With Reddit’s encroaching IPO and their poorly planned API changes, we need a place to keep up with privacy topics that isn’t tied to an anti-privacy, centralized sinking ship site.
Our forum running Discourse has been a great place to discuss website changes and answer questions, but it doesn’t quite provide the same experience as Reddit does for things like sharing news, so we’re trying something new:
[email protected] is our new ActivityPub-enabled community for sharing links and other information from the privacy and security realm. Welcome!
We’re going to be trying out posting to this community for a few months to decide if we want this to replace or coexist with the r/privacyguides subreddit, so we’ll see how it goes. If you want this to succeed, stay active! Our mission is to become the most inviting and friendly place to discuss privacy and security on the fediverse 😎
How do I join the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy?
You can join a few different ways:
- On Kbin.social, a Lemmy alternative with a more Reddit-like UI and instant registrations. I didn’t like Kbin from a hosting perspective because of some missing features, but for just browsing communities and joining ours it’s a great option: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]
- On Lemmy.one, this is the server which hosts the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, and also the server that I admin myself. You are welcome to create an account, but it might take up to 24 hours for your account to be approved.
- On another Lemmy instance: You can join the community by entering
!privacyguides@lemmy.onein the search box on your instance. There are plenty of servers you could join, or you could host your own relatively easily if you’re familiar with self-hosting. - On another ActivityPub instance: You can also probably join by entering
@privacyguides@lemmy.oneor https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides in the search box of the ActivityPub software you use, although Mastodon does not seem to pull in posts from Lemmy communities properly in my limited testing, so YMMV.
Verification post: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13x7oe3/who_wants_to_try_out_lemmy_privacyguideslemmyone/
Do you think disabling downvoting will work? While it does encourage people to just downvote things that are already downvoted, the alternative is that you have no way to mark bad/lazy/rude content that isn’t actually worth reporting, and you end up in the Facebook-like situation of low-effort stuff filling the space. Hopefully this won’t happen while the community is small, but that will probably change eventually!
Don’t know! We’ll evaluate it as we go, I don’t have an issue with enabling them if it’s clear that not having them is problematic, but I also don’t think people need a negative indicator to know not to engage with low-quality content.
Do you know if it’s possible to hide all upvote/downvote scores on comments? I’ve often wondered if that would kerb the “groupthink” as people wouldn’t be pre-influenced by the number, but it would still allow sorting by popular and filtering-out of mass-downvoted comments.
Lemmy does not have this feature as of now. You could create an issue for this feature on Lemmy GitHub. Alternatively, you can solve this by locally hiding the elements in the UI that display score with something like UO’s element picker easily after only a minute of figuring it out.
It’s not a configurable option. Maybe with a custom interface change, but I’m not convinced that making changes to Lemmy.one that remote users don’t experience is the best move.