literature.cafe meta

I won't go into full detail since it's a lemmy admin thing but someone in a community on another instance posted genuine CSAM today and it got federated across different instances. It was originally just one, but I was informed it was multiple.

This is an ongoing issue that is a topic of major discussion amongst lemmy admins. Please be advised that there is info regarding this that cannot be publicly shared at this time, but know that it is being handled carefully in a coordinated manner.

I'm sorry if I take a step back from posting for the next few days.

Newly federated posts should work as intended.

It was lagging the instance quite a bit, and really isn't necessary given the amount of active users we have now and the communities already federated in.

If you want to see new communities that might not be federated yet though, per usual feel free go to https://lemmyverse.net or !newcommunities@lemmy.world

Unsure when it will be resolved but we will see.

All are welcome in this discussion but this is really more focused on local users of literature.cafe, I'll leave this post up and pin it for a few days just to get some feedback. Insight from others on other instances are welcome, but please realize that this is a discussion focused on users who use literature.cafe

Our community may be small, but I do want to know peoples thoughts before anything.

For those who do not already know, hexbear is on our defederation list.

With that being said there's another thing that some might not already know. I am a practicing reform Jew. I am by no means a perfectly observant Jewish man but I am quite a lot more religious than most I think. I wear a kippah, try my best to keep kosher, and participate in the religious rites of Judaism as well as participate in prayers and community events. It is primarily why I started this instance as reading and books are a core cultural aspect in being Jewish. Knowledge is power, and we aren't called the people of the book for nothing. As well, I am extremely involved in the Jewish community and know many Jewish leaders across the country and the world due to my stints of working as a "Jewish professional."

Being a practicing Jew in a culture with rapidly rising antisemitism is extremely exhausting both in real life and online, and unfortunately that exhaustion was maximized on Reddit at times in regards to interacting with specific communities. One such community that I had pretty bad experiences with the specific subreddit that hexbear spawned from. Right now I'm pretty reserved about talking about Judaism and my faith as there isn't a Jewish focused community on here, but when (not if) one comes I will very much be active there.

And this leads into the elephant in the room that always is brought whenever I bring my Jewishness up: I am not Israeli, nor have I ever been to Israel but I have worked with Israelis and am friends with quite a few Israeli Jews. I rarely if ever discuss the topic of Israel & Palestine even within my own community because of how charged it tends to be, but especially online it is a topic I actively avoid due to the stress and antisemitism I have faced over it. My ideals and opinions in regards to that can pretty much summed up "fuck fascists" and "I pray for peace."

I have more opinions on the matter, specifically on my very direct hatred of Netanyahu as well as more detailed knowledge of just how completely fucked the Knesset is and how bad things really are there. I speak a bit of a Hebrew, and know some of the political stuff that goes on there. Things are bad, and are likely only going to get worse there not just for Palestinians but for that entire region as a whole due to the war mongering nature of the new government there.

Criticizing Israel and it's current fucked up fascist government is not antisemitic, but holding all Jews accountable for the crimes of the Israeli state absolutely is. Immediately asking a random Jewish person about their feelings on Israel isn't inherently antisemitic but it feels extremely hostile and often contributes to an environment of generally feeling unsafe as a Jewish person especially in left leaning spaces. It feels as if you're trying to pin down whether or not we're a "good jew" or a "bad jew."

When the community hexbear spawned from existed on reddit, the antisemitism I witnessed during brigades were some of the most egregious on the site outside of r/conspiracy. That is why I blocked that instance per-emptively, as I felt the antisemitism I directly experienced in that community would follow here if federation was enabled.

I had a pretty productive discussion with an admin from hexbear in a matrix chat, and to be quite honest it made me realize my bias towards the entire community wasn't probably the most fair. The team is different there than the subreddit, and the admin made it clear antisemitism is not tolerated.

I know the community is controversial across the lemmyverse, but I am willing to attempt federation. The admin offered to add our instance to their allowlist and refederate, and if there's issues that arise we can just reblock.

I'm curious of peoples thoughts on the matter. Overall this instance isn't politically focused, but books in large part do have a political nature to them. It's hard to deny that authoritarianism and the free consumption of literature is fundamentally incompatible.

