Latest update: Yay, it works on the test instance. I created a test instance in order to not impact production and be able to test out correct settings. I'll be applying these proven settings to production tomorrow.

Update: had to rollback due to problems in the migration to object storage`. This concludes the maintenance while I investigate what could be causing this.

files migrate correctly over to object storage but when trying to run lemmy from there, it starts breaking down and even the internal components like the UI report unsupported files. I had to restart because lemmy-ui wouldn't even start back up due to image format / problems reading images, which is weird.

Previous: Ongoing Maintenance right now: images are temporarily disabled as we upload them to object storage

Apologies for any inconvenience.

Tomorrow there'll be a planned maintenance during which I'll switch the media hosting from local to object storage.

This is now possible in a "proper" way since Lemmy v.0.18. During the interventions images won't be able to be uploaded and might not show up.

Uploading images might take about 30 minutes.

I've reviewed all applications before approving the account. Only one was denied for being rude.

Also, please don't give me your actual date of birth up to the day and month, and don't send me photos of your ID. It's far from necessary.

I encourage you to be more protective of this sensitive data here or on other platform such as discord.

Anyways, enjoy!

If for whatever reason you can't message me, contact me on Mastodon at @wander@packmates.org.

I am aware of a minor problem with styling for some drop-down boxes. Other than that it's worth mentioning that I had to clear cookies / cache to be able to view content again.

Tomorrow, 27th of June of 2023 there might a brief period of downtime as I undergo the upgrade of Lemmy from the current version to the newly release v0.18.

Thank you and apologies for any inconvenience.

There's a few discussions happening right now because one Lemmy instance is hosting a community for supporters of a certain ex US president which I don't want to name.

In view of this I wanted to share a few thoughts regarding remote content moderation and my thoughts on how to handle complicated scenarios.

I'll be brief and expand on this when I do a proper update of the rules, but here's the gist of it.

• This instance does not condone any sort of race, gender, ethnic, sexual orientation, language, etc... discrimination. While our "no politics" rule does not apply in remote communities and local Yiffit users are free to engage in political debate in remote communities, it is not allowed to use a Yiffit account to campaign or advocate for harmful discriminatory politics.

• Likewise it's not allowed to use a Yiffit account to engage in harassment, brigading, raiding or similar aggressive and non-constructive behavior, especially if it's related to flooding, spamming, disrupting remote communities, etc...

• If two or more users of remote instances are having a toxic argument in a remote community (ie. Non of the variables are related to our instance), I'm inclined to give the remote admins and moderators time to solve things. We wouldn't be able to keep up if we had to immediately act on every remote conflict. That is to say that my / our limited energies will be focused on keeping our spaces safe and I expect remote admins to do the same for theirs.

• If remote content is seriously distributing and very illegal (CSAM distribution, for example) that remote instance will probably be blocked ASAP.

• If remote content is controversial but not illegal, I am inclined to give remote admins to handle the situation. If that remote content is disturbing to our users, I am inclined to choose one of the following:

A) silence the remote community (not yet implemented).
B) block the remote community.
C) silence the remote instance (not yet implemented).
D) block the remote instance (last ressort).

Options A to D will depend on the type of content and the purpose of the remote instance. If it's merely annoying content, a silence might suffice. If the whole instance is dedicated to systematically attacking human rights and I see 0 or negative value in federating with them, I might consider an instance block even though I hate that option because of my fear that by doing so we are crippling the fediverse. For example, an instance dedicated to doxxing will probably get the axe.

That said, please be prepared to block offensive or controversial remote content first. If the remote content can be avoided by not visiting a certain community or by simply having it blocked, then please allow up to three months for me and any future moderation staff to make a decision. Unless it's disruptive and urgent, there needs to be a cooldown period before replying to any such request for several reasons:

1. To allow remote admins to deal with the situation
2. To collect more reports and opinions
3. To analyze the situation

As I said before, I'm very worried about the negative impact of snap decisions. If I were to make impulsive and careless bans, users would see being part of a smaller instance with a hot-headed admin as a liability and potentially flock over to larger instances, making the whole point of a distributed network a bit moot.

If a remote anti-furry community were to exist, as much as it would pain me I would have to take things equally as slow.

