Hello again you scallywags, welcome to to 2025! After last month's post we had a pretty amazing showing and we finished the funding for the year with quite a bit to spare! Not only that, but thanks to our 26 subscribers, we are completely self-reliant as we have enough stable subscriptions coming in to cover all our costs. Extra thanks to the two Salty Dogs who carry ~40% of the hosting costs on their own!

I have now opened the goal for the next half-year and I'm fairly confident we'll be able to cover it easily. Cause y'all are excellent.

On a more personal note, I want to say I regularly run into people mentioning our little corner of the fediverse, and the reactions I see seem always positive from the wider lemmy populace. Almost nobody has much of anything bad to say about the Divisions by zero and it just gives me a warm feeling inside to see a notoriously contentious bunch as y'all, manages to have us in high regards throughout. I live for such comments!

Alright, that's all. Carry on.

I created this account two days ago, but one of my posts ended up in the (metaphorical) hands of an AI powered search engine that has scraping capabilities. What do you guys think about this? How do you feel about your posts/content getting scraped off of the web and potentially being used by AI models and/or AI powered tools? Curious to hear your experiences and thoughts on this.

#Prompt Update

The prompt was something like, What do you know about the user [email protected] on Lemmy? What can you tell me about his interests?" Initially, it generated a lot of fabricated information, but it would still include one or two accurate details. When I ran the test again, the response was much more accurate compared to the first attempt. It seems that as my account became more established, it became easier for the crawlers to find relevant information.

It even talked about this very post on item 3 and on the second bullet point of the "Notable Posts" section.

For more information, check this comment.

Edit¹: This is Perplexity. Perplexity AI employs data scraping techniques to gather information from various online sources, which it then utilizes to feed its large language models (LLMs) for generating responses to user queries. The scraping process involves automated crawlers that index and extract content from websites, including articles, summaries, and other relevant data. It is an advanced conversational search engine that enhances the research experience by providing concise, sourced answers to user queries. It operates by leveraging AI language models, such as GPT-4, to analyze information from various sources on the web. (12/28/2024)

Edit²: One could argue that data scraping by services like Perplexity may raise privacy concerns because it collects and processes vast amounts of online information without explicit user consent, potentially including personal data, comments, or content that individuals may have posted without expecting it to be aggregated and/or analyzed by AI systems. One could also argue that this indiscriminate collection raise questions about data ownership, proper attribution, and the right to control how one's digital footprint is used in training AI models. (12/28/2024)

Edit³: I added the second image to the post and its description. (12/29/2024).

It's been getting a lot of quality of life upgrades recently and it's sad it's not more known by lemmy users. It handles a lot of things better than the lemmy devs envisioned in the lemmyUI and it improves integration of things like loops etc.

It's become my favorite web frontend as of late, so I wanted to spread the knowledge around. All kudos to @[email protected]

We host our own instance in https://t.lemmy.dbzer0.com/ if you're from lemmy.dbzer0.com and if you're from another instance, you can try it from https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

One year ago I developed the first (and from what I know, still only) real-time CSAM detection tool for the fediverse. This has been in use by this instance and recently the real-time version was put in use by lemmy.world. Unfortunately the false-positive rate was a tad too high as this was still using my original implementation in horde-safety. But through our demands in the AI Horde, we've had to constantly tweak and improve it over the past year and thereofre we've had an improved checker for a while, but not used in fedi-safety.

Unfortunately I haven't had the time/motivation to update into it recently so lemmy.world pinged me about its false positive rate being a tad too high, I felt it was a good time to do so.

So now horde-safety has been updated and it should already be more accurate. The admins of lemmy.world already put it into production and they have the most demand, so they'll report back with their findings in a week. If this is not sufficient for lemmy's purpose, I have some other ideas for tweaking it.

And yes, memes and pressure on the admins is what caused me to look into it, but remember we're all just volunteers here. I would have looked into it if y'all had asked nicely as well ;)

Speaking of volunteers, if you want to support my work in providing tooling for lemmy and the Fediverse, feel free to send some support my way which covers all of my FOSS project work.

