cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/54258281

I am testing a component for embedding a Lemmy post, and I needed a post to test with.

Photo by Mike Benna on Unsplash

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/38473938

I spent last night putting together this tool. You can try it out here: https://isitcanadian.cynber.dev/product-search

Some barcodes that you can try with:

• 0673513001507
• 0013000052528

It lets you search for a product by the barcode, and then using the Open Food Facts database, it will tell you where the product is from (origin of ingredients, location of manufacturing / processing, and where it is sold). You can then search for Canadian alternatives.

It uses the categories of the item to search for similar items in the database, and filters out items that aren't Canadian in at least one of the ways above. You can further filter by those categories or by origin and manufacturing / processing location.

I chose Open Food Facts because it is an existing open source initiative, run by a non-profit, and already has lots of data. When a product is missing or incorrect, you can contribute it with their mobile app. This has the added benefit of improving the data for everyone, and there's a lot more there than just the country of origin.

Some things I'd like to do:

• Ability to search by name, not just barcode
• Ability to scan a barcode instead of typing it in / pasting it
• Gather articles and compilations from community members since the search alone would be tedious
• Go through the mess I made of the code while trying to do it all in one night

I hope it's helpful, and I'd love to hear feedback. It's open source so if you want to contribute, you can find the code here: https://github.com/cynber/is-it-canadian

I'll be back again tonight to respond to comments and feedback. Thanks you!

I spent last night putting together this tool. You can try it out here: https://isitcanadian.cynber.dev/product-search

Some barcodes that you can try with:

• 0673513001507
• 0013000052528

It lets you search for a product by the barcode, and then using the Open Food Facts database, it will tell you where the product is from (origin of ingredients, location of manufacturing / processing, and where it is sold). You can then search for Canadian alternatives.

It uses the categories of the item to search for similar items in the database, and filters out items that aren't Canadian in at least one of the ways above. You can further filter by those categories or by origin and manufacturing / processing location.

I chose Open Food Facts because it is an existing open source initiative, run by a non-profit, and already has lots of data. When a product is missing or incorrect, you can contribute it with their mobile app. This has the added benefit of improving the data for everyone, and there's a lot more there than just the country of origin.

Some things I'd like to do:

• Ability to search by name, not just barcode
• Ability to scan a barcode instead of typing it in / pasting it
• Gather articles and compilations from community members since the search alone would be tedious
• Go through the mess I made of the code while trying to do it all in one night

I hope it's helpful, and I'd love to hear feedback. It's open source so if you want to contribute, you can find the code here: https://github.com/cynber/is-it-canadian

I'll be back again tonight to respond to comments and feedback. Thanks you!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/19327950

I'm not the developer. I came across it and I thought it was neat.

Repository: github.com/GRA0007/crab.fit

Align your schedules to find the perfect time that works for everyone. Open-source and licensed under the GNU GPLv3.

Self-hosting guide

I'm not the developer. I came across it and I thought it was neat.

Repository: github.com/GRA0007/crab.fit

Align your schedules to find the perfect time that works for everyone. Open-source and licensed under the GNU GPLv3.

Self-hosting guide

Firefox doesn't seem to do support it currently. Chrome and Brave do come up as options

I'm using a documentation framework that supports offline builds. It works well across browsers on desktop, but it's not great on mobile.

Any recommendations?

I don't see an option to enter that info on StreetComplete or EveryDoor, and it would be hard to open your laptop every time

This was specific to a university campus, to try and map out the amenities available to the public / to students

EDIT: Thank you for all the great responses! I agree that a forced implementation is no longer the way to go. I've left the post as is, aside from this comment, in case anyone wanted to reference part of it. At this point, I think implementation 1 (Sincere Request) is the way to go if anything.

I've seen a few of these posts, some with really cool solutions, but a lot of them are difficult to implement, or complicated for casual users to understand. Here is my proposal on how we can coordinate communities that share the same topic, while also keeping the spirit of federation.

This post has some general thoughts on why I think this is the best solution. It also has some possible implementations, including a trivial one that works already without any automod or code changes.

::: spoiler General Thoughts

This talks about why I think this is a better solution. Feel free to skip to 'proposed solutions'.

Leave vote counts alone:

• Some proposals talk about sending vote totals to the original post or having all cross posts share a total vote count. This leads to issues since larger communities can manipulate which posts show up, and it creates an incentive for users to spam posts to unrelated communities. This also might lead to implementation issues, where the vote counts don't properly federate out. It's also confusing for casual users, and it takes power away from individual communities to decide if a particular post is relevant or not.
• With all that in mind, I also don't see much of a benefit in playing with the vote counts. It might be better to leave them alone.