That said, there are three exceptions:

1. Remote content that requires urgent action to prevent harm or avoid very illegal or very disturbing material.

2. Remote users interact in a toxic and unsolicited way with our users or communities.

Eg. If that remote anti-furry community I used as an example were to start harassing, doxxing, causing disruption, etc... to Yiffit users or communities I that changes things drastically. That said, if such a community existed I would expect Yiffit users to stay clear from it. Block, report and carry on.

3. Temporarily because Lemmy doesn't have better moderation tools I might have to use a block for remote communities that would otherwise warrant a silence.

That said, please don't expect the ALL timeline to always catering to your needs and learn to block anything you don't like as it'll be much quicker.

In summary: if negative actions or content like harassment or discrimination involves our instance, either users or communities, I'll do my best to step in as quickly as possible and prevent any sort of negative consequences.

If a controversy involves remote communities and remote users, feel free to report it and please allow time for remote admins and moderators to handle the situation. If the situation is not solved by remote moderation and there's no urgent need to step in to prevent harm, allow for myself and any future staff to analyze the situation and make a well-thought decision that could take months.

This are my current thoughts on how a small instance can survive in a much larger sea of content and how smaller instances can prove their utility by not taking impulsive and hot-headed decisions which could negatively impact the usefulness and viability of the instance and of federated platforms as a whole. I will keep refining these thoughts and eventually consolidate them into the rules.

Thank you! Any feedback is welcome!

After upgrading to lemmy 17.4, the mailing configuration was reset to its defaults and sign-up confirmation emails might have been delivered as spam instead of reaching your inbox.

This has been fixed now, but please check your spam folder if you haven't been able to sign up over the last few days.

I'll keep this message pinned for a few hours.

This post is to inform our remote users about new communities that have been created over the last few days and to which they can subscribe.

If you're on lemmy, you can click on the [S] link to directly search for this community in your instance without having to copy/paste.

!gynomorph@yiffit.net [S] ^NSFW^ - Gynomorph, female characters with male genitalia
!malketart@yiffit.net [S] - Malek Art, personal community for uploads by the artist @MalekArt@yiffit.net
!furryvids@yiffit.net [S] - Furry videos: everything from music videos and animation to fursuit parades.
!impregnation@yiffit.net [S] ^NSFW^ - Impregnation Yiff
!oc_appreciation@yiffit.net [S] - OC character sharing and appreciation

If you're a fellow instance admin you should know about our instance:

• We do not allow and strictly enforce a ban of NSFW content involving underage characters
• We do not allow real NSFW photos or videos that are not related to the submitter. A nude selfie is OK, while NSFW content of a celebrity is not. We do not tolerate sharing or sending sensitive images without permission.
• We do not allow sharing content that is behind a paywall or where the artist has expressed their desire not to have their content shared.
• This instance aims to be safe and legal to federate with.

You can contact me at wander@yiffit.net if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you <3

Lemmy wasn't prepared for such an explosive growth and that means there are some kinks the devs need to iron out.

The current version has a small bug which causes the hot and active calculation for post sorting to stop at after some time.

In order to keep your timelines fresh I've setup a scheduled task to have the Lemmy service on the server restarting every four hours.

The next restart will be at 14:00 UTC (2PM UTC). It will happen every four hours, always at 00 minutes. Each restart should make the site unavailable for no longer than 20 to 30 seconds.

Let me thank everyone who's been posting content. You're awesome, all of you. I'll do my best to keep everything running as smoothly as possible so that you can have a great experience at using the site.

Apologies for any inconvenience!

Edit: I set it to restart every two hours. I hope it's not overkill. I calculated that the downtime is more like 10 seconds. It will always be at 0 minutes of every second hour.

Hey everyone!

I hope you're having a good time with the site and with the wider lemmyverse as a whole. I know that several users have been purposefully subscribing to many several remote communities in order to populate the All timeline with more content. Thank you a lot for this <3

As for today's update, there are several topics I want to cover. So let's get started:

Personal communities

Personal communities are those that you create for yourself, for your friends or about a very niche topic.

I wanted to let you know that there's no inherent restriction on the type of communities that can be created as long the they follow the instance's overall rules. This is both applicable to local users and remote users.

