Community Search Tips

You'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the profusion of AI-generated images on the internet. Some are beautiful, some are unsettling, but most of the ones people take the time to post are interesting. If you like the occasional artistic image to flow across your timeline, Stable Diffusion Art will make a great subscription for you.

Now, this is not to be confused with Stable Diffusion, also at dbzer0.com. Stable Diffusion Art is the showcase community, whereas Stable Diffusion is a discussion community about the generative program.

What I like the best about Stable Diffusion Art is that it has themed contests. Someone will post a theme (such as "zombie apocalypse"), and everyone is free to submit comments with the art they generated along that theme.

Go give it a look. We can all use a bit more art in our lives!

Searching through communities can be a daunting task. At latest count, there are over 15,000 communities to choose from. In addition, it’s common to pick communities that you are already interested in. This forms a bit of a bubble, where the content you are exposed to is the content you already agree with and like. So how do you push those boundaries and find new and diverse communities?

One way is to visit a random community. Lemmy-Discover makes this easy by giving you an interface that will show you exactly one community. You’ll see its statistics as well as a few posts and their associated comments. If the community isn’t for you, you can press the big red skip button and see another random community.

(Those of us who are of a certain age will recognize this immediately — it’s just flipping through the channels on the TV to see what’s on. How many great shows did you discover this way?)

It looks like Lemmy-Discover is designed to be an alternative front-end for Lemmy communities. It provides a “Follow” button that, if you create an account, is like subscribing to a community. But for our purposes, it makes a great Community discovery tool.

What do you get when you mix corporate abuses of data, a shift from ownership to renting of software, and dozens of high-profile security breaches? You get a healthy distrust of putting your data on someone else’s computer (also known as “the cloud”). You also get Data Hoarder, a community dedicated to the practice of storing your data on machines that you control. Free from monthly subscriptions and free from prying eyes.

Even if you aren’t a self-hoster, there are a lot of things you can learn from this community. Do you own a PC? Saving money on new storage is a constant topic of discussion. For example, did you know that you can often find great deals on 3.5” hard drives by buying external enclosures with the drive already included? Manufacturers will often put very high quality drives in these enclosures because that’s the model they have the most unsold units of. When you buy the external enclosure, it can cost much less than buying the drive you find inside on its own. Buying the enclosure to take the drive out is called “shucking,” and it can save you a lot of money. (But watch out. It’s a lottery — you might get a different model of drive than you expect.)

If some of these topics sound interesting to you, give Data Hoarder a subscribe and hang out for a while.

Until next time!

Yesterday's community spotlight about the PC Master Race community got me thinking: is there a similar community for deals on PC components? Anyone who has ever built a PC knows that component prices vary widely. Getting a good deal is probably half the work of building or upgrading a PC.

Luckily for us Lemmings, there is buildapcsales over at lemmy.ml! Each post in the community showcases a single deal. The titles of the post are strictly regulated to make it easy to find the component type you're looking for and to see its brand and price.

So are the deals any good? Well, that, my friends, is beyond the scope of this article. But at least it's an extra arrow in your quiver to help you keep costs down!

One additional note: PC sales are region-specific. If you're not in the US, you may want to check out these related communities for component deals:

• Canada: BAPC Sales Canada (484 users)
• Australia: bapcsalesaustralia (137 users)
• UK: Build A PC Sales UK (123 users)

And for laptop shoppers, you may benefit from Laptop Deals over at lemmy.world.

Happy hunting!

Deep in the warren of Lemmy communities lies a place that focuses on the venerable personal computer and everything around it: the technology, the process of building one, or even just celebrating what it looks like when it's all done. It's PC Master Race. Longtime Reddit users may recognize that community name. It was a staple of Reddit whose posts rose to the popular feed on a regular basis. With over 10,000 subscribers already, lemmy.world's version is similarly popular.

I've used PC Master Race to get support, help others with similar builds fix their problems, find good peripherals for my own upgrade projects, and just to see what's possible with PC gaming.

