Programming.dev Meta

Hey everyone! Theres an event upcoming for the fediverse in 1 week (you can see the countdown from this site: https://canvas.fediverse.events/). This is an event similar to place and ran by the toast.ooo instance

Everyone has access to a shared pixel art canvas and can place a new pixel every so often! Pixels placed onto the map color that pixel the color you choose which every person then sees. People often coordinate with things like templates to get art of different things onto the map.

An example of canvas

Last year we participated and managed to get a pretty big zone for programming.dev. This year however will have much more participants than last year so need more support and help constructing our area. I'll be attempting to establish a technology zone on the canvas so if theres any instances or communities that have to do something with technology and want to do something feel free to reach out and we can help each other.

Programming.Dev's area in last years canvas

If you're interested in joining the event theres three locations we will be talking. Theres event channels on the discord and matrix (that are bridged to each other). We also have an event community at https://programming.dev/c/events which most canvas posts will go in from now on. Hope to see you all there!

If you want to organize a section of the canvas for your community (e.g. c/godot) you can request a channel for your community on the discord and matrix which will help you organize better. Feel free to reach out to me (Ategon).

If you want to help out the instance itself make sure to join the locations and things will be announced for updates. If you want to help organize things (organizing the instance for the event) feel free to reach out so I can get people to lead the pixel placing for things like when I'm sleeping.

The current design for this year

Should start making some more blog posts on stacks as I come back to be active in the instance again. Took a large-ish break to focus on some game dev and now back to power through things.

After the federation issues the instance had earlier this week (for context see last meta post) its been taking a bit to catch up with all instances fully. Every instance apart from world should have federation fully functional in both directions now.

Federation from our instance to world is also working (so they can see posts the instance makes). Federation from world to our instance is 18 hours behind so we currently don't get posts as they are made (seems some recent comments are coming through for some reason though). This will slowly automatically get fixed over time (probably within a day) and is just due to lemmy.world being big and generating activities quickly enough to keep adding things to the queue of activities while the instance tries to catch up

In other news I'm coming back from taking a break from the instance for awhile and should be making some more posts soon for things like canvas that are coming up as well as some other stuff in my backlog so expect a couple more meta posts today

I've noticed that the external communities I'm subscribed to aren't syncing. I checked a few on their home server (lemmy. world), and they've got plenty of new posts (eg. [email protected]), but the posts aren't showing up here. I don't think it's just me, but I've been wrong before. Anybody else?

Lemmy 0.19.5 was released a few days ago, other instances already upgraded to this version.

Do we have a date for the programming.dev instance to upgrade as well?

After not getting what I needed out of a "managing up" post, I decided to create this community. Essentially the problem is that often we need to solve a social problem that others might deem "trivial". And when folks deem it trivial, they fail to provide anything except encouraging words.

This community will try to bridge that gap.

NTs / Allistics are very welcome, BUT they must understand that we need details, we need patience, and we need kindness around matters of business politics and office socializing.

Tried to use several different API endpoints as described in the link, but they all return 403 with a cloudflare "Just a moment..." html reply. Even tried copying an existing jwt token from a working logged-in browser but the same thing still happens.

Any idea what I could be doing wrong?

curl -v --request POST \
     --url https://programming.dev/api/v3/user/login \
     --header 'accept: application/json' \
     --header 'content-type: application/json' \
     --data '{"username_or_email": "redacted", "password": "redacted"}'
...
< HTTP/2 403
...

<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en-US"><head><title>Just a moment...</title>
...

Thank you for the reports however the toxic posts aren't from our admin but a troll impersonator

• https://sh.itjust.works/u/snowe
• https://sh.itjust.works/u/snowee

If you see these accounts, please ban away

Side Note:

• for anyone that has manual registration verification enabled I'd suggest on verifying with known users on past/pre-existing accounts before accepting duplicates,
  • esp for admin/moderator usernames

I am noticing that some comments, which are coming from users on other verified (via /instances) federated instances, do not show up on a post. For example: https://programming.dev/post/13648105

Does not show this comment on it: https://lemmy.ml/comment/10803786

Any ideas why? I checked the modlog and the comment wasn't removed, and their post history to me does not look like someone that is likely to be banned from the instance, so I'm not sure what else it could be.

