SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

There should be 2 comments from me in this post, but I don't see them and their responses until i change view to "Chat". I got notifications that I have messages there, and i can see responses to my comments only on my notifications page

I've noticed that for one instance in particular (in my experience), feddit.uk, I am regularly seeing posts not federate properly. The most recent example I have found of this is c/britishproblems

If you compare:
https://programming.dev/c/britishproblems@feddit.uk
with
https://feddit.uk/c/britishproblems

You will see there are two posts on the home instance that have not federated to programming.dev, despite both being a month old.

Is there a technical reason that posts so old would not have federated in all this time?

Edit: I seem to be incorrect. The posts are not missing. The instances just show them in a different order (despite both being sorted by 'Active'). I am an idiot.

I'll leave this up as there may be some interesting discussion on how federation does / does not work.

The site's been down in the morning for the last couple days. Running a new server that gets attention is tough - do the admins for this site need anything from this community? Volunteer time? Money?

So, it used to work just fine. Then jerboa became basically unusable due to some bug. That was a few weeks ago. I saw an update was available, so I thought to give it another try. It's much more stable after the update, and my lemmy.one account works just fine. But when I try to log in with this account on jerboa, I get an incorrect login error. I set the instance to "programming.dev" and I know I used the right credentials because my password manager filled them in, just like it does in the browser.

Any ideas on a cause or fix? It might be a jerboa issue but I don't get why it seems to only impact this instance.

Ive recently been made aware of a language bug existing from building up my remindme bot

The bug was that comments from platforms such as kbin will naturally be set to an undetermined language regardless of what the community language settings are. This makes it so that if people try to reply to that comment, lemmy will break and not let the reply be posted (since its a language that goes against what the community has set)

As a fix to this I have set every community I have access to to be able to handle every single language. (This should be about 90% of the communities, you can check the list in my profile). You shouldnt run into any language invalid errors anymore and should be able to talk to people from kbin now in almost all communities in the instance

You may still run into the bug in other instances though depending on what they have their community language set to

I noticed that every time I visit the site, I have to log in. I remember not having to do this a few days ago. I was assuming a cookie was being set for a timeframe until I explicitly log out. I can't remember if there was a "remember me" button. I'm using Firefox and tried disabling my extensions, but that didn't seem to help.

I am unable to subscribe to RSS feeds for programming.dev from a yarr instance hosted on an AWS EC2 instance (ap-south-1).

This issue seems specific to programming.dev. I can access RSS feeds for other lemmy instances without any issues.

I can access the feeds from browser, but when I try to fetch it on AWS I get a 403 error. Curious if this is done intentionally.

$ wget https://programming.dev/feeds/c/programming.xml?sort=Active
--2023-07-17 18:27:15--  https://programming.dev/feeds/c/programming.xml?sort=Active
Resolving programming.dev (programming.dev)... 172.67.137.159, 104.21.73.21, 2606:4700:3031::ac43:899f, ...
Connecting to programming.dev (programming.dev)|172.67.137.159|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2023-07-17 18:27:15 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

Programming.dev is nice a community and overall i like the content I get when i stay on my local instance.

The moment i am switching to "all" everything becomes extremely left leaning and too politicised for my taste.

Is there a way to block all the communist/anarchist/anti-capitalist stuff, or this is Lemmy in general?

Noticed you can save the programming.dev site as an app on iOS (add to Home Screen). When you do this though, there doesn’t seem to be a “back” button or anything similar. So when you navigate to read post comments, you can’t get back to the list of threads.

Thought maybe a swipe left would work, but no luck.

No biggie, just something to consider in the site design.

Even 1080p is failing. Got 480p to upload. Lemmy.world has no problem uploading full size images from iphone.

I wanted to start a discussion about the use of AI-generated solutions on Programming.dev. Personally, I've found that AI-powered tools have been incredibly helpful in solving programming questions. I won't name any specific commercial software, but I use one that combines GPT-4 and web search to get more factual information. I write some answers I think I might revisit to the ShareGPT community, but I would prefer posting programming solutions to this instance. However, I'm not sure if AI-generated solutions are welcomed on programming.dev. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. If AI-generated responses are accepted, how should we format the answers, should we just copy paste without quoting, should we quote the model, just mention that it's AI-generated,...?

took a gander around and didn't see anything at first glance

I'm not sure how much activity there would be, but it'd be neat to have imo

I've made a number of improvements since the last time I was posting about my extension. The update is now available on both Firefox and Chrome web stores.

For questions / support: !instance_assistant@lemmy.ca

TLDR: See the respective download pages on Firefox & Chrome. The screenshots and features list are mostly self-explanatory.

Note on versions:

• Firefox has a more recent 1.2.1 version, because my build script missed some files while uploading v1.2.0. It doesn't look like Chrome had this issue.
• I'm uploading v1.2.2 to both stores today, which will bring the two missing features to Chrome as well. After 1.2.2, all browsers should have the same features. See below for details.

So how is this different from other similar extensions?

You may have noticed the extension's name changed to be more generic (and include Kbin 🥳). I'm trying to make this a more well-rounded extension, and that means I've incorporated some features from the other extensions, in my own way.

