Relevant issue: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/252

I have never used yunohost before, but ldap was just recently integrated into piefed (that’s what chat.piefed.social uses for instance). So the main blocker from that issue seems resolved.

Ugh…this one still frustrates me a lot. If I could wave a magic wand and have a different contributor do two things for the project, animated gifs would be one and a more consistent compact layout would be the other.

Edit: Just want to add that when I was working on the gif problem, I got it working for posts…but you have to click through into the lightbox or to the complete image url…the thumbnail isn’t animated. So, I got partway there, but ran into technical limitations of the specific python library being used. Relevant issue.

As somebody that has done a lot of recent work on the UI for piefed, I have tried to make sure that it works even at quite small screen sizes. I actually just submitted a couple commits in the past couple hours to make the navbar across the top of communities/feeds/topics flow smoother across different screen sizes. The PWA is so far my preferred way to use piefed.

This isn’t happening in YouTube Music, the paid music platform. Instead, it is users putting together playlists of normal YouTube videos and presenting them as an album playlist while maliciously inserting a monetized, spammy video into it. As far as I know, YouTube Music wouldn’t really be vulnerable to the same kind of abuse.

Been a little while since I popped into one of these threads. Some notable events:

• !gundam@ani.social is entering an exciting period as a new gundam show just started. The first episode discussion thread was lively, so I am hoping that continues through the season.
• !anime@ani.social is also quite active at the moment due to the start of the new anime season. There have been quite a number of names that I don’t recognize from past seasons, so that is exciting.
• !manga@ani.social is similarly experiencing a bit of influx of new users posting and commenting. I haven’t been as active as I would like in this community due to time, so it is a welcome development to have more, different people posting.

Like winamp skins for lemmy?

I am a big fan of content-specific instances. Some instances off the top of my head that fit this description:

• bookwormstory.social - Instance about the Ascendance of a Bookworm series
• ani.social - Instance about anime/manga/Japanese media
• slrpnk.net - Instance focused on the climate crisis and related issues
• programming.dev - Instance focused on software development
• startrek.website - Instance about Star Trek
• literature.cafe - Instance about books and writing

…and I am sure there are many others. I just think that having a focus like that provides a more interesting local instance environment than a large, generalist instance, though both have a place.

Edit: Reading is hard and I misunderstood that this post is about promoting lemmy on reddit. I don’t have any experience to contribute with that, but I will leave the rest of my post for posterity.

By self-promotion, do you mean creating content for youtube/a blog/etc. and then posting it to lemmy? If so, then I think that is fine within reason. In the communities I mod, I have allow self-promotion with these guidelines:

• Be an active member of the community on other posts too, not just your own content
• If you post your own content, at least be responsive to questions you might get in the comment section
• Rate limit your self-promotion so that it doesn’t feel spammy (no defined rate, more vibes-based)

I have a couple posters that have posted article or projects that they have created and been fine. I also have a couple people I have ended up banning because they would just post links to their own content and vanish otherwise.

All that said, there is a sizable portion of lemmy that seems to chafe against any kind of corporate-controlled social media. So, there is an inbuilt hostility that can exert an outsized influence in smaller communities.

subtitle playback

This is still a little weird. I found that the web client (in a browser) handles this really well with default settings. However, if I try to use the desktop app or a mobile client, I have to force it to burn in the subtitles for them to show up reliably. Fortunately, there are per-client settings for this now:

It’s been a while since I last used LaTeX since I am in industry now, but there is definitely a learning curve. If you are talking about undergrads, then it might be too steep a challenge for most to want to take on unless they plan on pursuing academia long-term. Like others have mentioned, LaTeX is a kind of standard that you see used a lot in academic circles. Some journals also like or support things that are created through tex and will have their own templates to use.

Basically, LaTeX consists of writing in a markup language, like your screenshot, and then running that through a processor that interprets your .tex file and creates the formatted output (usually a pdf). Back in my day, TexnicCenter was the program of choice to write the actual .tex file, but some quick searching and it looks like VSCode with an appropriate extension is probably one of the best/easiest ways to do it now.

The most annoying part of tex is references. I remember being utterly confused by BibTeX when I was trying to get it to work. I am way out of date on what best practices for today might be, but I hope they have improved that process somewhat.

Seconding LaTeX as the gold standard for formatting math/science in written form. Some of my peers in grad school (physics) wrote up their assignments in it (I opted instead for massive reams of handwritten work). However, I did write up my thesis in LaTeX. My university had a LaTeX template for a thesis that took care of the boilerplate formatting, I just had to focus on the content.

I own a Prius (not a PHEV though, just a hybrid) and can corroborate that my mileage goes down significantly in the winter months. It is a combination of a couple factors in my experience.

