Programming.dev Meta

Hey everyone! Ive made a form that can be used to give feedback about the site including what you think its doing well and what you think needs improvement

Based on responses if something is highly requested we can prioritize improving/adding that first

Ill try to run these a couple times a year

Will be pinned for a day in the instance

https://www.threads.net/@potus

Hello P.D users.

I'm sure the recent news of lemmy.world's removal of piracy communities has not escaped the attention of many of you. For those who have not heard, here is their announcement on the matter.

Now, being as transparent as possible, this is not a subject that the admin team of P.D have discussed in great detail up until this point. We have yet to create an explicit rule stating that piracy related content is forbidden on this instance, and doing so is not something any of us wish to do.

With that being said, this topic requires more deliberation and consideration. There is more complexity to this issue than taking a stance for, against, or tolerant of piracy. There are legal considerations. And the truth is that we are not 100% sure on what the legal implications are for allowing piracy related content to exist on this instance, either directly on our communities or indirectly via federation.

One thing that must be considered when looking into the legalities is jurisdiction. I believe being part of a larger federation complicates this more than a centralised service, but P.D must at a minimum be considerate of the laws of the country its server(s) is hosted in, and the laws of the country the person responsible for the instance resides in.

For those who don't know, this instance is administrated by a reasonably large team of volunteers, but is hosted and ultimately provided by only one: snowe. There is no legal entity behind P.D other than his person, and this means that any ramifications of this subject ultimately fall on his shoulders.

After an initial discussion between us, it is clear that some professional legal advice is required. Snowe is intending to seek formal legal advice. Up until that point, we cannot say what the official P.D stance will be on this topic long term.

What I can say, is that nobody in this administrative team desires to impose any restrictions on users of this instance that overreach and limit discussion unnecessarily. So long as content here is not dangerous, hurtful or offensive, we have no wish to filter it out on an instance level. Communities can impose their own rules, for the most part.

You can expect a further update on this topic in the future, once we have a better understanding ourselves, and we will keep this topic as transparent as we possibly can. Until then, in relation to this matter, we do not currently intend to defederate from any instances or ban any communities that discuss piracy. Linking to websites that provide pirated content will also not be explicitly banned, but linking to or directly hosting pirated content on P.D is prohibited. Should any of these rules change, we will communicate it as quickly as possible and far ahead of any drastic action that would need to take place as a result.

I believe the majority of our users here will understand the pressure that any Lemmy instance faces by hosting content that can make them susceptible to legal action. To those of you who are understanding, we thank you for that, and are grateful for your patience with us while we get a better understanding ourselves.

Feel free to discuss this matter here.

Thanks,
The P.D. Admin Team.

Site link: https://bytes.programming.dev Blog post: https://stacks.programming.dev/posts/bytes/

Introducing the official release of Bytes, our programming microblog. This is being run for the most part in a similar way the main programming.dev instance is and anyone is free to join even if youre not a programmer (but be warned most topics will be about programming or similar aspects).

The software the site is using is called iceshrimp which is one of the misskey forks which has a better UI than mastodon and a lot of advanced features and customization

Microblogging

Microblogging is essentially making small posts of text or image to share things going on. This can include things like sharing things happening, progress on things youre working on, making polls for people to vote on, chatting with others, etc.

As opposed to programming.dev where things are sorted into communities, bytes works based off hashtags where you add tags to your post based on what categories it falls into.

Timelines

Theres 5 main timelines in the instance to browse (excluding custom ones).

• Home is the place to see posts from everyone you are following.
• Local shows posts from everyone in the instance.
• Social shows a combination of posts from home and local.
• Recommended show posts from instances that have been recommended by the admins (currently I have this set to mastodon.gamedev.place, peoplemaking.games, and gamemaking.social)
• All shows posts from all instances the server is currently pulling from.

Antennas

Antennas are a feature where you can set certain keywords to look out for and it will generate a feed of posts that have one or more of those keywords in them

This has further options such as making AND conditions, OR conditions, excluding posts with certain keywords, getting notifications, and changing the source of posts (to things such as posts made by certain people or on certain instances)

Reactions

As opposed to only having one thing to react to posts with (aka a like) you can react with any emoji you want on a post. We have added some custom emojis to start off with on the server but if you have ideas for more feel free to reach out.