What are the issues we're trying to address

• Comment threads are disjointed. Users need to open up multiple posts to see what is being discussed. With small communities, a few users are just talking into the void. This issue is addressed.
• Can't see relevant content without subscribing to multiple communities. While this can be seen as a downside, I think it has an added benefit because each community can decide if a post is relevant or not. Forcing posts into one community may lead to other drama with linking/unlinking, and it's very confusing for casual users to figure out who's actually going to see a particular post if it automatically appears pops up in other communities.
• Scrolling past multiple identical crossposts in a row. My proposal doesn't address this directly, but it may offer a way for apps and frontends to deal with them.

:::

::: spoiler Proposed Solutions

The general premise here is:

1. User makes a post in community A
2. User makes crossposts in communities B, C, and D
3. Posts in communities B, C, and D are locked, with a link to the post in community A
4. If someone wants to make a comment about the content, they can do so in the main post in community A

Benefits

• User can pick which community to have the comments appear in. They can base this on rules, moderation style, or if they want to promote a niche community
• Everyone else is free to upvote/downvote the posts independently

Issues that need to be addressed:

• A malicious user can post a scam or misleading content, and then lock the post with no easy way for people to call it out. While this can be reported to moderators, people may fall victim to it before the post is removed and the user is banned. Simply checking for a redirected post isn't enough because a user can make that post be on an instance/community they control, and remove comments calling out the content.

Implementations

1. Sincere Request: After making a post, the user can paste in a standard comment asking people to comment in the linked post.

• Doesn't require any code changes and you can start doing this right now
• Relies on commenters listening to the request
• somewhat silly, but this is the easiest implementation

1. Automod locks top level comments: After making a post, the user can leave a comment to trigger automod.

• automod will prevent any top level comments, but still allow replies to the original comment.
• requires updates to core lemmy for partial locks, or for an admin level bot that can remove comments from posts based on characteristics

1. Automod locks post entirely: After making a post, the user can leave a comment to trigger automod.

• automod will lock the post entirely, and leave a comment on how to deal with issues
• anyone can message automod with a link to the post, and have it be unlocked to discuss issues
• doesn't require updates to core lemmy, but it does require an admin level bot

::: ___

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/6770347

This is a very small update, but hopefully it's helpful! As I mentioned in the last update, I'm a little tied up with other commitments right now, so I haven't had a chance to implement the other features on the to-do list. This one was requested the other day, and it was simple to add since I could reuse a lot of existing code.

---

Links:

• Firefox Add-on
• Chrome Extension
• Edge Add-on (waiting as of 2023-10-09)
• GitHub

---

::: spoiler ❓ What is Instance Assistant?

If you're new to Instance Assistant, it is a browser extension with a collection of tools and features to simplify your browsing experience on Lemmy and Kbin. It is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; you can also install it from the releases page on GitHub.

For a full list of features, please see the GitHub homepage: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

:::

---

⭐ What's new in v1.2.6?

• Redirect user profile pages: When you want to message a user and click on their profile, you might end up on a foreign instance. To message them, you need to modify the URL or copy/paste. Instead, you will now find a little button to jump you to your home instance.

---

💛 Also

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback! Like I said before, I'm really happy to see that people are using the extension and finding it useful. Please continue to make suggestions and contribute your expertise.

Cheers :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/6770347

This is a very small update, but hopefully it's helpful! As I mentioned in the last update, I'm a little tied up with other commitments right now, so I haven't had a chance to implement the other features on the to-do list. This one was requested the other day, and it was simple to add since I could reuse a lot of existing code.

---

Links:

• Firefox Add-on
• Chrome Extension
• Edge Add-on (waiting as of 2023-10-09)
• GitHub

---

::: spoiler ❓ What is Instance Assistant?

If you're new to Instance Assistant, it is a browser extension with a collection of tools and features to simplify your browsing experience on Lemmy and Kbin. It is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; you can also install it from the releases page on GitHub.

For a full list of features, please see the GitHub homepage: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

:::

---

⭐ What's new in v1.2.6?

• Redirect user profile pages: When you want to message a user and click on their profile, you might end up on a foreign instance. To message them, you need to modify the URL or copy/paste. Instead, you will now find a little button to jump you to your home instance.