Recently noticed a resurfacing of the image bug that happened back when 0.19.6 was released where random posts with image links wouldn't be detected as the images they are.

I've noticed it happening for several posts on the instance, here's a few:

• ~~https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/33634525~~ (Works now)
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/33642831
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/33626225

I'm making this post here though and not in the Github issue since it seems to be affecting only this current instance. I checked and it doesn't seem like lemmy.ml is affected at all. So in all likelihood it's probably limited to dbzer0. If anyone else notices this elsewhere pleas feel free to chime in and provide post links (dbzer0 copy, the origins don't help us since this is a dbzer0 issue).

Alo you 'orrible lot, another year is almost at end end. Can you believe we launched this ship one and a half year ago? And we're still going strong! Our instance keeps growing even with the "stringent" application instructions we have, with a good mix of pirates, anarchists and other weirdos joining. All according to plan!

Communities

Last year the waters have been fairly calm, with our three top communities continuing to get more traffic

• [email protected] continues to upset libs whenever it brings up electoralism, while getting highly upvoted on everything else
• [email protected] hitting the frontpage with almost every post and getting a regular mix of rule 1 violations and people self-realizing.
• [email protected] being of course the most popular safe harbor outside of corporate shark infested waters

At the same time, our new communities seem to be finding ample traction

• [email protected] allowing people to air their grievances and striving to keep mods and admins in check, in lemmy and out.
• [email protected] fills in the gaps leftymemes leaves and provides a shiposting spot for anarchists while being unapologetically anti-tankie.
• [email protected] continuing to bash disinformation wherever it appears.
• [email protected] uniting and organizing all the image sharing comms together

Do mention your favourite new comms in the comments

Moderation

Generally y'all seem to be playing nice enough. We haven't had to issue that many bans instance-wide except for some dedicated trolls. The application instructions seem to be working quite well at stopping automated spammers and stupid bigots from getting in, in the first place.

Likewise there's been very few, if any appeals in our matrix channels and 0 [email protected] callouts.

Moderation load is manageable but do let us know if you think there's areas of improvement.

Fundraising

As always, our instance is completely donation based. We don't want to sell anything or advertise anyone. The plan is to avoid giving any incentives to enshittify this instance, or otherwise to give any ammo for anyone to claim trying to spread disinfo. The goal is to provide a truly communal space for people to express themselves (mostly how much they hate copyrights and capitalism 😅).

Our ko-fi page has managed to almost completely cover the server costs until the end of the year and anything extra will go as buffer for the next year. I'm also working on creating something official to enhance this whole process and hopefully I will announce it soon.

Given our costs and our monthly active users, each euro being donated, is currently supporting ~10 other active users in this instance, so do consider everything you donate as mutual aid to those needing a digital home!

(If you have any ideas on how I can reward sponsors to this instance, do let us know. I already offered custom emojis, but people don't seem to be interested)

Users

Just for fun, I decided to see what kind of answers people have given for our application. The tool to compile this took me way longer than I would have liked and I still have around 1500 answers that need improved parsing, but I'm out of time so here's what people answered for their favourite character

Historical Pirate: 447 (9.5%)
Digital Pirate: 1021 (21.7%)
Fictional Character: 479 (10.2%)
FOSS advocate: 1338 (28.4%)
Free Software: 400 (8.5%)
Anarchist: 480 (10.2%)
Other: 46 (1.0%)

Total Answers Analyzed: 4712
Answers matching multiple categories: 632

Top Mentions per Category:
---------------------------
Historical Pirate: Blackbeard (248), Anne Bonny (40), Zheng Yi Sao (25)
Digital Pirate: Fitgirl (183), Aaron Swartz (173), Empress (96)
Fictional Character: Captain Jack Sparrow (215), Luffy (73), Dread Pirate Roberts (43)
FOSS advocate: Linus Torvalds (888), Richard Stallman (332), Luis Rossman (97)
Free Software: Lemmy (304), Gnu (30), Github (23)
Anarchist: Kropotkin (86), Emma Goldman (78), Chomsky (53)
Other: John Oliver (15), Tim O'Reilly (15), Bernie Sanders (6)

Epilogue

I'm very proud of how well this instance, and the threadiverse in general (lemmy + mbin + piefed) is going. This feels like a fairly active forum from the good ole days, which cannot easily be taken away from us by shitty admins and corpos. Here's to one more year!

cross-posted from: https://dbzer0.com/?p=24321

I’ve had the ActivityPub plugin active on this blog for a while now and it’s been happily federating to mastodon for just as long. However it never worked on lemmy, and I always assumed it was just not set for it and was primarily focused on microblogging since lemmy was not even mentioned in the supported software.