Translation

If theres a post made in another language, you can select the translate option to translate the post into english to then be able to read!

Lists

Lists are a feature where you can set a bunch of people and it will make a feed with posts from those people.

Drive

The drive is a spot where you can upload photos for usage around the site or externally. All users have a limited amount of drive space but it should be high enough where you wont run into it unless youre uploading a lot of large files.

Chat

The site has a private message system thats a bit more advanced than the one on programming.dev. You can make group chats that contain multiple people.

Pages

You can create pages that contain text or images to link to or for other people to browse!

Channels

Channels are the equivalent of communities. You can make posts for certain topics in channels for that topic. This feature currently doesnt federate and is still a work in progress though.

Customization

The site features a very large amount of customization where you can customize the content of both of the sidebars to many different options, set a custom theme for yourself (with a built in theme editor), add plugins, mute specific instances, mute posts containing specific words, etc.

Hope you enjoy the new instance!

Its been a couple days which means I have the results of the threads federation poll we ran on the instance. The percentage difference between all of the options stayed relatively the same through the entire thing.

This was ran as ranked choice voting which means the least voted option gets eliminated every round and the votes for that option are distributed among the peoples second or third choices depending on if that was their first or second choice.

The total votes table shows the current votes for each option in each round. Differences shows the increase in votes the options gained from the last option being eliminated. Percentage shows the total % of votes the options have for each round.

Silenced was the first one to be eliminated with much less votes than everything else at 18 votes (aka 8.5%). Next up was limited being eliminated at 53 votes (25%). Out of the final two, blocked has the most amount of votes with around 55% of the vote total or 115 votes.

This means that threads will be fully defederated from on our instances. I will be running a poll again in around 6 months as a check in after threads has been federating for a bit to see if we want to change the decision or keep it.

• also note you will notice some numbers in the tables not being the same round from round, some people voted for the same option multiple times which means I couldnt give them a second or third choice since they only did 1 or 2

Introducing the programming.dev legal site! This is a place to easily see all of our legal documents instead of them being spread out in various locations.

You can find the site at https://legal.programming.dev

The documents are open to changes and are not final so if you have suggested changes and ways we can improve them feel free to reach out either by creating an issue on the legal site repository, by messaging me (Ategon) or by emailing info@programming.dev

Included Documents

• Privacy Policy - How we collect, protect, and use information provided to us
• Terms of Service - Terms that govern your access to and use of our services
• Automation Guidelines - Guidelines when using any form of automation on an account
• Code of Conduct - Expected conduct when interacting on our sites or on communities on our sites
• Contributor Guidelines - Guidelines for contributing to our projects
• Cookie Policy - How we use cookies
• Defederation Policy - How we defederate with other instances
• Donation Policy - How we handle and spend donations made towards us
• Moderator Guidelines - Expected conduct when moderating a community

You guys know that "remember me" checklist on every login page? Is it possible for us to use frontend that have that? Everytime my browser is starting up, the lemmy instances just forgets who I am and I must login again. This is not the observed behavior if I'm using Jerboa on my phone though.

In the past we said we were going to run a federation poll regarding Threads (activitypub compatible instance created by meta) and now that theyre ramping up federation and we have a new instance coming that would interact with that I decided its time to do so

This poll is only open to people who have an account on programming.dev as it only affects those users (other instances decide federation on their own).

This also only affects us pulling content from them. Them pulling content from us isnt stoppable on our side (and if it is they can still get it through things such as boosts from instances in the middle on the microblog side or by querying the api).

There will be mention of a link aggregator side and a microblog side. The link aggregator side is this site and the microblog side is a new instance being started up where I wanted to get this poll out before I release it publicly.

On the side of Threads they are making interacting using activitypub opt in so the amount of users there would not flood out everything else as people need to explicitly change in their settings that they want to interact with mastodon, etc.

Regardless of whats voted you shouldnt notice any changes on the link aggregator side similar to how mastodon users barely pop up now

This will be pinned in the instance for a couple days to ensure as many people as possible vote. Afterwards ill collect the results and make a post with them here (not pinned)

• Note accounts created after this poll was made cant vote to prevent vote manipulation

I tested by making a report on homeimprovement@lemmy.world. I can see it in my reports page on my lemmy.world account, but my programming.dev account reports page still doesn't show any reports.