---

💛 Also

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback! Like I said before, I'm really happy to see that people are using the extension and finding it useful. Please continue to make suggestions and contribute your expertise.

Cheers :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/6770347

This is a very small update, but hopefully it's helpful! As I mentioned in the last update, I'm a little tied up with other commitments right now, so I haven't had a chance to implement the other features on the to-do list. This one was requested the other day, and it was simple to add since I could reuse a lot of existing code.

---

Links:

• Firefox Add-on
• Chrome Extension
• Edge Add-on (waiting as of 2023-10-09)
• GitHub

---

::: spoiler ❓ What is Instance Assistant?

If you're new to Instance Assistant, it is a browser extension with a collection of tools and features to simplify your browsing experience on Lemmy and Kbin. It is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; you can also install it from the releases page on GitHub.

For a full list of features, please see the GitHub homepage: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

:::

---

⭐ What's new in v1.2.6?

• Redirect user profile pages: When you want to message a user and click on their profile, you might end up on a foreign instance. To message them, you need to modify the URL or copy/paste. Instead, you will now find a little button to jump you to your home instance.

---

💛 Also

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback! Like I said before, I'm really happy to see that people are using the extension and finding it useful. Please continue to make suggestions and contribute your expertise.

Cheers :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/6770347

This is a very small update, but hopefully it's helpful! As I mentioned in the last update, I'm a little tied up with other commitments right now, so I haven't had a chance to implement the other features on the to-do list. This one was requested the other day, and it was simple to add since I could reuse a lot of existing code.

---

Links:

• Firefox Add-on
• Chrome Extension
• Edge Add-on (waiting as of 2023-10-09)
• GitHub

---

::: spoiler ❓ What is Instance Assistant?

If you're new to Instance Assistant, it is a browser extension with a collection of tools and features to simplify your browsing experience on Lemmy and Kbin. It is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; you can also install it from the releases page on GitHub.

For a full list of features, please see the GitHub homepage: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

:::

---

⭐ What's new in v1.2.6?

• Redirect user profile pages: When you want to message a user and click on their profile, you might end up on a foreign instance. To message them, you need to modify the URL or copy/paste. Instead, you will now find a little button to jump you to your home instance.

---

💛 Also

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback! Like I said before, I'm really happy to see that people are using the extension and finding it useful. Please continue to make suggestions and contribute your expertise.

Cheers :)

This is a very small update, but hopefully it's helpful! As I mentioned in the last update, I'm a little tied up with other commitments right now, so I haven't had a chance to implement the other features on the to-do list. This one was requested the other day, and it was simple to add since I could reuse a lot of existing code.

Links:

• Firefox Add-on
• Chrome Extension
• Edge Add-on (waiting as of 2023-10-09)
• GitHub

::: spoiler ❓ What is Instance Assistant?

If you're new to Instance Assistant, it is a browser extension with a collection of tools and features to simplify your browsing experience on Lemmy and Kbin. It is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; you can also install it from the releases page on GitHub.

For a full list of features, please see the GitHub homepage: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

:::

⭐ What's new in v1.2.6?

• Redirect user profile pages: When you want to message a user and click on their profile, you might end up on a foreign instance. To message them, you need to modify the URL or copy/paste. Instead, you will now find a little button to jump you to your home instance.

💛 Also

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback! Like I said before, I'm really happy to see that people are using the extension and finding it useful. Please continue to make suggestions and contribute your expertise.

Cheers :)

Quoting:

Marvin and Mates were developed originally in support of the City of Edmonton’s downtown vibrancy campaign, Meet Me Downtown, a campaign centred around celebrating connection and community. A shared moment, an experience, an invite.

Now, we invite you to welcome Marvin and Mates into our community. This collaboration with the City of Edmonton and Mastodon Canada has been long in the making and we want to thank the City for proposing this idea and working with us to create the twenty unique emojis we're welcoming to the instance.

It's incredibly exciting to welcome the first Canadian municipality to the Fediverse, and look forward to welcoming more collaborations like this with other municipalities across the country!

This exclusive emoji pack contains 20 adorable (digitally) hand-drawn characters to help infuse our toots with an extra dose of elation.

What are some good rules to follow when handling people who want to collaborate on a project that is on your personal repo?

It looks like GitHub doesn't allow fine control of permissions unless it is an organization repo. I looked around and a lot of other projects (specifically browser extensions) still live on the main dev's account. I don't have any reason to doubt the people who want to help, but it might be nice to know what the best practices are.

