It doesn't look like anyone's going to complete whatever was being drawn in this area, so I figured I'd turn it into a holy Neco-Arc. If you wanna contribute, click this link and it should automatically set up the template for you :)

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/232185

Hey all,

I’ve got an exciting thing to announce today, Canvas — Lemmy’s r/Place!

We need to get our own traditions over here in the Threadiverse, why not start off with our own r/Place

This weekend, we will open up a canvas to all Lemmy users, each user will be able to place 1 pixel every minute. This event will last 72 hours, starting midnight EST on the 4th and ending at 11:59pm EST on the 6th

Some instances that are joining in:

• toast.ooo
• lemmy.zip
• lemmy.ca

Join the Lemmy Community [!canvas@toast.ooo](/c/canvas@toast.ooo)

Join the Matrix Space #lemmy-canvas:matrix.org

I noticed that when browsing posts which contain a link to an MP4 file, Voyager very conveniently embeds the video in the post. This is an awesome feature and AFAIK, Liftoff and Voyager are the only Lemmy apps I've tested that do this.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work well for IPFS links, even when including an .mp4 filename at the end of the URL. Doing this will allow the video to embed just fine on the Lemmy-UI web interface, but it won't carry over to the app interface.

I'm posting this as IPFS is a great option for decentralized video sharing online and it would be super nice to have it work just like any other MP4 url. I imagine it would be a simple fix, but I'm not too familiar with coding for applications, so someone else may have a better idea of what's going on under the hood that's preventing it from working. I've submitted this post with a link to an unrelated video for demonstration and testing purposes.

EDIT 2: Ruud has posted some guidelines for community moderation

EDIT: I want to clarify that the purpose of this post isn't to call anyone out in particular, and I think it's best to approach this issue with a gentle hand. Users who are doing this aren't necessarily ill intentioned, but may not realize the negative affect their actions may be having on the instance, hence why it's important to have this discussion. That being said, I removed the link to the user originally mentioned in this post to avoid any possible witchhunts.

Original Post:

I'm not sure what to call them, but I've noticed a few instances of users on this server creating dozens, and in some cases over a hundred different communities, and doing absolutely nothing with them. No sidebar description, no logo, banner, welcome post, or anything.

I understand that some people may be doing this in good faith in an effort to make sure that these spaces exist in the first place. That's fine and all - as long as you're allowing other community members to step in and help maintain and grow these spaces you've created, I don't really have a problem with it.

However, I think there are a good amount of people who are grabbing communities... just to squat on them? For some odd reason?

Take a look at this user's account [redacted]. Doing a little poking around, it seems they're an account that's owned by a [redacted] company based in [redacted]. They also don't have a single post or comment on record. So... Why do they own over 100 communities, many of which are simply duplicates of existing, popular Reddit subs?

I think the biggest problem here is that we may have users who want to create, cultivate, and grow communities that they feel strongly about, but when you go to set up a community only to find that it's owned by someone who isn't putting in any effort to make it a place for discussion, or outright doesn't care about it at all, it's going to discourage people from wanting to contribute in that way. First impressions are important, and these users might be turned off of Lemmy from an abundance of seemingly dead or spam communities.

What do you guys think? Is this an 'issue' worth thinking about, or will it sort itself out with time? I know it may not be super important in the grand scheme of things, but it's a question that's been on my mind for a few days now.

this is a cat. her name is Ziggy. please say hello