Feddit UK

Hey everyone. I'm a new to Lemmy after making a start to remove myself from big tech. Sorry if the questions are basic. First question is- how to choose which server as your 'home'. I chose feddit because I'm from the UK, but I live abroad- does that mean I should chose one only from the country I live in? And if you use a VPN does it matter anyway?

I came from reddit and it's not anywhere near as good unfortunately and obviously there are far fewer people on here, but I'm here to stay so want to make the best of it. TIA

Here at FedditUS, we always skibidi make sure to #NeverForget🇺🇸

Except when we do, no cap.

So when you fail to do your duties as a cold blooded warm hearted american, tap right in here with us, yeehaw, and we'll see if we can forgive you over a jar of moonshine with the rizzler

I'm asking this here because it looks like a very weird feddit.uk specific issue.

If I post a URL for cdn.bsky.app to an image, it shows up fine on the default web UI.

On the app I use (Connect) it only ever shows up as a link.

"But!", I hear you cry, "surely that's an app problem?"

You'd think so, and I thought so, but it is only happening on feddit.uk. If I switch to a different account on a different instance, they display as expected. It also doesn't matter which instance they were originally posted to, as I've just seen an image from bsky that I posted on feddit.uk, and that has the same problem.

Any ideas? This has been bugging me for weeks.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/24365548

This is a bit odd. From my feddit.uk account (this one) I get the above for posts on [email protected].

If I log into the account they were posted with (this is my bot) on lemmings.world they display as expected:

If I log back in as myself on feddit.uk website, the images also display as expected (Connect doesn't seem to want to upload this one, but you'll see it without logging in at feddit.uk/c/[email protected]).

What's different?

Apology from me. We're moving some things around on the back end, and my non-thinking brain didn't think to check another admin was online before handing over control of a system to them.

Hopefully, feddit.uk will be back up before the end of the day, assuming nothing horrid happens.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/25880686

If a federated community like this already exists, please point me to it. I'd rather not divide the effort any more than necessary.

I think it is clear to anyone in the UK. The disabled community is now under attack.

This community is an attempt to help pull people together and consider ideas for support and to enhance our voice.

I like many others in our community over the last 14 years. Have enough mental health issues. That I'd be grateful for other mod volunteers who will share the time managing the group. In the hope, we can keep the workload of off to few people.

https://feddit.uk/c/disabilityUK

Have shut down and deleted my Amazon account.

Do I sell my Echo devices or destroy them?

We had to remove old.feddit.uk as it was getting hammered by bots, degrading the server's performance. Measures have been implemented to block them and it is now back up and running, although we'll be monitoring the situation.

All our frontends can be found in the sidebar:

• a.feddit.uk
• p.feddit.uk
• old.feddit.uk

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/15932635

Hey everyone!

I hope you've had a wonderful year and are ready to discover new music, because the Lemmyvision song contest return now for its second edition! For those not in the loop, read below to learn more about this Lemmy Event:

TL;DR

• From right now and until April 1st, discuss with your country’s community on Lemmy about which song to send to the contest.
• Submit the song in this community by makign a new thread.
• On April 2nd, voting will begin, where you will rank your favourite songs in a form. Any song not submitted by this date will not be featured.
• On April 8th, results of everyone’s favourite songs will be published.
• You can use [email protected] for any question, this will be the community for updates and results, make sure to subscribe if you’d like to stay in the loop.

What is Lemmyvision?

Lemmyvision is inspired from Eureddision (itself a reenactment of the Eurovision song contest) which was held on r/europe some years ago, and based on the participation of national communities / instances and the delicate musical taste of their members (you!).

Every country/community is welcome to participate! The contest follows the rule of “national languages only” but regional languages are welcome too, if your community would like to feature a song in a regional language of your country, that’s awesome. The aim is to promote different languages and cultures from around the world, to share more between our online communities across Lemmy, and discover songs from lesser known artists.