Let's help this community with some posts! Go take a picture of your battlestation and share it, or post your build specs and ask the group how you can improve them. You'll be surprised what you can learn from the discussion!

What’s more fun than a trip to Bozeman, MT on First Contact Day? What’s more satisfying than a plate of salmon on Federation Day? What’s deeper than self-reflection on the sands of Vulcan? That’s right, it’s the Star Trek community over at startrek.website!

If you are a Star Trek fan, this is the community for you. It’s very active and full of high-quality content. Here you can read about the behind-the-scenes details of any show in the franchise. The sidebar helpfully lists the shows that are in development, production, and release. Really, anything that is Star Trek-related is talked about here. So go refill your Romulan ale and drop by for a visit!

It’s almost 11:00 AM, and I’m still exhausted. I can barely keep my eyes open. This seems like the perfect time to do a community spotlight for Espresso. Operated by our friends at infosec.pub, this community caters to lovers of espresso and the art of making it. It was created in response to the Reddit exodus, hoping to make a new home for espresso lovers here in the Fediverse.

It’s always a pleasure to find these smaller, niche communities on Lemmy. The moderators have thoughtfully migrated the wiki from the original Reddit community, and have filled out their sidebar with a ton of useful information. (All of that information is included in the bubble above this post. I feel a little guilty writing a spotlight article that’s shorter than the destination community’s sidebar!)

My only wish is that there was some sort of button that could deliver an espresso to me right now so that I could wake up the rest of the way. Oh, well. Maybe I should buy one of the espresso machines they’re recommending over there.

Until next time!

I'm back after a week hiatus where I was helping lemmy.ninja manage a large influx of new users. And that means it's time for a new Community Spotlight! Today I bring you Pitch A Youtuber, a community whose sole purpose is to spread the word about extraordinary youtube artists. I'm not much of a youtube-watcher myself, but I have to admit that there are some incredibly good offerings out there.

So today only, I'm going to give you a two-for-one deal. First you get this community spotlight telling you about the Pitch A Youtuber community! As an added bonus, I'm going to give you not one but two great Youtube channels that you should check out.

First there's Professor of Rock, a channel I only discovered last week when I watched the incredible Rick Roll episode. I'm not really a fan of rock culture, or music history. Sure, I loves me some techno, and I listen to all kinds of music; I just have never had that much of an interest in it. But there's such a level of quality in the Professor of Rock content that I couldn't put it down! I mean, have you seen my community spotlight posts? I have the attention span of a goldfish with dementia. And yet I watched that episode (and one or two others) from start to finish. Great content!

And for your other free gift, I present the irreverent but surprisingly insightful Red Letter Media. I'm an enormous film and television fan, having worked in the entertainment industry for a while and having seen probably every movie in existence. I love the horror genre, and I'm also a huge Star Trek fan. Put those together and you get the content of the Red Letter Media channel. There's a lot of snark, but so much more deeply informed content about the industry that I find myself coming back to this channel again and again. You'll have to watch a few to decide what you think. I don't really have a specific video to recommend. But I will say it was very interesting to see them come around on their opinions of Star Trek Picard.

So there you have it. My longest community spotlight post, with added bonuses. If you like content like this, head over to Pitch A Youtuber and contribute!

If you're looking for NSFW communities, Lemmyverse.net now provides a Show NSFW checkbox to help filter your search. Unlike a regular checkbox, however, this checkbox has three states.

By default when you visit Lemmyverse.net, the checkbox is unchecked. That means that any search you perform will exclude any community marked as NSFW.

Figure 1: The Show NSFW checkbox is unchecked, so no NSFW communities will be shown.

Clicking the checkbox once changes the filter to include both NSFW and SFW communities in the search result. This is indicated by a hyphen in the checkbox with a yellow background, as well as a tooltip if you over over it.

Figure 2: After clicking the Show NSFW checkbox once, NSFW communities will be included in search results alongside SFW communities.

Clicking the checkbox again will set the filter to display only NSFW communities. This is indicated by a checkmark in the checkbox with a red background. As before, a tooltip will also indicate the state of the filter.

