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.

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    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.

    • AdaMEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      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

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        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?

        • AdaMEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          Admins can change it for their instance. Would 25 be enough? Happy to do that

          Edit - I’ve set it to 25. Try now

                • @berry_chartreuseEnglish
                  3•1 year ago

                  One of my favorite subreddits! Thank you for making your way over here

                • MrNemobodyEnglish
                  2•1 year ago

                  I was gonna warn you that the community name is not showing up correctly on Jerboa: it only shows “Accidental”, but this post got ne thinking that maybe it’s also related to the 20-character limit?

                  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
                    3•1 year ago

                    Jeroba? I don’t know what that is… But yes, it probably has to do with the character limit. I figure that as communities fill up, the official character limit will eventually have to be raised anyway, just like the old-timey internet had to.

    • VeraticusEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        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.

        • VeraticusEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          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

          • @[email protected]OPEnglish
            7•1 year ago

            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.