Last year, an exception was made for the programming.dev Lemmy community to participate by sending a song related to their main interest (they sent a video game soundtrack), if your community does not represent a specific country or language but wants to participate by sending a song related to your instance center of interest, you're welcome to do so! For example, lemmy.blahaj.zone could send a song composed by a Queer person!

How it works:

This post, and the [email protected] community will be open until April 1st, and I will start promoting the event on various instances and communities. Lemmy communities who want to participate have the responsibility to gather its members and vote on a single song to send for the contest. On April 2nd, the songs will be locked in. A playlist will be created to allow you to listen to all of the submitted songs, and communities will be invited to vote on their favourite. The voting is estimated to last for about a week. On April 8th the results will be published, with a ranking of everyone’s favourite songs!

I don’t expect countries with a “small” population to be accurately represented on Lemmy, so no worries if you don’t have a community and are just a small group of people, or if your country is not even on Lemmy but another platform (Kbin and whatnot), I can make exceptions, just reach out!

Regional languages are welcome as well! Basque, Welsh, Cherokee... You’re welcome to promote a non official language instead!

Song submission:

• Each Lemmy community is responsible for their own organization.
• Only one (1) song is to be sent to represent your community.
• If the song contains vocals then it must be in (one of) the official language(s) of your choice, or a regional language of your choice.
• Songs must have been released within the last year (after January 1st, 2024).
• Songs must not be international hits^[1]^.
• Submit your songs in their own thread in this community
• Verification will just require a link to the discussion thread created within your community, to ensure it’s a community (not a single person’s) decision.

[1] this is to prevent drama that happened in the past on Reddit, where Germany sent a Rammstein song and obviously won. It's up to my own appreciation of what international hit means, because it's hard to measure (metrics on youtube or spotify aren't the same), but I'm pretty lenient, just ask me if you're not sure, better to discuss it than argue

Voting:

• Voting will be done through a form created on tally.so.
• I will set up the form near the end of the month, and share it in a new announcement post when the time has come.
• If you're worried about privacy, there will be no questions about personal data, and last year I deleted the form and its results a week after the event was done.

On Federation:

I don’t discriminate based on instances, if your account is not on the same instance as your community, that’s totally fine. Additionally, if you’re on another Fediverse/Activitypub platform and would like to participate, and you’re able to federate with your representing Lemmy community, you’re welcome to join us, I’d just like to keep organization within Lemmy so it’s easier to track participations.

Would you like to help?

Last year went really well, and I managed to handle the thing alone. Programming.dev even helped with setting up the playlist! If you’d like to help in any way, please feel free to reach out, I’d love to have as many people as possible involved!!

Cheers!

Alright, f.ukers, we won the last one, let's do it again this year.

Add a British song from the last year in a new reply, upvotes decide our submission (on songs that meet the criteria).

I'm now an admin, so go me! Going forward, things will rapidly stay the course.

There have been challenges but we powered on through.

Let's hope for a great 2025.

I've seen a few articles where small UK based websites are shutting down due to the Online Safety Act that's partly coming into force in March 2025.

It looks like Feddit UK would be a prime target for what this act covers.

Are we in a position to have the knowledge and tools to be compliant with the regulations? How does the act impact other instances on the fediverse that interact with us or have UK targeted communities?

I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of the act, but just wondering if it's something that's been thought about and if we're in a good position?

Links: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/guide-for-services/ https://www.webhosting.uk.com/blog/the-online-safety-act-2023-implications-for-website-owners/

So I was looking for a community to post a link to and I came accross:

• https://feddit.uk/c/ukpersonalfinance

What are our thoughts on this, and do we have a way to release such communities if that's what's wanted?

Welcome to this months financial report.

Everything is still ticking along nicely, so I'll make this short and sweet. If there's something else you want to know about all this then feel free to ask in the comments.