Figure 3: After clicking the Show NSFW checkbox a second time, search results will be limited to displaying only NSFW communities.

As you may have guessed, you can click the checkbox again to uncheck the box and display only SFW communities again.

In closing, here is a note about NSFW communities on Lemmy. If you are using the Lemmy UI on desktop or mobile, there is a Show NSFW Content setting in your profile. You will need to have this setting enabled before you can view the posts in the NSFW communities you subscribe to. If you've had this setting turned off, just be aware that your Lemmy experience could dramatically change when you enable it, especially if you spend a lot of time on the All timeline on a busy Lemmy server.

INXS, Porno for Pyros, Presidents of the United States, The Primitives.... These are just a few of the large (large!) number of Alternative Rock offerings at Alternative Nation. This is a genuinely busy place, folks, with 287 posts so far, growing by a dozen a day! It even has its own Spotify playlist, which I'm not even going to link to because I think you should visit this community that much!

This community clearly has dedicated mods who love the content and work hard to curate and present it with quality. Drop in, subscribe, and be sure to post!

Today we’re bringing attention to lemmy.ninja’s own Team Red, a community all about AMD and their products. Maybe you switched to AMD when NVidia’s video cards were impossible to find outside of a scalper’s den. Maybe you bailed on Intel and their space heater processors, opting for a Ryzen Threadripper. Or maybe you’ve been in AMD’s ecosystem for years. No matter your circumstances, this community is here to cater to you!

Come on in and show us your build. Share a benchmark! Ask a question and get some help from your colleagues. It’s all welcome at Team Red!

For today's spotlight, I present Australia. The most active and subscribed community of aussie.zone, this community boasts a whopping 246 users per week. So many, in fact, that I almost feel like writing this spotlight is moot, because everyone already seems to know about it! Then again, there's always someone whose Lemmy journey is just beginning, and who could benefit from learning about the popular destinations of the platform.

If Australia is too broad, aussie.zone has communities for various cities and regions of Australia for a more local discussion. And, in a particularly neighborly fashion, they have even listed the other Australia-related communities in their sidebar.

Today we highlight ADHD Women, a community “for women to find support and discuss living with ADHD.” There are a lot of ADHD-related communities across Lemmy, but this is the first one I’ve seen that caters to women. It’s a recent addition to the Fediverse, with posts going back a month or so.

Here we have a venerable community for today's Community Spotlight. Linux Guides has been around since 2021, which makes it one of the oldest communities we've featured here so far. It's a community where users are encouraged to post anything they find useful in the realm of linux. So that github page about creating LXCs that you starred a few years ago that you keep referring back to? That would be a good candidate to post here!

It's not terribly active, which surprises me. It seems that every big project I do in Linux requires one or more guides to get through. So let's share our hidden treasures with the community and help it grow!

Going forward, the moderators of Community Search Tips will strongly encourage posts to use the URL of a community when linking to that community. We won't get upset at you for using the other methods; we just feel that the full URL provides the best user experience, especially for users of small instances.

This is a bit of a meta post, but please feel free to comment on it if you like.

Background

There are several ways to link to a community in Lemmy. The two most common you will see are these:

• URL Method. This involves using the URL found in your browser's address bar when you are visiting the community. For example, https://lemmy.world/c/transformers
• Shorthand Method. This method uses an exclamation point in the address, which tells Lemmy to load the remote community through the instance you are currently logged in at. For example, [email protected].

We had previously thought that both methods were interchangeable, but we have since learned of some issues with each.

URL Method Drawbacks

You have probably already encountered the main drawback with the URL method. When you follow a URL to a Lemmy community, you visit that community at the remote instance. You can still see the content there, but you can't comment, upvote, downvote, or subscribe to the community from this page. To subscribe, you'd have to go back to your home instance and follow the instructions we've laid out here.

You can see an example of that below. Here I've folled the URL to https://[email protected], and I cannot subscribe to the community because there is no subscribe button present.