We have a bunch more supporting sites for the instances that have been set up. All of these are contributor sites which means accounts on them are available to programming.dev contributors, and/or admins.

Vault

Vault is a password manager running vaultwarden. It will be used to pass along login details when setting up accounts for users on the various contributor sites since registration isnt opened. The link for it is https://vault.programming.dev.

Files

Files is a site for file hosting and url shortening for then linking in places such as programming.dev. As an example heres a markdown file I added in https://files.programming.dev/u/9jsOS3.md and heres a link that redirects to an image http://files.programming.dev/go/meme.

Files can be given compression, a time it expires in, a maximum amount of views, and a password if you want to limit who can access it. The software used is Zipline.

The site for files is at https://files.programming.dev

Schedule

Schedule is a meeting poll site to find out what time people want to meet. This will be primarily used and have a poll link posted when we are scheduling events. The software used is rallly.

The site is at https://schedule.programming.dev and ive got an example poll at https://schedule.programming.dev/invite/Zwr8x2wrQBGA.

Polls

Polls is a poll site for getting information. Will be used when we want to poll the community about something or do something like a year end survey on stats for people using different languages, etc. Software used is input.

We updated our hosting of the mlmym frontend at old.programming.dev to version 0.0.40 which fixes an issue where bots could abuse a redirect feature for SEO.

You can see the details of the issue here: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/issues/101

Introducing blocks.programming.dev! This is a site to add small code snippets you make for sharing easily in threads in programming.dev if you need to do something like put the same code in multiple spots.

The site is running using software called opengist and is essentially an equivalent to gists in github. Repo for it is here https://github.com/thomiceli/opengist.

Snippets are accessible both in the web interface and using git if you prefer adding in code from your text editor and then pushing it.

You can find the site here: https://blocks.programming.dev.

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 info@programming.dev.

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 info@programming.dev and I can add you to the development team.

Two of our programming.dev alternate frontends have been updated to their most recent versions.

Voyager (v.programming.dev)

Has been updated from version 1.37.4 -> 1.41.0

Main changes:

• You can long press on comments/posts to get the more actions sheet
• Gifs can be configured to autoplay always, never, or on wifi
• When tapping into a post the video continues to play seamlessly
• Videos in the feed have a mute icon you can toggle
• You can now hide self-post thumbnails in compact mode
• You can now set it so you always need to tap to reveal child comments
• Large post voting buttons can be hidden
• Community icons can be hidden
• Link creation now has a dialog for entering link info
• Subscript and superscript support for markdown
• You can now long press usernames to block

Mlmym (old.programming.dev)

Has been updated from version 0.0.36 -> 0.0.38

Main changes:

• Image uploads has been fixed

Introducing the Programming.Dev community wiki. This is a place where communities can set up wiki pages for their communities to allow people to easily get info relating to it.

You can find the site here

How does navigation work?

The home page has a list of communities with pages. If you click on a community it will bring you to their list of documents that you can look through.

Some possible use cases for a community wiki are: a code of conduct page, a frequently asked questions page, information about the community, credits if you need to credit things such as your community icon, a page for related communities, etc.

Ive set up a couple example pages to start. The gamedev section of the site has 6 different pages that you can look through to set some ideas

How do I edit a page?

Editing is handled through git. Each page will have an edit this page button that will bring you to a page where you can fork the repository, make changes, and then make a pull request to get it accepted into the site.

The pages all reside in the content/docs folder while the sidebars are in content/menus. You can see how I set up some of the current pages for how to format things.

Pages are written in markdown.

Are other languages supported?

Yes! Currently theres only english set up as we don't really have communities in other languages but it would be easy to add more language options in the site config.

We have a brand new supporting site for the instances! Me.Programming.Dev is a place where you can see relevant links for things we host. Listed are software we are hosting, status pages, alternate frontends, and more.

You can find the site here

Custom pages

The site is a self-hosted linkstack instance so as a little thank you towards donators, donators are able to get a custom page to put socials on. You can see an example of that over on my page at https://me.programming.dev/@Ategon. If you want a page and you've donated just reach out to me (Ategon).

Adding links

As new instances and sites get made new links will be popping up over on the site. I recommend checking it out for new things every once in awhile just in case you miss an announcement on something new were releasing

Whats this instance I don't recognize?