Should I add everyone as a collaborator? This runs into the issue above where I can't limit permissions.

Should everyone push contributions from their forks? In that case, how would people work together on a particular feature.

What are some good rules to follow when handling people who want to collaborate on a project that is on your personal repo?

It looks like GitHub doesn't allow fine control of permissions unless it is an organization repo. I looked around and a lot of other projects (specifically browser extensions) still live on the main dev's account. I don't have any reason to doubt the people who want to help, but it might be nice to know what the best practices are.

Should I add everyone as a collaborator? This runs into the issue above where I can't limit permissions.

Should everyone push contributions from their forks? In that case, how would people work together on a particular feature.

Hi everyone, I'm excited to announce one more release before I take a short break. I have some other stuff starting up, so I won't be pushing out new features as fast, but I'll still be around to manage the project. (more at the end)

Links:

• Firefox Add-on
• Chrome Extension
• Edge Add-on
• GitHub

::: spoiler ❓ What is Instance Assistant?

If you're new to Instance Assistant, it is a browser extension with a collection of tools and features to simplify your browsing experience on Lemmy and Kbin. It is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; you can also install it from the releases page on GitHub.

For a full list of features, please see the GitHub homepage: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

:::

⭐ What's new in v1.2.5?

• Redirect posts to your home instance!: Post pages now have a redirect button that will find the same post on your home instance(1). You don't have to hunt it down yourself anymore.
• Posts related to this webpage buttons in popup & sidebar
  • Make a post: You can now create a post from any webpage! Click the 'Make a Post' button in the extension popup or sidebar to generate a draft post with autofilled title, URL, and body contents. Afterwards, just select a community and hit post. (This currently works for both Lemmy & Kbin, but custom frontends are untested while they develop). Try it here: https://lemmy.ca/post/4478560
  • Open Posts: This will find any posts about the webpage/article/video that you are looking at. Use it to see if something has already been posted, or to find related discussions about it. When there are multiple posts, it will ask before opening them all. (see note on risks and why it doesn't count automatically)
• Post an image: You can now right-click on an image, anywhere on the web, and hit "Post this image". It will open a new tab and autofill the title, image link, and add the page URL to the body as "Source: URL". Try it here: https://lemmy.ca/post/1282303
• Reorganizing popup:
  • I fixed the issue where the popup would still display a button after removing all instances from the list.
  • The number of default instances in the popup was reduced to 4
• Added settings:
  • You can now hide onboardining guides to make the interfaces less wordy
• General styling changes, wording improvements, and bugfixes

(1) This is an important feature to me because this little annoyance was part of why I set out to create the extension in the first place. Thanks to some help from @zero_gravitas, I was able to use the Lemmy API to grab the post details, and then run a search for it on your home instance. While most posts should only bring one result, there is a chance that there are multiple posts by the same user, in the same community, with the same title. If this is an issue, I'll make this search more specific.

🗣️ My questions for you:

Improving 'post to Lemmy'

• Right now the 'Post to Lemmy' button does a very basic search in the page meta tags for information. This works for most websites, but it is not perfect. What websites do you usually post from, and is the extension doing a good job of replicating how you format the post? Please share both good and bad examples, so we can fix what isn't working and keep what is.

Improving Post search

• Having the extension automatically count the number of posts and display it in the icon would be pretty nice, since then you would know about any posts for the news article / blog / video that you are looking at. However, there are privacy implications with this since it needs to send the URL to your home instance to do the search.
• I would like to add the option to whitelist specific websites, so the user can choose what browsing data they want to find posts for. Is this something you would list to use? What websites would you whitelist?

Anything else?

Please share any issues that you find. Lemmy and Kbin instances have a lot of variation in how things are structured, so there are bound to be some bugs that I haven't found yet. If you have any ideas for new features, please share them too! I'm always looking for new ideas to add to the project.

::: spoiler 🔮 Cool ideas being discussed for the future

• Account switcher & ability to save login info to extension
• Reddit migrator tools
  • multireddit input should convert subscriptions to official Threadiverse replacements, or large related communities
  • embeds on Subreddit sidebars to search for similar community
  • button on post pages to cross-post to home instance
• Prepping for Firefox Mobile app, now that they are opening mobile up to all extensions!
• Keyboard hotkeys, possibly collaborating with someone that already implemented something similar

For the most up to date information, see the issues or the project road map

:::

💛 Finally

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback so far! I'm really happy to see that people are using the extension and finding it useful. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do with it in the future.

