SOLVED: Our subreddit had a longass name, and Lemmy has a 20 character limit
Hi! Reddit mod from a large-ish but well-known subreddit looking to move things to the Lemmy-verse but for some reason my and my co-mod have had absolutely zero luck for the last 4 days creating a community on any Lemmy server. Whenever we try to create one, we just get the little spinny button of death and it’s never created.
Yes, even here on Blahaj.
Are we cursed?
We managed to create a magazine on Kbin (still glitchy but it’s the only one that worked) but we’re worried that if we don’t snag that exact name on Lemmy, someone else will pounce on the name and grab it for clout, which would be very distressing because we’ve worked our asses off trying to grow that community.
What are we doing wrong? Are our usernames not cute enough? Did someone snag the name and is hiding it from us?
Help, we are not good with computers.
What do you mean by “snag that exact name on Lemmy”? The same community name can be used across multiple instances, so you’d only be snagging it for the instance you create it in.
I’ve only created one community, but recently I’ve had the Spinny Button of Death when trying to post because of Language Settings. Until the last update we were advised to keep it “Undetermined” since changing that would also change the people who could see/reply to a post, but I’ve found some places are only accepting English.
Do you get any sort of errors? Also where have you been trying to create these communities? Not all instances accept free generation like that, beehaw for example is a fairly closed group.
edit: I also don’t think snagging the username will be relevant, since people can probably make communities with the same name in different instances. It would make for some very limited creative space if they could not, considering the possible size of the Lemmyverse as a whole.
No errors, just a spinny ring of death that lasts until the window is closed. I always choose English as the language.
I thought it was just a server issue until I began trying to make communities on smaller instances like this Blahaj server and I get the same problem. Tried disabling my VPN, still the spinny ring of death.
I’m kind of getting tired creating accounts on every Lemmy server just to keep running into the same damn problem.
@VoltasPistol@lemmy.blahaj.zone How long is the name of the sub you’re trying to create? Is it longer than 20 characters?
If you are trying to set an image for your community and the server cant process it (its pretty finicky) then it’ll error out. I would suggest trying to not set an image when creating it (you can always add it later).
I know community creation is working on my server, lib.lgbt, because I just saw a user create one. Not sure where else you’ve been trying.
Since you’re an admin on a server perhaps you will know: Is it possible for an admin to help a user setup a Lemmy community, and the user is top mod, not the admin?
I’ve asked my co-mod if maybe we should start asking admins directly but because my co-mod thinks that the admin cannot create a community without that admin being top mod of that community, and I don’t know if that is correct or not.
I can set up a community here for you on blahaj.zone and then mod you if you like, and then step down as a mod.
But the other thing that occurs to me is that it might be something to do with the length of the community name. By default, it’s limited to 20 characters, and will just give you the death spinny with no error if you try something longer than that
By default, it’s limited to 20 characters
Yep, that’s it. We have slightly over 20 letters in our subreddit name.
Is there a way to bypass that or will we have to truncate it?
Admins can change it for their instance. Would 25 be enough? Happy to do that
Edit - I’ve set it to 25. Try now
Omg thank you so much!!
De nada
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/accidentalrenaissance
Thank you so much for helping us <3
I’m not totally sure myself, I’ve never tried it. There isn’t an option to do so in the UI that I can see, but an admin could theoretically alter the database directly to change ownership. I’m not sure how that would reflect on federated instances, but on the local community it would certainly work.
Yeah, my co-mod is very particular about getting it done the right way. Can’t really blame her, between reddit and other mod drama, it’s been quite the whiplash of emotions. We’re in a very vulnerable spot because people have come gunning for us before, “Well then I’ll make my own subreddit with hookers and blow” type of deal. We’ve always had the numbers and excellent reputation to keep us from getting swallowed by the smaller fish that care less about academic stuff and just wanted to overtake us by just “getting popular” I guess and not being as carefully curated as we are. But we don’t have numbers here, we don’t have reputation here, to ensure that someone won’t just jump on the idea and run with it.
Yeah that makes sense. My philosophy about these things is always that the people matter more than the idea — even if someone takes your idea and runs with it, it will be worse because they aren’t you, they’re just copying you. But I get how it’s a bad feeling.
If you’re concerned about ownership stuff in particular the best option for you might be federating your own instance. I put the scripts I used to host Lemmy on fly.io in GitHub if you want to use fly as a provider. Here’s a link: https://github.com/Veraticus/fly-lemmy
We’re not sure if we’re in a place where we can really do that. On a technical or a financial level.
Thank you for giving us more info, though.
