These are all good questions and lead you to explore more about what it means to run software.

So as well as the instance (domain name / hardware server) admins, there are also the open source developers of the Lemmy software. They keep things updated and put out new features and releases. They currently have a (partial) grant from some European agencies who are making sure that open source software isn't all built and owned by American corporations.

It would be good for every instance to allocate some funding to the open source software they rely on.

I'm one of the people responsible for (currently a test Lemmy instance) news.cosocial.ca. Our main service today is our Mastodon server (cosocial.ca). We are a registered member-owned Canadian cooperative. Every member has paid at least $50 per year. We currently have volunteer moderators and server admins, our goal is to eventually pay those roles. More on our blog.

We're also here to be a resource to anyone running services in Canada, especially if you need legal or other help. /me waves at smorks

Back to keeping things running: the Lemmy software needs a bunch more features to scale. The moderation tools are very basic, there are a couple of mobile apps in development that are very early on. We should think about pooling funds and donating.

It's great to see Lemmy.ca on OpenCollective (we use it for Cosocial too). I've just donated as a $5 monthly backer. Thanks for setting this up!

Everybody is different, but I'd suggest subscribing as a backer or just tossing in a one time donation to start to support @smorks@lemmy.ca and Lemmy.ca.

I wrote a whole article with screenshots of how Mastodon and Lemmy interop.

I was with TekSavvy for a long time but they were getting worse. I Switched to Oxio https://oxio.ca which is cheaper and faster than TS was. It’s a brand for Cogeco.

The TLDR elsewhere is that... Canadian universities have actually risen in rankings and for our population this is actually good.

Sure. Then it should also apply to independent media. Which the Canadian bill does not. The Canadian government is picking and chooseing who news media is.

No, you’ll get different content based on everything from flaky federation (software that isn’t perfect) to differences in moderation.

So, for moderation, let’s do an example. Bob has an account on Server A. He posts a comment on a community with his Server A account which is federated from Server B.

But Bob breaks the terms of service / moderation rules on Server B. Server B mods block his account and his comment is not visible there.

If Alice views the comments on the post on Server A, she’ll see Bob’s comment. On Server B, where Bob is blocked, Alice won’t see Bob’s comment.

On Mastodon, servers will sometimes connect to Relays which specialize in moving content between many different servers, which is different than moderation blocks ;)

That's not how tenant unions work. I'm not in Toronto, but collecting a list of these unions and having a look at them might be useful.

Often times there are ones for particularly vulnerable groups, like new immigrants or single mothers. Rather than tenants have to figure stuff out on their own.

I did a quick search and found the Federation of Metro Tenants' Associations. Becoming a member is more about supporting and donating over time, much like you would any organization you believe in whether as an individual or a business.

The services of these organizations are free for tenants, like the Toronto Renters Forum that the FMTA runs https://www.torontotenants.org/...

Standing in solidarity might mean sharing their stuff, supporting their point of view, or any number of other supportive, joint action.

OK, this is VERY good. And just mention it anywhere? Hmm. Does the first link or image end up in the link or image field in Lemmy? I'll try your test group!

Ah yes, I didn't mean to skip group / community following, and I am following some already. The note there is that the communities don't make posts -- they boost the posts of the OP account posts / commenter posts (this would be a good screenshot too). I need to put all of this probably on a page on cosocial.info as a permanent FAQ.

You're right, if I were to create user vancouver@news.cosocial.ca, that would overlap with a group named vancouver. On lemmy, it's @ vs ! of course.

Feels like Lemmy should check for that and not allow it? My lag on sign up makes it annoying to test. One of the things I need to ask you about.

You’d have to dig into the report to check the methodology but anecdotally I know friends who have moved here recently and pay rents in this range.

Go (Metro) Vancouver! Burnaby next door is #3, so we've got both Gold and Bronze!

Because it’s supporting Canadian mega corporations. Read OpenMedia https://action.openmedia.org/...?

My wishlist would be to be able to link Mastodon accounts to Lemmy accounts, so the Lemmy system "knows" it's the same person. Including being able to edit the posts that come in from Mastodon, which right now is the biggest issue.

This post as an example, I was framing it as a Masto post, and it's pretty terrible on Lemmy. I'd focus on optimizing favourite/boost/comment from Mastodon as that is I think going to work best - comments don't need first class titles, links, and feature images.

