Now for the other weird bit. If I enable secret mode, the website works fine.

most likely the bad 404 response was also cached in your web browser. try clearing your cache or doing a reload with ctrl+f5 or cmd+shift+r.

we had an issue related to incorrectly caching 404 responses earlier but that was a few hours before your post. it should already have been resolved when you posted this.

as this has since been clarified by @nutomic@lemmy.ml, i have updated my comment above and can confirm that it is in fact 0% of lemmy.world/fedihosting foundation donations that go towards the lemmy.ml instance rather than 0.05%.

i believe they were confused by the topic of this comment chain, as the main post is about donations towards lemmy development.

lemmy development accepts cryptocurrency donations: https://join-lemmy.org/crypto

lemmy.world/fedihosting foundation does not currently have an option for cryptocurrency donations.

i’ve banned all the accounts i could identify as part of this scheme from lemmy.world now.

i originally sent them a warning before i was aware of the scale of this involving a bunch of alts with different usernames. if i had known that when i sent the warning it would’ve been a ban straight away.

they replied to my warning pretending they didn’t know about any recent vote manipulation, so they’re clearly not interested in acting in good faith going forward.

yes, we have a matrix room for coordinated efforts against spam and other types of abuse, which admins are welcome to join.

once lemmy allows reporting user profiles directly this will probably become more likely to reach the instances admins of instances that are less actively maintained as well.

I’ve sent out warnings to 10 other users in the past few days about similar behavior already and also banned two users for this type of behavior. one of them appealed and is unbanned again.

I also had this account in my list of such accounts, but I hadn’t followed up on it yet, as I figured I’d just deal with the top n users and then review it again at a later point in time.

i’ve sent them a warning about this as well now that they’ll get banned from our instance if they continue engaging in this behavior.

and just now there has been a PR merged in the upstream repo after i spent some time to get a fork properly set up…

@nnrx@lemmy.world @nnrx@lemmy.ca @nnrx@sh.itjust.works are you still reading on any of these accounts? are you planning to return to maintaining mlmym?

if people want to contribute code, they can check out the various repositories in the LemmyNet GitHub org to see which issues are looking for someone to pick them up.

the main repositories, by language, are:

• Rust
  • lemmy - backend of the application
  • activitypub-federation-rust - federation library
  • lemmy-ui-leptos - work in progress rewrite of lemmy-ui in Rust
• TypeScript/Inferno
  • lemmy-ui - the default lemmy web interface
• Kotlin
  • jerboa - the official Android app

additionally, there is a range of open source alternative web interfaces and apps that wouldn’t mind contributions. some of them are listed here: https://github.com/dbeley/awesome-lemmy?tab=readme-ov-file#alternative-front-ends

ethical ads are virtually non-existent. when limiting ads to ethical ads it’s unlikely you’re getting even remotely close to bringing in the necessary funds.

people promoting ads are typically those who expect others to suffer while they themselves are using ad blockers. there are some people who honestly turn off ad blockers, but i wouldn’t recommend anyone to do that for any site, as i don’t consider the majority of ads ethical and it’s also often used as a malware/phishing/scam distribution mechanism.

this is also a vicious cycle of more people blocking ads -> ads getting worse to offset the lost ad revenue -> more people blocking ads. this is what lead to the internet today, where the majority of the internet is basically unusable if you don’t use ublock origin or a comparable solution.

this would better be asked on the original post by nutomic: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

nutomic previously also shared on matrix that he is not participating in moderation except for removing spam.

edit: commented this before refreshing, so i didn’t see nutomic already replied

our foundation is in NL, because that’s where @ruud@lemmy.world is located, but the active admin and infra team members are distributed across the world with members in Netherlands, Germany and USA currently.

lemmy.ml is not the primary test server.

there are multiple dedicated test instances that are used for development purposes.

testing on lemmy.ml is mostly happening for release candidates that require actual user activity to find remaining bugs, at the point where it’s getting close to a proper release.

instance admins were indeed asked to help promote the post, but this is nothing anyone was forced to do, and this is probably something we would have done without explicitly being asked about it. i don’t see anything that would need to be disclosed here, as it is in our own interest keep lemmy development going and we did not receive or were offered anything in return for sharing this post.

the draft for the original post was shared a few days ago in a public matrix room for instance admins, so admins had some time to consider if/how they wanted to help promoting this when it was published and maybe prepare some text for their own posts.

instance categorization requires someone to PR that to the joinlemmy-site repository, as those tags are not automatic.

HC is in fact present on https://join-lemmy.org/instances, but as there is no explicit tag it won’t show up if you search by tag.

there are a few instances excluded, you can find the list here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/5471b9cc7423fc51af3d72a464f740a1ee887489/recommended-instances.json#L16-L28

it’s around 2.5% of our monthly expenses that go to the lemmy devs. 2% of the stated minimum donation goal would be the hosting costs for lemmy.ml. with the assumption that the lemmy donation goals is met, that would mean around 0.05% of the donations to lemmy.world/fedihosting foundation are used for lemmy.ml hosting costs.

this was already explained in a few other places in the comments here, but in the end, even if it wasn’t directly going to instance operating costs, if you pay people a salary and they then take it out of their own pockets there is no real difference, as the money would still end up in the same place.

edit: it has since been clarified that only donations via Lemmy’s open collective account are used for lemmy.ml hosting costs. our donations towards Lemmy development are not done through open collective and therefore 0% of lemmy.world/fedihosting foundation donations are used for lemmy.ml hosting costs.

whether this is something that makes a difference in the end is something you have to decide on your own, but this is still the addressing the frequently mentioned topic of having donations explicitly for development rather than also supporting lemmy.ml operations.

at least via opencollective there is an option for yearly donations. when using a payment method other than paypal this will be yearly payments.

the code is excluding instances with a monthly active user share of 30% or higher: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/blob/5471b9cc7423fc51af3d72a464f740a1ee887489/src/shared/components/instances.tsx#L451-L456. .ee is currently at around 14%. the intention behind this is to reduce centralization, not punish specific instances.

Federated image links to non-lemmy websites sometimes show up as image_proxy links from the poster’s instance. This is a really annoying issue that results in misleading domains showing up next to posts as well as breaking image display in the post itself.

that is not directly a mlmym issue, it’s that people copy links on instances with image proxying enabled and use them in new posts :|

feel free to also raise them as issues on the repo directly to have them documented.

by the way, we run the version on the main branch on https://mlmym-unstable.lemmy.world/, although it does have a domain lock to lemmy.world.

sorry about the late response, got a lot of stuff going on currently and it seemed like you got useful replies here already anyway when i checked before.

we currently have a rule in place that blocks traffic with too high of a threat score. this rule was implemented before i joined, i’ll have to check with the team about the original reason for this and if we want to relax this.

at least the error message should be improved if we can do that, i think that’s just returning a static message currently.