Everyone is free to create a community of their choice, for example to display their artwork, to talk about their favorite furry convention or to simply keep a journal.

This, of course, also poses some challenges which I want to discuss.

Challenges: There are two basic concerns:

1. It could clutter the local timeline
2. It could make the instance go too much off-topic

Regarding the first concern, I realized that while useful, the local timeline should not be seen as this ultra-curated feed of furry artwork. It is very unlikely that even the local feed is going to be "one-size-fits-all". Eventually you'll have so much different content that it will be better to start using subscriptions. Hopefully soon Lemmy will allow the creation of "multi-community subscriptions", allowing users to create their own customized feeds or lists.

As for the second concern, after thinking it through carefully, I came to the conclusion that my hesitation and worries should ultimately not hinder the creative expression of the community. In the end, if you create a furry space it'll remain a furry space even if people are allowed to talk about all and anything and post about any type of content.

However, since the instance is in a very early stage and it can still be a make or break deal depending on what happens in the next few weeks I was thinking of placing a temporary restriction on non-furry nsfw artwork unless it's part of a larger portfolio that you, as an artist, want to post in your personal community.

My intention with this is to give SFW and NSFW-furry communities a bit of a head start and use that time to gather feedback and evaluate what to do next.

In summary, this post is to say that if you want to create a community about your pets, to journal, to talk about a convention, to share cooking recipes or whatever, that you are free to do so. We benefit much more from having an active and thriving community than we do from trying to clamp down on a meticulously curated local timeline which won't be to the liking of everyone anyways since there's so many niche kinks and interests.

A note on temporary restrictions: You might be aware that we currently also have a temporary restriction on certain content considered more extreme while we network with other instances regarding moderation issues.

I wanted to let you know that all these temporary restrictions are to be reviewed and hopefully removed within less than two months. August 15th is the date I'm aiming for right now.

During this time I hope to: a) Establish closer ties with remote instances regarding moderation b) Have a mechanism to get feedback from instance users c) Have things rolling smoothly so we get a good feeling about what the "baseline" should be.

Please rest assured that I don't enjoy this restriction. In my personal case, I'd much prefer to post all sorts of feral yiff but I do understand that I want to take things slowly and allow other admins to come to trust this instance first.

Generally speaking, if content is not illegal, harmful or political and it does not feature underage characters, it should be okay.

Requirements for owning a community

I won't extend this too much, but basically I've been thinking about the requirements that local or remote users should meet in order to own a community. It's very simple:

1. Follow the instance's overall rules.
2. Make an effort to get the community started. Don't just reserve the name and then disappear, please.
3. Be reasonably available to handle reports.

Point three is the important part. If you own a public community you are responsible for moderating it and handling reports in a timely manner most of the time. This is the only way we can sustain the instance when in the future we might have hundreds of different communities.

This does not mean that you can't go on vacation or disappear for the weekend. That's why I said "most of the time". Once instance admins / moderators are all properly set up, we'll be more than happy to help you out and we'll have each others backs, but please understand that we need you to be responsible for your community and handle reports whenever possible.

If you go away for an extended period of time, please consider asking your community's users for help and getting an additional moderator on board.

Yiffit aims to be a home for your community and your creative vision

The way I envision Yiffit is NOT like a discord server, where you've got the server's staff creating and moderating all the channels.

Instead, Yiffit is supposed to be like discord itself (or like reddit, if you will) where you are able to create your own servers / communities and moderate them in your style.

If you don't like the style or rules of a specific community you can always create your own. Or, start one for friends, to showcase your art, photos, writing, discussions, RPG sessions or whatever. Hopefully you'll find value in the open-minded, friendly and adult-only setting that Yiffit provides.

The ~~world~~ instance is your canvas.

PS. All this will be soon incorporated into the rules officially, but I need to re-write them first since they've turned into an unwieldy long list and need to be separated into sections.

I was wondering how we should go about creating icons for communities?

There's a case against using an artist's image and cropping it without their permission.

On the other paw it'll difficult to find free icon packs that specialize in yiff. Maybe RPG gamedev asset icons?

We could allow the use for AI images for icons only?

What do you think?

No longer do I get an endless spinning load animation that lasts up to 30s.