This was until one of the lemmy developers contacted me, having been informed by a member of our lemmy instance that dbzer0.com was not properly configured for lemmy. I was perplexed of course because I didn’t really do any customization on the wordpress plugin whatsoever. I just used whatever defaults it came with.

Through some back and forth between the developers and me, I eventually started experimenting with the plugin settings, trying to see if any of them would make it behave in a way that lemmy could understand, until one of the options finally did the trick.

As a result, this WordPress blog is now happily existing as a lemmy community [email protected]

’tis a bit of a silly community name, but it works.

Unfortunately the previous posts on this blog are not retrieved automatically, so you won’t be able to see them or their comments in the community, but one can search for a blog url in lemmy and it will discover it and open it for comments. Any comments posted there should also appear as comments under the posts here which is pretty neat!

Example

So if you’re on lemmy or piefed, just visit its community from your own instance and subscribe to it, and new blogposts will appear directly in your lemmy feed. I love apub!

Many thanks to both pferfferle (the apub plugin developer) and the lemmy developers who looked into this!

leave a comment (from lemmy?) to let me know what you think.

I don't want to be the judge here or anything. Just wondering if a religious sub belongs in an instance with nothing anti-science as a rule. If its fine by everyone and the admin, its fine by me. I'd just block the community. Just felt wrong to see a Catholicism community in local.

I won't go down voting the community or anything, we've got enough of those people here

As mentioned earlier, I have now finished upgrading lemmy to 0.19.6 which should bring massive improvements to federations speeds and a ton of other stuff. So many thanks to all the developers who made this happen! I love FOSS!

Fortunately the upgrade took less than 10 minutes and everything appears to have gone quite smoothly.

A little while ago, I disabled mlmym as it was not working and someone in the comments suggested I re-add tesseract, as it's still under active development and compatible with the lemmy API. I had initially removed it at the suggestion of its core developer, but since it's still working, why not, eh?

So you can once again use https://t.lemmy.dbzer0.com/ to browser using the tesseract frontend. Let us know how it goes

Finally, if you appreciate this instance, please consider donating to its running costs. We're only at ~35% for covering our bi-yearly budget so we could use the support.

Expect 30 mins downtime or so. You know how it is around here...

This is not a new issue, but we've had reports from some communities that they are experiencing a lot of repeated downvotes from the same set of people.

This is how it typically plays out, using AI images as an example:

1. A section of the lemmy user base really hates anything AI generated.
2. Instead of blocking AI generated image communities, they down vote those posts every time they see them.
3. The posts in those communities effectively have to overcome a "handicap" of down votes each time they are posted. This harms community growth and discoverability.

The admin team would like to know how our community would like us to handle this issue, since it isn't clear to us what is the best approach, and we would like a consensus view.

Some option for consideration:

1. Encourage/allow community mods to ban persistent down voters from their community (note that we currently have no specific rule in place for this, so it is currently allowed).

• Pros: prevents future down votes; essentially "unsubscribes" from the community on their behalf
• Cons: could potentially be abused by mods who want to eliminate all down voters and "game" the system

2. Have a policy of ignoring the persistent down voters

• Pros: allows people to continue to express their dislike of [insert topic]-type posts
• Cons: means that communities on topics that are not of interest to (or are actively disliked by) the majority of users will continue to be penalized in the lemmy post feeds.

3. Leave it up to the discretion of the individual community mods

• Pros: self-determination and community based approach (i.e. only applied when needed)
• Cons: potentially inconsistent approach to down voters across the instance

Feel free to come up with more options, but these are the three main alternatives I could come up with.

