Canvas is a yearly Fediverse event similar to Reddit's Place - it's a collaborative art project where any Fediverse user can place colored pixels on a shared canvas over a period of a few days. It has a dedicated community at [email protected] - the canvas itself is here.

This will be its third year; the first time, there were some minor furry drawings, and last year, we were a bit more organized, with a bit of collaboration between Pawb and Yiffit. The full canvas from last year can be seen here - we had a small spot carved out in the lower left corner, as well as a few scattered things all around.

I'd be great to actually start organized this year, and create something substantial together.

Anyone else interested in participating? Any thoughts on what we might make? Anyone with artistic skill want to sketch something out? If we can get a few ideas, maybe we vote on them prior to the event itself?

Just wanted you to know, @[email protected], that your personal carrying of this community with daily bat pics was both noticed, and appreciated!

I'm sure you know, but I haven't seen any communication about it, so I'm bringing it up just to make sure. Performance tanked abruptly a few days ago and has only gotten worse in the following days.

Is it helpful to bring this up when it's observed, or would you prefer we just chill and wait?

Hugely improved performance! Great work! Thanks a lot!

Rather than communities being hosted by an instance, they should function like hashtags, where each instance hosts posts to that community that originate from their instance, and users viewing the community see the aggregate of all of these. Let me explain.

Currently, communities are created and hosted on a single instance, and are moderated by moderators on that instance. This is generally fine, but it has some undesirable effects:

• Multiple communities exist for the same topics on different instances, which results in fractured discussions and duplicated posts (as people cross-post the same content to each of them).
• One moderation team is responsible for all content on that community, meaning that if the moderation team is biased, they can effectively stifle discussion about certain topics.
• If an instance goes down, even temporarily, all of its communities go down with it.
• Larger instances tend to edge out similar communities on other instances, which just results in slow consolidation into e.g. lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. This, in turn, puts more strain on their servers and can have performance impact.

I'm proposing a new way of handling this:

• Rather than visiting a specific community, e.g. [email protected], you could simply visit the community name, like a hashtag. This is, functionally, the same as visiting that community on your own local instance: [yourinstance]/c/worldnews
  • You'd see posts from all instances (that your instance is aware of), from their individual /worldnews communities, in a single feed.
  • If you create a new post, it would originate from your instance (which effectively would create that community on your instance, if it didn't previously exist).
  • Other users on other instances would, similarly, see your post in their feed for that "meta community".
• Moderation is handled by each instance's version of that community separately.
  • An instance's moderators have full moderation rights over all posts, but those moderator actions only apply to that instance's view of the community.
    • If a post that was posted on lemmy.ml is deleted by a moderator on e.g. lemmy.world, a user viewing the community from lemmy.ml could still see it (unless their moderators had also deleted the post).
    • If a post is deleted by moderators on the instance it was created on, it is effectively deleted for everyone, regardless of instance.
    • This applies to all moderator actions. Banning a user from a community stops them from posting to that instance's version of the community, and stops their posts from showing up to users viewing the community through that instance.
    • Instances with different worldviews and posting guidelines can co-exist; moderators can curate the view that appears to users on their instance. A user who disagreed with moderator actions could view the community via a different instance instead.
• Users could still visit the community through another instance, as we do now - in this case, [yourinstance]/c/[email protected], for example.
  • In this case, you'd see lemmy.world's "view" of the community, including all of their moderator actions.

The benefit is that communities become decentralized, which is more in line with (my understanding of) the purpose of the fediverse. It stops an instance from becoming large enough to direct discussion on a topic, stops community fragmentation due to multiple versions of the community existing across multiple instances, and makes it easier for smaller communities to pop up (since discoverability is easier - you don't have to know where a community is hosted, you just need to know the community name, or be able to reasonably guess it. You don't need to know that a community for e.g. linux exists or where it is, you just need to visit [yourinstance]/c/linux and you'll see posts.

If an instance wanted to have their own personal version of a community, they could either use a different tag (e.g. world_news instead of worldnews), or, one could choose to view only local posts.