You may notice theres something we haven't announced yet on there. Left it in as a little early access for those reading our update posts before it releases later this week. Feel free to make an account and check it out before the floodgates open :)

We finally have a blog site where you can easily see news relating to Programming.Dev! Theres an rss feed if you want to add it to your rss reader and posts from it will be mirrored onto all of our platforms (eventually ideally automated)

Theres a small welcome post I made on there and we should be releasing more things this week that will get announced there and then mirrored here

It turned out that most things I was working on are being completed mostly all at once so there will be daily news posts about new things dropping for a bit. Theres currently 4 things in the queue to be released

You may have seen me say in some posts for adding new admins to the team that we use discord as the chatting platform for the admins to all talk to each other

This has now been bridged to matrix so people on matrix can chat from there to the rest of the admin team on discord. This means that we don't require people to use discord to be an admin for the instance anymore, now its discord or matrix.

Also we are still looking to expand the admin teams a bit if you're interested in being on the community team (either for here or our new platform coming soon), development team, or infrastructure team

So recently theres been a bunch of trolls posting csam over in some other communities in the All feed. So handling this can be automated instead of a bunch of people needing to report it every time ive made it so users that have barely any activity in their account will no be able to make image posts

Let me know if theres any issues with the bot. Its also open source here https://github.com/programming-dot-dev/karma-bot (theres prebuilt docker images but theyre a bit bugged currently so if you want to use docker build it yourself)

this is the account that will be removing posts / showing up in the modlog - Ategon speaking here

So, I love this site. I've been here more-or-less since the beginning, across various accounts. I also have accounts on other Lemmy instances.

One common pattern I see is that instances branch out their communities too soon, and overly dilute the conversation. It makes an instance that is ultimately not that active (compared to any of the big sites that don't need naming, really) appear to be even less lively, due to so many instances with either nothing at all, a few month old posts, or a generic post linking to a projects blog.

Note that I am not criticizing the instance by pointing out the low activity levels - I really do love this place. It's just a fact at the moment. You can switch viewing posts by new and scroll down a little to see we get around 5 - 6 posts per hour, occasionally a bit more and occasionally a bit less.

I think that having lots of inactive, dead looking communities is off-putting. I know that I certainly don't feel encouraged to post in them. I worry this might have a similar effect on other users too.

I do understand that c/programming is deemed as something of a catch-all community, and so anyone could post there rather than the niche communities, but I'm not sure that this is totally obvious to everyone.

Personally, I feel we should purge all the tiny communities that have no posts (or just a single blog post, for example) and encourage people to post in c/programming. Then, new communities can be made when a particular topic becomes large enough to warrant divergence, either because it's clearly a subject of interest to many users or because it ends up dominating c/programming. c/rust is an example of such a community, as is c/programmerhumor.

I am nobody here, and I was not asked for my opinion, but I just wonder if this topic has been thought about much? I really want this place to thrive. Do any other users here have an opinion? What do the instance admins think?

Hey everyone! I talked a bit in the January Newsletter about us expanding the admin team but figured I would do a post specifically about the development team so I can go more into depth about it.

Currently in the admin teams around half the people are in infrastructure and the other half are in community with 1 person in development making the split around 4/4/1. This means that currently ive been the only one doing the development work so figured I would do a post looking for some more help

Whats the development team

The development team is in charge of development projects for the instance for users to interact with. This ranges from adding in features to the software we use (e.g. lemmy, sublinks) that the instance needs, to making supporting development projects such as events, bots, a support page, etc.

What would joining the team mean?

If you want to help out and join the team theres a very wide range of possible things that could be worked on depending on what you enjoy.

For frontend currently theres some supporting sites being built such as a team page, a support page, a donation page, etc. as well as the frontend for sublinks which will become the instance default UI at some point. Primary languages used are JavaScript and TypeScript and sublinks uses Next.js

For backend the backend of sublinks is currently under construction. Primary languages used are Java for backend and Go for federation. We also have another thing we will be hosting soon that is currently being rewritten to use C# for the backend

(for people who dont know what sublinks is its a lemmy alternative being built with the help of a bunch of different instances and lemmy alternative frontend devs. Being built with a compatible API so will be easy to swap out to it when it reaches parity with all of the apps and frontends still working)

If youre also interested in making some misc thing that might not fit in either of these but could be cool for the instance feel free to join as well. For example some supporting bots or a tool for users to use (e.g. post scheduler (this already exists but this kind of thing))

How much time would I have to commit?