At most you can view the community and its content. You can still return to your instance, search for the community using the same URL, and subscribe to it there.

Shorthand Method Drawbacks

1. The Error Page

As inconvenient as the URL Method is, the shorthand method can introduce even worse problems. In Lemmy, a community isn't linked to your instance until at least one user has searched for that community on the search page. This necessary step causes a serious problem when using the shorthand method on a site where that search hasn't happened yet. If you try to follow a link that uses the shorthand method to a community that hasn't been searched for, you will receive an error response.

This is much less of a problem on sites like lemmy.world, where tens of thousands of users have searched for communities already. As you can imagine, however, smaller instances and newer instances haven't necessarily searched for the vast majority of communities out there, making this problem much more pervasive on those instances. To make matters worse, the error page is cryptic and doesn't explain what the problem is or how to solve it.

2. Incompatibilities with other services

This site is primarily focused on Lemmy, but other projects in the Fediverse, such as Mastadon, can -- and do -- interact with Lemmy communities. We can't test the shorthand method in all of these products, but we have received reports that it won't work for Mastodon users, and I suspect there are other projects out there that would run into the same problem. (Note that I did test this for kbin, and kbin can follow the shorthand method.)

Conclusion

We feel that the drawbacks of the shorthand notation have more severe consequences for user experience than the inconvenience of using the URL method. Neither approach is perfect, but a community link that leads to an error message completely defeats the purpose of the content in this community. We hope you agree.

We have confidence that the error will eventually get fixed. Until that time, please use the full URL when linking to communities when making posts to Community Search Tips. Thank you!

If you're not familiar with it, Mastodon is a microblogging platform that works in a federated manner, just like Lemmy. In fact, since both Lemmy and Mastodon use the ActivityPub protocol to share their posts, Mastodon users can fully interact with Lemmy content.

So, in the spirit of broadening the Fediverse, today's community spotlight focuses on [email protected]. It's a busy place, but that should be no surprise, since it's hosted at lemmy.ml. So head on over there and say hello, especially if you're a Mastodon user!

It's Friday, so today's Community Spotlight post is brought to you by Cats! No, it's not a community about the awful 2019 movie based on the Broadway Play -- yeah, that one -- with the infamous butthole cut. No, this is a community focused on the core purpose of the internet.

No, not porn.

Cats! Posting cat pictures and cat videos and cat-related content! Glorious glorious cats!

Now, granted: this community is pretty small right now. But if there's one thing I've learned in my years on the internet, it's that cat communities grow exponentially. So get in there and secure your spot as one of the founding members of Cats!

Part of making communities discoverable is making the posts in those communities stand out. If you're an admin, moderator, or even if you're a contributor who wants to draw in subscribers and increase engagement, you should always try to attach an image to any text-only posts you make.

Overview

Important note: This post applies to Lemmy 0.18.0. In Lemmy 0.18.1, you will see separate text boxes for the URL and the image of a post.

When you create a post that has a URL, Lemmy will try to grab a picture from the URL's destination to insert into the post thumbnail. But when you create a text-only post, you need to supply that image yourself. Luckily, it's very easy to do.

How To

In the image below, we have a post I'm writing for Lemmy.ninja's Boomer Shooter community. It's about a patch for Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, a first-person boomer shooter game. As is often the case with announcements like this, there isn't a good web page for me to link to. Just an announcement on Twitter (ewww!) and a quick note in Steam. This is the perfect candidate for a text post with a picture!

Step One: Get a picture

Start by finding a good image to use for your post. You will need to download this image to your computer so that you can upload it to your post in a later step. For this example, I've selected an image from the news article about the patch. Another good source is an image generated by Stable Diffusion or another AI image generation system. AI-generated images are always different. Using them will give the posts in your community variety when viewed side-by-side.

Try to keep the image somewhat small. Let's say somewhere around 500 x 500 pixels or less. Larger images take longer to load, which can be especially noticeable on overloaded servers. They also take up a relatively large amount of space on the server.

