The bans are AI driven, and the appeal responses are AI driven. You won’t find an explanation for why you were banned, because there was no human behind the ban

Quality lenses benefit you immediately, whatever body you stick them on.

Quality bodies only benefit you if you have found yourself limited with your previous bodies, and specifically need the new features.

Do my adjustments in Rawtherapee. Save in sidecar file. (Digikam will not see the changes.)

It will if you store the images locally rather than remotely, or if you rescan the folder in digikam.

I store my photos on a NAS drive, but I mirror them to my local PC using unison and do all of my work from the local versions, so any updates I do in external apps automatically appear in digikam. I also unison sync my (JPG) photos to an externally hosted photoprism instance for offsite backup. Aside from needing more storage, its working pretty well!

Layers are the thing I hate about the cold

I’d rather be blistering hot than wrapped up in layers and living inside stuffy heated buildings

I wonder the same thing about people who live in cold environments. I’ve never seen snow, and I know I won’t handle it, because I can’t handle single digit (Celsius) temperatures, let alone below 0…

1: is lemmy good for macro blogging? Like how you’d use something like Tumblr or the like.

No. You’re looking for Mastodon/Sharkey/Misskey/Friendica or kbin for that! Lemmy is more the federated equivalent of a site like reddit.

2: when you create a community for yourself and post in it, does it reach other people or is it only if they actively search for it? Is it common here to create a community just for yourself to post blogs and the like? Can you even do that?

There is no such thing as a community for yourself. Every community is either visible to everyone, or you can lock it down to just people on the same instance as you. But you can’t ever make it just for you. You can make it so that no one else can post to it, but you can’t stop them reading it.

3: how does the federation thing work exactly? I’m from an instance that has downvotes disabled, so what happens when someone tries to downvote me?

Basically, the instance just ignores downvotes that it receives. Other instances don’t. So that means that the timeline you see will be different to the timeline someone on a different instance sees, because their timeline will factor in downvotes and yours won’t.

4: is lemmy safe from AI scrapping or nah?

Nothing that is publicly visible or searchable is safe from AI scraping.

Is this platform good for artists compared to something like mastodon, twitter, or bluesky?

Different things.

Lemmy is “reddit like”. Mastodon and Bluesky are “twitter like”. On lemmy, you subscribe to and follow communities. On mastodon, you subscribe to and follow users.

So it really depends on what you’re looking for.

5: is there search engine crawling on lemmy? Are all posts on here possible to show up in search engines or nah? How do things work on that front?

Yep, it can and is crawled. If you don’t want that, lemmy isn’t going to be great, as it’s impossible to avoid.

You do have more control over that on mastodon, as you can lock posts down to be more private, but even then, it’s imperfect.

6: how’s development? Is lemmy going to continue to build and improve or are things gonna stay as they are for the foreseeable future?

Active and ongoing, with a couple of competing alternatives that are also actively developed

7: how privacy friendly and secure is lemmy really? I’m guessing a lot better then reddit, but just curious.

Admins have full access to the database, and in theory, can pull out pretty much anything. Which is just the same as reddit. Your best bet for privacy is anonymity

8: are there normal people or communities here? From what I’m seeing all of lemmy seems primarily focused on politics and tech, am not seeing much beyond that.

Lots of meme communities too! It’s a size thing. Not as many lemmy users as there are reddit users, and the ones that are here tend to be more tech oriented.

Lots of queer communities our instance!

I’ve seen AI spam bots. Does that count?

The first one. Hormones may have played a part too, but the bulk of it was dysphoria and repression

I transitioned…

Yes to both, thought only a couple of times each…

instances/hubs/rpcs cannot block a user account or community

Why would I want that? That sounds genuinely awful.

Edit - And the plebbit homepage talks about making a 4chan equivalent, and along with this post, there are pepe images everywhere. No thanks. Plebbit can fuck right off

Think of it this way. All bans and content removals are local only, and don’t federate to other instances, with a few exceptions

The most notable of these exceptions are

i) a community moderator removing content or banning a user from their community. This federates. An instance admin doing the same thing does not federate, unless the community was created on their instance.

ii) an instance admin banning a user based on their instance, and choosing to remove all of their content. This will federate the ban and the content removal to other instances.