We are interested to get your thoughts on the topic so we can come up with a policy for the instance. Please leave your comments below on your preferred option and the reasons for your choice.

Edit: apparently community mods can't currently see the voting breakdown in Lemmy, only instance admins can, so this adds further complexity to the issue.

One of our hosts is doing some router maintenance which affects some components of this instance. As such expect downtime in the following range:

• Start: 2024-11-08 03:30 UTC+0
• Estimated end: 2024-11-08 05:30 UTC+0

Hey peeps, let's have a chat.

Do you have anything that you would like to see improved around the divisions by zero? I'm always up for enhancements I could implement. I can't change the lemmy source, but I can do plugins and other hacks.

You can mention anything, from tech stuff, to softer social stuff.

since the slow loading issues were resolved: using the default browser UI — every time i open dbzer0 in a new tab in Firefox — the page will appear as if i'm signed out.

i can fix this by hard refreshing, except on /posts. if i open a /post in a tab where i appear signed in, it loads correctly.

sometimes this happens on the subscribed feed page, where i seem signed out but i see someone else's subscriptions, but with my votes indicated. when i'm stuck like this, /unread_count is still polled for my account.

this doesn't happen to me on other instances.

Hey everyone, I have been forced to disable the mlmym frontent which you would have reached from old. and mlmym. simulating the old reddit interface. Something has been broken in it for the past months and it's been causing me headaches. My inquiries to the developers have gone unanswered.

I will consider re-adding it when issues are resolved.

Just wondering if it would be possible to enable the instance on LemmyFederate since then we could more easily distribute communities from here to elsewhere since as it is it's kind of hard to grow communities or even just have them be discoverable on other instances.

Uh for those who don't know LemmyFederate is a service that allows communities to be distributed to other instances via a bot that subscribes to them, then unsubscribes once a real user joins. It's helpful because communities don't become visible on remote servers until someone from that server searches and subscribes to it. Due to a limitation of how the Activitypub system works.

We saw a sudden influx of new account applications recently, so we were collectively wondering if any specific event brought you all here, or it was just a coincidink.

In any case, welcome!

Dbzer0 is working perfectly for me for the first time in nearly a month. Did something change or was it a me problem?

Hi, i didn't find anything using the search, so i just wanted to know if any issues are known causing those error messages, which need a few reloads to resolve; additionally, voting on an post often takes 2, sometimes 5 or more tries.

i already tried:

• logged in/out
• with my VPN(Mullvad, on by default) and without
• Firefox / Vivaldi / Edge
• wired / wireless

and before i get into the weeds with the abyssmal support of my ISP i wanted to know if any of you have encountered the same issues.

I'm not sure if this is the issue.

I've tried other accounts on eternity and they seem to work fine.

I've used a jerboa for this account and still seem to be slow. The reason I'm not sure if this is an issue is bc it isn't always slow, everything seems to be working just fine. But very slowly.

Am I the only one?

Many newer Lemmy users still don't know they can block users, communities, and even whole instances they may not want to see in their feed or interact with.

This is a very basic guide to doing this on lemmy.dbzer0.com using the default web UI.

1. Open your profile Settings page:

2. Switch from the Settings tab to the Blocks tab

3. From this page you can block by User, Instance, or Community

That's all there is to it.

Edit: No offense to [email protected] for appearing in my community block list. It's just there as a (hopefully) inoffensive example.

The past few days I've noticed occasionally dbzer0 loads extremely slowly, or even hits a gateway timeout.

Is it just me or is the instance having some trouble keeping up?

Seems like it's only the front-end that has trouble loading, as I could still navigate next pages just fine while a different tab was busy timing out on load.

Also another thing I noticed is sometimes while it's still loading, the title of the page will be about a different post altogether. Not sure if that's related, sounds like just a caching issue to me.

Preface: Love this instance, happy to be here and this isnt a complaint just an observation.

OK so I mod a few communities across several instances, big and small. 3 on this very instance, I have noticed a pattern that posts on this instance tend to get a consistent early downvote count.

This might be my bad observations or the type of posts I see so I'd love to hear if anyone else has noticed the same.