Scroll down to see the original post Alright, I'll consider the maintenance complete. Here are the updates:

1. Lemmy backend has been upgraded to version 0.17.4 which is the latest available. This added some database optimizations, applied some security patches and potentially fixed some bugs although the lemmy devs have very vague release notes for this version and mention that more information will be given in the next version.

2. I have also hooked up the server's backups to cloud storage. This should have no visible impact but it gives us an extra redundancy layer in case a backup needs to be used. Now that the instance is growing this is a must.

3. Finally there's one issue which I wanted to do today but had to postpone: media storage.

Yesterday the instance crashed because we filled up the virtual machine's hard drive completely. This should not have happened so early. For some reason we've been caching a lot of media of external instances. This could be a bug in the way lemmy handles media. Unfortunately this is pretty much "beta software" and we have to roll with the punches.

My intention was to hook up the server to object storage for media files where we'd have plenty of space, but there's currently two ways of doing it: a good way and and a proper way. The proper way requires upgrading the pict-rs component of lemmy to the latest version... but a) it's not a final version, but a release candidate. b) I have doubts on how this will impact the lemmy upgrade process since it is pretty much automated and I'm worried there might be some sort of conflict or issue for manually upgrading one of the components.

For now it might be best to wait a little bit more until I have more information. I doubled the hard drive and it should last us for some time. Rest assured that this has nothing to do with the images that we upload in our communities, but with caching remote media which should not be cached.

Anyways, this concludes today's maintenance. I do have some pending updates about moderation, personal communities, and plans for the future, but it'll have to wait until tomorrow. I will give you a quick heads up in bullet point format:

1. I'm at the point where I'll open up applications for moderators. Stay tuned.
2. Please don't use NSFW content for community icons or banners. No one has done so, but I remembered that I need to put this in the rules. This is because they appear as profile icons and profile banner on other clients such as Mastodon and are visible to everyone.
3. When I said that I want Yiffit to become a community space, I meant it. !malekart@yiffit.net is the first "personal community" and this is perfectly fine. I'll soon give more details about how this fits into the larger vision as well as the challenges this presents. I want to give you, the users, the tools to carve out your own space.
4. Most importantly, please tag NSFW very liberally. We do this as a courtesy to remote users from different parts of the world and cultures. Since everyone on yiffit has access to this content and is over 18, it's not meant to be a filter to keep minors away from sensitive images, but more as a respectful gesture for other users who may not share our values. I'll share more info about it tomorrow. If you have any concerns, please send me a DM.

Please note this is not a restriction since every yiffit user or remote user interested in yiffit should already have an account capable of viewing NSFW tagged content. This is just a measure to get highly sensitive remote users off our backs :P.

There's a point to be made about us having the moral high ground, but if you'll post some sort of cropped yiff, pin-up, sensual, etc... image, even if it should be safe, it's probably best to tag it as NSFW. And don't worry too much if you forget.

Example:

But as I said, more info about all this tomorrow!

PS: I have been reading all your comments and I am humbled by the amount of support I've been receiving. Actually they were popping up on screen as notifications while doing maintenance work. It felt like one of those anime scenes where you've got friends and family shouting messages of hope and determination ^///^. Thank you everyone!

Original post First of all we'll be upgrading to the new version of lemmy (v.17.4) which does not have major changes but some database optimizations and might change some bugs.

As far as I know its the next one which will have much expected bug fixes, but we might be surprised with some improvements in this one as well. In any case this update needs to be done to prepare for the next.

Furthermore I will also do some server maintenance in ensuring that the instance is more robust and capable of handling our growth. I'll be able to give more details about our current setup and technical details once the upgrade concluded.

I hope to keep the downtime to a minimum. It could be less than 5 minutes for each, but could also be around 30min in a bad-case scenario. (Worst case if is something goes wrong and I need to restore a backup, but that is unlikely to happen).

It seems we're growing faster than expected and the server needed to be expanded a bit. Apologies.

Tomorrow I'll dedicate some time to have this better monitored so we don't hit the wall and can scale earlier.

Thank you and apologies for the downtime!

Update: one of the docker containers ended up as a zombie and I had to manually kill a file to make it work again. Image uploading works again.

I'll pin this for a day. Due to there being potentially different implementations of the ActivityPub protocol such as Lemmy, Mastodon or Kbin it's not always guaranteed that an image in a NSFW community will be hidden or flagged by default.

