Hilarious Chaos Announcements

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There are a few opinions floating around on either or not downvotes should be disabled.

I'm interested to see what everyone thinks and if there's a majority consensus one way or the other.

So please reply in this thread with your preference and why. You can also debate it in the comments.

Edit 23-03-2024 - Thanks everyone for your feedback. It looks like opinions are split on this, with good arguments made on either side. As downvotes aren't currently a big issue, we'll leave them as they are and we can revisit this again in future if things change.

For context: https://hilariouschaos.com/post/2268

It's done, feel free to start subbing to some external communities, and let's keep the conversation going on which instances we should link to.

Instances only see federated content from external communities that have at least one subscriber on the instance. If you want our content to propagate to a certain instance, then please sign up with them and start subbing to some of our communities - I've been doing this for the larger ones.

It will likely take 30-60min

I know all of us would be happy to have more people to interact with on content. The idea of limited federation came up a bit recently too, and I mentioned that we are open to it.

The reasons we haven't been federated have nothing to do with not wanting to open up to the rest of the Fediverse, and everything to do with the drama that comes with federation. Specifically, we don't want the dodgy porn that other instances get bombed with, the endless political fanatics who poison every topic, the admins who want to impose their views on you, the constant screeching and demonizing, etc. The overwhelming majority of all Fediverse content is hot garbage, and having to store that bloat for nothing is also a huge turn-off.

On the other hand, I think we can all agree that it would be nice to have more people to talk shit with, and federation is an easy(er) way to achieve that. Our current thinking is that we'd like to selectively federate with instances who tick off a few requirements:

1. No porn or loli shit or pedo apologists or anything like that
2. They require registration applications (this one's about spam)
3. Their admins aren't missing in action (also about spam)
4. Their rules don't sound like something Stalin would've come up with

The requirements above are just a way of me saying I don't have time to deal with this shit if it became high drama and high maintenance, so I'd like to avoid that if possible. I really don't care about political lean or anything like that.

Alice compiled an initial list:

• https://aussie.zone/
• https://lemmy.sdf.org/
• https://programming.dev/
• https://mander.xyz/
• https://monero.town/
• https://lemmy.zip/
• https://reddthat.com/
• https://feddit.ch/
• https://lemm.ee/
• https://lemmy.nz/
• https://dmv.social/
• https://iusearchlinux.fyi/
• https://fanaticus.social/
• https://lemmy.basedcount.com/
• https://donky.social/
• https://links.hackliberty.org/
• https://lotide.fbxl.net/

What are your thoughts?

Edit: Updated list

How cool right ! Man, I'm telling you, it's not becauseI'm arrogant lol but we are the best instance for sure. We aren't like how they are and behave.

I just want to thank everybody who signed up to hilarious chaos, to welcome our new users, and that we encourage you to post and comment.

We want you to feel comfortable here. Please hit me up if you have questions or anything.

There's been a bit of a stir over this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/13512126

I thought I would explain some things about Lemmy in general and HC in particular, for better or worse.

About this exploit

1. We are NOT affected by this particular bug. It only affects Lemmy 0.18.5, at the time of that post we were on 0.19.2 and I have just upgraded us to 0.19.3, which was released a few days ago. In general I keep close tabs on Lemmy development and we are always on the latest version within a couple of days.

2. Even if we had been affected, you would have to be a registered user on HC to even attempt to exploit it, and this particular bug involved spamming the Report feature. It would've been really obvious to Alice or I had anyone tried, since we get notified of all reports.

About Lemmy security in general

Lemmy is still early in its development, things are changing rapidly and there have been a number of rather serious security bugs over the past year. This is not the first time and it won't be the last time something like this comes up.

I keep an eye on Lemmy development and upgrade us to the latest version soon after it is released. This is the main thing I can do to make sure we limit our exposure to any potential Lemmy exploits.

We are also not federated and as of now we're a pretty small tight knit group. This vastly reduces our risk from any exploits, since typically exploits require you to be a registered user.

Lastly, if there was ever a serious exploit that affected us, you will hear from me.

About Lemmy private messages

Lemmy private messages exist as unencrypted text inside of the Lemmy database.

Lemmy admins in general CAN'T view or delete your private messages through the Lemmy admin interface, there is simply no option for it.

The server admin (me in this example) has access to the database directly and could run a query to view or delete private messages.

In practical terms, this means the only person here who could do that is me. As I said before, I really don't care to view the dick pics you send to each other, but you should keep in mind that I could.

In general you should never use Lemmy private messages for anything that could hurt you if they ever became public. There are some scenarios in which that data could end up in other people's hands, such as:

• Through some funky Lemmy exploit we don't know about yet
• If someone hacks the server itself (extremely unlikely but you never know)
• If someone shows up at my door with a warrant.

Overall though, Lemmy private messages aren't less secure than those of any other similar service you use, even the likes of Reddit, Twitter, etc. There is nothing to panic over, just use common sense.

I'm happy to answer questions on any of this, feel free to ask them here.

We also have a PeerTube instance: https://videos.hilariouschaos.com/

I'm happy to give you access to it if you want to use it to share your creations. As a general rule, this should be original content you made, not anything copyrighted.

If you're interested then just sign up at https://videos.hilariouschaos.com/ and send me a DM here to let me know it's you.

https://www.hilariouschaos.com/c/unpopular

https://www.hilariouschaos.com/c/cmm

https://www.hilariouschaos.com/c/insults

https://www.hilariouschaos.com/c/fight

https://www.hilariouschaos.com/c/youregay

When creating new communities, please use all caps in the display name only. Example: New Community

And add an image icon. You don't need to add a banner unless you want to.

I do get excited when yall make communities too. Makes me happy. :'D

Thank you all

Yay ! 🙌

Giving these a shout-out because the jerboah app doesn't display new communities for a little while. For some reason. I barely saw them now in boost.

https://hilariouschaos.com/c/health

https://hilariouschaos.com/c/math

There's also a science community I thought I copied the link for.

Yes, yes, I know it's fucking gay alright, I know.

I made this community bc holy shit, there is so much negativity on social media.

Like fuck. Puts me in an Off kinda mood sometimes.

Want to even it out some like dam lol.

If anything, just laugh at how gay and heart felt the posts are lol

Or block it whatever is clever.

What's weird cuz I was literally just wondering right now why we don't have a Gaming Community LOL

Let me know if you want me to change the icon. I'm sorry lol I saw that picture and that shit made me laugh lol

Yay !

I'm cutting over to the new router, this could take anywhere between 30 minutes to a couple of hours depending on how badly shit goes wrong.

Edit: It's mostly done now, I'm still making some tweaks but overall the site will work.

You may have noticed that HC was unreachable for a few hours. This was likely caused by planned maintenance by the ISP, but my existing router doesn't recover very well from these events and this happened while I was sleeping.

The good news is this router is being replaced later today anyway, ironically enough, with a 16 core monster. This also means there will have to be another outage at some point, but I will announce this one and things will settle down after that.

Anyway this happens very rarely (I hope I don't jinx it lol), but don't panic when it does, it's only temporary and HC is coming back.