Hello everyone - just a brief update as we begin July.

There was some positive interest in https://digipres.cafe in the first week of standing it up.

At the end of that week was an ill-advised upgrade to 0.18 of the Lemmy Software: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy. Some of the issues caused by the upgrade have since been recovered from.

In the past week we’ve seen more federation issues caused by the upgrade - those seemed to be very local to the Ansible deployment: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/issues/106 and have now been fixed. The patch has been applied on the server here to help ease things.

There remains a last(?) Federation issue that really affects the user experience of Federation using Lemmy, described below.

The issue

If you take the URL for this post, and paste it into Mastodon (or another ActivityPub instance), you should be able to boost or comment it. This expands the network reach of the post and this site allowing comments and support to come in from anywhere in the Fediverse.

Since the upgrade it hasn’t been possible to do this with posts here on Lemmy.

I have left a comment about it on the GitHub repository. The issue I have responded to may be too broad and so I anticipate it landing in a new specific issue sometime in the future (hopefully near).

Others have noticed the issue as well and so it’s great not to be alone.

Going forward

As I say, the issue really affects the user experience of Lemmy. Digipres.cafe is meant to be a link aggregator, but there are other ways of going about that when we’re not using the Fediverrse.

But the Fediverse is the unique selling point that made it seem worth standing up with the hope (as mentioned in previous posts) that the site may provide some glue between different ActivityPub instances for information surrounding digital preservation.

Until the issue is fixed, the experience here may be a little lackluster. Hopefully it won’t be too long, and then the site can be promoted a little bit more.