developed to run some API, but you don't always hear from a sole developer running a service for such a long time.

There's something about the consistency that is missing nowadays.