At a guess, I’d say it’s confirmation bias

If I as an instance owner search & subscribe to another instance’s community, I get “federated” with that community. Does that mean my instance is, or my user is?

When a user on your instance subscribes to an external community, the instance that hosts that community gets a notification about the subscription. Then when new content is posted to to that community, the remote instance forwards a single copy of that content to all instances that have subscribers to the community, including your instance.

Then, when your instance receives it, it checks the content to see if it should send anyone a notification, and does so. It then makes the content visible to people and it will start appearing in the appropriate timelines of your local users (ie, in the “subscribed” and/or “all” timelines depending on the user)

If I want users at my instance to see posts from communities on other instances, is there a way for me to pull those posts in to my instance? Or, how do I get my users to see other communities’ content?

As soon as a single account on your instance subscribes to a remote community, you will get future content from that community.

As an admin, assuming you don’t want to subscribe to random groups just to federate them, you can create a dummy account, find common/popular communities using a site like Lemmyverse, and then subscribe with your dummy account.

You can also point your users at https://lemmyverse.net/communities. That site lets them set their home instance, and once they’ve done so, links to any community will point the user to the community on your instance. And if your instance didn’t have it, the act of someone trying to find it will cause your instance to go and fetch the community and recent content posted to it from the remote instance. Though in this case, unless the user then subscribes, you won’t continue to get future content from that community.

When someone on your instance subscribes to a community on another instance for the first time, it grabs a small amount of back history, and the other instance starts federating all new content to your instance as it generates.

There is no way to pull in a complete backlog of all history automatically, because it would be a large resource burden

However, what you can do is find content that you want to interact with on the remote instance, copy the URL and then search for that URL on your server. That will pull that content and its context to your instance.

someone trying to sincerely answer a reasonable question

Yeah, that’s why you linked to transphobic hit pieces and described trans women in sports with hugely emotionally loaded terms

Because you’re reasonable

As I said from the beginning, your comment was fine unti you let some of your more transphobic opinions out in the final paragraph. That paragraph was not “reasonable”

I went through the numbers to highlight her performance is on par with the rest of her team, and you still think that I’m being unreasonable

As I said, you presented your position quite clearly, which is why I called you out

Yes, they’re designed to seem that way.

Which is why I earlier stated that my issue wasn’t with listing them, but specifically, the way you presented them.

I’ve also not presented my beliefs

You used the word “murdering” to describe a transgender woman playing sports with other women, despite her playing at a level comparable to them.

You absolutely presented your beliefs.

This is a tricky issue, trans women in men’s prisons are also at risk

“Also at risk”

The fact that you equate cherry picked single instance anecdotes as comparable to entrenched violence and discrimination against trans folk as being somehow comparable is the part that makes it transphobia.

Murder was hyperbole

It was, yeah. Despite her “murdering” the opposition, from the very article you linked, Australia finished 5th.

There are 7 players on a handball team. She scored 23 goals across 6 games, for an average of just under 4 goals per game (3.83 to be specific).

The total goals scored by Australia in those games was 160, which works out to an average of 3.81 per Australian player across those 6 games. Her “murdering” of her opponents consisted of having a 0.02% higher average than her team mates.

The fact that you parrot lines like “murdering” and look at videos designed to make it look open and shut, whilst not bothering to investigate the reality of the situation is what makes it transphobic.

The whole article is discomforting and worth reading. But, while WPATH (what is supposed to, and claims to be and independent science based organization) was creating their guidelines:

An article posted on the economist, who has Helen Joyce, a vocally transphobic journalist as one of their senior staff. Linking to an article that has been mostly circulated on various transphobic websites, calling out WPATH for being biased and getting in the way of evidence based research? Whilst defending the Cass review, which has been widely called out by many international medical bodies for its own bias and inconsistent approach to evidence.

The fact that you’re worried about WPATH as the real issue here is telling…