As can be seen from our graph on Open Collective we got £43.76 in and spent £49.99:

However, that's not the complete picture - the various outgoings are listed in the spreadsheet but to break it down further:

Hosting remains unchanged (total after VAT €40.68 - £34.74):

• Server - €29.00
• IP4 - €1.70
• Backup box - €3.20

In addition I've been reimbursed £10.57 for earlier hosting payments. This is the penultimate one of these. So, after next month the contributions will cover the outgoings.

Since Tom handed over the instance, we've largely been focused on ensuring the site is working properly and that the bills get paid. This is now all working smoothly and, as a thank you for sticking with us and generously supporting the instance, we've been working on a few things. First up, we've added new frontends. We're looking into other changes and hope to also add some perks for contributors too. With the latter in mind, I will be working through everyone who has donated and linking them to their feddit.uk usernames. If your's isn't obvious then contact me either here or on Matrix (the secure message button in my profile).

Previous reports:

• July 2024

Happy to announce we've finally setup some alternative frontends.

• https://p.feddit.uk/ (photon)
• https://a.feddit.uk/ (alexanderite)
• https://old.feddit.uk/ (mlmym)

Photon might be flaky, we're on a release candidate because of issue I was running into using it in Firefox. It's also what I'm using to write this. If you notice any issues, feel free to let us know.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to ask if there is any reason why UK_Politics on Feddit has substantially less content compared to UK_Politics on Reddit?

I'd love to only use Feddit but I find myself starting with Feddit and reading the stories/articles quickly and then checking Reddit to see other content. This annoys me (and maybe many others) as I would love to get completely away from Reddit.

Is it purely down to less people on Feddit vs Reddit? or some other reason?

Is there any way we could 'sync' with Reddit to get the same content? I'm not bothered with the discussion parts of it I'd just like to get the stories and articles (which would hopefully add more discussion on Feddit if we got them)

Today marks the one year anniversary of our humble little instance. It's been an eventful year but, despite fate's best efforts, we're still here. So go us! (or boo us if you think we suck)

When GreatAlbatross and I agreed to become Admins our guiding principle was that this couldn't be a project run and funded by an individual and subjects to their waxing and waning interest. Instead, this had to be a social network run by and for the users. That meant that we needed as much as possible to be open and transparent with no single point of failure. This should ensure that feddit.uk would be around as long as people needed it, possibly even outlasting the both of us.

To this end, now the server move has been competed, we move on to the next step in securing the instance's future - ensuring there are enough funds coming in to cover the cost of running the site.

Fortunately, the outgoings are pretty modest (£40/month) and so it will only take a few dozen people contributing a small amount each month to pay for everything.

With the ideas of openness and transparency in mind, and after listening to suggests from you, we have signed up with Open Collective. As we are using a fiscal host it doesn't require any donated money to be held in a personal bank account, all banking and accounts are done by them (in return for a set-up fee and 5%) and the state of the finances can be viewed on the Open Collective website.

As well as a custom option (where you can pay what you like when you like), we have set a few contribution tiers:

• Regular subscription of £1 or £5 a month
• One-off donations of £5 or £10

This should meet the regular costs and, hopefully, build up enough of a surplus to increase storage as needed or upgrade the hosting if there is a sudden influx of Reddit refugees again. GA and I have also been funding things from our own pocket up to this point and, when there is enough of a war chest built up, we will repay those costs.

There will be regular updates (probably around this time every month as the invoice for the server goes out on the 4th and regular contributions are collected on the 1st) where we'll explain the costs and summarise the fundraising efforts so far.

If anyone has any questions feel free to ask below.

Hello everybody,
It's time for a update on feddit.uk.
This time, it's good news, and stability.

I'll keep things concise, then elaborate later in the post for curious people:

• feddit.uk has been stabilised, and we have access to everything we need to move forward with it.
• The new domain name will not be used as the main instance, feddit.uk will remain the domain.
• Emperor and myself are responsible for instance and domain respectively.
• The domain has been transferred to me.
• We will be working with Tom to transfer the instance to new hosting under Emperor.
• The instance is currently running at capacity, which requires manual intervention every so often. This will be permanently resolved once the server is migrated.
• Images may be disabled while the system is prepared for migration, other services should be working

"What went wrong?"
"Why has conflicting information been showing up at times?"