Step Two: Write Your Post and Upload the image.

Once you have your image downloaded, it's time to write your post (if you haven't already) and to attach your image to the post. Attaching it is easy:

1. Click the little image icon beneath the URL field.

Note: There's another, identical icon on the Body section. Don't use this one; it's used to upload an image in the body of your text.

2. Select the image you want to upload.

When you click upload, the image will be uploaded to the server that the community is hosted on, and you will see the URL field is populated with a path to the image.

Note: You can also supply a URL to a remotely-hosted image in the URL field and get the same result. The bonus is that the image won't be taking up space on your community's Lemmy instance. This will make your administrators very happy.

And that's it! You can now submit your post and the post will contain a nice thumbnail. Users can click on the thumbnail and expand it if they want to see the image at full size.

Let's take a look at the final result!

This looks great! All of the posts in the community have a good variety of eye-catching images. On the All feed, this post will stand out among all the other posts from different communities, hopefully encouraging people to subscribe and participate. It's also a signal to others that the contributors care about the comment of their community!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1080409

I built this for myself some years ago and used it a lot to find many interesting niche subreddits. Today I expanded it to also help myself and others find interesting niche communities across the Lemmyverse!

There is a longer explanation here from an older article, but basically:

• You give this a link that you found interesting
• It will (try to) find everywhere it has been shared on the Lemmyverse (and other websites)
• It will show you all comments from everywhere it's been shared on a single page
• You can do all the regular stuff like filter, sort, isolate etc.

One thing I find myself doing very often is hitting "toggle sources" on the top banner; this shows me everywhere the link has been shared and commented on, and if I see a community I'm not familiar with, I'll isolate the comments from that source and have a look through to see if it's a community I'd like to engage with.

There are also browser extensions and an iOS shortcut available.

You can check out an example from a post that just hit "Hot" on lemmy.world here!

I hope this helps people find interesting, engaging and fulfilling communities in this next chapter of the internet! 🚀

[Edit: Wefwef has been rebranded as Voyager, and the community has moved as well. This post was updated to include the new name and links.]

Today's spotlight centers on the community for the nascent Lemmy web application Voyager! Voyager isn't a binary application that you install; it's a web application that you can run on most phones with a web browser. It's targeted toward iOS, but the developers say that you can run it on Android, too! It is a spiritual successor to the extraordinarily popular Apollo mobile app for viewing Reddit content.

Much of that enthusiasm for Apollo has certainly carried over. Just look at these engagement statistics for the Voyager community:

The community is a hive of activity, with pretty much what you would expect from an application community: bug reports, feature requests, and feature comparisons. The community users are even submitting icon concepts and other contributions. It really feels like an open source effort.

So if you have the web application, or if you just like watching development in real time, check out the Voyager community.

Summary

This is an Apple .shortcut file that will make it easier to subscribe to the community you are currently viewing. It was designed for Lemmy 0.18.0 and requires a device running Mac OS or iOS and using Safari to view Lemmy. You have to be on the community page you want to subscribe to when you invoke the shortcut.

[Update: I discovered this version doesn't work for iOS. A different action was needed to capture the URL in Safari. If you want to use this on iOS, Download this file instead. To make it work on iOS, you need to go into the shortcut and enable "Include on Share Sheet." Invoking it requires you to click the share button when you are on the community page that you want to subscribe to.]

Important: Be sure to edit the shortcut and change the Instance URL at the very top from lemmy.ninja (my home instance) to the URL of your home instance. If you don't do this, it will not work unless you are a registered user at Lemmy.ninja.

Overview

Today @[email protected] asked for an Apple .shortcut file that would make it easier to subscribe. I've linked the file I built for him here.

Due to the way Lemmy is designed, you can't just visit a community and subscribe to it. You first have to search for that community at your home instance so that your instance will connect to the community, and then you can click the link in the search results to visit the community and subscribe to it.

This shortcut works by taking the link you are currently viewing in Safari and directing Safari to search for it at your home instance. You then have to click on the community link in the search results and click the subscribe button. (See Usage below.)