Hey everyone! Recently there was a small issue with the backend (docker shenanigans) that brought the site down and then took a bit to fix

Things should be fixed for now and we will be looking more at it in the future to try to prevent the site from being taken down that way again

Downtime was around 30 minutes

The best place to reach us when theres an outage with the site and to receive updates of it is on the discord server or matrix space or on one of our microblog accounts

• Discord Server

• Matrix Space

• Main Microblog Account (hosted on the same infrastructure so if the entire server goes down the other account is used)

• Secondary Microblog Accout

Introducing a new supporting site for the instance, git.programming.dev aka Forge! This is a spot where development on things relating to the instance will be taking place. This includes for each thing having source code, task boards, and issue trackers viewable.

This gives us a spot away from GitHub so we don't have to rely on them for hosting our code. In addition, Forgejo, the software used, is working on federation so eventually features could be implemented to do things such as interact with Forge directly from our instances.

Who is allowed to make an account?

Anyone is free to make an account on the site provided you have not broken our code of conduct and have gotten banned from one of the instances.

What is allowed to be hosted?

Any code that relates to things we do on the fediverse or outside the fediverse but relating to programming.dev is allowed to be hosted on Forge. This includes things such as bots made for lemmy/sublinks, alternate frontends, software we host, tools, etc.

As an example alternate frontends like photon, alexandrite, etc. are free to choose to be hosted on Forge. Software such as Sublinks, etc. can be hosted, and various misc bots and tools such as Fediseer, Automod, etc. can be hosted.

Anything hosted on forge must be able to support the programming.dev instance it is built around. This means that things like bots and alternate frontends for the programming.dev instance must be able to support sublinks.

How can I make an organization on Forge?

If you want an organization on Forge to group a collection of repos together feel free to reach out to one of the team leads or email [email protected].

How can I contribute to a programming.dev repo?

If you want to contribute code feel free to fork the relevant repo and then make a pull request back to it with the changes. If you have an idea for something that can be added to a platform or a bug report open up an issue on the relevant repo in the Programming.Dev org.

If you're interested in contributing a large amount to the programming.dev repos feel free to reach out to me (Ategon) on discord or matrix or email [email protected] and I can add you to the development team.

Hey everyone. Some of you may have seen the recent announcement with blahaj to defederate with the instance. Ive been handling things privately and wanted to do an announcement to catch you all up on the results of that

#1: Background knowledge

Realized that not everyone knows how the instance is structured so figured I would do a little section in the front to go over that (especially for visitors reading this from other instances)

We currently have 8 admins in the instance. Of those 2 people are currently lead admins (snowe and I). Majority of admins are part of the community team but not all of them (people are split between infrastructure, development, and community). I was planning out a team page similar to what lemmy.world has to go over this with a bit more detail and that should be coming in the future. Main thing though is its intentionally structured so one person doesnt solely have power (hence the two leads). If one person ends up messing up theres the other lead and the rest of the admin team to talk with them about it and help them do better in the future.

#2: What happened?

There was a thread in lemmy.ml about the hogwarts legacy game winning a steam award. For reference for the following images + description, snowe is the other lead admin for the instance apart from me and the other people are various other users

There was a conversation that ended up essentially devolving into a slap fight within this post (ive purged the entire conversation so people dont stumble onto it in the future but ill post images here with them for archiving reasons and to explain it)

^ These comments were what initially started it. Essentially it was an argument about the hogwarts legacy game being or being not transphobic

^ Later in the argument

^ One branch that ended up getting started due to the frontend snowe uses on mobile not showing pronouns (how most instances handle it currently is its appended to the end of the display name but some frontends choose to ignore the display name and just do the username instead)

(edit: changed the word triggered to started to make it more clear what definition of triggered I used. Forgot that tends to not be common usage)

There are other branches but it is a very large amount to screenshot and dont want this to completely flood this post. Everything should be available in the modlogs still if you want to dig a bit deeper or I can send other screenshots in the replies on this post if youre interested in what was said for certain parts

#3 Aftermath

Due to the argument above blahaj chose to defederate with programming.dev which was going to take effect 48 hours after their announcement on it. (This is due to the person in the conversation being one of our lead admins which is ultimately understandable as they represent the instance)

snowe has sent a message apologizing to ada (the lead admin for blahaj). I dont know the contents of what was said but if they want the two of them can choose to publicize it.