The honest answer is, for the last few months, there have been two paths forward. These plans were constantly being updated, and the needle swung between viability for Plan A, and Plan B, often at the last moment.

At first, when Tom wasn't able to respond:
Plan A, new Admins added, new admins carry on the work.
Plan B, new site made, Emperor and I splitting responsibilities to make sure we had a bus factor >1.

As time went on, we started down the Plan B.
Lots of long discussion over names, discussing with community members, registering domains, and getting back-ends set up.
I was battling ansible setup, when suddenly, we had admin, and swung back to Plan A.

Things calmed down a little, but we were still lacking back-end, and needed to discuss how things would work long term.
Eventually, we started having to make A/B plans again:
Plan A, start doing back-end work, and work out long-term plans.
Plan B, build a new site.

It all came to a bit of a head on Christmas
(when doesn't it? Never agree to do on-call over the holidays, folks)
feddit.uk was down, Emperor and I still didn't have back-end.

So Plan B started again. I put on Bridget Jones Diary, in the hope that my partner wouldn't notice I was about to spend two hours trying to build a new lemmy instance from scratch.
(Don't ever do this. They knew. I still need to make it up to them.)
And it was just about working.
But Emperor was unwell, and I felt it would not be a good idea launching with half the team unavailable.

A few days later, Emperor is back in business.
Great, lets continue with Plan B.
And I recieve a message that we're getting back-end access.
Plan A time. The needle swings again.

So that's where we are now. Plan A. Everything is now in place.
feddit.uk stays up, and we work on it.

Questions that might come up:

"When are you going to a new host?"
Once Emperor and I have had time to run through the process, and schedule a day to make the change over.
When we have set a date, we will communicate it.

"When are we going to 19.2 (or higher)?"
The aim was to perform the upgrade after the site was migrated.
This morning, the site was upgraded, and we are dealing with a few of the impacts of this.
(Tom has been very busy, and we're very thankful!)

"What about email verification?
Email should now be going out correctly. We may go through the list of accounts that have not been validated, and re-send the email verification.

Who is "Teasmade?"
Teasmade is the face of site processes. Validations, password resets.
If you message admins, you may get a response from them.
They may end up with a backstory and personality down the line.

"I like/don't like the name Teasmade"
We'll happily hear alternative suggestions.

"Why didn't you continue with migrating to a new site?"
Because even with full migrations, we would never be able to move everything. Now that we're able to improve feddit.uk, we aim to achieve a lot of the same goals, while keeping existing communities intact.

"Who is running things?"
Currently, it's a combination of Tom, Emperor, and GreatAlbatross (me). Tom may stay on as an admin post-migration.

"What happens if one of you disappears?"
Our overall role definitions are based on responsibility, realistically we could function on just one until new admins could be recruited.

"What is happening on the technical side at the moment? Can I be involved?"
Once the system is on a new host, I will do some writing up, and we will consider people for back-end access.
Until things are more settled, and we have change-control in place, we're keeping configuration simple.
There will definitely be talk about the technical issues encountered, as people may find it interesting.
In the meantime, if there are reasonable features you would like to see, and you're happy to send us documentation, we'll absolutely look into them.

"How can I contact someone outside of the Lemmy instance?"
We have a Matrix channel (run by emperor).
For general queries, you can email teasmade at the domain (just trying to keep spam down a little). And we have general complaince addresses (abuse/trouble).

"I wanted to sign up, but I couldn't/the email didn't arrive"
If you email Teasmade, we can sort it. We do have to do this manually, but we're happy to do so.

Other questions?

Pop a reply in, we'll do our best to reply.

Emperor, Tom, and GreatAlbatross.