Please make sure you flag your individual posts as NSFW as well.

We're in the very early stages of Lemmy/kbin and there's still many things to iron out. It sucks but things will go better and easier over time.

If you have some time please check your post history to make sure your images are tagged correctly.

Thank you!

I've not seen this happen yet, but figured I'd draw attention to it just in case, because it can be a little counter intuitive. Apologies if this isn't the right place or this is already in the rules somewhere.

When you post to a community on Yiffit, the post (and any attachements like images) lives on your homeserver, not Yiffit.

If your homeserver allows you to view NSFW but does not allow you to post it, you may be breaking that rule by posting NSFW to a remote instance.

I think (from a quick reading of their rules), pawb.social and lemmy.world allow posting of NSFW, but be careful out there if you're on another instance!

This post is to inform our remote users about new communities that have been created over the last few days and to which they can subscribe.

If you're on lemmy, you can click on the [S] link to directly search for this community in your instance without having to copy/paste.

!shinyyiff@yiffit.net [S] ^NSFW^ - Shiny Yiff, Rubber and latex
!bara@yiffit.net [S] ^NSFW^ - Bara, Muscular male furries
!loonansfw@yiffit.net [S] ^NSFW^ - Loona NSFW, Character from Helluva Boss
!therian@yiffit.net [S] - Therian, Therianthropy discussion
!wallpapers@yiffit.net [S] - Furry Wallpapers
!commissions@yiffit.net [S] - Commissions and promotions, place for artists to promote themselves

If you're a fellow instance admin you should know about our instance:

• We do not allow and strictly enforce a ban of NSFW content involving underage characters
• We do not allow real NSFW photos or videos that are not related to the submitter. A nude selfie is OK, while NSFW content of a celebrity is not. We do not tolerate sharing or sending sensitive images without permission.
• We do not allow sharing content that is behind a paywall or where the artist has expressed their desire not to have their content shared.
• This instance aims to be safe and legal to federate with.

You can contact me at wander@yiffit.net if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you <3

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/187391

On iOS: tap the share button in browser => add to home screen On Android: tap the 3 dot menu button in browser => tap "install" or "add to home screen"

I don't like pinned posts always sitting at the top of my feeds.

This a bug on Lemmy, but if we want to circumvent it we must play ball and configure our communities in such a way that it won't affect us.

Basically you for a community to have both English AND Undetermined languages selected in order for things to work properly.

Otherwise it could be impossible for a Lemmy user to reply to either a Mastodon User or to reply to the post itself.

This is now being fixed and should no longer be an issue. Message me if you can't send comments.

Edit: your need to select both English AND Undetermined or it will cause issues for Lemmy users not being able to comment

I've noticed that it's sometimes impossible to reply to messages sent by Mastodon users. That is unless you remember to specify your language when sending the comment / reply, which is difficult to realize because it's a tiny field in a row of many buttons.

I just discovered that this problem goes away completely if the community's language is set to undetermined.

Example (won't work):

• Mastodon user replies or creates a new post by mentioning the community
• In community, language is set to English
• Result: lemmy users can't reply unless they select "English" when writing he comment.

Example (will work):

• Mastodon user replies or creates a new post by mentioning the community
• In community, language is set to English
• Result: lemmy users can reply normally.

This is important because it's often better to create posts from Mastodon to improve discoverability and conversation. But it beats the purpose if lemmy users are not able to reply.

If the community language is set to English, lemmy users will be able to reply.

(As far as I know, the language the post is set to does not matter, though).

Sometimes I'll open many tabs in the background when scrolling and not view them right away, and later when I go to look at them the contents of many of the tabs will have been replaced by a particular unrelated post, usually the same post.

In this instance the post that should be displayed here titled "What value did you get from Reddit that you hope to realize or expand upon here?"

Of course being displayed instead is "Are there any advanced searching guides or searching in general ?"

This time I had four pages open that this happened too:

https://yiffit.net/post/19069?scrollToComments=true

https://yiffit.net/post/18574?scrollToComments=true

https://yiffit.net/post/22377?scrollToComments=true

https://yiffit.net/post/22583?scrollToComments=true

The post that ended up replacing all of them was this one:

https://yiffit.net/post/23745?scrollToComments=true

One thing they all have in common they all seem to originate from Lemmy.world@lemmy.world so I assume that probably has some bearing.