The shortcut was designed for Lemmy 0.18.0. I believe the search functionality changed between 0.17.4 and 0.18.0, so I doubt it will work for earlier versions.

I'm sure this shortcut will quickly become obsolete as Lemmy's UI improves and third-party apps get developed. Until then, this should help speed up the process of adding communities to your subscribed list.

Usage

Let's say you are reading through the All Communities feed at your home Lemmy instance and you come across a great post about a vintage Atari 2600, hosted at lemmy.sdf.org.

You want to subscribe to the community this post is in. In the screenshot you'll see the community name at the top there: Atari 8bit. Click that link and it will take you to the community page at lemmy.sdf.org.

Here we are in the Atari 8bit community. This is where you invoke the shortcut. I put my shortcut in the menu bar group so that it appears in the shortcuts menu. Invoke the shortcut now.

When you click on it, the shortcut will take you back to your home instance (provided that you configured the correct address in the first step of the shortcut file). It will take the URL from the Safari page you were on and search for that URL at your home instance. After a few seconds, you should see the name of the community appear in the search results.

Click on the community link. Then, go over to the sidebar and click on Subscribe until you are successfully subscribed to the community.

Configuration

After you download the shortcut, you must edit the shortcut and change the first step. Change https://lemmy.ninja/ to the URL of your home instance. If you don't complete this configuration step, the shortcut will not work for you unless you happen to be a registered user of Lemmy.ninja.

After that, the shortcut is ready to use and should be available on all devices connected to your iCloud account. If you're using MacOS, I suggest that you drag and drop the shortcut box into the Menu Bar group to make it easy to access. I have only ever used shortcuts on my iPhone via Siri, so I have no idea where the most convenient location would be on iOS.

Today's community spotlight comes from vlemmy.net. The community is called Interesting News From Around the World, but it might be easier to refer to it by its shortname, "!globalnews." At around 100 users per month, it's fairly active. It has over 200 posts so far, with somewhere between 3 and 6 new posts every day.

In my time browsing the community, I saw posts about news in many different countries in Europe, Asia, and Australia. There were posts about North American news, but I didn't feel like they outnumbered the others, which can happen in news communities sometimes. All the post titles I saw were in English.

I did notice that every single post was posted by BrikoX, a vlemmy.net user. This leads me to believe that BrikoX may be an RSS bot, feeding the sub with content. That doesn't seem to have lessened the desire for user participation however; there are plenty of upvotes and comments -- especially on the newer posts.

This is our first Community Spotlight for a subreddit that officially migrated to Lemmy! [email protected] comes to us from r/steamdeck_linux, a subreddit of about 3,000 users. Steamdeck aims to provide guides and support to people that want to experiment with the more Linux side of the Steam Deck.

Prior to moving to Lemmy, the goals of the subreddit were:

• Creating a wiki, with detailed, noob friendly, guides for using Plasma / Arch
• Planning on how to grow awareness for Linux off the back of the Steam Deck
• Growing up this community, ready for the Steam Deck release

Moving to Lemmy seems to have had a positive effect on the community, as the Lemmy version has over 4,700 subscribers now.

Here we have a community dedicated to Nethack! It's hosted by SDF Chatter, a Lemmy instance that hosts many communities dedicated to retro topics.

As a seminal roguelike video game, NetHack has significantly influenced the genre with its procedurally generated dungeon filled with monsters, pitfalls, and enigmas. Lauded for its replayability and intricate gameplay, it utilizes a simple ASCII aesthetic that fosters imaginative immersion. Its comprehensive design philosophy is reflected in its motto: "The DevTeam thinks of everything."

Those of you who are sysadmins or who run your own homelabs may be interested in this new community: [email protected]. It's the new home of Reddit's r/ntfy. It's a community that supports the ntfy tool.

From ntfy.sh's site:

ntfy (pronounced notify) is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, and/or using a REST API. It's infinitely flexible, and 100% free software.