Like I said above, I won't be as active over the next few months in terms of getting new features out. The extension is now in good shape, and it covers most of the important use cases. There's still lots of cool stuff we can do with it, so please contribute ideas and expertise! When I get a chance, I'll pop in and grab a few more issues.

Cheers :)

Hi everyone, I'm excited to announce one more release before I take a short break. I have some other stuff starting up, so I won't be pushing out new features as fast, but I'll still be around to manage the project. (more at the end)

Links:

• Firefox Add-on
• Chrome Extension
• Edge Add-on
• GitHub

::: spoiler ❓ What is Instance Assistant?

If you're new to Instance Assistant, it is a browser extension with a collection of tools and features to simplify your browsing experience on Lemmy and Kbin. It is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; you can also install it from the releases page on GitHub.

For a full list of features, please see the GitHub homepage: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

:::

⭐ What's new in v1.2.5?

• Redirect posts to your home instance!: Post pages now have a redirect button that will find the same post on your home instance(1). You don't have to hunt it down yourself anymore.
• Posts related to this webpage buttons in popup & sidebar
  • Make a post: You can now create a post from any webpage! Click the 'Make a Post' button in the extension popup or sidebar to generate a draft post with autofilled title, URL, and body contents. Afterwards, just select a community and hit post. (This currently works for both Lemmy & Kbin, but custom frontends are untested while they develop). Try it here: https://lemmy.ca/post/4478560
  • Open Posts: This will find any posts about the webpage/article/video that you are looking at. Use it to see if something has already been posted, or to find related discussions about it. When there are multiple posts, it will ask before opening them all. (see note on risks and why it doesn't count automatically)
• Post an image: You can now right-click on an image, anywhere on the web, and hit "Post this image". It will open a new tab and autofill the title, image link, and add the page URL to the body as "Source: URL". Try it here: https://lemmy.ca/post/1282303
• Reorganizing popup:
  • I fixed the issue where the popup would still display a button after removing all instances from the list.
  • The number of default instances in the popup was reduced to 4
• Added settings:
  • You can now hide onboardining guides to make the interfaces less wordy
• General styling changes, wording improvements, and bugfixes

(1) This is an important feature to me because this little annoyance was part of why I set out to create the extension in the first place. Thanks to some help from @zero_gravitas, I was able to use the Lemmy API to grab the post details, and then run a search for it on your home instance. While most posts should only bring one result, there is a chance that there are multiple posts by the same user, in the same community, with the same title. If this is an issue, I'll make this search more specific.

🗣️ My questions for you:

Improving 'post to Lemmy'

• Right now the 'Post to Lemmy' button does a very basic search in the page meta tags for information. This works for most websites, but it is not perfect. What websites do you usually post from, and is the extension doing a good job of replicating how you format the post? Please share both good and bad examples, so we can fix what isn't working and keep what is.

Improving Post search

• Having the extension automatically count the number of posts and display it in the icon would be pretty nice, since then you would know about any posts for the news article / blog / video that you are looking at. However, there are privacy implications with this since it needs to send the URL to your home instance to do the search.
• I would like to add the option to whitelist specific websites, so the user can choose what browsing data they want to find posts for. Is this something you would list to use? What websites would you whitelist?

Anything else?

Please share any issues that you find. Lemmy and Kbin instances have a lot of variation in how things are structured, so there are bound to be some bugs that I haven't found yet. If you have any ideas for new features, please share them too! I'm always looking for new ideas to add to the project.

::: spoiler 🔮 Cool ideas being discussed for the future

• Account switcher & ability to save login info to extension
• Reddit migrator tools
  • multireddit input should convert subscriptions to official Threadiverse replacements, or large related communities
  • embeds on Subreddit sidebars to search for similar community
  • button on post pages to cross-post to home instance
• Prepping for Firefox Mobile app, now that they are opening mobile up to all extensions!
• Keyboard hotkeys, possibly collaborating with someone that already implemented something similar

For the most up to date information, see the issues or the project road map

:::

💛 Finally

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback so far! I'm really happy to see that people are using the extension and finding it useful. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do with it in the future.

Like I said above, I won't be as active over the next few months in terms of getting new features out. The extension is now in good shape, and it covers most of the important use cases. There's still lots of cool stuff we can do with it, so please contribute ideas and expertise! When I get a chance, I'll pop in and grab a few more issues.

Cheers :)