Lemmy Links, Kbin Links, and the other forks:

This is a great extension that replaces links on your page with versions that go to your home instance. However, in order for this to work, it needs to recursively check every element on your page whenever DOM content (the stuff the browser is reading) changes. This is somewhat resource intensive, and while testing I ran into lag and freezing issues. As such, I decided to not include this functionality in the same way.

Instead, I've added a right click context menu that does the same thing. This way the user can pick which links they want the extension to convert, and it's a lot more efficient resource wise. While it's an extra click, I felt this was a reasonable compromise. However, I'm open to feedback!

NOTE: The context menu is available on Firefox, and it will be available in Chrome in about a week, depending on when they approve my update.

Lemmy Home Instance Helper

This is another extension which checks if you are logged in to an instance, and it creates a button to the search page if you are not. As my extension creates a button on any foreign instance, the search page is only helpful when a community hasn't been loaded into your home instance yet (ex. because you're the first one to try accessing it).

To deal with this, my extension modifies the "Community not found" pages with more instructions, as well as buttons to trigger the fetch process or to open the community elsewhere. See this screenshot for an example. Again, open to feedback!

As always, I'd love to collaborate with other people while building this. I'm still cleaning up my code, but feel free to look at the GitHub. If this extension gets popular, I will definitely need help for translations and for things like getting the extension on Safari (I don't have a recent Apple device to sign the extension with).

Note on permissions:

• The current versions request "Access to all sites". This is because the extension needs access to any page that contains "/c/", "/m/", or "/post/" in order to create the sidebar buttons. While the extension only looks for those pages, it will show up as "Access to all sites" when installing. Once I have a proper welcome message and settings page, I plan on making this permission optional so you can just use the popup menu if you would like.

Summary of Recent Changes:

• Added support for Kbin
• Fixed issue where button wouldn't load when navigating to a community within Lemmy (available on Firefox, should be on Chrome in a week).
• (NEW) Right-click context menu on Lemmy/Kbin community links to let you open them directly. You can test them out here: https://lemmy.ca/post/1282303 (available on Firefox, should be on Chrome in a week)
• (NEW) Information and buttons added to "Community Not Found" error pages to let you fetch the community or open it elsewhere.
• Updates to sidebar button to state the current selected instance and provide more detailed instructions as a dropdownList
• Refactored the code to remove more unnecessary permissions.
• Another pile of bugfixes, UI improvements, and better wording for instructions.

Future Plans:

• This is complete and will be in v1.2.2. ~~Bringing over the new changes to Google Chrome. Since chrome requires Manifest 3, I still need to iron out some issues with the service workers. The missing features are all related to the background processes that are running on the Firefox version~~
• Pushing to other browsers: Microsoft Edge & Opera are still reviewing v1.2.0. Unfortunately, I don't have any immediate plans for Safari, as I don't have a device that can sign the extension. I am looking into getting help for that.
• Setting up a proper Welcome page, Settings page, and Options menu to allow users to turn off features that they don't like. This will also let me make "access to all sites" optional.
• Finishing the translations' setup so that people can contribute other languages to the extension.
• Adding an option to save your own instances to the popup, for those that have multiple home instances.

The reason I don't want to simply go ahead and create one is that there already are a lot of language-specific communities that have a lot of similarities, leading me to suspect that they're under a common management umbrella, and I think it would be best if the F# community were covered by this as well.

I miss this function from reddit. I used it often to find if a post has already been submitted. Also, it was useful to see what else was posted from this domain. I hope some day this will come to Lemmy.

Examples:

1. https://www.reddit.com/domain/hillelwayne.com/
2. https://www.reddit.com/domain/hillelwayne.com/top/?sort=top&t=all

Hey all, I created my account but didn't enter my email address in the account creation field (it's marked optional). When I try to update my email address on the account settings page it's returning back a 504 timout. Is this a known issue? Is there some workaround I can do?

Drawing attention on this instance so Admins are aware and can address the propagating exploit.

EDIT: Found more info about the patch.

A more thorough recap of the issue.

GitHub PR fixing the bug: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1897/files

If your instance has custom emojis defined, this is exploitable everywhere Markdown is available. It is NOT restricted to admins, but can be used to steal an admin's JWT, which then lets the attacker get into that admin's account which can then spread the exploit further by putting it somewhere where it's rendered on every single page and then deface the site.

If your instance doesn't have any custom emojis, you are safe, the exploit requires custom emojis to trigger the bad code branch.

I'm not sure if programming.dev is affected (doesn't feel like it currently, but I rather note it here, before it is)

Hey everyone. The instance has recently updated to 0.18.1 which changed the default shape of icons for users and communities. As circles won the poll before when I polled for what shape people want things to be ill be working on reverting those back to circles as soon as possible. Ill aim to eventually have a setting you can set in your user settings to swap to whatever you want (square, circle, hexagon, etc.)

Will take a bit as im in the middle of the gmtk game jam but just wanted to get a post out just for transparency on why they changed

Start by reading these two articles:

• https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
• https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Ok, now that you've done that (hopefully in the order I posted them), I can begin.