Has anyone else seen this? I'm running a fairly customized version of LibreWolf (a firefox fork) version 110.0 so it could be something I've caused but I though I'd ask in case it's an actual bug.

i guess i'm not able to reply to posts that originate from mastodon. it just spins forever :C just wanted to let y'all know that you might run into problems if the comment or post originates from mastodon.

Hello everyone! It's been four days since this instance was born and I feel like we have something special and with a lot of potential. But it's up to us to build the community that we want and I expect that we'll be put to the test if everything returns back to normal (or mostly normal) over at reddit.

Still, Mastodon is a good example that furry communities can thrive on federated network even if their main corporate counterpart (twitter) is still alive. Thus, we have all the reason to believe that we can build something meaningful if we persist in creating a welcoming, friendly, open and content-rich instance.

Goals for the future

After realizing how enriching it was to share this instance with like-minded people, I believe we would do ourselves a disservice if we didn't explore more of the SFW / community-building side of things.

I don't want to overlap too much with pawb.social who are doing an awesome job themselves, but since we only allow members over 18 and specialize in sharing artwork, I believe there's a very interesting niche to be found in becoming a community where mature conversations can be held as well as having an awesome collection of the best furry artwork and memes..

I believe it makes a lot of sense for Yiffit.net to position itself as the lemmy instance where you can hold conversations about sensitive topics regarding relationships, sexuality, life as an adult, evolution of the furry fandom over time, and many more mature subjects (as well as casual banter of course!). On the art side of things, we'll want to be THE place on the fediverse to discover amazing art of all types and funny memes.

In this sense Yiffit could be similar to one of those traditional adult magazines with sexy pin-ups on one page and a serious, yet also insightful and empowering report about trans rights on the other (not sure if you've ever come across one of those magazines).

Present Challenges

Currently my biggest concern is defederation. We are a smaller instance (although growing!) and not yet fully established. This means that we run a bigger risk of being blocked by large instances who don't understand or care for nsfw artwork.

Fortunately it seems that most instances really don't care about it as long as we don't start sharing content of underage characters or content which is extreme.

It is for that reason that I want to ask you to please be extra careful with both the images you post and their titles. For the following months as we become more and more established we want to make absolutely sure that anything that is posted could not look like an underage character to a non-furry remote instance admin who might be seeing yiff for the first time in their lives.

Images depicting teacher/student or posts including words like "daddy" or "mommy" are not banned and I really hate to be in this position, but from both the content and the title it must be clear to any casual observer that it is not an underage character. Likewise, extreme content involving blood, gore, cheesegraters or similar should be avoided until the instance is more established.

I'm the last person who wants put restrictions to the creativity and freedom of our users, but right now the fediverse is a bit like the wild west where it's "shoot first and ask later". We want to have a solid foundation and let other instances get to know us better before we venture into those areas.

I hope you can understand :(

Clarification on some rules

Finally, I wanted to clarify one rule and give a heads up to a new rule for the /c/yiff community.

1. Regarding linking back to the artist's gallery or profile Please keep in mind that we need to do our part in giving attribution to the artists without whom this whole instance would not exists.

When you link back, please don't link to an e621 post. We want to give the artists direct traffic by linking to their profile, gallery or post on FA/Twitter/DeviantArt etc...

Fortunately e621 does have source links (which is what I have been using). So, instead of copy pasting the url from the browser this can simply be fixed by copy pasting the url to the artist's gallery or post which is listed in the left column (at the bottom) of e621.

2. Regarding communities like /c/yiff and others which are not gender-specific and which are moderated by me, it would be a good idea to start adding the gender pairing in the title.

For example: [M/M], [M/F], etc... Once this change goes live it'll be explained in detail in the sidebar so don't worry!

This rule will not be applicable to any community that is not moderated by me. I want to give you all the freedom you want in how you run your communities, so it's up to you.

And I think that's it for now. Please let me know in the comments what you think about these changes. It would mean a lot and I depend on your feedback to be able to steer things towards the right direction.

nice 👌 💙