For OPs, wouldn't it be amazing if I could DM some links and images and stuff, and then login to Lemmy/kbin and have it appear as a draft, and then publish it natively with rich text tools on the Lemmy/kbin side.

Subscribing via Mastodon works much better for me, even if I then go over and interact with my Lemmy account. I want both OPs and comments, and it's easy enough to put in a list or otherwise manage notifications from my clients. Micro-blog native vs Thread native people are going to differ in their opinions here :)

Yes, these are real rents, paid by real renters. I have rent from 13 years ago, plus about 10 years of annual 2% increases. The pandemic made my landlord forget about rent increases or something.

Both speak ActivityPub and yes you can use a Mastodon client to interact with Lemmy communities.

I did a bunch of experiments today and ... thoroughly confused myself.

Here's what I learned:

(I have more protocol info but ultimately this is the lived experience of working across different software systems, federation, and the actual client / front end web experiences that people interact through)

Various things "just work" by pasting URLs into the Mastodon web interface or the Mastodon mobile app.

Posting the link to this post https://lemmy.ca/post/606549 finds this post

Clicking on the user profile shows me a profile for Doctor_Pi@lemmy.ca, with one post displayed. Including a follow button

Only one post is shown, because that's all that's available on the local server right now. If I chose to follow Doctor_Pi's Lemmy account, I'd get all of their posts going forward. Both OPs (which has a link to the post on Lemmy.ca) as well as comments (which appear as replies).

Other clients (Ivory on iOS) have extremely variable support. You can't usually paste in Lemmy URLs, but you can paste in Lemmy accounts and follow them, and then see posts going forward.

You can't create an "original post" using just a Mastodon account, you have to have a Lemmy account and create it somewhere (I'd love this to be not true, and maybe we can make this a feature request!)

Every Lemmy user can be followed on Mastodon. So, for example, my Lemmy account @boris@news.cosocial.ca. Paste that into the web interface of Mastodon or into the Mastodon native mobile app and you will find my Lemmy profile and can follow it.

If you reply to a Lemmy post using your Mastodon account, your reply will be posted as a comment. A user profile is created on the Lemmy instance.

I just did that with this very post, and it seems to have worked.

This is my boris@cosocial.ca Mastodon account, viewed through news.cosocial.ca as a local user profile. All of that info -- including the images -- are from my Mastodon profile.

The comment is technically originally on Lemmy.ca.

I'll leave it there for now. Still exploring different combinations. I have two questions / features I'd like to enable for Lemmy <> Mastodon.

1. Being able to create OP directly from Mastodon works!

• You'd be limited by character limits, lack of more formatting, no inline images, and so on. Depending on your Mastodon server you might have larger character limits, or something like the Elk or Phanpy web front ends could enable "Lemmy mode" from your Mastodon account.
• If I were designing this, I'd do it as maybe a DM to the group account. e.g. DM @vaneats@news.cosocial.ca.

This does work, see @smorks, and his post on Mastodon.

1. Logging in to a Lemmy instance with your Mastodon account

• If it's already creating profiles for Mastodon accounts, why not go all the way and just use your Mastodon account to login? You need to trust your Mastodon host more than your Lemmy host.
• More likely: a "linking" mode, where you do need a "local" account, but you can link it with your Mastodon account so there aren't two of you :)

Do you agree that indepedent Canadian media should also get paid?

I have seen worse behaviour and bias from corporate media than independent. I think we perhaps have very different pictures of what this means.

My 20 years of seeing people denigrated as “bloggers” while opinion columnists are platformed and not held accountable hasn’t made me feel good about the information coming from corporate media.

And yeah we’re in a tough spot. We need much better discussion tools. I don’t think the CRTC is the right entity to do a good job here.

Hey @wakest@lemmy.ml thanks for sharing. This was a quick weekend hack. Mostly need some feedback and discussion on good ways of presenting the info and and what info to gather.

There were a couple of food vendors and some singing when I walked by the other night.

It's literally a quick test with me filling out two, and @waglo@jasette.facil.services submitting one. Can you dump a link to a CSV or source into an issue there of the stuff you're gathering please -- I need examples to build out the schema, so I can actually display that rather than just the blog post stuff. Well, and the JSON file underneath that is meant to be used as an API.

I guess to put the question back to you, what would motivate you to pay $5/month or $50/year to support LemmyCa?

You’re also talking to people who also think it’s an important question. My answer is “I think we should all pay for it”.