Theres no real hard time limit you need to fulfill. Were all volunteers helping out here and anything helps. If youre mostly busy during the week but have time to fix a small bug on a site for a couple hours thats perfectly fine

Im not great at coding, can I still join?

Yep! Anyone is free to join regardless of level and if you need some help I can guide you through how to develop using the technologies we use or can get some other developers to help out if its more backend related since im primarily frontend. Certain tasks are available on some of the projects that are fine for new coders to do

How to join?

If youre interested feel free to dm me or comment below and I can add you to the development team spaces. The admin team in general primarily chats on our discord server https://discord.gg/kwyxvYEYt4

this post is being pinned in the instance for 24 hours

Hey everyone, have a lot of updates on things occuring around the instance so figured would compile them all into one post. Will be pinned for 24 hours in the instance

Sublinks

In the past a bunch of you may have seen me working on a new frontend for the instance called Pangora. That has been merged into another project called Sublinks which should let progress go way faster (was previously 2 people who contributed to Pangora vs now 18 in Sublinks)

Sublinks is releasing with a lemmy compatible API and we should be switching over to it once it reaches parity. As the API is lemmy compatible all alternative frontends and apps will still be usable when we swap over.

For anyone interested in the project the matrix space for it is here https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online and the repositories are here https://github.com/sublinks

The backend is using Java, the frontend is using TypeScript with Next.js, and the federation is using Go

New Community Team Lead

Ive been prepping to stop being the community lead for awhile now so I can focus on the development side of things and ill be transitioning fully over the course of the next month into being only on the development team. The new community team lead will be @recursive_recursion@programming.dev

With me focusing on development I should be able to develop things for the instance a lot faster so you should see some new things popping up soon :)

Hexbear

Hexbear handles federation by votes and they recently had a vote and removed programming.dev, lemm.ee, and aussie.zone from their allowlist. Weve added them to our blocklist as well so theres no one way conversations

Community Stats

Types of Communities

• Lively: 5001+ members
• Active: 201-5000
• Moderate: 51-200
• Quiet: 11-50
• Dead: 0-10

Stats

• Lively: 0% (-1% from last month) (theres still 1 lively community but the total communities pushed it down to 0%)
• Active: 7% (~)
• Moderate: 12% (+2%)
• Quiet: 26% (-8%)
• Dead: 55% (+7%)
• Total: 243 communities (+55 from last month)

Overall the amount of communities has been getting significant expanded and starting out near the bottom in terms of active users. I assume these are going to start climbing up within the next month and there should be a boost to moderate and quiet. Moderate still has been growing and active has been holding on to its 7% even with the amount of new communities

Expanding the Admin Team

We have a new thing releasing soon and in preparation of that we are expanding out the admin teams. If youre interested in helping out in the instance (development, infrastructure, or community) feel free to reach out

New Release Soon

Speaking of the new thing releasing soon it should hopefully be released sometime within the next month as a subdomain here. For anyone who wants to beta test it its theoretically up now if you're able to find it. Good luck :)

Hint: Larger than bits

We upgraded to 0.19.3 which should fix a bunch of bugs including the need for us to restart the servers every day

• The site now receives reports from mastodon and kbin
• Admins can see votes in the UI (could previously do so within the database but this makes it easier to moderate votes)
• Post views have a secondary sort of published date added so things that have the hot rank of 0 arent returned randomly
• Max title is based on chars (previously it was bytes)
• Mastodon federation (aka posts showing up when people follow the community in mastodon) has been fixed

Pulled some updates for some of the alternate frontends were hosting!

Photon

(https://p.programming.dev)

• Community and instance sidebar got overhauled to declutter them a ton

Voyager

(https://v.programming.dev)

• You can now create crossposts
• Unread item color got changed
• Updated login + sign up flow
• Autofill crosspost titles
• A new setting has been added to show posts youve hidden so it shows in the community it was posted in rather than being hidden everywhere
• User and community autosuggest when you start typing the relative links for them (!community@instance and @user@instance)
• Account switching anywhere
• Guest accounts

Hello everyone,

First of all, thank you for your good work on this instance. I was wondering, do you know when you plan to move to 19.3? I noticed some federation issues (especially votes), it's not a big deal but it would be nice to see them fixed.

Thanks!