• Needing to run the engine more to heat things up for defrosting and heating the cabin.
• Related to the above, I tend to idle a lot more in the winter while cleaning ice/snow off the car, letting it warm up, or clearing the driveway.
• Switching to winter tires (Blizzaks) negatively impacts rolling resistance compared to the LRR tires (Ecopias) I use the rest of the year.

I tend to average ~45 mpg in the summer and ~37 mpg in the winter over the past two years.

Starting a new community is an uphill slog. Some tips and observations:

• Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.
• If you haven’t yet, make sure to announce the community in !newcommunities@lemmy.world and/or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
• If you can think of some kind of recurring post series, it is a good structure to provide a steady drip of content. For latin, maybe something like a weekly post about the etymology of a modern word with a latin root?
• In general, posts with a lead image generate much more interaction than non-image, discussion posts. So, the meme-type posts can serve a role to help people discover the community.

Fantastic, thanks! I haven’t made announcements yet about the new community, but hoping to do that some time this week when I get a chance.

I haven’t been able to post as much this past week compared to normal, but things have been going ok:

• !anime@ani.social is actually kind of booming right now with the start of a new season of shows. I have seen lots of first-time commenters chiming in on episode threads. It actually hit ~300 users/day at one point over the weekend.
• !manga@ani.social has been calm but active. There are a handful of other fairly reliable posters that have been able to keep things going while I have been away.

The not as active ones:

• !nokotan@ani.social - I inherited this community when the previous moderator had to step away for an extended period of time. The nokotan community in general is very meme-heavy, and I just don’t really know how to engage with that very well. There is only so much non-meme content about the series. So, I am going to try to binge-read the manga and start posting chapter discussion threads when new chapters are released. I just need to find the time to do that.
• !gundam@ani.social - This is another kind of special case. The current, most active Gundam community is !gundam@possumpat.io. However, that instance announced that they are shutting down later this month. The current users over there were interested in setting up a new community but there wasn’t anybody that wanted to moderate. So, I offered my help in that respect. It just started this past week, so there isn’t much there yet, but I am going to try to keep posting any Gundam-related content I find over there.

You must have taken Nokotan’s loss pretty hard. /s

Good luck finding new mods and I am hoping that you are able to come back before Dan Da Dan season 2 this summer.

Recently, in !anime@ani.social, I configured the episode discussion bot to create posts using the poster art of the show rather than just an empty discussion post as a bit of an experiment about the effect of images. I don’t have hard analytics to dig into, but I have noticed that the episode discussion threads have garnered significantly more votes when they have images, and a small increase in comments. Though, the additional comments are usually just wandering folks instead of people that stick around and engage.

I still don’t let fanart in either the main anime nor manga community because it would too quickly spiral out of control. There is simply too much fanart in existence for these things. Instead, I limit it to official art only, which usually means teasers/posters/trailers. In the manga community, there is a bit of a special case in that I do allow fanart of a series if it was done by a different published author (not just some random pixiv user). This happens sometimes when a series ends and you get other authors drawing commemorative art for it.

We celebrated a one year birthday for both !anime@ani.social and !manga@ani.social. Over the past year we have grown from nothing to being (in my biased opinion), the best place on the fediverse to discuss anime and manga. It has been a lot of work, but they are both active enough now that I can do something like go on vacation for a couple days and they will keep going in my absence (including other mods that will manage things).

I made a series of birthday-themed anime clips to celebrate. If you are interested, here they are:

• Will You Come to My Birthday Party? - Gundam Wing (post on ani.social)
• Celebrating a Birthday with Yunyun - Konosuba (post on ani.social)
• Exchanging Birthday Presents - Azumanga Daioh (post on ani.social)
• Surprise! Happy Birthday! Let’s Have Some Cake - Nichijou (post on ani.social)
• Bonus - Backup Cake - Nichijou

As somebody that mods other communities on ani.social, lemmy has a sizeable portion of its userbase that browses by All rather than by Subscribed. Lemmy also has a sizeable portion of users that are extremely hostile to anything anime or anime-adjacent (just see the lemmy.ml defederation drama from last year for example). So, random downvotes on active posts happen a lot since each new comment pushes that post to the top of the feed when sorted by Active. The important part is the engagement from your community members. One person commenting is worth >100 random up/down votes for keeping a community going.

I have hosted a wordpress site on my unraid box before, but ended up moving it to a VPS instead. I ended up moving it primarily because a VPS is just going to have more uptime since I end up tinkering around with my homelab too often. So, any service that I expect other people to use, I often end up moving it to a VPS (mostly wikis for different things). The one exception to that is anything related to media delivery (plex, jellyfin, *arr stack), because I don’t want to make that as publicly accessible and it needs close integration with the storage array in unraid.