I have always been a strong supporter of Open Source Software (OSS), so much so that all of my projects (yes all) are OSS and fully open for anyone to use. And with that, I knew that things could be used for good... and bad. I took that risk. But I also made sure to build stuff that wasn't, in itself, inherently bad. I didn't build anything unethical to my eyes (I understand the nuance here).

But I've seen what unethical devs can do.

Just take a look at those implementing the ModFascismBot for Reddit (that's not its name, but that's what it is). That is an incredibly unethical thing to build. Not because it's a private company controlling what they want their site to do, no, that's fine by me. Reddit can do whatever they want. But because it's an attempt to lie about reality, to force users to do something through manipulation not through honesty. Even subreddits that voted overwhelmingly to shut down still got messaged by the bot telling them that the users (that voted for it) didn't want it and they had to open back up or they would be removed from mod position. This is not ethical. This is not right. This is not what the internet is about.

Or the unethical devs at Twitter, who:

• built in actual keywords to mark Ukraine news as misinformation
• marked Substack as unsafe when they released their own Twitter competitor
• banned Mastodon links for no reason besides the fact that they are a competitor
• marked NPR, BBC, CBC, and PBS as 'state-funded media' even though that is clearly meant to indicate something along the lines of Russia's propaganda arm RT or China Daily, the same for China. Then when there was enormous backlash, they removed the labels, but did the same for the actual government propaganda accounts like RT and China Daily. And then they removed the limits on virality of those posts from those propaganda accounts allowing them to have a massive spike in engagement, thus furthering misinformation.

It's one thing for an organization to have political lean...that is just a part of life, and that will never end. It's another to actually sow disinformation in order to accomplish nefarious things to further your profits. It is what has caused massive addiction to tobacco, the continuation of climate change, death and disfiguration from forever chemicals, ovarian cancer and mesothelioma from undisclosed exposure to asbestos, or selling 'health products' that claim to cure everything under the sun, but can "interfere with clinical lab tests, such as those used to diagnose heart attacks".

Please do not confuse this for saying that companies shouldn't be able to sell things and make a profit. If you want to sell someone something that kills them if they misuse it and you market it as such, you go for it. That's literally how every product in the cleaning aisle of your grocery store works. That's how guns work, that's how fertilizers work, that's why we have labels. But manipulation for profit is unethical, and that's why companies hide it. It hurts their bottom line. They know that their products will not be used if they reveal the truth. Instead of doing something good for humanity, they choose the subterfuge. Profits over people. Profits over Earth honestly. Profits over continuing the human race. Absolutely nothing matters to companies like this. And unethical developers enable this.

Facebook (ok, fine, Meta, still going to refer to them as FB though) is trying to join the Fediverse. We as a community, but honestly each of you as individuals, have a decision to make. Do they stay or do they go? Let's put some information on the table.

Facebook...

• lies about the amount of misinformation it removes ^1
• increased censorship of 'anti-state' posts ^1 ^2 ^3
• lied to Congress about social networks polarizing people, while FB's own researchers found that they do ^2
• attempted to attract preteens to the platform (huh, wonder where all that "you must be 13" stuff went) ^4
• rewards outrage and discord ^3

Facebook also...

• Allows for checking on friends and family in disasters ^6
• Created and maintained some of the most popular open source software on the planet (including the software that runs the interface you're looking at right now) [^7][^8]

From my perspective... There's not much good about FB. It has single handedly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people across the planet, if not hundreds of thousands. It continually makes people angrier and angrier. It's a launching pad for scammers, thieves, malevolent malefactors, manipulators, dictators, to push their conquests onto the world through manipulation, lies, tricks, and deceit. Its algorithms foster an echo chamber effect, exacerbating division and animosity, making civil discourse and mutual understanding all but impossible. Instead of being a platform for connection, it often serves as a catalyst for discord and misinformation. FB's propensity for prioritizing user engagement over factual accuracy has resulted in a global maelstrom of confusion and mistrust. Innocent minds are drawn into this vortex, manipulated by fear and falsehoods, consequently promoting harmful actions and beliefs. Despite its potential to be a tool for good, it is more frequently wielded as a weapon, sharpened by unscrupulous entities exploiting its vast reach and influence. The promise of a globally connected community seems to be overshadowed by its darker realities.

As a person, I believe that we need to choose things as a community. I do not believe in the 'BDFL'...the Benevolent Dictator For Life. Graydon Hoare, creator of Rust, wrote an article just recently about how things would have been different if they had stayed BDFL of Rust. From my position the BDFLs we currently have on this planet really suck. Not just politically, but even in tech. I don't think that path is good for society. It might work in specific circumstances, but it usually fails, and when it does, people get hurt. Badly.

So, with that in mind, I've been working on a polling feature for Lemmy. I seriously doubt I'll be done with it soon, but hopefully FB takes a while longer to implement federation. I understand there's a desire for me, or the other admins to just make a decision, but I really don't like doing that. If it comes down to it, I will implement defederation to start with, but I will still be holding a vote as soon as I can get this damn feature done.

[^8]: the website actually uses Inferno, but from what I can tell it was forked directly from React, judging from the actually documentation and references in the repo.