Go ahead, tear me apart and tell me why this is a terrible idea.

Kind of falls under the 'Too Afraid to Ask' category, I guess, but I've been curious about this for a while. Did something actually happen at some point, or was this just a procedural thing that wasn't ever followed up on?

It's mildly annoying given how large they are.

Edit: It's possible that this isn't a federation problem at all (as discussion is bringing to light) but something else entirely. Regardless, though, something is going on.

It's also possible that the site I link below is out of date, so maybe don't take that as gospel. I bookmarked it a year ago and just hit it up to check on this a few minutes before posting, so I haven't been keeping up with it.

Doing a little more digging in light of the above, it's possible this is related to this issue, and there's just an extremely long delay before we get content from lemmy.world. Weirdly, though, it doesn't seem to be the case with other instances - maybe because of their size? Either way, looking at the same posts on our instance and 3 or 4 others, we seem to be the only ones not getting the replies. So something's fucked, maybe.

If you're on lemmy.world and happen to see this, drop a reply in here, maybe - I'd be curious to see how long it takes for us to see it (or if we can at all).

Page load times have been very slow for some communities, especially those hosted on other instances, and especially over the past few days. Not sure if this was related to the maintenance over the weekend. Here's some quick examples from a sample of 3 communities. I'm listing them in the order that I visited them (I'm not sure if images et. al. are cached across instances, but just in case):

• https://pawb.social/c/[email protected] - Load: 6.8s
• https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196 - Load: 655ms
• https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] - Load: 705ms

• https://lemmy.world/c/technology - Load: 705ms
• https://pawb.social/c/[email protected] - Load: 17.58ms
• https://yiffit.net/c/[email protected] - Load: 557ms

• https://yiffit.net/c/memes - Load: 557ms
• https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] - Load: 699ms
• https://pawb.social/c/[email protected] - Load: 587ms

Of these three tests, we performed fine on one, but the other two were markedly slower. Refreshing the home feed (settings: Subscribed, New) has also been very slow (with load times in excess of 5 seconds being very common).

Is anyone else seeing this, or is this a 'Me' problem?

(I swear I don't only complain.) :D

I'm sure there's a really simple answer to this, but it's a surprisingly difficult problem to search for.

I've got a RichTextBox control and I'm trying to write text that includes the letters "ff", but they don't show up. This is the specific code in question:

for entry in suffix:
  desc += "[color=darkgray]Suffix (Tier: %s, Quality: %s%%) 'of %s'\n[color=royalblue]" % [entry.tier, entry.quality, entry.mod.name]

This is what it ends up printing:

If I change one or both of the Fs to capitals, they both display fine; it's specifically two lowercase Fs that're problematic. They also display fine elsewhere in the same textbox; it's just this line specifically that's problematic. Even tried escaping it but it didn't like that, either.

Most of the settings on the RichTextBox are default; the font has a lowercase 'f' character; I haven't done anything weird with the font size, or style, or anything else.

I'm tearing my hair out here. Please tell me this is just some stupid bbcode tag or some such.

Edit: For anyone finding this later:

It's a ligature (ffi) that the font is missing a glyph for. To solve the problem: On the Import tab, choose the font you're using, click Advanced, and under Metadata Overrides, expand OpenType Features, click Add Feature -> Ligatures, add whichever option is appropriate (discretionary or standard ligatures), then disable the option. Reimport the font, and the issue is fixed!

Let's get some furry shit up in there. We can create / share a template so we're all working on something cohesive. Any interest / anyone have any suggestions for something to draw?

Community Link

The hacktivists, which describe themselves as made up of "gay furry hackers," usually target government orgs whose policies they disagrees with, and have a flare for political publicity stunts, also posted a link to the purported stolen files on their Telegram channel.

"The astonishing siegedsec hackers have struck NATO once more!!1!!!," the crew wrote, bragging: "NATO: 0. Siegedsec: 2."

The team is referring to its earlier NATO intrusion in July, during which it claimed it swiped information belonging to 31 nations and leaked 845MB of data from the alliance's the Communities of Interest (COI) Cooperation Portal.