Joking aside, I'm already donating the labor involved to create an alternative web UI. That's as far as I'm willing to go for this project.
I host a Lemmy.world web UI at https://lemminator.netlify.app/ on Netlify's free tier. Due to intense usage, I got an e-mail warning me that 75% of my functions allowance has been depleted:
I assume that when this counter hits 100%, people who use it will be locked out until the bill cycle resets. Although instance admins can self-host Lemminator, it's still missing a few features like post creation and registration that admins might consider essential.
What do I do? Are there any other free Netlify-like services where I wouldn't run into this usage limit?
GitHub and GitLab both support inserting images into your README.md. Here's the syntax:
As a user, I completely agree. People often make decisions in a few seconds, and you've done all this work developing an app. That little extra step will allow you to make a difference to more people!
As a developer of a Lemmy web UI, I've been thinking about adding screenshots to my README for weeks but still haven't done so 🙈
The SvelteKit + TypeScript combo is such a breeze to work with!
And compared to other languages, JavaScript scores pretty well in performance benchmarks. It has a lot more going for it than people give it credit for.
I feel your pain and I'm hoping I can help! I'm making a web UI that aims to be easier to use than existing ones.
Heck yeah, share your work with the world.
We should probably compile a regularly updated list somewhere. It's great that people have so many options. Now we just need to make it easier for them to find a web UI that suits their needs.
Maybe a frontend or app that just shows you everything and allows you to interact easily without worrying about logins or urls for instances, and pushes the federation aspect “behind the scenes”.
Let's say I'm browsing Lemmy.world through this frontend and I stumbled upon !privacy@lemmy.ml. Would the following be clear?
It's a just rhetorical device to explain a theory for why most Redditors haven't jumped ship yet. It may be correct, it may be incorrect.
If it was that easy to convince Redditors, we'd already have a very diverse userbase. But by all means, keep spreading the word. We all want Lemmy to succeed.
In all honesty, as much as I want non-profit Reddit alternatives to succeed, I think Lemmy is a tough sell to Redditors. Here's roughly how I think that'd go.
Lemmy user: "You should try Lemmy"
Redditor: "Sure, what's its website?"
Lemmy user: "There are many"
Redditor: "Wait what"
Lemmy user: "You have to pick one"
Redditor: "Why?"
Lemmy user: "See, Lemmy is not a website, but a network of federated instan-"
Redditor: "That sounds complicated. I just want a website like Reddit"
Lemmy user: "But don't you care about how Reddit has treated its mods, app devs and the general community?"
Redditor: "Yeah but all this Lemmy and Kbin stuff is confusing. Can I just use a website without reading up on all this Fediverse stuff?"
Lemmy user: "Okay, just go to Lemmy.world"
Redditor: "It seems to be down"
Lemmy user: "Hmm, maybe try Lemmy.ml?"
Redditor: "This website looks a little... hard to wrap my head around"
Lemmy user: "There are alternative frontends"
Redditor: "What now?"
Lemmy user: "Do you know about Alexandrite?"
Redditor: "Nevermind, I'm out"
If we want to convince a wide range of users to use Lemmy, we have to make using Lemmy a no-brainer for everyone.
I'm trying to contribute by building a new opensource web UI that I hope will provide a better UX for the average Redditor. It's not ready to become a daily driver yet, but I'm hoping to get to a point where it's nice enough that instances will want to host it on their domain. Maybe I'm delusional in thinking this web UI will appeal to users that don't like the current ones. But there's only one way to find out, and that is to build it.
I may have bumped into a bug while testing comment functionality.
- Go to https://lemmy.ml/comment/2566997
- Click '2 more replies'
I think those two other replies were comments that I deleted. I assume the cause of the bug is comment 2566997 having a child_count value of 2.
I have a question about the semantics of child_count in the comment list API endpoint. Sorry for being related to an earlier question but I haven't quite figured it out yet.
My assumption was that child_count would indicate the amount of total descendants of a comment, regardless of depth. But take this case for example:
$ curl 'https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/comment/list?parent_id=2157873&max_depth=999&limit=999' | jq '.comments[] | { path: .comment.path, id: .comment.id, content: .comment.content, child_count: .counts.child_count }'
json { "path": "0.2157873", "id": 2157873, "content": "Really cool! I'm excited to learn more about you and the project!\n\nWhat's the format? Should we submit questions beforehand, or will you process questions that arrive at the start time? I've never participated in an AMA 😅 ", "child_count": 9 } { "path": "0.2157873.2158260", "id": 2158260, "content": "You just post questions as top-level replies to the stickied thread that day, and we'll be online to answer them.", "child_count": 6 } { "path": "0.2157873.2158260.2158286", "id": 2158286, "content": "Cool. Thank you for doing this!", "child_count": 1 } { "path": "0.2157873.2158260.2229041", "id": 2229041, "content": "Post doesn’t mention, where is the AMA? Here or in a different community?", "child_count": 3 } { "path": "0.2157873.2158260.2158286.2158743", "id": 2158743, "content": "No probs!", "child_count": 0 } { "path": "0.2157873.2158260.2229041.2231423", "id": 2231423, "content": "As the post mentions, it will be stickied to the top of lemmy.ml ", "child_count": 2 } { "path": "0.2157873.2158260.2229041.2231423.2231737", "id": 2231737, "content": "Thanks for the details. May be I’m missing something, but I don’t see that detail in the post. ", "child_count": 1 } { "path": "0.2157873.2158260.2229041.2231423.2231737.2238347", "id": 2238347, "content": "Oops my bad, that was something I responded to in a comment.", "child_count": 0 }
I see that comment 2157873 has a child count of 9, with one direct descendant (2158260). The descendant has a child count of 6. I'd reason that comment 2157873 has 2 direct descendants that aren't visible in the API response yet, because it has one visible descendant having a child count of 6 (i.e. 9 - 1 - 6 = 2). My calculation seems incorrect because (a) I don't see a 'Load more' indicator for this part of the comment thread on https://lemmy.ml/post/2671212, and (b) every comment shown there also seems present in the API response.
Am I understanding the meaning of child_count correctly?
Fair enough. I'm currently focused on creating my own Lemmy web UI, but later I might have room to submit some SEO-related PRs. While I'm not yet sure what needs to be done, instance owners can get tailored recommendations from Google. I have a hunch that Lemmy is currently being penalized for duplicate content, which we might be able to mitigate by adding `` to federated posts.
I'm fully with you on not wanting to cater to Google. On the other hand, if someone writes a helpful Lemmy post, I would like people who don't know Lemmy to be able to find it.
I'm creating an AGPL-licensed Lemmy web UI.
While working on the comment section I wondered: what's the best way to retrieve the total amount of direct descendants of a comment? I'm not talking about child_count as this appears to count descendants at any depth.
My use case is displaying a 'Load X more' button that for a given comment loads any direct descendants that are not yet being displayed.
Thanks - I'll remove this post and create one there.
I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy's core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It'll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.
If you're not sure where to start, Google's free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.