One of our admins should not have escalated the situation and participated in this slap fight so on behalf of the admin team here were sorry about that

Internally we have a guidebook for admins to follow for the various aspects of the instance (moderation, applications, etc.). Ive refined this guidebook with a couple new rules for admins that should be taking effect in the future

• admins will be required to have two accounts, one for admin activities and one for non admin activities. This is how some admins have already been interacting in the fediverse and basically makes it so comments done on the non-admin account should not be taken as that admin speaking on behalf of the instance. Generally the admin account will be things done relating to admin duties (e.g. my posts here in meta) while the non-admin account is other various conversations. Admins can be as anonymous as they want with the non-admin account similar to how our users here can be as anonymous as they want with their accounts
• im adding in some guidelines for tone while chatting for the admins so comments made that are on behalf of the instance should be respectful and not devolve to slap fights

Like I said before in #2 ive also purged the entire conversation to avoid people stumbling onto it and seeing a slap fight with an admin that has since apologized. As the community exists on lemmy.ml I cant fully do this due to how federation works in lemmy but the mods in the community have been doing the same which should federate.

This should not have happened in the first place and we as an admin team will be better going forward

I hope the blahaj instance sees our actions and chooses to reverse the defederation decision but at the end of the day its their instance and they can choose whoever they want to federate with (note federation is done directionally. I will still leave our direction of federation open)

Edit: Blahaj stopped their defederation (shown in an edit on their announcement) so the two instances will still be federated both directions going forward

Another edit: its a work day, its midnight here, and some comments here are also devolving into slapfights. Ive locked the post since this has already taken up most of my free time to try to handle and moderate this. My dms are always open if you want to dm me regarding the situation

I will no longer be able to assist with development nor debugging actual issues with the software... Quite juvenile behavior from the devs. It stemmed from this issue where the devs continuously argued in public by opening and closing an issue. Anyway, thought I would keep y'all apprised of the situation, since these are the people maintaining the software you are currently using.

Hey everyone! Wanted to give a quick update on some federation status with other communities

burggit.moe

burggit.moe has been defederated from for two main reasons

• They ignore DMCA requests and dont follow it. We get a copy of all of their posts due to how federation works and since this rule is instance wide it can easily apply to a new community in the future if we purge current ones. We dont have the manpower to handle other instances continually breaking the law and then us needing to deal with that with takedowns

• They post pornographic content that is illegal / in a gray area in the US that I would rather err on the side of caution in terms of allowing due to things like the PROTECT Act and certain states explicitly banning it themselves

hexbear

Hexbear defederated from us so to prevent one way conversations I have added them to our blocklist as well. If the hexbear admins decide to unblock us I can do the same and go back to the previous stance of hiding their politics related communities from the all feed once that feature is implemented into the site

Misc

There are a couple misc pleroma and mastoton instances that ive added to our blocklist (and there are a couple more I might add soon) that post content that is extremely against our rules. As they arent lemmy instances purging communities isnt an option and its allowed instance wide

if you have other requests of instances that clearly break our rules (you can find them in the site sidebar) feel free to send me them and ill take a look

Some communities there are literally calling for the annihilation of Ukraine

https://programming.dev/comment/1999097

edit: Since people are either willfully or otherwose are missing my point, this is a pro-russia, pro-fascist hate group, therefore we shouldn't give them the platform to spread their shit. this is not about me seeing their community or then causing issues accross other communities, it's about de-platforming fascists.

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