I moved things over to a liberapay team link instead of it being linked to my own liberapay account. I did add a donation goal but it's really just arbitrary. Per usual donations aren't expected but are appreciated to help keep things running.

On the bookwyrm side of things, I'm unsure if I would need to get a different server altogether for a bookwyrm instance or if I can use it here, we will see. If you do truly want to see a bookwyrm instance I'd suggest considering donating, as that may become an extra cost even if I am successful in running it on the same server as this lemmy instance.

seems like the federation queue is slowly but surely catching up for lemmy.world, we will see though

Server needs to restart for some update stuff, should be brief though

https://m.literature.cafe - voyager/mobile site

https://a.literature.cafe - alexandrite

https://old.literature.cafe - old reddit style

https://ph.literature.cafe - photon (kinda glitchy) had to remove cause its too wonky

There's a couple that look pretty good. I'm a fan of photon and alexandrite. mlmym is a throwback to old reddit.

https://github.com/aeharding/voyager https://github.com/diamondburned/slemmy https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon https://github.com/cr4yfish/nemmy https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym https://github.com/sheodox/alexandrite

Obviously not a requirement, but for those who are interested it is here. It'll also be on the sidebar.

I've contemplated potentially making a mastodon or firefish instance as well eventually but I dunno

I've seen other instances do this, so I figured I might as well too. Right now the instance is hosted on a relatively medium sized VPS with object storage. Lemmy uses very little resources, so I run some personal stuff on the server as well (like a screenshot hoster, blog, etc) but if I need to upgrade I can eventually.

VPS: $13.99

Object storage: as of right now it is $2.20 (and growing, slowly but surely)

I'm not opposed to donations, but it's not required. The biggest cost is likely going to be object storage more and more.

👍

I'm gonna be using the link attached, it basically pulls top communities across different instances as they appear in their top feeds.

What instances should I try to pull from?

It's really upsetting to watch but the admin over there has gone MIA and exploding-heads (a fascist instance thats defederated here as well) has set up shop to explicitly spread stuff across the federation. Just straight up horrific bigotry. I hope the admin over there comes back and cleans house. For now, I aint dealing with that.

Switched the default image saving to webp instead of whatever format it pleased so itll save a lot of space 😀

Let's see if lemmy is actually able to do that now, or if its gonna be a pain in the ass to do 🙄

!literature@beehaw.org

!books@lemmy.world

!audiobooks@lemmy.ml

!bookclub@lemmy.world

!library_haul@lemmy.world

Feel free to click on all to see some posts from communities that are federated.

What is this place???

This is a lemmy instance I decided to make with a focus on books and writers (and anyone else wanting a smaller instance). I also am on the team of a rather large lemmy instance, but I wanted to have a space where I could post and just generally "exist" on that's a little smaller and focused on my niche interests (such as reading)

What is lemmy?

Lemmy is a decentralized platform that serves as an alternative to reddit, it functions in a similar way to older bulletin boards/usenet or email. It can get complicated to explain, but all you really need to know is that by using this instance you can access pretty much the rest of lemmy with ease and others can see posts and topics in communities here. Feel free to take a peek in the all tab, I've already federated with some pretty large communities.

Defederation

Much like with email you have spam filters that different providers use to block bad stuff, defederation serves to exist kind of like that. I only defederate from explicitly hateful or generally toxic instances. There's only a few on lemmy that are also pretty much defederated en masse, but I did migrate a list over from mastodon since sometimes mastodon content can migrate over between lemmy (it's glitchy though). I did defederate with the porn communities, and it's mainly because their communities can clog up all really fast with how lemmy functions right now.

General Rules

If I need to elaborate the rules further, I will but for the most part just generally don't be a jerk and it'll be fine.

Finding new communities

If you don't see anything that really interests you in /all, thats ok! Go to lemmyverse.net/communities and find a link to what communities look interesting and copy and paste the link into the search bar. Be patient, maybe click it more than once and it'll start to federate. If you need any help finding stuff, just ask :)

Community Creation

If you want a community here, don't hesitate to ask and I can make it for you!