Hi all, I wanted to let you know about an incident that happened a few days back. An individual requested to become a mod on c/Portland when they thought there was no moderators due to a federation issue. Then, an admin mistakenly made them a mod.

I reached out to the admins to let them know I was upset by such a mistake happening on their part. I also de-modded the individual, but tried to encourage them to make a post getting input from all of you about becoming a mod. I'm honestly not against them becoming a mod.

I think having more mods would actually help this place grow. If you've posted here at least a few times, and are interested in volunteering, nominate yourself below.

I doubt anyone will have any red flags to call out, but if you do contact me about it or post.

Thanks all. I hope you were able to stay cool these past few days.

** Update: I still haven't heard from any mod, but the user did get back to me though they weren't very receptive to the frustration. However, I did find out that you can remove others as mods but the option is hidden in having to click into one of their posts. So, this unique situation is resolved, but the appointing of a mod without checking if the current community is actually abandoned should still be addressed.**

A user posted on !community_requests claiming that a sub I'm a moderator of had no active mods despite the fact that I have actively been posting on there and holding a moderation discussion with the community this week. At the time of request the account was only a day old. Still, an admin proceeded to make them a mod in our community.

As far as I can tell, this was a mistake on both the user and admin's part.

Within an hour of the new mod appearing I responded to both the admin and the user politely asking them for answers about what happened. I also privately DMed the user on Matrix asking them to demod themselves and put a post up in the community petitioning to become a mod instead of just sidestepping the people who are already there.

It has now been nearly 8 hours and no admin has gotten back to me, and the user hasn't responded.

Even if this is a mistake, it gives me a lot of pause. The fact a one day old account could come and claim our community was abandoned, even though clearly it was not, and be given mod powers for hours upon hours after the mistake being reported is really scary.

Again, I think this was a mistake on both the admin and user's part, but there needs to be a better process to deal with this going forward. I'm really disappointed.___

Hi all,

I am noticing that a lot of what is being posted is the same outrage clickbait articles on crime and poverty that have overrun other Portland centric communities. These are absolutely important topics, and something I hope everyone is thinking about and involved with advocating for improved policy around. However, I do question the usefulness of a constant deluge of these types of articles.

When we go to a space like the local coffee shop, pub, or bookstore, a place where we immediately feel the "Portland vibes", we usually aren't met with a non-stop stream of poverty, drug, and crime news. If I we were, then we would probably leave (or at least I would). Similarly, I feel like our online space can be so much more than just the same daily rehash of divisive arguments that don't go anywhere.

This is especially true on our Lemmy community, where we are small and still developing a culture. There are not many other types of posts here yet, so the click-bait outrage headlines dominate. Personally, I would love to see more events, reviews of concerts, pictures, slice of life stories, and other things that make this feel like the "Portland vibes".

This isn't a moderation decision. It's more of an appeal. I haven't removed any links or banned anyone (other than some obvious malicious spam), and I don't plan to. I haven't even been down voting.

IDK ... what do you think about the future of this space and how we might build a community space that isn't just local doom scrolling?

I reserved a Deck day one within a minute and I think I might be in the initial launch (still no expected ship date listed though the payment processed and I got the confirmation email within a couple minutes). Whenever I get it, I'm hyped.

I'm not a typical user. I do enjoy handheld games, but I also am an Arch Linux user (btw), I deploy servers, I write code, blah blah blah. My current personal computer is an old T430, and I plan to use my deck as a daily driver as a desktop at home, a media center on the couch, handheld in bed, and a tablet on the go. To meet those use cases I plan to do a custom Arch install.

Is anyone else planning on doing something similar?

Some things I'm starting to plan out are:

• Some sort of custom lockscreen that can use the deck controls to unlock or an onscreen keyboard.
• E-reader mode
• Audio mode
• Kodi for media center and plex
• RetroArch for retro games
• Steam (of course)
• Removal of telemetry and possibly iptable rules to block Steam telemetry if any
• Graphical interface to do basic maintenance tasks without a keyboard (like a script launcher window). This could probably be the app launcher in gnome with some custom desktop entries

I just saw the huge list of sites that yt-dl supports, and it's ... well staggering. I've been playing around with it a bit more, and I'm writing custom aliases for ease of downloading. For example I made:

alias bandcamp-dl="youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 --add-metadata -o '~/Music/%(artist)s/%(album)s/%(track_number)02d - %(track)s.%(ext)s'"

That alias allows me to do bandcamp-dl <http://some-album.url>, and then it creates the proper artist and album directories in my music library, adds the tracks as mp3s with formatted file names, and sets their metadata so my music app can pick it up.

Anyone else have some handy aliases or yt-dl commands that do something cool?